man allegedly stole a woman Yolanda volunteer’s cellphone, takes selfies, didn’t know cellphone automatically sends the selfies to Dropbox

the alleged cellphone thief who took a selfie

it’s an amazing story, one that can probably make you cry, laugh and get angry all at the same time, or one after the other. we saw an article online about it (http://www.wheninmanila.com/thief-steals-from-volunteers-helping-typhoon-victims-unknowingly-uploads-selfies-to-the-internet/) and was shown at TV Patrol last night.

a certain NJ Torres (name from TV Patrol)  was doing volunteer work for Yolanda survivors at Villamor Airbase and while doing work there, she had the unfortunate experience of her cellphone, a Samsung S4 was stolen from her.

days after, Torres found out who stole her phone or at least know how the alleged thief looks like. the alleged thief took selfies. but what the alleged thief didn’t know was that the cellphone was automatically sending all the pictures taken by the cellphone to the cellphone owner’s Dropbox account. the owner we suppose went to a computer and most likely to her surprise or disgust or both sees the uploaded selfies of the person who may have stolen her cellphone.

it’s an amazing story of several stories:

• primarily for us it’s one of disgust that people actually go to a place and activity that is all about strangers who are charitable enough to do volunteer work for victims of Yolanda with the intent of stealing cellphones of the volunteers. instead of helping, this alleged thief was there to steal and take advantage of the volunteers.
• one more count of disgust that the alleged thief would have the gall to take selfies from a stolen cellphone
•  a triumph of technology and social media where the technology silently and worked incognito to reveal to the owner and the world the disgusting crime of some humans. social media contributed as we saw this story on the internet and when we posted the story at twitter (@wawam), it got multiple retweets from many people, most we did not know and did not follow. the effect of that is this man’s face, the alleged thief, is known to many of us and hopefully others will be warned and eventually caught

when we tweeted the story, it actually caught the attention of police authorities. we are hoping the alleged thief will be caught and made to answer for his crime and spanked with a stinging lesson from technology and social media.

@wawam: Man steals phone fr volunteer helping #YolandaPH survivors, then uploads his selfie to FB pic.twitter.com/ntcLWpYHRI @NCRPOReact

— PNP Tweets (@PNPhotline) November 25, 2013

these are the other selfies taken by the alleged thief.

from the article (http://www.wheninmanila.com/thief-steals-from-volunteers-helping-typhoon-victims-unknowingly-uploads-selfies-to-the-internet/)

I just want to give a friendly warning to all of you especially who are volunteering now in Villamor Airbase and other relief operations. Some people are just here to really take advantage during times like these.

As you might know, I lost some valuables last Tuesday, November 19, while doing volunteer work in Villamor Airbase. Before we even started, we noticed this guy in pink shirt lingering around our designated area, but since we thought he is with the other volunteer group with the sole purpose also of helping the Yolanda survivors, we just ignored him and continued packing & distributing relief goods. Little did we know that he was there not to help, but he was there for his own personal gain.

Thanks to technology, I was able to confirm my suspicions. Two days after the incident, I was able to retrive pictures of him thru my Dropbox app account that is synced to my stolen Samsung S4 phone. YESSS! THE THIEF IS UNKNOWINGLY SENDING ME HIS SELFIE PICS!!!

The police said this might be a scheme/ modus operandi, so please, to all of you, please be warned. Look at his pictures. Stare at it. (Creepy!!) Be vigilant. Take care of your things and beware of people like him. PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. Pls help me share.

Yep. we are 500% sure!!! I was with other friends that  night. We all remembered him from that night lurking around our area. It will be too much of a coincidence that he was there too the moment I lost my phone… and he coincidentally bought the same phone in Greenhills… and the first picture uploaded by him is around the time I lost my phone..

lessons learned from super storm Yolanda (Haiyan) – what needs to be changed

reading all the news and looking at all the pictures, these we think are next steps and the lessons learned from the super storm Yolanda (Haiyan) experience:

1. there is a need to put up a separate Disaster Prevention & Rescue National Agency for whom a cabinet-level head should be appointed. this agency is at the same level as the Finance, DILG, Defense and others. this is necessary as it has now become apparent that national calamities like earthquakes, floods and storms will be a constant and regular occurrence in the country and they are not getting less frequent nor less severe. this year alone, it feels like the philippines has experienced at least one major natural disaster every three months and the need for rescue and rebuilding appear to be monthly and year round. setting up such a department will enable the country to have a well trained, well equipped and well staffed agency that will handle all the rescue needs of the country at a highly professional and effective level. this agency will operate independently of other agencies in government and reports directly to the president. it may as needed call on other agencies in the government for help and support when it operates in the field.
2. this agency will have its own set of organization, personnel, equipment, tools and training specific to disaster prevention and most specially search, rescue and relief. the organization will be very similar to the military but with goals and mandates very different from the military. key here will be the training of its personnel and the hiring of people with specific skills and experiences that will cover the whole breathe and width of search, rescue and relied. it will have departments or divisions with specializations – like medical. rescue, engineering, communications, logistics, technology & IT, psychiatry, social work, security and others. it will have its own equipment like cargo planes, ships, boats,  trucks and others. it will have bases on which personnel and equipment will be housed, one each in Luzon, Metro Manila, Visayas and Mindanao.
3. the organization and logistics capability of this agency should be very close to what a military organization has. think of it this way – it has reconnaissance, it brings everything with it from food, water to hardware, the whole logistical needs and people with skills and training needed when it  invades a country.
4.  pre-positioning of relief goods, rescue & relief teams and equipment should be done two ways – one in the area where the disaster is expected to hit  and at an area nearest the disaster area but not in the path of the storm. the lesson of Yolanda was that the whole of Tacloban was demolished by the storm hence whatever relief goods and equipment that were pre-positioned there before the storm his has been demolished as well. having a second place where the pre-positioning was done will ensure that ground zero will get help almost immediately versus equipment and relief goods coming from Metro Manila.
5. the national government should be prepared to put in place people coming from other areas who will take over the local government and its function on an immediate basis. a law will probably needs to be passed for this. the experience in Tacloban showed that because the storm devastated the whole place, even the local government officials may have died, or family members have died and certainly their own homes demolished. given that situation it is understandable that the local government officials will not be able to function or perform their duties for sometime.
6. security (military and police), clearing crews  and rescue teams should be the first groups to be put in place in a disaster hit area. one of the first questions we asked our self was this – why did we not see news items on people buried under the rubble or thrown at sea being rescued by rescue teams? to us appeared no group made an effort for people who were still alive but buried under the rubble at Tacloban. its hard to imagine how many people may have been saved if crews went out to look under the rubble. tougher to think, that we just let them die there. we also read in the news that the police were not at all present in the streets of Tacloban that goons terrorized people a nd looting occurred. given the widespread destruction, the local police personnel must have suffered themselves hence they were not out in the streets keeping order and protecting lives and properties. we also here that in many cases trucks with relief goods were stopped by residents and its contents looted. obviously security in situations like these is very important. local police cannot be relied on since they are also victims. the military and police from outside provinces should immediately brought in.
7. there is a need to redefine or have a better understand the meaning of the term “storm surge”. people in tacloban seemed to have misunderstood the true meaning and corresponding risk with the term “storm surge”. two days ago we had a conversation with Mahar Lagmay (@nababaha) who is the lead of Project Noah on “storm surge”. ted failon of abs-cbn described “storm surge” as the “whole sea falling onto the whole city of tacloban’ thus flooding the whole place which based on TV news footages up to neck-deep to reaching the roofs of two-story homes. many died because of this storm surge. we suggested to mr. lagmay that perhaps we need to redefine what a “storm surge” means so that people will understand the real risks. if not redefine it, then look for other descriptors to make it more understandable. in fact international articles including ted failon likened the storm surge to a tsunami.

 

~~ to be continued ~~

super storm Yolanda (Haiyan) news and photos & free calls to the US

here is where you can read and see pics of the aftermath of super storm yolanda (super storm haiyan) at Flipboard that devastated the Visayas in the Philippines:

click link to “Philippines – Bayan Ko (Philippines – My Country)” : https://flipboard.com/section/philippines—bayan-ko-bvLfcI

click link to “OMG!” :  https://flipboard.com/section/omg!-bo8zji

screen cap above, shows even Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011 at Flipboard covered Yolanda (top section, left, second from the left).

we got the above message from Viber – free calls from viber to any number in the US, mobile or landline for people in the philippines to call their relatives and friends that they are safe. thank you, Viber.

we tried the free Viber call (california) and it worked very well.

 

 

above is a Flipboard magazine dedicated to pictures from Haiyan : https://flipboard.com/section/news-bUOmct

where are the 2 foreign storm chasers, james reynolds and jim edds both inside Tacloban before super storm Yolanda hit

a day or two before super storm yolanda (haiyan) hit tacloban, we followed two foreign storm chasers on twitter, james reynolds (@typhoonfury) and jim edds (@ExtremeStorm). the two were in tacloban before the storm hit the city. they were even tweeting when they arrived at the city together with the preparations they were doing and a few situationers.

however, both of them sent out tweets last november 8 right about the brunt of the super typhoon his tacloban. no other tweets were posted after. we are wondering about them.

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just in:

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in journalism, is it okay to use in the headline a quote with an obvious grammatical error?

“in journalism, is it okay to use in the headline a quote with an obvious grammatical error?” – in the end that was the question left with me on a rappler.com article that i saw posted in twitter.

we’re not a journalist, didn’t even take up journalism in school. the closest we came to journalism was to write a few articles for the school newspaper in college, the blogs we have here but most of it is we just consume a lot of news and articles published in newspapers, magazines and in the last few years the internet.

we saw a tweet by maria ressa, big boss at rappler.com with the headline “tacloban : ‘barely any houses standing’” . we are also not an english teacher, at most we write in english at work but alarm bells went off when we read that headline. we thought the headline had an obvious grammatical error – “houses” should not be plural, it had an unneeded letter “s” on it.

the headline didn’t sound right. we felt it was very difficult to read and caused some pain when reading it.

maria ressa was kind enough to respond:

we were left with a question – is it okay in journalism, for a news website to put on the headline something that is obviously wrong grammar just because it is a ‘direct quote’, meaning these were the exact words spoken by the person interviewed?

the point we raised was, fine it’s a direct quote (and the article did show it was a quote), but what harm will it do if the media outlet took the liberty to change the quote to make it grammatically correct? will the person quoted complain that his words were not directly quoted? we thought there will be no harm if it was corrected. in a succeeding tweet, i said this was the first time that i had read an obvious grammatical error in a headline from a news outlet.

anyone has an answer to my question?

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postscript : rappler.com had revised / updated that article and completely changed the headline. click here :   http://www.rappler.com/nation/43285-initial-reports-damage-tacloban-city

Atom Araullo’s News Porn on super storm Yolanda

posted this morning, on atom’s news porn video

like everyone else in the philippines, i was glued on TV to watch news footages of the effects of super typhoon Yolanda on the country. i watched ABS-CBN’s TV Patrol and this news footage by atom araullo was the first to be shown in the newscast.

watch atom araullo’s news porn here :

the moment we saw that footage, we knew it will be a big hit and most specially among the ladies. with that in mind, we sent out these tweets almost immediately after the footage was shown on TV:

read tweets from bottom to top, tweet at bottom was sent out first

and we were  right.

the first tweet (bottom) got dozens and dozens of retweets from mostly women, a large number of them from people we do not know and do not follow at twitter. we had not put atom araullo’s twitter name (@atomaraullo) and yet it got a lot of retweets. that means many in twitter, many of them women were searching for atom araullo’s name. of course as our tweets were getting retweets, many more twitter users read it and reacted to it.

we have been reading on twitter that atom araullo is a news heart throb among the ladies. we saw proof of that first hand during the Million People March at the Rizal Park. we were going around the park and saw this guy walking and often getting stopped by women who asked photos and selfies to be taken with the guy. it caught my attention as there were few times he was not stopped by women. i asked the people i was with who it was and they told me it was atom araullo from abs-cbn.

there were many very interesting tweets from ladies that followed my tweet on atom araullo. stuff like panties may have dropped, the need to cross the legs of ladies, some wanted to go to tacloban to be with atom and this thing about ovaries of ladies. in twitter, when women refer to their ovaries, it usually means they have the hots for someone. that is opposed to the “heart” which typically means “love”. when “ovaries” are mentioned, it is “lust”. i thought this episode on philippine tv created a new term – News Porn.

today, abs-cbn posted a new article on the atom araullo video saying his news video trended worldwide and from tweets, many said CNN kept playing back atom’s news video.

video at the abs-cbn article posted here, above

read in full here : http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/11/08/13/daring-atom-araullo-coverage-yolanda-trends-worldwide

we thought it would be a good idea to put everything here for the ladies to appreciate and yes to have them watch atom araullo’s news porn.

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just in over twitter:

screencap of atom araullo saving people in neck deep flood water:

@scrap_pork gets the scrap pork logo right, very, very close

we had written about the poster of the october 4 million people march poster previously (click here : million people march october 4 rally poster – cute shades the point) where we said the image of the scrap pork idea was too cute and missed the important point of what the rally was all about – to scrap pork.

the twitter account @scrap_pork recently released a new logo for it and we think this one just about got it right.

this logo says it right – to scrap pork with the diagonal line across the face of the pig image like what we see in traffic signs that says  “no left turn” or the the simple “no smoking signs”.

we are all familiar and that means we all know what that diagonal line across the image mean. logos or symbols work best when it obviously and easily communicates what it means. when you see these images, you know immediately what they mean, even without needing to think about it.

“no pork” or “no pork barrel” is the message and this new logo of @scrap_pork says it all and very well.

well, at least very, very close to it – the diagonal line did not cover or slash the snout of the pig. you can still see the two holes of the snout. this treatment made it look like the snout and the diagonal line is a design element rather than single-mindedly talking about removing it or saying no to it.

BUT that really is a very, very minor point. it is as many in the ad industry will say, “it’s just nit-picking”.

kudos to the designer of this new logo!