Slashdot Mirror
Did NBC Alter the Olympics' Opening Ceremony?
techmuse writes "Viewing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony online at NBC's Olympics website, you can see that the order in which the countries were presented was very different from the actual order of the countries in the ceremony, as listed at Wikipedia. NBC skipped roughly 100 countries ahead, then jumped back and forth, apparently delaying the appearance of the United States in its home market until later in the broadcast. (In fact, the US team was shown on the infield before they were shown marching!) NBC did not acknowledge this in its broadcast. Is NBC altering the reality of the broadcast to boost ratings? Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"
Movie at 11.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Excuse me, are you serious? It's television , FFS! They edit, it's normal. Been going on since at least the 1950s.
Caveat Utilitor
Last Post!!!!
Don't watch the Olympics, on NBC or any other outlet.
If you are not Windows or Mac, there is no web broadcast.
Gets me thinking, how did a Slashdoter view the web broadcast... Is someone using Windows?
to further nationalistic propaganda. All the medals won by Americans in the past were all actually made of tin. All the better to make hats with!
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
This has been a tradition in Olympic broadcasts for years. It's called editing.
Hi:
I thought only America was in the Olympics. When did they start letting other countries participate?
I looked yesterday for where I could watch Olypics videos. Looks like I needed to instal some plugin from Microsoft that only works with "approved" browsers. Silverlight?
I don't even mind if I'm bombarded with ads to see video. I would even pay for certain footage of one person I know competing in Beijing and some of the events. But a Microsoft player? No thanks.
Now I don't know whether to boycott the Olympic Games because of China ignoring human rights or because it was converted to a festival of commerce. If it goes on like this, I may be soon able to boycott each day of Olympics for a different reason.
If you had RTFA, you would know that's not the issue raised by the submitter. The question isn't how the countries were ordered, it is whether NBC's broadcast actually showed the countries in that order.
Traditionally the Olympic teams are introduced in the alphabetical order of their name in the language of the host country, with the host team moved to last. Chinese has the problem of not having an order to follow, so they had to make something up.
"make something up" like apply 3000 year old rules, accepted by all for ordering countries in Mandarin?
... is that I have to actually subscribe to some local TV provider like AT&T, even if I don't own a TV, just so I could watch the NBC Olympics. There is no option for saying I don't have a TV service and to pay the sum they would receive from the local cable company directly to NBC. That is seriously outrageous.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
your gay and youe a newb your gay and youe a newb
Translation:
"Translate Server Error."
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I'd Mod NBC +1 (Interesting)
So no, they didn't make anything up.
I just did a quick check of the recording of the live broadcast that I made. In every spot I checked, the order given on the Wikipedia pages matches the one in the broadcast. So, at least in the case of the broadcasted version, the ordering matches up.
The opening ceremony took place in the early morning hours of Friday for timezones in the USA. Beijing is 16 hours ahead of US Eastern Dayliight Time. Where I live the opening ceremony was broadcast on NBC over-the-air TV at 8:00am Saturday morning Beijing time. Hardly what I'd call live.
I'm not sure if NBC broadcast it live over the Internet - I was sleeping at that time since it was still 5am Friday morning where I am (Utah).
In contrast to that, the opening ceremony for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah was broadcast on NBC over-the-air TV live - so there was no editing, though during the introduction of countries, some of them were not shown due to commercial breaks. In that case, when the coverage resumed, it was mentioned that countries X, Y, and Z had been introduced during the commercial break, but they were not shown.
I did, in fact, watch the entire broadcast. The countries were not broadcast in that order. You can find the order in which they actually marched in the wikipedia page. The issue here is that NBC appears to have altered the order of the events themselves. This is different from editing out bits to fit in commercials. The *story* has changed. Example:
1) You get out of your car and walk into a store.
2) You pull up to the store in your car
3) You leave your house and get into your car
4) You drive to the store
5) You leave the store with your purchase.
The correct order is 3,4,2,1,5, but the story told about what you did gives the impression that something very different happened.
... do as the Chinese government does. We wouldn't want to see REALITY on TV, would we? It's so... passé (and often incongruous with how Big Brother / Our Corporate Overlords want us to think).
Sounds like a Quentin Tarnetino flick.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Oh my, oh my. You mean the TV companies alter reality for marketing purposes? I am shocked.
All those yellow lines that magically appear and disappear on the football fields?
All those "billboards" that are not really there on the stadium wall?
I bet those starlets are even where padded bras. Do you think that they might even have had surgery. Goodness gracious, I wonder if Barbara Walters uses botox?
And those wrestlers. Do you think that they might be using steroids?
I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Actually, the MSNBC online video let's you pick what you want to see and caries a lot of obscure sports from end to end. Much better than listening to Pierre Salinger babble on about wine tasting in all the French villages while you are waiting to see actual athletes.
Statesman
NBC has done an excellent job of insuring that Americans cannot watch the Olympics, the Opening Ceremony and other aspects of what is going on in China. They are the first to bitch and moan about China censorship and just look at what they're doing now! Typical media.
They don't have cable out here so watching anything on the Internet from NBC is just not possible. They have effectively censored millions of Americans from watching the Olympics.
What they do have has been cut up and altered to make room for all that advertising. And, just how many times do I have to hear "Ra Deem Team" from NBC. If I hear it again, I'm going to puke!
Now, there are plenty of NON-AMERICAN web sites with the streams and videos! China has some, Germany has one, and there are others. You get the point... AVOID NBC and you can watch for free!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Guess, take a breath. Yes, NBC altered the video. They do the same thing when you see movies. They take your beloved movie and ALTER IT!!!!!! They do this to squish down time and show more things.
Now, before we freak out shit out and panic that they are hiding something from you, realize that this stuff is filmed by more cameras then you can even begin to contemplate AND is filled with people from all around the world to serve as witnesses. What does this mean? It is really frigging unlikely that NBC is hiding "the truth" from you. Far more likely, they are trying to shrink a 4+ hour opening ceremony into something that will better fit their schedule.
Worrying that they some how were altering the live feed is so dumb and inane that I can't even respond. People, take a frigging collective deep breath.
In fairness to the parent, NBC edits a lot of their live broadcasts, but not typically to this extent.
They've stretched the boundaries of 'live' so far that it really has no meaning any more.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That ass hole. Did he want to know the time? What an ass. A cool president would just sit there looking all clam and collected and shit and not check the time. I bet that jerk also went to the bathroom to piss like a human.
Uh, I hate Bush like the other 90% of the world does too... but get a grip.
I usually hate to defend Bush, but I have to point out that he was probably suffering from an extreme case of jet lag at that point.
Check his watch and look terribly bored? Oh yeah, talk about editing. But I did sigh, as a leader should at least feign interest.
There was some incredible scenes to see but NBC camera people must have been told to zoom every camera and it diminished the quality IMO. The designers didn't create the imagery for moving viewers or moving cameras/lenses.
It really became an annoyance and a disappointment.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Dick Ebersole, who runs NBC Sports, is on record as saying that it is his goal to get better ratings, no matter what. That's why NBC doesn't post the running score of a football game, because they want you to stay and wait for it.
It's why they show all those personal profiles instead of sporting events. It's why they edited the opening games. It's why we can't see live events in the US.
1992 called. They want their George H.W. Bush debate footage back.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I would have assumed that since French is the official language of the modern olympic games, they would have used that for the alphabetical ordering of the countries...
Who the fuck cares about the Olympics?
***We all point at you and shriek like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers***
Caveat Utilitor
I once photocopied a book, and then dropped all the pages, and when I picked them up they were in the wrong order.
They always use the name collating system native to the hosting nation to create an ascending list.
I watched NBC's broadcast on TV of the opening ceremonies and followed along with the Wikipedia list for a bit (at least, the Wikipedia list as it appeared last night) from Great Britain to the United States, and they matched perfectly. I've still got it on my DVR, and if someone can give an actual example of this reordering besides linking to the NBC olympics website (not even the opening ceremony video), I can check it out, but otherwise this objection is ridiculous. A little specificity would be helpful.
Yeah but more entertaining & original.
French is one of the official languages. According to the Olympic Charter, "The official languages of the IOC are French and English." But the convention apparently is to introduce countries in alphabetical order in the language of the host country.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Seriously??? You think they changed the order in the live feed? How would they do that, with a time machine?
...unless:
A) NBC has some sort of time machine which allowed them to skip ahead into the future, tape events, and then go back in time and use that tape.
B) The live wasn't actually live, but had a serious 30+ minute delay, which would mean you could see things on the 'Net feed a half hour to an hour before you could see them on TV.
Why does it matter in the slightest? This isn't ZOMGFLAIMBATE, I'm honestly puzzled.
Oh, wait... Did Slashdot Alter the Discussion Ordering Ceremony?
Most Chinese dictionaries actually sort characters first by the radical and then by stoke count within each group of radicals. I'm curious why they used just the stroke count ordering for the Olympics.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
What's really outrageous is that you're too stupid to understand that you just need to choose a random radio button. Any Radio Button. To get the exact same programming.
Or that you could even select the "Over the Air" option.
This is how the Commander-in-Chief behaves in front of the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ_YhM4OGkU
Suggesting that NBC canjumped back and forth in a _live_ broadcast makes me wonder if there weren't a better use of their time machine.
That would just lead to a rash of countries with names like A One Republic and AAA Reliable Nation (well, probably in the French equivalent).
While NBC may well have done what they are accused of (I wouldn't know, the BBC had it all live and unedited), it's not the most insulting thing they've done.
They bribed the Chinese organisers of the Olympics to put certain events early in the morning (local time). The swimming starting soon is an example. Why? So they would be during prime time in America. This sound fair enough, until you realise that prime time in America is THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN EUROPE. So we get to miss half the events, just so it's a little more convenient for the Yanks. I mean, it's not like we invented the Olympics or anything...
Except in this case it doesn't give the impression that something very different happened since aside from the first and last countries the order that nations appear in the parade has no significance. Still it's a pretty stupid thing to change.
More important to me is that they put ads over the performances in the opening ceremony so we really did not get to see the full performance how it was intended.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes, the online one is out of order. What makes it so glaring is at one point, then mention that the US will be next after the commercial break. After the break, Uruguay was shown instead of the US, and is not shown until much later online. The broadcast feed on TV was not at least not done in the order that you're seeing online. I hope this answers your question. It's a bit frustrating to see no one answering the question, but talking about how evil/manipulative big media is.
Interestingly, several countries have ignored that part of the charter in previous olympics, to the chagrin of the French. http://thatscricket.oneindia.in/olympics/2000/news/09/12/120900paris.html
What wouldn't Jesus do?!
that the order was altered by the simple fact that it was observed and that for each of the observers, the order was different.
Sig this!
I noticed the IOC threw an absolute fit over the use of Army Rangers for some portions of the opening ceremonies in Atlanta in 1996. (They pleaded for the Rangers to not perform their contribution in uniform. They didn't.)
But I don't think the guys who raised the Olympic flag while GOOSE-STEPPING in China were members of the local Beijing Boy Scout troop.
Fucking IOC Hypocrites.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
President Bush check his watch during the parade?
He did?!
Keep up the good work vandelais - President Bush can't be allowed to get away with this!
Seriously people, get some perspective.
The Opening Ceremony shown in the US on Friday was not live. In fact, right at the beginning it said "Previously Recorded." On CNN in the afternoon, they even had an article titled "Chinese president declares Olympics officially open," which is an event that takes place in the Opening Ceremony. China is 12 hrs ahead of the US East Coast. It could not have been shown live, as there were fireworks and darkness throughout the ceremony that daylight would have made impossible.
As far as the order goes, they did mention a couple of times during the television broadcast that the order was not what we were used to, and explained the stroke-number-system that the Chinese organizers were using. It was a bit odd watching, but it made sense to me. Glancing at the list on Wikipedia, I seem to remember the countries being ordered that way. So the TV broadcast and the Wikipedia lists match.
They also briefly showed us the countries that we missed while we were away during the commercial break.
I'm not going to watch the online version, so I can't compare to that. The Parade of Nations is very boring, and I can live until the Winter Olympics in 2010 before seeing it again.
One way to compare the accuracy between the TV broadcast and the online version would be to look at the bottom third graphics. Because of the different order system, they had a dimmed out preview of the next three countries, in a slider that moved along. So, if the online version has those graphics, and the images presented match up with the list shown on Wikipedia, then it is the same version... Yes, I know they could have edited those too, but I'd rather not get out my tin foil hat.
Sounds like the did stuff around with the order the teams marched in. They certainly had enough time to do it - it was delayed half a day from when it really happened.
Opening ceremony was at 8pm on the 8th of August 2008 (Chinese like 8 - it's a lucky number :) and Beijing is at GMT+8. Some of the folks here in Melbourne, Australia were watching it that night live (about 10pm onwards local time). Based on the twitter feeds from those in the USA who were tweeting what they saw, it looked like they were watching it around 8pm on the 8th in THEIR time zone. Somewhat impossible, no?
I'm already hearing reports of US swimmers being coached to refer to the time of their race in US broadcast time rather than Beijing time. Ummmmmm - WTF?
So yeah, if you've got HOURS between recording the event and showing it then making any changes you want is a piece of cake.
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Indeed. I believe the practice started with the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the German newsreels showed only negatives of all of the track and field events, so that a white Jesse Owens could be seen beating the pants off of all the black athletes.
I did, in fact, watch the entire broadcast. The countries were not broadcast in that order.
I watched the entire broadcast (TiVo'd it) and was so impressed, I stayed up until 4am and watched it all over again. While I don't have the countries memorized in the order they appeared, but from what I do remember, it seems about the same as on the Wikipedia article. The US came in about 2/3 of the way down the list in the broadcast and they're #139 of 204 in Wikipedia (or roughly 2/3 of the way down the list).
I did notice that a number of small countries got very short screen times and seemed "clipped", so I guess they edited out some content to shorten up the whole thing.
I just sat through the four and a half hours of the opening ceremony that was aired last night on NBC here in the States (thank you TiVo), and as far as I can tell, it matched the order listed on Wikipedia pretty well. Even when they cut to commercial (shockingly infrequently), when they came back, the announcers went quickly through the missed countries, to catch back up to real time. Considering the soundtrack playing in the background while the countries were being read over the public address system in three languages, it would be pretty obvious if they skipped around, and the music and crowd noise suddenly changed. Politics aside, that's one of the coolest cultural and artistic displays I've ever seen.
According to friends in Europe, who watched the ceremonies live NBC totally used FAKE CROWD noise.
Apparently Vladimir Putin from Russia got the biggest crowd applause all night when they showed him on the big screen, and the Iraq athletes were given loud BOO's.
And all we heard all night long were the exact same levels of 'monotone cheering' on the NBC broadcast.
Don't believe ANYTHING you see on TV, especially if they had 12 hours to make changes,edits,lies.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
First time in years!
The part where you pay at the cashier must have been edited out to make room for a commercial.
The Disney Christmas day parade is actually shot in November, or was it October. I can't quite remember.
Boss + family got to go down and see it.
So no surprise with the Olympics.
M
For the people who are not believing the order was changed: Zimbabwe and Tunisia show up before the US delegation on the NBC broadcast, where in reality they came after the US.
But then he wouldn't have gotten the chance to be a wordy, condescending asshole, and that wouldn't be Slashdot.
The whole ceremony lasted 4.4 hours without any commercial interruption from CCTV1/5/7. I watched the whole live ceremony (don't ask how). I guarantee you NBC cut about at least 1/5. Who has more censoring?
...they didn't fix the audio and video cut outs and glitches in the TWELVE hours between the real deal and the tape delay. They were too busy screwing with cutting and pasting the athletes.
Freaking morons.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Do they still charge VAT?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
So wikipedia is infallible now. I must have missed that memo.
Most Chinese dictionaries actually sort characters first by the radical and then by stoke count within each group of radicals.
Fool! Look at the government sanctioned sites! There are NO radicals in China!
Probably because that would have been another layer of complexity/confusion for any countries that aren't familiar with the Chinese writing system.
I kind of wished they showed the Chinese characters at the bottom of the screen with the country name so that at least we would have a better understanding of what they meant by counting strokes, but then again since they changed the order of the countries appearing that would explain why they didn't do that.
It is easier to sort out by stroke than by radicals. Ii is not easy to know the radicals of some words.
Most Chinese dictionaries actually sort characters first by the radical and then by stoke count within each group of radicals. I'm curious why they used just the stroke count ordering for the Olympics.
Because the Olympics aren't a dictionary? (: Listing by stroke count / reading seems to be another accepted way of doing things, at least to judge from the song lists I see in karaoke places.
Gold medal in the Markov chain event.
A more correct example should be:
1. Blue car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
2. Red car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
3. Yellow car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
4. Green car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
No matter what order you change them, it doesn't change much of the overall story, as their order is not significant.
Perhaps they want to avoid another "Wardrobe Malfunction" going live on air...
http://www.justin.tv/channel34
photosMy Photostream
Almost all TV shows (especially the news) save the hot item for last so as to keep the audience watching the whole show. It happened regularly on Ed Sullivan and Carson. If you show the big act first, the watchers wander off. It is to be expected.
Well I'm using Vista.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
The olympics do not stop for commercial breaks... Obviously there was at least some editing done to catch up.
I don't know about the web site version but I watched the entire NBC broadcast and I can tell you without a doubt the US team was shown first marching. I was keeping a careful eye out of curiousity of how the US team would be dressed (The suites and hat were kind of a let down in my opinion) the very first time they were shown it was when they were announced in the parade.
Now there were times when the camera shifted back and forth between marching and infield *after* their initial apperance..but this was artistic license by the people editing the broadcast.
I can't speak for the web content and don't have a photographic memory of the the NBC broadcast but it does appear to me to jive with the ordering as I remembered it from the wikepedia list.
I at least know for a fact that Russia and then Syria were played directly before the US in the origional NBC broadcast.
I've given up trying to watch the olympics since the last few I watched chunks of were so heavily edited, and so horribly over commentated as to really ruin them.
Basically ou got the highlights and the bloopers, with commentary that would make Bob Sagat proud.
With 500 channels of cable/satellite it is a major shame that we can't have a dozen channels with nothing but live feed of virtually every venue in real time, with a 100% unedited repeat until the next day fires up. Instead I get a dozen channels of Law & Order reruns (Law & Order, Spedcial Ed. Unit).
Maybe they wanted to edit out 'W' looking at his watch. Notice how Mrs. Bush always looked poised and well composed? Makes me wonder what the last eight years would have been like if she had been president...
No free radicals, you mean. Which is why Chinese always look so healthy and young.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Textbook definition of "slow news day."
i watched it live in japan-on NHK.
china was last, the USA somewhere near the middle/end.
i imagine that the entire show was edited...especially the CHEERS that the USA recieved when taking the field. (btw, north korea got cheered too!) the Australians and the British were also recieved well.
awesome show!
They'd never show the opening ceremonies live - those three 4$$h0l3$ reading the commentary can't possibly THINK fast enough to do it live, they had to voice-over the production to get parts of it right, you could see/hear the slight difference even on videotape.
Crowd noises were inconsistent, quality was crappy, editing was out of sequence - a blind, hydrocephalic, legless, autistic dead man with iMovie could've done a better job.
After all the criticism of previous olympic shows for exactly the same tape-delaying you'd think they'd AT LEAST run the opening/closing ceremonies on-time.
The earliest olympics I was old enough to appreciate was Tokyo in '64 and even though the satellite-relayed pictures were grainy and noisy I can remember thinking "gee, this is happening on the other side of the world RIGHT NOW..." and it was awesome to realize that even though it was an event a half-a-world away from me I could see it (essentially) immediately. The world stopped seeming unimaginably large right at that moment.
Too bad "Nothing But Crap" can't see their way clear to keep even THAT four hours of the games live (well, AND the closing ceremonies) - the rest of the games don't matter as much, but there's somethng special about seeing the opening/closing live from the other side of the planet.
(/soppy_romanticism)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I don't care about the order of the athletes so much as the fact that they didn't broadcast it live at all. I had hoped to have watched it at the same time as my friends in Beijing, but was unable to do this. As far as I know, the USA is the only country who failed to broadcast the opening when it really happened. (some, like Canada, broadcast it twice - in real time and later a repeat in the evening.)
In the old days (don't call me geezer!) they did lots of live broadcasting, and, while it was a strain to get up in the middle of the night to see it, there's something about that experience that brings home a real sense of the world, and how big it is. In this case, there's a sense of wonder to the idea that you're watching something at the same time as people all around the world. NBC, unsurprisingly but no less disgustingly, prefers profit over human fellowship.
Of course, if you disagree with my point of view, that's no problem - you can just record it if it's broadcast live in the middle of the night.
What's even more frustrating is that I was unable to find an unblocked stream in another country so I could watch it on my computer. I found out later that some German stations hadn't blocked it. There was an article in the New York times today how NBC kept playing internet "whack a mole" with those who knew how to find a way around their blocking. Well, so much for the idea that the Internet is free. Kind of feels like the West must have felt when they fenced it all in.
actually I'm going to China soon, and I was going to start studying methods of circumventing China's great firewall. I wish I'd started already. Maybe I could (ironically) have used those methods to circumvent the great NBC firewall and watched the feeds from China or Canada.
111st Free County
# United States #
!! Belgium !!
Sadly, this is probably the future.
Great Intellect...
Can you imagine the confusion online if they'd ordered countries by radical? A Wubi system would have been fun - i haven't even figured that out yet.
I heard the 2008 Olympics were not held. John Titor told me so. Maybe that was an alternate timeline. Divergence is a bitch.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
To hell with my karma. This may very well be the dumbest argument I've ever seen anyone make. And I've worked with a lot of complete douchebags that will argue about the most meaningless and stupid things.
The story didn't change. A bunch of people walked in a circle. NBC showed you a bunch of people walking in a circle. If it had been edited to look like the fireworks displays were going off when the American team came in, or to look like Nicolas Sarkozy was falling asleep when the Chinese team came on (instead of Uzbekistan or whatever it was), sure, what you are saying might be reasonable. But as it stands, you are making me wish slashdot had [img] tags so I could do better than just link to this. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v340/cowcowmoomoo1/arguingOnTheInternet.jpg
Whale
A network editing its content to "improve reality"? Incredible!
Well, there WAS that whole thing with that Katie Couric interview with John McCain where they basically realized McCain was rambling in an answer, so they cut and pasted another one of his answers over that one to make him sound more coherant...but nah. No way!
ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX...you wonder if the people running the show at any of those stations ever read 1984. You wonder if they ever creep themselves out with some of the stuff they pull to improve ratings. News shows ARE the new sitcoms. They know that sitcoms get more viewers than the news, so they've made the news like sitcoms or staged "reality" shows. It's not about the truth, it's about the money, buddy.
I know what you mean, the part with the red drumsticks was terrible camera work. However I don't think it was NBC, I think it was the same pool cameras that I watched here in Oz.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The first time I watched this, I couldn't figure out what order they were coming out in. I was watching it in a foreign stream with Chinese commentary and then it was later switched to Norwegian, cause I had no English stream available to me in Norway, where I am currently living.
But I later downloaded copies of the broadcast from NBC and Australia's 7 network, and briefly compared bits of them. They seemed to be roughly the same, except for different camera angles. I checked the countries too, and in all 4 streams that I saw, they did all come out in the same order.
But I can't believe they put ad breaks in the NBC broadcast! Channel 7 broadcast the whole thing completely free of ads, like they always do. Although, it was broadcast live in Australia. Also, I found the Australian commentators better (though I'm a little bias, since I am Australian)
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
I was told by someone from Shanghai that in Traditional Chinese (Mandarin) sorting is done by number of strokes, but the newer Simplified Chinese is sorted by alphabetical/phonetic pinyin.
Although when I asked about it I was inquiring how Windows Explorer sort files using Chinese characters.
Unbelievable, I can't believe that the news entertainment industry would change reality to suit their purpose. That would be like a politician leaving out key points of information that might alter the size of their support group.
...I think a lot of the precision and discipline are inherently Asian values. If Japan were to host the Olympic games we would see at least an opening ceremony in the same ballpark. As for the rest, I'd have to agree. That's the "advantage" of a centralized, authoritarian government.
...on the BBC web site. So all you have to do is move to the UK and buy a TV license then you're set to watch it again on the BBC iPlayer. The online viewing works in FireFox using Flash so I'd guess it'd work on a Linux box too?
Yeah, that's actually one very good reason for using only stoke counts. It is very simple to explain.
I'm still a beginner at Chinese, so those structural input methods are way out of my league. I've tried them a few times in the past but didn't get anywhere with it.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Naahhh... they just watched the broadcast on NBC
bickerdyke
Anybody seen those huge mechanized billboards on NASCAR (or the French F1 race) used to advertise the network. They aint there either.
The ordering follows the number of strokes in the chinese calligraphy of the first word of the nation. The first country appeared was 'Kee' ... (could remember the whole name). It has 2 strokes. Then followed by 3, 4 strokes etc. The ordering was used in chinese phone books. So the ordering is not random. The network guys might have got freaked out when they got the list of ordering, which looks random in alphabetical order.
In a parallel universe... or, given an infinite amount of time, the NBC broadcast will eventually arrive at a place where the marching order is correct. So, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Gently reply
It wouldn't have worked in 2008, the countries were introduced in order of the number of strokes in their chinese translated characters.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Not to record history Not to broadcast 'truth' Not to present 'facts' THEY SELL ADVERTIZING Btw - that goes for 'News' papers, magazines, radio, billboards....
I didn't realize they were even on, until I saw something on the news website Saturday afternoon. I don't bother with crap like the Olympics...most of the (so called) athletes are doped up on something for the "extra" edge anyway.
You've got to cut the guy some slack: (1) It was unbelievably hot and uncomfortable in the stadium (2) The parade of nations is unnecessarily long and boring (heck, I tivo'd it and watched it sped up and it still took an hour) (3) President Bush can't look at a watch discreetly -- it takes time to figure out which is the hour hand and which does the minutes, and Mickey's so gosh-darn cute you can't help but stare
If NBC was doing that much editing, why would they NOT cut out the one (maybe more?) shot of Bush yawning and looking at his watch?
Surely its much better for them to show everyone being completely interested, involved and smiling at the event?
Probably. And if not, it seems like the alternative is "Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong", etc.
The giant firework footprints were faked too, already at the source. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2534499/Beijing-Olympic-2008-opening-ceremony-giant-firework-footprints-faked.html
Changing the order of things may seem like a trivial change but unless it is explained that this has been done it may give the impression of a very different series of events. Just ask the BBC.
i was keenly watching the finals of the women's 4 x 100 meter relay. at the very start i noticed something wrong. lead-off U.S. swimmer natalie coughlin hit the pool first and had a half body length over everyone else at the 50 meter mark yet somehow was overtaken by the australian and the dutch on the way back. the 2nd leg U.S. swimmer was even slower. dara torres for all her vaunted strength could never have overtaken the dutch and the australian with the lead they had on the final leg. now natalie coughlin is a world record holder. for her to be overtaken in a relay, particularly in the lead-off, is very suspicious. if she had just kept her lead, the U.S. could probably have won the gold. did she intentionally hold back so as to conserve her strength for her individual events? if she goes on to win these in record times i'd say she really did ease off in the 4 x 100 team relay.
A reasoned explanation for what TV viewers saw, what Internet viewers saw, and a mechanism by which the difference could arise from stupidity rather than malice. When a thread has 441 comments and one of those comments answers all that, sometimes you just need a Score:6, Informative.
Now that we have that settled... I want to thank Coke and NBC for showing Sunday's Olympic Basketball match between China and USA with minimal commercials. Good job. Have a coke. The opening ceremony was another matter, however, which was disgracefully and disrespectfully chopped up with commercials every couple of minutes.
Computers obey me.
Funny, I would have guessed 4,3,1,2,5.
According to this article: Beijing Olympic 2008 opening ceremony giant firework footprints 'faked' the coverage was not only edited, censored, audio altered but the fireworks in what you saw may have been a computer generated graphic.
This reality TV is really cool stuff!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
When I was younger I remember watching the Olympics on every major channel and you tunned into the sport that seemed interesting to you to watch. I remember getting so mad that I could not watch my regularly scheduled programs due to the Olympics. They broacasted day and night non stop.
How I wish those days were back, now I am forced to watch what the dirt bag network (singular we bought the exclusive broadcast rights) deem to be highly watched programs.
The Olympics are so much more clouded with politics and so much corporate manipulation that it ozzes of pure shit.
They cry because nobody is watching them, I wonder why.
I want to see the sports that I dont normaly see televised. I want to see other countries althetic best. I want to hear other countries nathional anthems being played.
I want to travel the world from the comfort of my living room.
Well, the number 1 in Chinese is one stroke, horizontally (2 is two strokes stacked horizontally).
In Surveillance UK, Olympic events watch you.
I'm sure I'm younger then you think but all the dictionaries I've seen for looking up characters still use the radical-stroke order system. These are all current Chinese-English dictionaries (like this one), however I can't say how purely Chinese dictionaries are ordered. I'm curious, what sort of methods are more common for looking up characters?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I've got many Chinese dictionaries. Most of them are sorted by pronunciation (i.e. alphabetized by the pinyin), but also include a small index which lets you look up characters based on the components of the written characters (the radicals). One difficulty is that it takes a fair bit of experience to know which part of a character is the primary radical. E.g. the character xiang3 (to want / to miss / to think) has 3 components: mu4 (wood), mu4 (eye), and xin1 (heart), which all look roughly equally "prominent". For some characters, it takes a few tries to find it. And not just for foreigners; I've occasionally found characters which even native Chinese people have trouble looking up in dictionaries (though granted, they usually don't need to look up characters, so they sometimes don't have a lot of actual experience using the radical-index part of dictionaries).
Anyway, I've got other dictionaries which include other methods for looking up written characters. One of the ones I found easier to use when I first started was a dictionary from mainland China, where the index table is first broken down by the total number of strokes in the entire character, and then within each value, broken down by the first two strokes used when writing the character. Even if I don't know which radical is the "primary" one, I learned the proper stroke order for writing characters pretty well from the beginning, so I generally didn't have trouble using this dictionary. (I don't think the primary radical is always the first one when writing the character?)
It seems perhaps it's this latter method that was used to order the countries marching at the Olympics, but I didn't bother looking at the details closely enough (i.e. try to determine what ordering was used for countries whose first characters had the same number of strokes).
Oh, and just a random bit of info, another interesting dictionary I have is called a "reverse" dictionary. E.g. normally to look up "zhi1 dao4" ("to know"), you'd look under "zhi1". But in the reverse dictionary, you look under "dao4", the second character. That's a handy one for those times you remember the second character in a word but not the first. That one's also from mainland China.
None of the US Territories that had Olympic Teams are "incorporated" areas, and therefore Bush is not their President. They do not vote for the President, they send no electors to the Electoral College, and they each have their own governments.
Perhaps you should do a bit of reaearch before making offhand comments?
Is NBC altering the reality of the broadcast to boost ratings?
Your question is easily answered by looking up "television" in the dictionary.
Nicely done.
This is one of the reasons I agree with the TV license and am thankful for the BBC's services in the UK.
- Dan
...it doesn't bother any of you that this is an entirely inaccurate claim? The order wasn't changed at all, and whoever alleged that it was is smoking crack.
Flamebait huh? If I'd said the same thing about Fox it would be +5 Insightful. Makes you wonder about the double standard being so obvious.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.