Tonight at 9 pm, ABC is premiering a television show that all you computer potatoes need to see: “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.”

Oliver, a well-known chef from Britain, is taking his war against unhealthy eating habits to American shores, starting in West Virginia. The U.S. is suffering from an obesity epidemic and he aims to stop it, one pizza for breakfast at a time.

The scene of kids in a classroom thinking a tomato is a potato and school bureaucrats calling french fries a vegetable is really rivetingly sad.

Oliver won this year’s TED Prize at the high-profile conference–you can add your name to his online petition here to “save cooking and improve school food.”

You can also watch the show online here.

Here’s the video of his speech at TED, as well as the trailer for “Food Revolution”:

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself: Head over to any major Web publisher and try to watch more than 15 seconds of its clips. Tough odds.

So I have a lot of admiration for people who are figuring out how to do interesting stuff with Web video.

And I kept that in mind last month when I spent the day judging video entries for the “digital Ellies,” the online awards handed out by the American Society of Magazine Editors every year.

The new list of finalists is out now, and you can see some of them below.

The ASME folks have asked me not to talk about the specifics of our discussions (or to identify fellow judges), but I did want to make one note: All of those I worked with have to deal with the reality of Web economics in their day jobs. So we’re not oblivious to the fact that some of this stuff may not be a practical option for some Web publishers.

You’ll have a hard time selling ads against a 20-minute documentary on environmental destruction in West Virginia, for instance. But we also wanted people to see just how many options Web video offers if you think broadly about this stuff. And we also made a point of including some stuff that a publisher could conceivably use to generate dollars, like interviews with movie stars.

One big bummer: The majority of our finalists don’t allow embedding. So I can’t actually show you their stuff, and will have to settle for directing you to their sites. Apologies. The list of all the digital ASME finalists is here, and winners will be announced March 18.

Reason.tv: UPS vs. Fedex: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix

Oxford American: “SoLost” series

SoLost: Wayne White Goes Thrifting from Oxford American on Vimeo.

Yale Environment 360: Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy
of Mountaintop Removal Mining

National Geographic: Redwoods: The Super Trees

“T,” New York Times Style Magazine, Screen Test series

A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today’s election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

‘He smashed it with the cat’s ears,’ said volunteer Jim Govostis.”

–Morning Call, Nov. 7, 2006

Fantastic. Here we are, just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the integrity and accuracy of some of the electronic voting machines that will determine its outcome are in question.

Again.

According to new research from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines used throughout New Jersey and Louisiana, and in a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well, can be hacked in eight minutes to manipulate vote tallies.

From the Princeton report:

The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It’s easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It’s easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic ‘audit trail’ in the computer. Without voter-verified paper ballots, it’s extremely hard to know whether a voting machine (such as the AVC Advantage) is running the right program.”

Damning allegations and ones which Sequoia categorically denied after unsuccessfully attempting to suppress them. According to Sequoia, its voting machines are vulnerable only in a classroom setting. In real-life election scenarios, they’re just fine. “…Simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections–removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs–make the items in their report next to impossible,” Sequoia said in rebuttal to Princeton researchers’ claims. “In fact, many of the scenarios painted by plaintiffs depend on the existence of crooked, malicious, and corrupt pollworkers, while the success of some scenarios depends on both corrupt pollworkers and inattentive voters.”

How reassuring.

Well, at least they’re not switching votes between candidates like some of those touchscreen systems in West Virginia, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Got a “Verifiable Paper Trail” for Those Phantom Voters?
• Premier Continues Proud Tradition of Diebold E-Voting Screw-Ups
• Make the E-voting System’s Password “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″? That’s so Obvious It’s Genius!
• Diebold: A New Beginning (to the First Step in E-Voting Terror)
• AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
• What Did You Expect? They All Run Windows…

[Image Credit: Diebold Variations]

A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today’s election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

‘He smashed it with the cat’s ears,’ said volunteer Jim Govostis.”

–Morning Call, Nov. 7, 2006

Fantastic. Here we are, just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the integrity and accuracy of some of the electronic voting machines that will determine its outcome are in question.

Again.

According to new research from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines used throughout New Jersey and Louisiana, and in a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well, can be hacked in eight minutes to manipulate vote tallies.

From the Princeton report:

The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It’s easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It’s easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic ‘audit trail’ in the computer. Without voter-verified paper ballots, it’s extremely hard to know whether a voting machine (such as the AVC Advantage) is running the right program.”

Damning allegations and ones which Sequoia categorically denied after unsuccessfully attempting to suppress them. According to Sequoia, its voting machines are vulnerable only in a classroom setting. In real-life election scenarios, they’re just fine. “…Simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections–removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs–make the items in their report next to impossible,” Sequoia said in rebuttal to Princeton researchers’ claims. “In fact, many of the scenarios painted by plaintiffs depend on the existence of crooked, malicious, and corrupt pollworkers, while the success of some scenarios depends on both corrupt pollworkers and inattentive voters.”

How reassuring.

Well, at least they’re not switching votes between candidates like some of those touchscreen systems in West Virginia, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Got a “Verifiable Paper Trail” for Those Phantom Voters?
• Premier Continues Proud Tradition of Diebold E-Voting Screw-Ups
• Make the E-voting System’s Password “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″? That’s so Obvious It’s Genius!
• Diebold: A New Beginning (to the First Step in E-Voting Terror)
• AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
• What Did You Expect? They All Run Windows…

[Image Credit: Diebold Variations]