Archive for the 'Media' Category

Disaster?

Published on January 27, 2009 in Media and Politics. 1 Comment

yassinThe government of Israel has a policy of assassinating political leaders in Gaza. That means that the people who have ended up in charge of Hamas are the violent nutters rather that anyone who might be interested in a political solution. If the British government had shown this kind of clumsy disrespect for the rule of law in the 1980’s (and let’s face it they came close) then Gerry Adams and his colleagues wouldn’t have been around for any kind of peace process and we’d still be waging a war in Northern Ireland against the throwbacks who eventually became the Real IRA.

Gaza VictimEven so, despite being idiots Hamas can fairly reasonably claim to be a legitimate party of government in Gaza because they were kind of voted in. They are committed to armed conflict against Israel, that is the ticket they ran on and that is what people voted for. Which is fair enough. I don’t think they should be described as terrorists, they are entitled to go to war if they want to. It does mean, though, that the awful casualties that the Israelis caused in their retaliation are not a ‘disaster’. They are casualties of war. Describing it as a disaster, as though it couldn’t be avoided, is dishonest.

So I agree with the BBC’s recent decision not to show a fundraising film on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee. While I hate to have to agree with the annoying Mark Thompson I think that he’s right when he says:

…Gaza remains a major ongoing news story, in which humanitarian issues – the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict, the debate about who is responsible for causing it and what should be done about it – are both at the heart of the story and contentious.

DEC Donate nowPeople say that the BBC should trust the judgement of the charities who make up the DEC. Why? The people who work for charities are only human, they can be corrupt, incompetent or wrong just like anyone else. And because their credibility depends on maintaining a pristine image they don’t publicise their failings. They also have their own biases. Just because the DEC thinks that aid can be delivered safely and without being diverted by Hamas that doesn’t mean it can be. It is reasonable for the BBC to be sceptical about their claims.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should give money to the DEC, of course they should if they want to. But BBC news isn’t there to tell people how to react to what’s going on, it’s just there to report the story. Reporting the suffering of the people of Gaza is the right thing to do in a news programme. Showing a film afterwards which is specifically designed to tug on the heart strings and raise money isn’t. We all know that when there stop being developments in the story it will stop dominating the headlines and yet the suffering will go on. That is the right time to show a fund-raising film, not now.

Uncertainty

Published on December 8, 2008 in Media and Shopping. 1 Comment

Some researchers at Edinburgh University have just published a report about how easy it is to buy prescription-only medicines online. They visited sites which they found via Google and Yahoo but they did not take the final step of actually buying the drugs because they felt that would not be ethical. So they were just counting sites which offered drugs.

At the start of this year researchers at Berkeley and San Diego were doing a study into how profitable spamming could be. They set up a fake online pharmacy which was just like the real thing, offering prescription-only drugs. They counted how many people visited the site and added drugs to their basket. The only point at which the customers discovered that it was not actually working was when they submitted their credit-card details, at which point they got an error page.

So, the Edinburgh researchers probably included the Berkeley researchers in their study, and vice versa, unless they warned each other, which seems unlikely. It’s like a collaborative version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Whenever you try to measure something by doing anything on the web you are probably affecting someone else’s measurements at the same time.

Debt

Published on November 27, 2008 in Media, Politics and Shopping. 0 Comments

Basing the growth of your economy on people borrowing money, as opposed to relying on increased productivity, doesn’t seem like a very sensible idea. An Austrian ecomomist called Ludwig von Mises described the problem very nicely:

It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.

Nevertheless this is exactly the economic model that pretty much everyone apparently believes in at the moment. It seems to be the unanimous view of both journalists and politicians that we need the banks to start lending again in order to get the economy moving. But some of the banks are in trouble because of their imprudent and greedy business practices and so now all the banks are being extra-cautious and won’t lend. So the favoured solution is for governments to give the banks yet more money in the hope that they will lend it out to people. To go back to Ludwig von Mises, this is still not a wonderful method of heating; it’s just the government buying more furniture. Nobody is prepared to say the truth, which is that lots of people are going to have to accept a prolonged lowering of their standard of living.

Robert Burns

Published on August 15, 2008 in Art and Media. 0 Comments

It’s funny seeing the terrible fuss some Scottish people are making after Jeremy Paxman described (accurately in my view) Robert Burns’ poetry as sentimental doggerel. It often feels like a good result if one can make it through any conversation with a Scot without having to accept with good humour some sort of complaint about England or the English. Make even the slightest suggestion though that Scotland is not the mistreated heaven on earth that its natives believe it to be and you’ll be in for a lecture, and as for Scottish culture and cuisine, why it’s only the English that eat oats nowadays isn’t it?

Anyway, someone said that Mr Paxman should read more Burns so that he could understand the poet’s great insight better and it got me thinking. Isn’t it about time someone produced a decent Burns anthology in translation? All the translations I’ve ever seen make him seem prosaic and shallow when the picturesque language is stripped away. Come on Seamus Heaney, let’s settle this once and for all!

Staring

Published on May 18, 2008 in Media. 1 Comment

I know I’m only posting videos on here these days. I’m too busy writing music to do anything else. Sorry. Who am I kidding? I know nobody cares. Anyway, look at MRirian (and she’ll look at you), or you could look at her strange, compelling ears.

Miranda July

Published on May 1, 2008 in Media. 0 Comments

I don’t love her like I want to marry her, although I suspect it would be great being married to her, well at least really interesting and stimulating, but I do love Miranda July more than anyone else in the world who I don’t really know. Not only is this film about how buttons are made really perfect, but also she’s got a great thing on her site about good reasons to vote which applies just as much here as it does in the US. (If you’re intimidated by the way her site asks for a password use mine – “nobody”.)

BBC World News

Published on April 21, 2008 in Media. 0 Comments

So, today the BBC launched BBC World News, the new name for their global channel BBC World. They’ve changed the on-screen branding and everything. There’s one thing that won’t be changing though – the website remains www.bbcworld.com for now as they put it. Why would that be. Surely they snapped up the bbcworldnews.com domain as soon as they thought of the title. Didn’t they? Oh dear.

Big Jim

Published on March 12, 2008 in Media. 0 Comments

I’ve been listening to Ivor Cutler a bit lately and, let’s face it, he doesn’t get played on the radio as often as he should be, so I decided to infringe the copyright and put some on here because there are plenty of people in the world who would love him and who don’t know about him. This track is from Jammy Smears.

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Hopscotch

Published on February 27, 2008 in Media. 3 Comments

Compare and contrast.

The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.

So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use Wordpress and off they went.

Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things – the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.

Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.

The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.

I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.

Bye Facebook

Published on February 12, 2008 in Media. 3 Comments

facebook drainI was spending too much time on Facebook and I was starting to worry about just what sort of place it really is. So I deleted everything and deactivated my account.

You may not know this, but you can’t really delete a Facebook account. It always remains available to be re-activated so that you can return when the cold turkey gets too hard to bear. There is a way of making the account un-useable though. You just have to add the contact email address of your account to someone else’s account. Because the Facebook computers won’t let the same address appear in two accounts your deactivated account will completely lose its email address and thus become impossible to reactivate.

Now all I’ve got to do is find someone who will add my email address to their account temporarily, and I’ll be gone forever. (Having said that, I have just opened up a new Flickr account…)