- links for 2009-07-03
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"The consequence of all this insider chat is that fewer and fewer people can follow extremely important goings-on. People are tuning out what is the most important story of our lives, which is being delivered incrementally by a number of very smart people, nearly all of them working exclusively online, to a small audience of people who are financially educated enough to understand. So do your part and educate me, please."
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- links for 2009-05-12
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They have been the defining differences introduced by a Scottish Government in the last decade: free personal and nursing care, the abolition of tuition fees and the rejection of targets and use of the private sector in health. All those moves have played well with Scots voters. But objective measures, as reported by the FT, suggest they have failed: waiting times are falling more slowly than in the south and participation in higher education has not outstripped England. Worse, England is doing better than Scotland on maths and science scores, while overall GCSE performance has risen rapidly to equal Scotland’s, in its equivalent qualifications. “It could be,” says Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh university, “that the greater competitiveness and specialisation of English secondary schooling has introduced a dynamic of emulation and improvement which the more defensive policies of Scotland and Wales are not matching.”
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Dan Gillmor: “I’ve learned my lesson. Anything I write — for myself or for someone else — is backed up on my machines under my control. I’m creating a cloud backup as well.”
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- links for 2009-05-01
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Stephen Potter: The reviewer's mission "is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't, you are glad that someone else has, although obviously it might have been done better."
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How droll.
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- links for 2009-04-30
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Lloyd thinks about local information, and launches some experiments just a couple of postcodes away from me in South London…
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- links for 2009-04-25
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Because everything sounds better with Auto-Tune. Utter genius.
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- links for 2009-04-20
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Peter Preston proposes that newsgathering be funded through a new broadband tax, but not for "bloggers or celebrity chat: just serious, factual stuff". Well, I guess it would be easier than *persuading* people to pay for news.
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- links for 2009-04-17
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Staggeringly, Creamola Foam was Scottish.
"The packaging included the phrases:
* "CREAMOLA FOAM CRYSTALS"
* "MAKES 10 BIG DRINKS"
* "FULLY SWEETENED"The original ingredient list read: sugar, fruit acids, sodium bicarbonate, gum acacia, saccharin, saponin, flavouring, colour."
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"So the battle lines are being drawn between opposing groups of companies and also according to radically different strategies and philosophies. The opposing forces are polarized; the opening part of the game is over. Now the middlegame — and the carnage — begins on a grand scale."
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- links for 2009-04-14
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"Media moguls—journalism moguls, anyway—need two sets of skills. They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger. They also have to forge, through creativity, cunning, and force, a set of arrangements with customers, competitors, governments, advertisers, production facilities, and distribution networks which can generate a lot of money. Even in an era of focus groups and marketing research, any news publication that attracts an audience has to have a personality, which means that it has to bear the stamp of a real person."
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- links for 2009-04-04
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Genius - on his very snazzy website, the Spinal Tap bass player collects raw video feeds (he has a big satellite dish, I'm told) and, thusly, raw satellite moments - the bits you don't see in TV news broadcasts, the bits that are supposed to be off-air. "If I had to proclaim my philosophy of humour, it would be: Comedy is good, reality better", he writes.
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- links for 2009-03-18
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A rather nice Wordpress theme. This blog may end up looking like this shortly…
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"Radio 4 has axed its only children's series, the magazine show Go4it, after admitting that its average audience was aged over 50… this year Go4it sometimes registered zero listeners from its target four-to-14 age range, with an average of about 20,000 listeners in that age bracket tuning in." [Neil adds: it took eight years to cancel the show]
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