"Twitter's lawyer, Ben Lee, said: "Twitter's terms of service make absolutely clear that its users 'own' their own content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.""

"The BBC appears to have missed the fact One Percent Rule was never intended to dictate a single pattern across the entire web: it was a rough guideline for expectations inside any given online community or service. Should it be a surprise that 77 percent of people are active in some way in some sort of community? I don’t think so — and to suggest otherwise ignores the fact that people behave in different ways in different places. After all, like me, you could be highly active on Twitter, and therefore part of the one percent, but remain a lurker on a site like Metafilter (even though I’ve been a member there for a decade). Or you could be a highly active Wikipedia editor (one percent) who uses Instagram simply to browse pictures from people you know (10 percent). Or you could be an active commenter on one blog but never leave comments anywhere else. It goes on. That’s where your 77 percent comes from: the BBC research is really just comparing apples and oranges."

"The New Radiophonic Workshop (NRW) will be led by Matthew Herbert, the electronic composer who has collaborated with Björk and been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack work. "What the [original] workshop achieved was the pinnacle of electronic music in this country, and it is all the more extraordinary given that it was conceived in the 50s," Herbert told The Independent yesterday. He is already working on his first NRW commission. "The first thing is to define the sound of 'The Space'. There is a black hole in the internet and that is 'sound'," he said. "I'm interested in bringing together musicians and software technicians. You can tell stories in sound that you can't do with images.""

"The first of eight highly specialised Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM), which each weigh nearly 1,000 tonnes, is being positioned at Royal Oak in west London. From here it will begin its slow journey east, as it carves out a new east-west underground link. The scheme is currently the largest civil engineering project in Europe."

via Bobbie (Twitter)

HT @bruces Downloading Ballard's 1992 Desert Island disc session

"It's not what they teach - since what they teach (a smattering of Chinese history excepted) is largely useless. It's that they teach. Brains love to learn. … Brains love information - finding connections, mapping relationships - and games let you mainline a fat flow of pure, perfected data, all deliberately contrived to be rich with exactly those kinds of interconnections. And as you learn, you're given an incredible window into your own capabilities. Games are a test-bed where you can endlessly explore what an extraordinary machine you are. … Games let you be a spectator in your own head. They're laboratories which let you contrive test after test - tweak a condition here and a parameter there - and give you a visible, beautiful read-out on just how smart your brain really is. And in doing that, they give you more insight into your own capabilities than I've ever found in any work of literature or any piece of music. And that's why I play games."

"In February I wrote a blog called "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere". With the global Occupy protests yesterday it is still looking quite accurate. But it's now clear there is a 21st reason. And a 22nd. We've had nine months of political paralysis. And people have begun to feel the economic permafrost setting in. … these protests are a powerful signal worldwide. Their mere existence shows that people are determined to "think globally" about routes out of this crisis - at a time when economics is driving politicians down the route of national solutions. … this communal, negotiated, networked life already exists in people's heads as a result of the rapid adoption of social networks and networked lifestyles. As Manuel Castells, one of the first sociologists of the internet, said: the more autonomous and rebellious a person's attitudes are, the more they use the internet; the more they use the internet, the more autonomous their lifestyle becomes. Something has been going on between the left earphone and the right earphone of this generation that represents a profound change in attitude. … the movement is a kind of replacement social democracy … Basically we are in danger of a global stagnation - it was HSBC's economics team that described it as a permafrost. It poses the question "who pays for the banking crisis" very acutely. And large numbers of people are now realising it is going to be them, and more painfully, their children. As in Greece, in that circumstance, for every protester camped in the freezing dawn there may be many more quietly fuming in their living rooms who feel the same way."

"It's become a library of the air. … It now seems that we are becoming an encyclopaedia (I say "we" not in the Mrs Thatcher sense of "We are a grandmother" but "we" in the sense of "the succession of producers, researchers and myself"). There couldn't be a much better outcome, could there? We are asking people to come in and talk whose work furnishes the great written encyclopaedias, and who themselves are salami-slicers of encyclopaedias, and they are now being recycled into a soundipaedia. Can we claim that as a new word?"

"This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down. Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven't been dealt with. They've simply been shifted to states. Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can't be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away - a process that is bound to painful and impoverishing for many. The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. But it won't be the end of the world, or even of capitalism. Whatever happens, we're still going to have to learn to live with the mercurial energy that the market has released."

"JN I agree about Paul Mason. His blog post about the origins of the Arab Spring was a model of what sense-making should be. What was most striking about Newsnight's attempts to cover the recent unrest was the absence of any sign of intellectual curiosity. The riots were alarming, complex and baffling. Why were they happening? Why were the police responding as they did? Did we really need new laws to cope with the phenomenon? Were social networking tools really being used to co-ordinate looting? How could a prime minister be so clueless about the internet? What happened after the Toxteth riots in 1981? And so on. Britain is full of knowledgeable people who could have helped answer such questions. Academics such as Paul Gilroy and Conor Gearty of LSE, for example, or Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce of Bradford (whose careful study of the 2001 riots in that city showed that most of the instant explanations offered at the time turned out to be wrong). Where were the technology experts who could have dissected the idea of squelching Twitter? Or the retired judges and police officers who could have explained why the disorder was being handled the way it was? None of them appeared on Newsnight, for the simple reason that they are probably not in the contact books of the programme's researchers. So if I had one recommendation for the editor it would be to insist that his researchers prune their Rolodexes, get out more, read more widely and above all wean themselves off the news agenda of the rightwing, xenophobic British press.
JC That's a lot of questions and they should be directed not at me but at Newsnight's editor. It was unfortunate for them that Paxman was away during the riots. He at least would have been able to direct the traffic. I'm not sure I agree that the programme's researchers and producers are poorly read. Your suggestion for alternative contributors betrays your own generational preferences. Instead of Gilroy, I would like to have heard from Hari Kunzru; instead of Conor Gearty, David Allen Green, a lawyer-blogger and an expert on new technology and social networks, and so on. One of the flaws of the present programme is that it attempts to do too much too quickly. There is an addiction to haste and compression. Complex subjects are necessarily trivialised because of the desire to move briskly on to the next subject. Contributors gather in the "green room" – a dismal, untidy, cramped space the size of a small tent – and they are hurried on and off the set. The whole experience can be unsatisfactory. And yet, when Newsnight is at its best, there is nothing as good. We can wish it were better, but equally we would miss it if were no more."

"I want to put up a wonderful and oddly-touching film I have found in the BBC archives. It is a documentary made in 1969 in response to a growing panic about violent teenage gangs in England and it focusses on the Hells Angels and Skinheads. The filmmakers went off to get in with a group of Hells Angels and with a gang of skinheads. Their aim was to find out who the scary psychopaths were that made up the gangs that were threatening society. But what they came back with is a weird and brilliant mini-drama about two groups of individuals who are just like us - but more bored. It is also sometimes very funny - because the gangs have their own rules and structures that are absurd and distorted reflections of our own society."

"not everyone who grows up in a deprived neighbourhood turns to crime - just as not everyone who grows up in a rich neighbourhood stays on the straight and narrow. Individuals are responsible for their actions - and every individual has the choice between doing right and doing wrong. But there are connections between circumstances and behaviour. … we'll never get the answers right unless we understand what's gone wrong. Understanding the background, the reasons, the causes. It doesn't mean excusing crime but it will help us tackle it. … debating the symptoms rather than the causes won't get us very far. Because the fact is that the hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself. We - the people in suits - often see hoodies as aggressive, the uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters. But, for young people, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive. They're a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in, don't stand out. For some, the hoodie represents all that's wrong about youth culture in Britain today. For me, adult society's response to the hoodie shows how far we are from finding the long-term answers to put things right. … when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement - think what has brought that child to that moment. If the first thing we have to do is understand what's gone wrong, the second thing is to realise that putting things right is not just about law enforcement. It's about the quality of the work we do with young people. It's about relationships. It's about trust. Above all, it's about emotion and emotional development. Of course we should never excuse teenage crime, or tolerate the police ignoring it. We need tough sanctions, protection and punishment. … Justice is about setting boundaries, and stepping over those boundaries should have painful consequences. But that's not the whole answer. To build a safe and civilised society for the long term, we have to look at what goes on inside the boundaries. … no child is ever really feral. No child is beyond recovery, beyond civilisation."

"As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he was given community service after setting fire to a rare collection of cacti in a "drunken prank". … When he returned to England, he was ordered to spend the holidays - and a lot of money - finding the cacti he had destroyed and sending them on to the German professor whose collection he had ruined."

"The idea that posting something online makes it freely available for re-use is a common mainstream media trope. … It really does sometimes seem like there is one copyright rule for the media, and one for the rest of us."

"The Home Office said closing down networks would be disproportionate and potentially ineffective - since it would penalise businesses and people NOT engaged in crime."

""You can't arrest your way out of the problem. Arrest is certainly appropriate for the most violent, the incorrigible, but so much of it can be addressed in other ways and it's not just a police issue, it is in fact a societal issue.""

"American newspaper articles are in the main more accurate and better-researched than British ones; the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal was not wrong when it ventured that Fleet Street has "long had a well-earned global reputation for the blind-quote, single-sourced story that may or may not be true." But stories in the American press also tend to be tedious, overly long, and academic, written for the benefit of po-faced editors and Pulitzer panels rather than readers. There's a reason a country with a population one-fifth the size of that of the United States buys millions more newspapers each week. For all their faults, British "rags" are more vibrant, entertaining, opinionated, and competitive than American newspapers. We break more stories, upset more people, and have greater political impact. (The BBC, with its decidedly American outlook on the news, has become increasingly irrelevant as its state-sponsored dominance has been challenged by Murdoch's Sky News.) Broadsheets journalists like me view ourselves as part of the same gang as the tabloid hacks -- and there is movement between the "tabs" and the more serious papers, not least because the hard-nosed skills are in demand by editors of both. If they weren't too busy shaking their heads at us and quoting the laughably pompous Journalist's Creed, the genteel scolds of the U.S. media might learn a thing or two. … The danger of the fevered atmosphere in Britain -- where justified outrage over tabloid tactics is fast leading to a hasty public inquisition, with 10 official inquiries or investigations underway at last count -- is that what Prime Minister Tony Blair once termed the "feral beast" of the media might be tamed and muzzled. Perhaps the worst outcome of all would be for it to be turned into an American-style lapdog."

"How did the Wall Street Journal, led by Rupert Murdoch’s hand-picked Managing Editor Robert Thomson, follow up on the resignation of its publisher and the arrest of former top News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). exec Rebekah Brooks? With some standard news stories—and a flame-throwing editorial the Journal hopes will singe critics but could catch it in a backdraft. … The editorial in Monday’s Journal doesn’t use the term “shut the f* up” or quote Cee Lo Green but the 1,046 carefully chosen words are written for the choir and aimed squarely at News Corp. critics. The gist: Don’t blame us; the Journal is better off out of the hands of the Bancrofts; not investigating hacking is worse than hacking; fear media regulation; the BBC; the Guardian and liberal politicians have their own agendas; and anyone who backs Wikileaks should look in the mirror. It is a masterpiece as far as defensive editorials go—and the Journal and its journalists would be better off if it had been spiked. … Had the Journal gone the safe route, the editorial would have emphasized the statement it ends with more than the flames aimed at others: "Phone-hacking is deplorable, and we assume the guilty will be prosecuted. More fundamentally, the News of the World’s offense—fatal, as it turned out—was to violate the trust of its readers by not coming about its news honestly.We realize how precious that reader trust is, and our obligation is to re-earn it every day." The editorial is unsigned. Paul Gigot is editorial page editor."

"Phone-hacking is illegal, and it is up to British authorities to enforce their laws. If Scotland Yard failed to do so adequately when the hacking was first uncovered several years ago, then that is more troubling than the hacking itself. … When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had. That promise is worth repeating now that politicians and our competitors are using the phone-hacking years ago at a British corner of News Corp. to assail the Journal, and perhaps injure press freedom in general. … The British politicians now bemoaning media influence over politics are also the same statesmen who have long coveted media support. The idea that the BBC and the Guardian newspaper aren't attempting to influence public affairs, and don't skew their coverage to do so, can't stand a day's scrutiny. The overnight turn toward righteous independence recalls an eternal truth: Never trust a politician. … We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world." DNA will out.

"Whatever happens with BSkyB – and it is difficult to see the referral to the Competition Commission as anything other than the forerunner to the bid failing – the events of the past week mean that never again should we all be lectured by a Murdoch on how the media should be run. Anyone who listened to James Murdoch’s self-interested lecture in Edinburgh in 2009 will be relieved to know the family’s power is waning. Those of us who believe in the values of the BBC can sleep easier knowing that the Murdochs will never be as powerful again."

"As if they’re not in enough trouble already, it seems certain executives are actively seeking to undermine the police’s anti-corruption investigation by continuing to brief their favourite media lackeys – notably the BBC’s Robert Peston – on their latest discoveries."

"If the big question, as I said at the start, is why it took four years for News International to hand over the e-mails to the police, there are some subsidiary questions: Which executives at News International were aware of the e-mails in 2007? Did Harbottle & Lewis give any advice to News International on the alleged criminal activity described in the e-mails? How was it that James Murdoch, chairman of News International, didn't have the full picture of wrongdoing at the News of the World till recently (as he says)? Will the Commons culture, media and sport committee feel that the Harbottle & Lewis letter, which was shown to them by News International, gave MPs a fair impression of wrongdoing at the News of the World?"

""the social silence": the subject that everybody at high-class cocktail parties wants to avoid. … there is a school of social theory that has a name for a system in which press barons, police officers and elected politicians operate a mutual back-scratching club: it is termed "the manufacturing of consent". Pioneered by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, the theory states that essentially the mass media is a propaganda machine … even the most "constructed" of TV and radio journalism looks natural and spontaneous compared to the machine-written prose of tabloid newspapers: I have become convinced that the Facebook generation, when it reads such newspapers at all, does so ironically, much as it watches Big Brother. That is, even though you can make a business model out of selling scandal sheets about the famous, you cannot manufacture consent with it anymore. … Nobody under the age of 50 is remotely surprised to see a man once trusted to run the information operation of the British government arrested, or to see the Met admit that "a small group of officers" took payment. … three institutions stand weakened: Mr Murdoch is facing the collapse of his BSkyB bid; a Conservative Party, cut adrift from him, faces a moment of internal re-appraisal; and in the cappuccino joints around New Scotland Yard there is apprehension over whether the Met can survive another systemic kicking so soon after the MacPherson report. … Rupert Murdoch's resilience relies on the few handpicked lieutenants and family members holed up in London and New York. It is a classic "Weberian hierarchy" - a command structure stronger vertically than horizontally. Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made "all propaganda instantly flammable". It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers are now also flammable."

"So that gives us 80 million, which just leaves 1,920 million to find in the rest of the world. … It’s a fairy tale wedding and it surely deserves a fairy tale audience."

"Left to its own devices … the BBC would probably have missed the internet, just as Microsoft nearly did. … even in this hostile atmosphere, BBC Online flourished. It did that by being properly funded & by attracting some talented people who were motivated by the public-service mission & the opportunities for innovation offered by an organisation that did not have shareholders demanding instant returns. The result was an impressive set of innovations, one of which – the iPlayer – has transformed the online landscape. But the biggest achievement of BBC Online has been to ensure that the BBC is by far the most significant UK player in the global online entertainment market. … The BBC needs to spend more, not less, on its online operation if it is to have a chance of being relevant in 20 years' time. It needs to do more innovation, not less, in technologies beyond the iPlayer. … given that its top management apparently still doesn't "get" the net, it badly needs a new chairman who does."

"Horrocks said the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, has pledged to reverse the World Service cuts when the 'corporation takes over responsibility for its funding from the Foreign Office in 2014."

"I can't help thinking that in 10 years time there will be comparisons with the short-sighted junking of 60s TV shows - including Doctor Who episodes - that was done in the 70s to save money and space." http://853blog.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-internet-history/: "The BBC should be shouting about its role in creating the British web, not sweeping this history under the carpet for fear of offending ideologically-obsessed blowhards. Archive these sites somewhere, give them to the British Library, but don’t kill them off – people worked hard on those. The BBC regrets the days it routinely wiped TV shows to save on storage space. It may similarly come to rue the day it deleted all these old websites." http://adactio.com/journal/4336/, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/02/bbc-internet-deletion-follow-u.php, http://adactio.com/journal/4377/

"even in core areas of expertise with glorious heritage ... public-service broadcasters can, and will get dis-intermediated in a world where data is played with as much as stories are told"; via Kim

As angry MPs agree witnesses should be called to account over the phone-hacking affair, Henry Porter and Will Hutton examine the wide influence of the media empire behind the scandal
The malign influence of Rupert Murdoch on British lifeNews International acts as if it is above the law and has contributed to the coarsening of society's values, writes Henry Porter
When Rupert Murdoch appeared on his own Fox News Channel last week and was, astonishingly, asked about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal – "the story that was really buzzing around the country and certainly here in New York", as the anchorman put it – Murdoch cut him off with the words: "I'm not talking about that issue at all today. I'm sorry."
Seen against the background of Sun Valley, Idaho, and in short sleeves and sunglasses, Murdoch appeared more like a gangster fighting extradition proceedings than the attendee of a media conference. For some reason, the vicious agility of the elderly Hyman Roth in The Godfather, Part II came to mind. Naturally, the Fox News anchor didn't challenge the man he called Mr Chairman and the matter of the mass hacking of phones belonging to MPs, public figures and celebrities was dropped as Murdoch moved to praise his own organisation for its robust criticism of the Obama administration, delivering one swift jab at a competitor, the Financial Times, in the process.
Murdoch is a problem for British society and the News of the World phone-hacking story – given further impetus over the last 10 days by the New York Times and the Guardian – is a symptom of the chronic malignity of his power. In the last 40 years, we have grown used to News International (NI), so that it is difficult to imagine Britain without Murdoch's occupation, without, for instance, the leaders of the main parties humiliating themselves and our political system to gain his endorsement, or News International journalists and executives treating the law, national institutions and Parliament with disdain.
Murdoch has become one of the political issues of our time, as menacing in his own special way to democracy and conduct of politics as many other threats our society faces, only we do not see it, because his power is used behind the scenes to extend his commercial influence and so his grip on the flow of so much of the information in Britain. He and his equally unappealing son, James, (probable salary £1.3m) may bellyache about the BBC, but when you set the advertising spend and income of BSkyB alongside those of ITV and the BBC and add his newspapers and websites into the equation, you realise that Murdoch is by far the greatest force.
In February, I evoked the nightmare of Berlusconi's Italy when commenting on the fact that News International had concealed the truth about the extent of the phone hacking and that people such as Rebekah Brooks, formerly editor of the Sun and News of the World and now chief executive of NI, had refused to turn up to answer questions from the Commons culture, media and sport select committee. This is wrong in one respect. Berlusconi is at least an Italian operating in his own land. As an American citizen, Murdoch appears to have scant interest in the plurality of information in Britain and therefore the health of British society.
His overriding concern is that the government remains covertly in step with his plans for expansion and that the flow of profits to News Corp remains uninterrupted. It is as though we had handed over a huge chunk of British agricultural land or given up our food distribution networks to a relentless foreign corporation.
But the amazing thing about Murdoch's power is that it is maintained even though we owe him absolutely nothing and he is, theoretically, at the mercy of laws and regulations that can be activated to control him. His power is in a sense illusory, maintained because people choose to believe it. He argues with some reason that Sky News Sport and Sky+, for instance, and the continued existence of the loss-making Times and Sunday Times newspapers (losses up to £87.7m in 2009) make an important contribution to entertainment and information, yet it is also probable that other companies, possibly more benign, would have grown to occupy the commercial space that he has created for NI.
Anyway, the good in his enterprises must surely be set against the detriment to British society, laid bare in the phone-hacking scandal. These are as follows. First, he has been responsible for a distortion of politics in the last four decades. In an unguarded moment at Davos three years ago, he replied to a question about shaping the agenda on the Iraq war: "We basically supported the Bush policy." And so he did. In the nine days before the invasion, freedom of information requests reveal that he had three conversations with Tony Blair.
No British political party has succeeded at an election in the last 30 years without Murdoch's blessing and the drumbeat of his papers can make life extremely difficult for a government when he withdraws his support, as he did from Labour last year. This ability to intervene decisively in general elections gives him immediate access to the prime minister and power to his editors to dictate laws, such as Sarah's Law. It was hardly a surprise when David Cameron employed the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, now mired in the phone-hacking scandal, to be his director of communications.
Blair's deputy director of communications, Lance Price, called Murdoch the 24th member of the cabinet. "His presence was always felt," he wrote. "No big decision could ever be made inside Number 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored." That is almost certainly true of the new government and Andy Coulson is seen as the key facilitator of Rupert's habitual privilege.
Second, News International regards itself as above the law of the land. As well as paying out large sums to several victims of the phone hacking, who might otherwise have brought cases against NI in open court, it is suspected of subverting the police.
The Metropolitan Police's investigations by Andy Hayman into Glenn Mulcaire's operation to tap phones on behalf of the News of the World is thought by MPs such as Paul Farrelly to be inadequate. Mr Hayman is now employed by the Times as a columnist. Further, Rebekah Brooks admitted to a House of Commons committee, then denied it, that as editor she authorised payments to the police for stories.
Unseen political influence, paying the police for stories and the hobbling of due process are the standard procedures followed by crime families and though I do not say that Murdoch is a criminal, there is a case for placing the influence of the media magnate, his clannish associates and family on the spectrum of undesirable behaviour in a democracy.
The third part of the case against Rupert Murdoch stems from the unusual clarity of a one-dimensional being – the lack of doubt in his positions – as well as the acid drip of his customary cynicism.
British society is far from perfect: we are sometimes harsh, jeering, vulgar, indolent and lacking in compassion and it is to these traits that Murdoch's tabloid newspapers and much else in his media empire appeal. But look at Britain before Murdoch bought the News of the World and you see a nation that was a good deal less derisive. Murdoch has undoubtedly contributed to the coarsening of British society and also to an erosion of values, which now sees a society where the outrageous practices of his – and other – tabloid journalists are expected, if not quite accepted.
I often wonder what Murdoch and his family will leave behind when they pass from the scene – the memory of an extraordinarily successful business empire and of many conquests no doubt, but there will be few monuments, libraries, inventions, endowments, galleries or campaigns for justice to remember them by; merely a vague sense of depletion and of a power that existed, to a bewildering degree, for its own sake.
After a good debate in the Commons, which, incidentally, was an encouraging change from the proceedings in the last Parliament, the standards and privileges committee will investigate the hacking of MPs' phones. Together with renewed scrutiny of the police investigations this is a start.
MPs could do worse than summon Murdoch to the Commons, to answer questions about who sanctioned illegal practices by his journalists, but he'd probably reply as Hyman Roth did to Michael Corleone: "I didn't ask who gave the order because it had nothing to do with business."

It's time government stood in the way of his ambitions
A plurality review over the BSkyB bid is essential to protect the scope of our TV and newspaper coverage, writes Will Hutton

Three days into the coalition government's life, Rupert Murdoch was seen leaving Number 10 by a back door. Nobody knows the substance of his conversation with the prime minister. However, it would be astonishing if during the course of the unminuted exchanges he did not foreshadow the view of Chase Carey, Sky's chief operating officer, in a telephone call with City analysts later in June, that News International's bid for the some 60% of the shares it does not own in BskyB should not warrant a "plurality review". Rupert Murdoch wants as little opposition as possible to this tipping point for News International – its desire to have 100% ownership of BSkyB. Not to have raised this with the new prime minister would have been a dereliction of duty.
The arcane "plurality" provision in the 2003 Communications Act, inserted by Lord Puttnam despite the opposition of Tony Blair and the Labour government, permits the business secretary to refer any bid involving cross-media ownership to OfCom to ensure it will not materially reduce the plurality of voice in the British […]

"By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonisation of Mars. … The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden. So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina. … Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades. … "What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."

http://howbigreally.com/ — "like a digital toy – that just does one thing, very clearly (we hope) and delights in doing so. … Alan Kay once said that “A change of perspective is worth +80 IQ points”- that’s the goal of BBC Dimensions. So long as it delivers tiny bursts of that along with the little grins of ah-ha it seems to generate, we’ll be very happy."

"I no longer see why I should buy material I'm not interested in, just because it's been bundled up by one publisher rather than another. Am I alone? I'll pay. I'll buy. But I want to be more discriminating." "journalism may be on the edge of a great new age. How good have we been, honestly, at telling the truth to the powerful? … Further, the daily competition for newness … means the media's attention span has been limited. … we will have large numbers of specialist news sites - for specific companies or sectors, for different environmental issues, for overseas crises - which bring together journalists, academics, specialists, campaigners, professionals, lobbyists and so on. These will be where the expertise and longer-term attention span will be found. They will pile the pressure onto the powerful, and keep asking the questions. And from time to time their work will break upwards, to the aggregators (we need a better word) and the global headlines."

This is one of those stories that every journalist - especially editors and reporters - should read.
It is written by Chris Wheal, an award-winning freelance who works for various business magazines, blogs for AOL's DailyFinance website and also trains journalists.
I want to make it crystal clear that he is no ingenue. He is an experienced journalist with a lengthy track record. He knows of what he speaks. That context is important in the light of what follows.
Eight days ago Wheal's nine-year-old nephew Jamie Bray died in a tragic accident by breaking his neck after getting entangled in a rope swing in his garden.
Aware that there would be press interest, Wheal offered to deal with reporters on behalf of his sister and her husband. At first they didn't think it would be necessary because they wanted nothing to do with the media.
But the media had other ideas. As Wheal writes: "Being a journalist on the receiving end of journalism is an eye-opener."
The first journalists turned up on the doorstep (up a private road) the day after Jamie's death. Then there was a call from someone claiming to be from Love It! magazine offering cash. Other fresh-faced reporters knocked on the door, prompting Wheal to wonder why only the most junior hacks have to do the death knock.
So the family realised they needed Wheal to deal with the situation after all. He takes up the story...
I drafted a statement. I had to convince my sister to include details as I knew that was what the press would want. I made a comment – an uncle is a close enough relative.
And we asked a professional photographer who had a great photo of Jamie for permission to use the pic in the papers.
Hampshire police could not issue the statement in full. The details of the accident came from the pathologist. The police can only issue details released by the coroner, who had not yet ruled.
This meant the accident was open to misinterpretation. We could not state that it was a rope swing, for example. I asked that my details be included in the edited statement and that the press contact me. The phone did not stop ringing.
Over the next few days Wheal spoke to all the local papers and the Press Association's southern office. He emailed Meridian TV and did four local radio interviews. He also contacted the Southern Daily Echo reporter, Julian Robinson, who had broken the story using Facebook comments from his sister.
The Echo story was syndicated. The Daily Telegraph ran it virtually word for word but inserted in the intro a speculative figure for the supposed worth of his sister's house (£800,000).
Wheal notes the reasoning behind the apparent irrelevance of including the value of a house: "For rich parents this is a tragic accident. For poor parents, no doubt, it would have been negligence." He continues:
The BBC website used the police-issued information without calling, so missed out on the extra detail I could have given to clarify the story. The Sunday Times, Mail and others pieced together the issued statement from PA copy and excerpts from the syndicated local paper stories...
Not a single national news organisation rang me. I am guessing most did not contact Hampshire police, so would not have got my statement with my contact details. They relied on PA and cuttings. It was classic "churnalism".
But he adds: "Not all the local papers can be proud. After getting my statement issued though the police and having seen rival papers out-scoop and take a more news-focused attitude... The News in Portsmouth sent a reporter to doorstep my sister. He was met with a torrent of abuse."
A day later The News apologised. The paper accepted it was an error of judgment by the news editor to send a reporter rather than to phone. Then came a call to Wheal's sister from the SWNS news agency in which the reporter offered her money for the story.
Wheal writes: "There is just no way they would accept money and you have to admit it is sick of the agency to even offer."
Now, planning ahead with next Monday's funeral in mind, Wheal is compiling tributes to Jamie from friends and family and gathering more pictures. He writes:
I am trying to give the press what they want without it impacting on my sister and the rest of our family.
My big concern now is a media scrum at the funeral. Even one snapper trying to get shots of the grieving parents etc will be too much. I will have my sister's eulogy to Jamie available to the press.
I can even report details of the service. I hope in exchange they will leave us alone.
He concludes with a heartfelt plea:
My sister is not me. She is an inherently private person, as is her husband. They have never courted publicity. They have never sought to be in the press. They are not celebrities. I ask the press of consider that and leave them alone.
Source: Chris Wheal
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"Researchers have discovered the skull of a 29 million-year-old animal that could be a common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes, including humans. … The discovery suggests that the divergence of apes and Old World monkeys happened much later than the 30-35 million years ago that genetic studies have suggested. The new date, of 29 million years ago, fits more closely with what the researchers would have expected and is not surprising from a palaeontological point of view."

"Earlier this week Prime Minister David Cameron spoke to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg about a partnership deal. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said the prime minister had been dismissive of social networking websites in the past. But the government now says Facebook will be its "primary channel" for communicating with the public about spending cuts, as it seeks to tackle the UK's record deficit. The website will have a page for people to debate spending priorities and will allow people to submit and vote for ideas on where cuts could be made. The government says the "most serious ideas will be taken forward by officials in the Treasury and other government departments". It says it wants to use new technology to "crowd source" and get people involved in making policy."

"early humans [may have] arrived in Britain nearly a million years ago - or even earlier. The find, published in the journal Nature, pushes back the arrival of the first humans in what is now the UK by several hundred thousand years. … The discoveries were made in Happisburgh, in the north of Norfolk. At the time there was a land bridge connecting what is now southern Britain with continental Europe. There are no early human remains, but the researchers speculate that the most likely species was Homo antecessor, more commonly … known as "Pioneer Man". Remains of the species have been found in the Atapuerca region of northern Spain, and dated to 0.8-1.2 million years ago. So the species could well have been in Britain at around that time, according to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. "If the climate was good and the land bridge was there, there's no real reason they couldn't have come (to Britain) as far back as 1.2 million years ago""

"The review, chaired by former civil servant Sir Muir Russell, has spent months reading submissions sent in by climate scientists and their critics and interviewing key players, notably scientists within the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). It concludes that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt". … the university accepted the inquiry's criticisms on lack of openness and compliance with FoI legislation, and that he had written to all staff at the university reminding them of their responsibilities. Meanwhile Professor Phil Jones, the former CRU director at the centre of many of the allegations, has taken up the new post of director of research within the unit. Professor Acton said this would allow him to continue his research while others shouldered more of the administrative burden, including taking primary responsibility for FoI requests."

"Only 18 UK teachers have been struck off for incompetence in the past 40 years, the BBC's Panorama has learned."

"The fossils would have existed during a period in Earth history that came shortly after the so-called Great Oxidation Event, when free oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere rose rapidly. Another oxygen surge that occurred about half a billion years ago co-incided with the Cambrian Explosion - the huge spurt in evolution that established all the major animal groupings. "The evolution of the Gabon macrofossils, representing an early step toward large-sized multicellularity, may have become possible by the first boost in oxygen," Dr El Albani and colleagues said in a statement, "whereas the Cambrian Explosion could have been fuelled by the second. "Why it took 1.5 billion years for the multicellular organisms to take over is currently one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of the biosphere.""

via Adrian Hon, http://mssv.net/2010/06/13/educational-games-from-3500-years-ago/. "the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus … [is] a crammer for the Civil Service exams around 1550 BC and, like self-help publications today that promise instant success, it has a wonderful title, written boldly in red on the front page: "The correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things, and knowing everything - obscurities and all secrets." … The numeracy of the Egyptians, honed by works like the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, was widely admired across the ancient world. Plato, for example, urged the Greeks to copy the Egyptians, where ... " ... The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organising military expeditions and all together form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others and a great deal wider awake." [Laws 7,819]"

"The simple devastating charge that can be laid at BP's door is that it had no timely & viable plan to deal with a high impact, low probability event … the catastrophic successive failures of preventative equipment on the rig itself. It is precisely the same charge that was levelled at big financial institutions from Northern Rock, to Royal Bank of Scotland, Lehman, AIG, UBS, Citigroup & the rest - namely that they had no plan B for when the unthinkable happened & entire financial markets, on which they were dependent for vital finance, closed down. … the long-term costs of finance for banks & therefore for the rest of us is on a pronounced rising trend (ignoring the short-term reductions in interest rates engineered by central banks) as a result of reforms to reduce the risks taken by banks. And the cost of oil will also have to rise, as companies are forced to take much more expensive precautions when drilling for oil in treacherous regions. … it's not a recipe for booming economies"

"The first phase of the project is expected to take at least three years."

"A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there. The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars. The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favourable for the evolution of life at this time than they were on Earth. "This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars," said Dr Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson."

"Those in our audience [those at the start of their careers] for On the Money weren't on their way to the barricades, as far I could tell. They were strikingly optimistic about their personal prospects - and primarily interested in practical solutions to their immediate problems (such as how to avoid being classified as a poor credit risk - yes they want to borrow more). One of the conclusions I drew was that the general-election campaign had not prepared them in any serious way for the public spending cuts and lean years to come. So as and when the harsh reality of today's speech by David Cameron sinks in, the anger of youth that is conspicuous by its absence may be ignited (oh, and that pernicious disillusionment with our elected representatives - which is particularly characteristic of a younger generation - is probably not going to evaporate)."

"sense of proportion & context had been missing from the moment that the Telegraph published its story on Friday night. Laws paid a market rate to rent a room in London. He hadn't used taxpayers' money to play the property market, either to make capital gains or to avoid paying tax on them. His breach of the rules was technical, since he could legitimately have bought or rented his own flat, charged its much more considerable costs to the taxpayer, & had his partner live in it rent-free. Fairness or thoughtfulness, though, were absent in most reactions. Instead the media felt free to place the worst possible interpretation on his behaviour. On the BBC's Today programme on Saturday morning, John Humphrys repeatedly accused Laws of "taking public money in pursuit of his private life". … Britain has developed a media and public culture in which suspicion and criticism are now regarded as the appropriate lens through which to view every political figure and every political event."

"Mr Laws might have survived the initial newspaper report that his parliamentary allowance claims had breached the rules. His career was over as soon as the BBC took up the story. These days, the nation’s public broadcaster sees its role as making the news rather than reporting it. … There was a time when the BBC concerned itself with dispassionate reporting and analysis of the facts. Now it runs at the front of the tabloid pack. … Common sense would have treated his behaviour as an oversight … Yet the default position of the media remains that the country is governed by thieves and charlatans. The standards of behaviour demanded of politicians deny the possibility of human frailty. The media has decided that it prefers to throw rocks at elected representatives than to listen to or report their endeavours. … At some point the politicians must face down the mob. Mr Laws has lost his job. The country has nothing to celebrate." via Steve (twitter)

""My problems have been caused by my unwillingness to be open about my sexuality and not by any intention to exploit the MPs' expenses system." … I have paid a high price for trying to keep my sexuality a secret. … Losing your privacy, your Cabinet job and your perceived integrity within 48 hours isn't very easy. But I accept that I should have been more open and should have set a better example as a public figure.""