In my first interview to be the chairman of Channel 4, the panel asked me what I thought of public service broadcasting. Obviously I had no idea what they meant, so I waffled and got away with it.

So that’s all right then.

Yet Britons refuse to do the same, and for this their newspapers, which seldom look on the sunny side of life, are much to blame. “NAME THE DEVIL BOYS—WE MUST NOT LET THEM HIDE”, roared the Mail on Sunday on January 24th, quoting the parents of the Edlington victims. Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron’s comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London’s teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital.

via Britain’s “broken society”: Through a glass darkly | The Economist.

Data Underload #7 – No Worries | FlowingData.

I would very much concur with this. Although would like to see some values on that x-axis. When does the downward slope start?

A leaked copy of the SoundScan figures for a single week from the fall tells an equally sad tale. In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

via Classical artists such as Hilary Hahn chart big on Billboard with little sales – washingtonpost.com.

Which begs the question: how many records are being sold in the mainstream charts? Classical music represents 3% of recorded music sales. So if you can get to No.10 with 189 sales in America in classical, can you get to No. 10 with (189/3)*100, or 6,300 sales?

Some consumers have objected that e-books must be cheaper to make than ink-on-paper books. A simple cost breakdown by Money magazine last year, however, suggested that only about 10 percent of a book's list price goes to printing. But ink-on-paper books have to be shipped, stored, and (when they go unsold) returned, and e-books would be spared these costs, too, as this analysis suggests. Also, according to TBI Research, because e-books are likely to end up with a lower list price after the dust clears, author royalties, calculated as a percentage of the list price, are likely to be lower, too—additional savings! Yay! When all these savings are added up, do you succeed in dropping a list price of $28 to one of $9.95? That’s a big drop. Profit margins at book publishers now are rumored to be no more than 10 percent, where they exist at all. It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.

via Clash of the titans – Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.

The Haiti earthquake has, as you will be aware,  generated a ground swell of support from every corner of society.   Six British artists and Giles Baker-Smith of GBS Fine Art have come together to donate six fantastic pieces to raise funds for Merlin’s work in Haiti. With five pieces available for individuals, this unique online fundraising appeal and prize draw, limited to 100 tickets, provides you with a 1 in 20 chance of winning a piece of art.  And for corporations we have one larger installation, which would sit well in a corporate setting.  Tickets for this piece are £500, with only 20 tickets available.  All the pieces, valued between £1,500 and £6,500, are on offer today, so please read on for details of how to enter the prize draw and make your donation to Merlin’s emergency response in Haiti.  Both draws are a great opportunity to support the Haiti Appeal and have the chance of winning some great art! Do pass this on to anyone who may be interested.

For Individuals: To enter the prize draw click this dedicated link and make a minimum recommended donation of £100*

For Corporates: To purchase one of only 20 tickets click here and enter today.

The artists in question are: Sean Fairman, who has provided the corporate piece; Emily Allchurch; Veronica Bailey (and in relation to her piece, by kind donation of Coutts & Co); Susannah Baker-Smith; and Robert Davies.  Merlin extends a huge thank you to these artists and to Giles Baker-Smith who initiated this appeal.

More information on the Art for Haiti Appeal can be found here and further details on the artists and the specifications of the pieces can be found here at www.gbsfineart.com

For more information on Merlin’s work in Haiti please visit: www.merlin.org.uk

Using Foursquare or Gowalla represents such a minimal amount of effort and energy – normally in a moment of your day when you’re not doing anything else – that you only need a tiny amount of reward for it to be worthwhile. And, actually, for quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the point is in seeing how much point there is.

via russell davies: lowering the point point.

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income. Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population. These figures are astounding. It highlights the fact that Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is.

via Mobile Operators, Price Gouging, Innovation, and Txteagle — A Critique by Steve Song | MobileActive.org.

The truth is that The Shining is the story of how Stanley Kubrick cut a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Apollo moon landings.

It is also the story of how Kubrick may have accidentally told someone what he had done and how that person had to be killed.

The Shining is also the story of how faking the Apollo moon landings almost sacrificed his relationship with his wife.

Finally it is the story of how Stanley Kubrick barely escaped alive to create another day.

The Shining is the story of how a part of Stanley Kubrick was killed by the agreement that he made with the U. S. government to become the “caretaker” of The Project called A11 or Apollo 11.

It is also the story of the history of NASA.

This explains why the previous “caretaker” was so pressured and stressed that he had to kill his TWIN daughters.

Why?

Because the previous NASA missions before Apollo were named Gemini!

via Jay Weidner (and initially via Metafilter and LinkMachineGo).

The thing I really loved about it is that the assumption of meaning in every symbol and the worship of allusion would not be out of place in some of the English literature texts I read at uni. They’re full of crap like the stuff in this essay. “If x means y, then we can assume that y means z, and Eliot is actually talking about bullfighting.”