April 21, 2006
U2 line tops VH1 favourite lyric poll
The "winner" being the utterly meaningless "One life, with each other, sisters, brothers", proving that you should never, ever underestimate the British public's bad taste. How can something so trite come in first, when "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds" comes third?
Even with the muppet vote split by "Look at the stars, look how they shine for you"??Permalink #
March 13, 2006
Former Supreme Court judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship
Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary... Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.
She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."
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June 06, 2005
Supermarkets selling fish that face extinction
The draft of a new Greenpeace report, which has been circulated to supermarkets, claims that chains such as Asda and Morrisons have no policies at all about which fish are caught in the most sustainable manner... The leaked report says that Asda still sells cod from the North Sea and the north-east Atlantic, even though scientists have been calling for a ban on fishing North Sea cod for the past three years.
A spokesman for Asda said: "As far I am aware all our fish - including the sharks which we used to sell but do not sell any longer - are from a sustainable source. In terms of them being endangered, I don't know where Greenpeace are coming from."
Given that there are no common/desirable fish available from 'sustainable' sources, it's hard to tell where ASDA is coming from. Given that most of the desirable fish stocks are somewhere between overfished, extremely rare, and all but extinct, it's surprising that fish is still on the menu.
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May 17, 2005
City extends Princes Street car ban
Traffic has been banned from travelling along Edinburgh's Princes Street. Councillors also say it will significantly improve local bus services to the capital's famous shopping strip, which runs below and alongside Edinburgh Castle.
Which is all very bizarre, because the side of Princes Street that suffers from congestion is the side that cars were already banned from driving down.
But hey, since when has the council let facts get in the way of a stupid decision??
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May 08, 2005
Top-up fees make UK second most expensive place to study
Education in Britain cannot truly be considered affordable and in most respects lags behind some allegedly expensive countries such as the United States.
The cynic might point out that this is exaggerated by the weakness of the American dollar...
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April 24, 2005
Council rejects simple solution in favor of complex and unworkable one. Again.
City leaders today warned against introducing a local income tax in the Capital after branding it unworkable.
Because it's so very simple and easy to administer and requires almost no effort on the part of the council [as it will invariably be collected by the Inland Revenue], not to mention much more efficient [remember Edinburgh's just sent out nastygrams to a third of households who haven't paid last year's council tax yet...] the Council is against it.
Once again, the flat earthers win.
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April 19, 2005
Preparing for the G8
McDonalds is planning to close all of its city centre branches during this summer’s G8 protests
It's hard to say what will happen then the G8 meeting happens, but it certainly seems that Edinburgh fears the worst... Hard to say if all the protest [etc.] stories are true or just media speculation, but they're increasingly unsettling.
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April 17, 2005
Spiked on ideas and anti-intellectualism in the US
My impression is that much of the population has come to feel that ideas themselves are elitist.
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April 15, 2005
Labour at centre of new row over postal votes
With 11 days to go until the deadline to apply for a postal vote passes, a Guardian survey of more than 20 key marginal constituencies shows that postal voting is soaring in crucial seats with small majorities, with applications in some areas up more than 300% since the last election.
It is beginning to look like the integrity of the UK's voting system is about to come under sustained attack from the UK's main political parties. Given that the postal vote system is a recipe for abuse, this does not bode well for the accuracy/honesty of the upcoming election. Methinks that there may be a number of constituencies with rather unexpected results.
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April 11, 2005
Edinburgh trying to attract immigrants from London
Edinburgh has lifestyle options that are very attractive to workers in London because it is not such a crowded city, property is cheaper and journey times are shorter.
Such pithy but completely wrong comments are of course the raison d'etre of Donald Anderson, Edinburgh's erstwhile Council Leader, who is guaranteed to be habitually wrong about just about everything.
While not as crowded as London, Edinburgh's not bloody empty, property is already immensely over-priced, the education system is pretty shocking, and journey times are much higher [you're not going as far in Edinburgh, but you're going slower]. I know, details, details.
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MPs savage Labour education strategy
The national literacy strategy, the foundation of the Government's education policies, is almost certainly flawed, fails one child in five and needs to be urgently reviewed, a Labour-dominated committee of MPs said yesterday.
I could be cynical but no, literacy is the key to most social policy, and literacy is a much bigger problem in the UK than many admit.
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April 10, 2005
Beneath modern Britain, the old skeleton of power and belief rises
There is the grisly spectacle of the corpse of an old man dressed and displayed to be venerated... Then there is the approaching marriage of a lugubrious middle-aged man and his mistress, a pleasant-looking if rather posh lady. Both have been married before, have grown-up children, seem to dislike publicity and have nothing special to say. Yet this humdrum event is being elevated into a moment of national significance, requiring TV crews, solemn-looking presenters and castellated backdrops. It is even delaying the Grand National
This is a reasonable, secular, undeferential, inherently democratic country... We have our ups and downs, but this is still a relatively friendly and comfortable place to live.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, old Adam comes stalking back, and we are expected to fall into line ... an ancient Britain of bloodlines, the throne of St Peter and the bellowing of Westminster man. Underneath the diverse day-to-day world, the old skeleton of power and belief is still there. A death, a marriage and a vote only need to combine, like planets, to bring it to life.
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April 09, 2005
Two times four is plenty, or how to calculate a journalist's IQ
Mark Lawson: Our prime ministers should be given an expiry date of eight years
stops on length of office better suit a presidential than a parliamentary system. While many countries with the latter system do have a constitutional definition of enough, term limits under such arrangements can increase the risk of coalition governments and prime ministers being chosen by MPs rather than the electorate - unless, as in the US, a separation between party and national leadership can be achieved.
And while term limits for leaders may be problematic (the second half of the second term inevitably becomes a waiting-room phase), an increasingly powerful moral and pragmatic argument for them exists.
There are days when the punditocracy makes you despair. Prime Ministers aren't chosen by the electorate - the electorate has bugger all to do with it. Prime Ministers are chosen by political parties, who sometimes even let their members have a say, albeit for completely different reasons - Labour needs to ask their members to try and counteract the votes of the various Unions in their bizarre electoral system[1], while the Tories don't want to ask their members in case they unearth another Ian Duncan Smith.
You can only have term-limits in a parliamentary system if you divorce the election of the Prime Minister from the parliamentary party system, i.e. implement some process where the Prime Minister is directly elected through a State-sanctioned system rather than appointed by a political party.
[1] Yes, I know there are historical reasons for doing things the way they do. This doesn't make it any less bizarre.
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Polly Toynbee for Pope...
With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome. Even this august organ [i.e. The Guardian], which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing.
The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.
He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost.
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Heysel: the inevitable result of a brutalised era?
There has been no spectacle in the history of televised sport as compelling and atrocious as the night of 29 May 1985, when 39 Italians were killed on the terraces of the Heysel stadium, Brussels, in the murderous prelude to a European Cup final.
Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.
His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting 'pseudo-events'.
Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment.
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Life Everlasting - Doctors, Death and Dying in America
You will notice, for example, how the fear of playing God operates exclusively on one side of the medical playground. Thus to help a patient end his or her life ‘prematurely’ is playing God, while extending it... is the mandate of ‘our Judeo-Christian heritage’ and the Hippocratic oath.
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April 08, 2005
It'll be a quiet summer... Part I
Historic Scotland has cancelled all six of this summer's outdoor concerts at Edinburgh Castle. Apparently tourists can't tell the difference between the Castle, the staging for the Tattoo, and tour buses. Or they get confused. Or the castle really is just there for tourists, not for people who live here. Some weak-ass excuse like that.
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It'll be a quiet summer... Part II
One of Edinburgh’s best known festival venues has been banned from playing jazz in the afternoon - because it interrupts Bible studies.
Divinity students are among those who complained about the level of noise coming from the Spiegeltent, in George Square, last year.
The only reason this happened is because the University of Edinburgh owns George Square... if they didn't, the poor wee lambs would have been told to get stuffed. Probably. Bah humbug.
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April 04, 2005
More naivety from the Archbishop of Canterbury
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April 03, 2005
Government relaxes ban on new out of town supermarkets
Under pressure from the Treasury, John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister announced that developers could get permission to build on greenfield sites if there is no suitable inner-city land available in particular areas.
Oh where have you gone John Gummer, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you...
This is just so stupid to be unbelievable, although given this government nothing really does surprise me. Out of town shopping centres kill existing retail developments, and make it harder for the poor and the less mobile to buy cheap food.
And one does wonder what on earth this has got to do with the Treasury... is the Treasury really the guiding hand behind all government policy, or just a convenient scapegoat?
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Stores have suppliers by 'short and curlies'
Despite this minor wee problem, the OFT seems to have decided that retailers were treating their suppliers fairly... rather than continuing their investigation 'till they've actually figured out what is going on in the supermarket business...
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April 01, 2005
Edinburgh Council still in denial...
I love the fact that the Council is blaming the congestion charging debacle on the voting law [which wouldn't give them access to the complete electoral register, hence disenfranchising a chunk of voters] rather than accepting that their plans were poorly thought out and resoundingly rejected by the ratepayers.
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March 29, 2005
The Telegraph reveals its very small brain
Of the 44,200 whole time equivalent new employees, 7,200 are doctors, 10,500 are nurses and 2,600 allied health professionals. The balance of 23,900 are back office staff, administrators, receptionists, lab technicians and cleaners.
I love the assumption that lab technicians, who provide relatively useful information for doctors, and cleaners, who are supposed to protect us all from MRSA, are not 'frontline health professionals'. But then obviously neither are all the white-collar staff who make the wheels of the NHS edifice turn, however slowly.
Obviously the nurses should do the lab tests and doctors should wash the floors. [via the Adam Smith Institute's blog, which seems to have an even smaller collective iq than the Telegraph does...]
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Archbishop attacks the reality of modern life
The Archbishop of Canterbury opines thusly:
And why would one find any of this surprising?? Is this not the experience of modern life? His point that we increasingly live in a scape-goat society where we are quick to blame others for our ills, is undoubtedly true to some degree, but there is also a growing unwillingness to engage in/with wider issues, which increasingly divorces us from issues that in turn affect us. If one was cynical enough you could apply exactly the same arguments to the Anglican church, which certainly seems to be riven by toxic brew of self-doubt, over-analysis and artificial/doctrinal crises.
We live in a modern world. This is not a safe state of affairs. The hallmark of modern life is the contradiction [if not outright war] between constant social and economic change and a desire for stability in a world where all that is solid melts into air. The pace of life has changed forever over the last century, and with it the differences and understanding between generations. [A couple of days ago I referenced some of Grant McCracken's thoughts on the impact of change on different generations.]
But why shouldn't we resent limits? Many limits on us are placed upon us for good reason: a growing number though are arbitrary and capricious. Why shouldn't we resent the passage of time? Is there anyone who does not look back on things they wish they'd done, have things they wish to do but doubt they'll ever have time for?
And why shouldn't we fear growing old? Is not this part and parcel of our mortality, the recognition that we will be unable to do many of the things we currently do, perhaps the things we most take for granted? Are we to be in denial of the precarious nature of the UK pension system? Are we to be unconcerned by the raising of the retirement age? Should we be unconcerned about trusting our care to younger generations with whom we may share little in the way of cultural and social values??
Blur said it best: Modern life is rubbish.
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March 28, 2005
What the traffic will bear: the music industry and peer to peer systems
You just can't emphasise enough just how broken the music industry's distribution model is. The average UK consumer, apparently the most voracious music buyer in the world, still only buys 3 albums a year. But the singles market, once the mainstay of the pop music industry, has all but collapsed. Who in their right mind would pay £4 for a single?
The music industry is one that believes that theirs is a premium product when the reality is that it's a disposable one.
Combine this with the structural changes inherent in the emergence of the internet - and lord knows we don't understand them at all, and combine them with the recognition of existence of the market's 'Long Tail'...
What we have here, if we're honest, is the conflation of technological developments [with the rise of P2P] and a widespread consumer dissatisfaction with the music industry [that was suppressed by the lack of viable alternatives that is a prescription for a cultural and economic train wreck.
Peer-to-peer [P2P] systems aren't going away - after all billionaire Mark Cuban is going to pay for Grokster's defense of P2P systems before the US Supreme Court tomorrow - and all these issues about access to goods and services [including access to unavailable goods, because much of what we want we can't get, and unaffordable goods, where we're not willing to pay the prices the industry sets] are going to be recurring themes in economics [and society, for that matter] for much of the remainder of this decade.
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Peter Drucker on the next global economic crisis...
The dollar is still the world's key currency. But the Bretton Woods system is being killed by the U.S. government deficit, which is fast becoming the sinkhole of the world financial economy. The persistent U.S. deficit creates a persistent deficit in the U.S. balance of payments, which make both the U.S. economy and the government increasingly dependent on massive injections of short-term and panic-prone money from abroad. The U.S. savings rate is barely high enough to finance the minimum capital needs of industry. It could, in all likelihood, be raised considerably by raising interest rates. But that is not only politically almost impossible; it would also require that a larger share of incomes go into savings rather than into consumption, with an inevitable collapse of an economy based on consumer spending and low interest rates, as for instance, the U.S. housing market.
An inevitable collapse of an economy based on consumer spending and low interest rates... sounds increasingly like like that of the UK, doesn't it?? [via Marginal Revolution]
See also:
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Jon Carroll on political grandstanding...
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spiked on the farcical 'anti-terror' bill
They would no longer really be rights, but privileges, favourably passed down to us by officials satisfied that we are not getting up to anything untoward.
When such freedoms can be removed at a moment's notice, without recourse to a court of law, they effectively become favours that we enjoy so long as we remain on our best behaviour.
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March 26, 2005
The myth of dying
Polly Toynbee on "the torture of unassisted death".
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March 24, 2005
More on the American Taleban
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican, Connecticut
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March 23, 2005
Foods with outlawed dye still on sale in Edinburgh
As seems usual in the UK these days, store owners have been 'warned' when they should have been 'prosecuted'.
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John Scalzi on the Schiavo show
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Nothing like feathering one's nest...
Call for big pension rise for "top" civil servants
If senior civil servants think they deserve private-sector size pensions, then they should go and work for the private sector, if they can.
Very simple solution, that.
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March 20, 2005
The rise and rise of American Theocracy
Creationists take their fight to the really big screen
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous".
James Cameron, the director of 'Aliens of the Deep', put it best:
It's one thing to aim for the lowest common denominator, but this is setting the bar pretty low.
Speaking of making things worse, it's pretty obvious that the Guardian article is a just a bloody poor re-write of the NY Times story.
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March 19, 2005
Pensions Panic: All worked up as nobody signs up
Common denominator here? Lots of low paid workers. I would bet there's a v. strong correlation between your income, the size of your employer's contribution, and the likelihood of you being in a pension scheme...
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Slavery is alive in well, and not just in Niger
sayeth the judge. I remember meeting a masters student 15 years ago [oh boy, that's a shocking thought in and of itself...] who was doing a thesis at NPSIA and being shocked to find that they were doing a Master's thesis on modern day slavery. After all, we're all well past that now, aren't we...??Permalink #
March 15, 2005
Scottish parents reject local schools
Ah, the joys of living in Scotland...
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March 14, 2005
Banana wars
Banana farmers in the Windwards face economic ruin
Ah, the humble banana. My grandfather used to grow bananas, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the yellow tubers we buy in the UK are just absolute rubbish.
Come to think of it, most of the fruit you get over here is flavourless rubbish.
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March 13, 2005
'Child-unfriendly' England warned
This is not limited to children: I think that increasingly Britons care deeply about those very close to us and very little about everyone else, with the notable exceptions of celebrities and unless our heart-strings are being tugged by Comic Relief et al..
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March 12, 2005
Nothing like another bit of political corruption...
Labour MSPs battle change in vote system
In a surprise move, they have officially thrown their weight behind retaining the current system of constituency and list MSPs
Under the current system, 73 of Scotland's MSPs are directly elected as traditional constituency MSPs, and another 56 are "elected" [well, appointed] from regional 'top-up' lists in an allocation system that tries to ensure that each political party’s total number of MSPs reflects its share of the vote.
So if you're a thoroughly unpopular political party [like the Tories - Tories say winning one seat would be a success], and unlikely to win seats under a first past the post system, you'll still get some MSPs.
The thing is, voters have nothing to do with the election of this second tranche of "representatives": political parties are given/allocated a number of seats, and they then give them to whomever they want. So while normal politicians have to have at least some measure of popularity, 'list' MSPs suffer no such burden.
[This often means that the leader of a political party can ensure that they sit in parliament, even if local electors have had the temerity to decline to endorse/elect same.]
But if Scotland switches to STV [the Single Transferable Vote], then parties will lose a considerable measure of their political power, and people will be far more able to elect who they want [although the Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party are all against it, probably for good reason...], particularly the more awkward party members who speak their minds and/or otherwise fail to toe the party line.
In a democracy, anything that weakens the power of the party system is a good thing.
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Nothing like a bit of truth in sentencing...
Boy who raped teacher given life
Alleged sentence: life.
Actual sentence: a minimum of 21 months.
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March 11, 2005
Defying the Commons
sayeth the Lord Chancellor. Time to fundamentally challenge the supremacy of the Commons, more like.Permalink #
March 06, 2005
Cardiff City £30 million in debt
You can't help but wonder who on earth was dumb enough to put that much money into a football club, particularly a [no offense CC fans...] small lower division club, with no marquee players, a ramshackle stadium and [to put it mildly] a bit of a hooligan problem.
But things may all get turned around once they start to build a new stadium with associated retail developments, but for some strange reason I won't be a bit surprised if the club ends up having to transfer them to a property company... owned by the club chairman, of course...
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Great Ormond Street forced to turn away ill children
Could there be a more potent symbol of the problems in the NHS than this? Decades of underfunding, systematic inefficiencies that neither party seems to be able to address...
This is the modern face of health care rationing. And who pays? The kids, and the nurses, who have been asked to take a £5/hour pay cut.
Not exactly a shining example of Labour competence, is it??
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Yet more signs that a constitutional re-write is long overdue...
The Observer: Charles shelters in Oz as legal wrangle threatens wedding
Proof positive that it is high time we had a serious chat about the role/place of the monarchy in the 21st century. Why should you not be allowed a civil marriage simply because of who your parents are? More to the point, why should you by law be banned from marrying people of a particular religion [i.e. catholics] ??
I think the second most important women in Britain [assuming for the sake of argument that she's not actually number one, which she almost definitely is] is Cherie Blair...
Ah, the hagiography of Diana continues... as does this rather bizarre fantasy about the "institution of marriage" and the role of the monarchy in the UK. The "institution" of marriage historically exists for one single purpose: to attempt to regulate procreation in order to regulate/govern/direct the inheritance of property.
Everything else that allegedly goes with marriage [love, happiness etc.] is little more than a combination of 19th and 20th century fantasies [and with a rather large dollop of 'courtly love' and rose tinted-glasses] grafted ontop of the 'historic' "institution".
As for undermining the monarchy, it is rather strange that we should be so entranced by the semi-random behavior of a single upper-class family... this is of course a generational thing: much of British society regards the Royal Family as a sideshow. The Royal Family as an institution is doomed, and while some of that is because its members do seem to have a rather well-developed self-destructive streak, mostly this is because the UK media regard it as an asset to be ruthlessly mined for the media's own profit... and as we all know, all mines are eventually exhausted.
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March 03, 2005
UK Food labels are 'misleading'
It's not that food labels aren't accurate, it's the degree to which they're allowed to be wrong...
Wow.
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March 01, 2005
The African Cliff, aka the impact of AIDS on life expectancy in Africa
While we do (should) know that AIDS is a serious problem in sub-saharan Africa, none of the numbers I've seen come close to the impact of this simple chart:
via Crooked Timber
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A third of Edinburgh households have no savings...
If the percentage with no bank account is from the Scottish Household Survey, then that's actually 9% of households with no account, so the real number of adults with no accounts will be somewhat higher...
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February 26, 2005
Cardboard Spaceship: Dreaded Air Travel
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February 20, 2005
Everything you know about anthropolgy is wrong
Or so it appears after a German professor [Reiner Protsch von Zieten] who claimed to have proved that homo sapiens and neanderthal man not only co-existed but interbred was found to have faked the evidence.
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February 19, 2005
The end of the innocence
WB seeks revitalized cartoon franchise with new look for Bugs Bunny and friends
There are things in life that just take your breath away: some good, some bad, some apalling, and frankly, this is one of the latter. Words fail me - the fundamental idea, though perhaps understandable from the corporate 'need-to-maximize-revenue-from-this-bit-of-our-portfolio' perspective is just so fundamentally wrong that it defies both belief and explication.
Think colourizing black and white films was bad? This is ten times worse.
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February 13, 2005
The alienation of science in America
Neal Stephenson is interviewed in Reason:
More particularly:
[via Kottke]
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February 10, 2005
Jimmy Smith dies
Award-winning jazz organist Jimmy Smith died on Tuesday.
First Johnny Cash, then Ray Charles, now Jimmy Smith - it seems like the generation who profoundly shaped American music since the 50s are now swiftly dying away.
I have many CDs... well, far too many CDs. I'd say hundreds, but if you include all the boxes full of CDs that are squirelled away here and there, it's probably closer to a thousand, much of it, I'll freely admit, complete rubbish. But in the midst of all the chaff are 12 Jimmy Smith albums, mostly Blue Note, as I don't hugely like his later stuff - which is on Verve.
I'd recommend Back at the Chicken Shack and Crazy Baby if you were looking for somewhere to start exploring.
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January 20, 2005
Teenagers face citizen pledge at 18
What complete and utter rubbish - since when have 18 year olds been mature enough [both socially and politically...] for this to have the slightest relevance to them?
And sayeth the remarkably sensible Liberal Democrats:
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January 13, 2005
The posh ned
Harry urged to say sorry publicly
More like Harry urged to grow the f*ck up methinks...
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November 30, 2004
Canada, the new India
Culturally similar to the US, but cheaper. Oh Canada, eh?
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November 23, 2004
The new economic game...
is forecasting how much house prices in the UK will fall in the next year or two.
The National Institute for Economic and Social Research, the think-tank, said house prices were overvalued by 30 per cent while Capital Economics, the consultancy, predicted prices would fall by 20 per cent.
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November 16, 2004
Inquiry into BBC 'pro-Euro bias'
The independent panel will investigate claims the BBC is "systematically Europhile" and has excluded pro-withdrawal voices from its coverage.
Because we all know it's important that the flat-earthers and antediluvians get their say too...
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November 08, 2004
TV documentary shows rail 'flaws'
The BBC 1 Whistleblower programme claims parts of the UK's railways are "dangerous" and of "great concern".
A nice middle-class reporter who hadn't done a day's manual labour in his life isn't exactly qualified to comment on much to do with the railways, although this didn't stop the BBC from trying.
What was a bit strange was that the show was basically about one reporter, the opinions of a Professor being shown undercover tapes, and a supervisor in Scotland who was quitting, who was the only one in the programme who was really an 'insider'. Although it was interesting from a fly-on-a-wall perspective, I didn't find it particularly convincing.
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November 06, 2004
Even more [bad] media math
New figures reveal that around £2679 is spent caring for and treating each patient in the ERI - compared with just £1710 at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
Now, there are apples and oranges and then there's these numbers... a comparison is only useful if you care comparing comparable things, and these numbers are too vague to compare. I don't know what's worse, the politicians using them to make a pseudo point [yes, PFI is expensive], or the fairly uncritical "reporting".
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November 04, 2004
Adventures in bad math
Election exit polls 'useless' and 'distorted'
Not that this is news or anything... the question is, given that exit polls are fundamentally flawed, will the media do anything to develop more accurate measuring/forecasting methods??
Won't be betting any money on it, myself...
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November 03, 2004
Scotsman - 'Difficult' start for new rail operator
There are a couple of marked difference between ScotRail, who used to run the passenger railways in Scotland, and First ScotRail, who took them over at the end of October...
- Punctuality is even worse than ever, and trains seem even less likely to leave on time than before.
- But we get an apology when we arrive, just to make sure that we've noticed that we're late.
- They no longer tell you at Glasgow Queen Street where the next Edinburgh train will leave from if it's not arrived. Which means you end up with 100 people standing in front of the ticket barriers not knowing where to go and getting in the way of other arriving and departing passengers.
- Trains are a damn sight dirtier.
- And worst of all, the trains are smaller/shorter.
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