Stories

The BBC, Thermageddon, and a Giant Snake

by

a giant snake

Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell:

“The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many orders of magnitude faster than any natural process – and is moving too fast for natural systems to respond.”

Hearing this, I did what any normal person would do: grab all the bags of frozen peas I could find in the ice compartment of my refridgerator, and hunker down behind the sofa to wait for Thermageddon.

Hours passed. My life flashed before my eyes a few times, and a few times more. But then I noticed that the house was still there, and so was the neighbourhood. And so was I!

Read more

Twitter’s Jam Festival

by


Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job.

The rest of the world, however, completely ignores it. But with the journalists’ attention fixed firmly on each others’ navels, they don’t seem to realise what a fringe activity Twitter is. Now we can quantify this a little.

Read more

Virgin puts legal P2P plans on ice

by

Big label pressure has forced British cable ISP Virgin Media to suspend plans to introduce a legal music sharing service for its subscribers, just weeks ahead of its launch, The Register has learned.

The radical initiative, tentatively branded as “Virgin Music Unlimited”, represented a major investment for the ISP, and would have been the first such attempt to monetise P2P file sharing in an ISP partnership in either Europe or the USA. However, 11th hour “anti-piracy” demands by major record labels including Universal Music and Sony Music meant Virgin could no longer launch the service as it had envisaged. Labels demanded that Virgin block uploads and downloads of songs from subscribers’ PCs, sources suggest. Since the system is designed to encourage file sharing, the demand removed the service’s USP.

Virgin is believed to be particularly disappointed at the collapse of the initiative. The ISP had been the first to co-operate with the music business-ISP Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed last July and send warning letters to file sharers. It had also made a significant investment in the Music Unlimited initiative, estimated at eight figures.

Read more

Manx P2P for €1 a year?

by

The Isle of Man’s e-commerce minister says he wants to legalise P2P music file sharing – taking just one Euro a year from broadband subscribers.

Tim Craine told us today that such a scheme would be voluntary. The Manx government is hopeful that blanket P2P schemes would be rolled out in other countries – including the UK.

“If you take a Euro a year from millions, then that’s a lot of revenue,” Craine told us.

“There is an opt-out for people who don’t want a compulsory charge. We would envisage an opt-out – there would be a public reaction against it,” he explained. “But you have to compete with free.”

Read more

Why animals shouldn’t be able to sue you

by

Mr Ed, the talking attorney

Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue.

Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer.

“Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian-like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf,” according to Sunstein. The Harvard legal scholar first proposed the argument in 2002.

“This doesn’t look good for hunters, ranchers, restaurateurs, biomedical researchers, or ordinary pet owners,” says the food industry lobby group The Center for Consumer Freedom, which raised Sunstein’s radical “rights” agenda. In Spain, activists have already proposed that apes be granted human rights.

Read more

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

by

Image from Google's 2006 analyst presentation

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

A few years ago, Google’s apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. ”

That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.

For these soothsayers of the Hive Mind, the years ahead looked prosperous. As blog-aware marketing and media consultants, they saw a lucrative future in explaining the New Emergent World Order to the uninitiated. (That part has come true – Web 2.0 “gurus” now advise large media companies).

It wasn’t surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google’s search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.

But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google’s active participation. This week Marissa Meyer explained that editorial judgments will play a key role in Google searches.

Read more

Jim Griffin’s Choruss

by

The plan to provide US students with compulsory flat-fee music finally has a name, it emerged this week. Choruss LLC will provide participating universities with a replacement for their current subscription services such as Rhapsody, and has the backing of the the EFF and the tacit support of the RIAA. That alone indicates the magnitude of the initiative. When have those two lobbying groups ever agreed on music policy?

Read more

The hitman, the Pirate Bay and the Freetard professor

by

REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression!
REG: It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality
– Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Everyone’s a prankster these days – it’s all in the name of art.

On Monday a former Irish loyalist hitman was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the attempted murder of senior Sinn Fein leaders. Michael Stone had burst into the Belfast Assembly with nail bombs, a garotte, an axe and knives, but was quickly wrestled to the ground. In court, Stone claimed the event had been a piece of “performance art”.

Stone’s paintings had exhibited at Belfast Engine Room Gallery. In court, Stone was defiant: “Make art, not war,” he told an unimpressed judge.

But Stone’s not alone. Last week two art school students in the Netherlands released a software prank. They developed a Firefox brower plug-in that redirected Amazon.com surfers to unlicensed versions of the same material on P2P site Pirate Bay. The Pirates of the Amazon (geddit?) plug-in was quickly withdrawn after Amazon.com lawyers got in touch with the students’ ISP.

Read more

The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

by

Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell – the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.

Malcolm Gladwell: the awkward teenage years

Gladwell gave two vanity “performances” in the West End – prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers – the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell.

It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar “knowledge workers” hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight – and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That’s pretty odd.

So what’s really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that hold so much appeal?

Let’s start with the first two first.

The Master at Work

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable.

Read more