Churnalism is a brilliant idea – no surprise that it was originally one of Chris Lightfoot’s. Basically, it allows you to determine how much of a given newspaper article was copied from which press release. There’s a nice graphic visualisation, and a diff, so you can see precisely what was altered and what taken over…
Read More Fun with nonsense and hash functionsSomething else. Around the table sat his son James– the head of News Corp’s European and Asian operations – Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of its British newspaper division News International, plus the editors of the Sun and the Times, Dominic Mohan and James Harding respectively. Meatballs were on the menu, although staff preferred not…
Read More someone has to stay in controlSo what about that Murdoch? Gordon Brown is suing, and the government has been claiming that meetings between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks were covered by MP-constituent privilege; Tessa Jowell (for it is she!) alleges that the monitoring was going on as recently as last week. The police investigation is back on with a new…
Read More the tapesFaintly disgusting at the Register. “The corporation vowed to increase the spending on “devolved nations” – which is Beeb-speak not for Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea, you may be surprised to learn, but Wales and Scotland. This will increase from 12 per cent to 17 per cent.” Because people who aren’t as pale as Andrew…
Read More fremdschamBecause someone wanted this: a list of aircraft investigation resources. First thing: you always need to be able to map registrations to aircraft serial numbers (MSNs) and vice versa, as well as linking registrations to operators and vice versa. So you need to subscribe to one of several commercial databases that provide this information. Otherwise…
Read More a quick HOWTOI think I’m going to cut the UK Wired out of my diet. They recently got an award, and the mag is usually a handsome book, but it’s not good enough. Typically there’s a bit less than one genuinely interesting piece per issue, which is nowhere near enough to make the cover price worthwhile. The…
Read More a Christmas gift for you: UK Wired editionSo Viktor Bout got extradited at last. As a result, I was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Irina Lagunina. They wanted to hear about how the whole Viktor-blogging project got started – I told them about the Defence Energy Support Center files and the T-DODAACs and the like, and the plane spotter websites, and the…
Read More An interview with Radio Free Europe(Inspiration here.) A numerical variable was today reported to have either increased or decreased or remained constant. Depending on which one, this may represent a record value for this variable, a dramatic rise or fall since whichever point in time is required to show a dramatic rise or fall, or nothing whatsoever. In a development…
Read More This is an article about a statisticSorry about this, but yet more journobashing follows. And I warn you that the actual information in this story is media-bollocks, but it may be interesting all the same. Zoe Williams interviews Rachel “Boris Johnson’s Sister” Johnson, editor of the Lady. Rachel Johnson has been editing the Lady for almost a year. In that time,…
Read More a glimpse of the press in action: Johnson family editionHas anyone else found that the Guardian‘s coverage of the Labour conference made them want to throw up? Here’s Patrick “Unseasonably Mild” Wintour: But his efforts to show he can lead a united, re-energised party committed to redefining the centre ground of politics look likely to be hampered by the expected decision of his defeated…
Read More a glimpse of the press in action: Ed Miliband edition