I just read about the Freeplay Devo radio and was quite excited. OK it is £90 which is a little steep for a radio but I’m geeky enough to want to supplement my podcast listening with a little digital radio. So a wind-up one seemed just the thing… until I looked at the fine print. The Devo weighs 1.2Kg and while 60 seconds of winding gives you an hour of FM listening, it provides just 3-5 minutes of digital radio listening! Inevitably this ‘green’ radio would mostly stay plugged into the mains or run off its 6hr battery. Guess I’ll have to wait another few years. Which is probably just as well since I also just read that the Freeplay radio and others may become obsolete anyway.

The advertising editorial divide in action!

Originally uploaded by D & D.

Photography – the lazy man’s blog entry 😉 This juxtaposition is so delicious it’s hard to believe it wasn’t a joke by someone in the paper…

So much about The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids was interesting and/or rang a bell. It covers a lot of ground but the key take-away point for me was that you should be very cautious about telling your kid that s/he is smart – you should be praising them for putting in effort and/or for specific aspects of what they did. It sounds rather puritanical but apparently there’s evidence that praising a kid’s capability can be harmful – they can end up avoiding things that are challenging.

I have long been in the habit of reading The Economist and while it has often irritated me I have generally found something in each issue I didn’t know before – often a statistic or chart worth clipping. Alas in an editorial this week about Ken Livingstone, the Economist seems to have let dislike of the mayor get in the way of the facts. When it comes to public transport “Bagehot”

• distorts some of the facts – London may have some of “most expensive capital-city fares in the world” but only if you don’t have an Oystercard – and London’s public transport fares have never been cheap. Oystercard fares are still often cheaper than when he first came to power.
• Refers to old conspiracy theories that are as far as I know at best unproven – that lower car traffic speeds are due to “artificially restricting road widths and re-sequencing traffic lights across the capital” and worst of all…
• Resorts to complete (and misleading) hyperbole. “Even the mayor’s buses travel at little more than walking speed.” Well I haven’t been able to find figures more recent than the TFL 2003 report but then the average bus speed was 18kph and the average walking speed was 5kph. I do not believe the gap could have closed appreciably in the last three years!

Ken is no angel – some of his political alliances are certainly suspect – but it’s hard to argue with the broad thrust of his transport policy.

Here’s a radio series I am going to have to record – Meet the bloggers – mostly A list British personal bloggers but also featuring an interview with the ubiquitous Instapundit.

The LSE Library is having a sale today of several thousand books it doesn’t want. Unfortunately, they keep almost anything of any value. All I could see was books like this inspirational study by George Kazakov. Even a hardened bibliophile would have a hard time loving these but there was a steady stream of would-be purchasers anyway.

I was stunned to discover that not only was this book mentioned in Google – 3 times – someone had actually referenced it in an academic journal! Truly no scholarship is entirely wasted.

So if you are in London, you read this, and you want to know more about Soviet peat in the 50s, dash on over to the LSE library – the sale is on until 16:00 and I have a feeling it may not have been snapped up yet…

P.S. In a strange quirk of fate the first academic publication I have been involved with was published today – details are available here. I hope it doesn’t meet a similar fate to Kazakov’s work – at least not during my lifetime…

I just finished watching a documentary about the rise and fall of the BBC’s Third Programme, an ambitious attempt to make an unashamedly ‘high culture’ music and speech programme on the radio after WWII. The documentary interestingly put it into a wider cultural context – it was part of a general feeling among politicians and cultural elites at the time that during and after the war the public needed access to the opportunity to ‘improve itself’ through appreciation and consumption of the best of what the arts could offer.

It’s a rather outmoded idea now but I can’t help admiring the idealism of those times. The programme argues that the Third Programme was killed off by both hostility towards elitism in the 50s and the general availability of more and more competing cultural products. This sounds to me reminiscent of what happened to high-minded dissident authors in Eastern Europe when their art was no longer suppressed and they found, ironically, their market and popular support collapsed.

The wheel seems to have come full circle here in the UK with the launch of BBC 4, a digital TV station with some of the same “no compromise” ethos. It has faced similar criticism because of its high budget per viewer but it has been generally agreed that in a massively multichannel world there is once again room for an island of highbrow-ness to exist.

P.S. I seem to be getting the Wikipedia habit – I found a halfway useful Wikipedia entry on the Third Programme (linked above) and couldn’t resist spending a half hour or so correcting it and adding the details I could…

P.P.S. In my search for web stuff relating to the Third Programme (there was disappointingly little) I came across this Third Programme magazine – an online site about broadcasting put out by the rather interesting Transdiffusion Broadcasting System, “a not-for-profit historical society dedicated to documenting and preserving broadcasting history” (which alas doesn’t seem to have an article dedicated to the Third Programme itself).

Playlist magazine has a handy roundup of places to get free or cheap audiobooks, including an interesting organization called Tell Tale Weekly which sells the audiobooks it produces but for very small sums and gives the money to the people who read out the books, which has helped to produce a reasonably large list of available works. Then after five years (or 100,000 downloads) it releases the audiobooks that have been digitised under a Creative Commons license. Librivox is a similar effort but relies on volunteers to read the books and charges nothing for the result. There are a couple of books read by people available through Project Gutenberg as well – lots more if you are happy to listen to computer-generated dictation.

If you want to hear free contemporary SF instead, check out Escape Pod (which broadcasts short stories) and Podiobooks which hasn’t quite launched yet but you can subscribe to it through iTunes or whatever and wait…

Benjamen Walker’s Theory Of Everything is quite like one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life, but… well… stranger (which is sometimes no bad thing). Ben is a professional radio producer and it shows.

If you are more interested in technology (and I am guessing most of you have some interest in it) the top-ranked podcast at the moment – This Week In Tech – is head and shoulders above much of the podcasting rabble. It features a large round table of tech luminaries and is a very convincing and enjoyable reproduction of the kind of tech-related banter, gossip and bluster that I used to enjoy myself when I was a tech journalist (though at over an hour each week it may be a little self-indulgent). For daily more ‘straight’ tech snippets, you could try Future Tense, and for recordings from the many technology-related conferences that seem to happen every other day across the US you should check out IT Conversations. And if you are a hardcore Macintosh user you should try listening to the MacCast (though frankly it could do with a little pruning as there is a lot of discussion of minutiae on it).

Update: If you want more audiobooks for no payment there are a number of streamed options. They are less easily downloadable (you need to use Total Recorder – PC – or WireTap Pro – Mac – to turn them into MP3s) but OneWord radio offers free audiobooks and book commentary 24 hours a day (streamed only) and the BBC – Radio 4 and BBC7 broadcast less but includes some originally commissioned work too and unlike OneWord the streams are archived (if only for a week) which makes capturing easier. A few BBC radio programmes are even being podcast (though not drama yet).
Podcast Review

Visiting the Edinburgh Festival,
originally uploaded by D & D.

This packed schedule gives you an idea of the richness of this amazing event. Of course we won’t be able to see even a fraction of the tens of thousands of performances at this the world’s biggest arts festival. The advent of the Internet has been a godsend in helping to arrange our upcoming visit. Not only can we listen to interviews with the artists and read several blogs by performers and critics but we can access the invaluable reviews by the Scotsman and others mixed in with the comprehensive listings for all five of the currently-running festivals, and read comments by fringe festival-goers as well on the Fringe Festival’s own site. The latter even offers SMS voting for shows. The Stage also has a pretty comprehensive Edinburgh review festival and fringe reviews and listings site. This way we can get some idea of the ‘buzz’ around shows before we take the sleeper up and book what we are interested in – which is just as well since I’m sure a lot of the best stuff will already be sold out for the rest of its run…

As Salon pointed out to me, the wonderful folks at the Internet Archive have 150 tracks of Caruso singing – part 1 and part 2 – turned from 78s into MP3s. Download what you like before some idiot lengthens the term of copyright even more and it goes out of the public domain again…

And along similar lines, I was encouraged to learn that the BBC’s recent experiment with free Beethoven downloads garnered millions of downloads – many more than any commercial single sales.