“Second, reporters are messengers – their job is to tell, as accurately as they can, what has been said, with the benefit of such insight as their experience allows them to bring, not to second guess whether what is said is right.”

Laurence, Jeremy. “Dr Goldacre doesn’t make everything better” The Independent on the Web 8 June 2010.

Please note: This post was written under the influence of influenza and many pharmaceuticals – I cannot guarantee it’ll make any sense ;)

There increasingly seems to be a division in British journalism between “reporters” and true “journalists”. Real journalists change the world, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes on a dramatic scale. A journalist checks facts, verifies sources and if they cannot be cast-iron sure of the information they make their readers are aware of the fact. Journalists are people like Paul Foot, Phillip Knightley and Anna Politskovskaya – they get to the truth, then they tell the story.

Sadly there seem to be fewer and fewer true journalists and more and more reporters, like Mr Laurence, who don’t believe that fact checking is within their remit. This is bad for people like me, who want to find value in our national newspaper. Worse, though, is it’s dangerous.

If we have learnt nothing else from the Wakefield/MMR scandal, we must recognise that the public make important – sometimes life-threatening – decisions based on the “facts” they get from news outlets. By irresponsibly reporting, without verifying, the data given at a press conference, a significant proportion of the British news media created a air of panic and fear and convinced many parents to risk their child’s life by refusing the MMR injections.

We need more journalists and fewer reporters, not just in our news media, but in everyday life. We all need to fact check before spreading unfounded rumour, we all need to act based on evidence, not on speculation – especially when it comes to the big decisions.

Thankfully all is not lost, we have the likes of Heather Brooke, Ben Goldacre and many others who are fighting the corner for good journalism. I just hope that they win the day.

We have a brief window before the Act comes into effect to make a coordinated effort to push for the repeal of the ill-considered clauses. Today I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up with Lib Dem MP and DEAct crusader Julian Huppert and he has been able to assure me that there are plans afoot within the Commons to this regard.

In order to succeed, though, Julian and the other anti-DEAct MPs need our help. I’ve outlined the action points below.

If we are to succeed in repairing the flaws (clauses 9 – 18) in the Digital Economy Act 2010 we need to get it on the Goverment’s agenda. The best way to do this is by drumming up support for an Early Day Motion which has already been tabled.

EDM 17: Effects of Digital Economy Act 2010 on Use of the Internet

That this House believes that sections nine to 18 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 should not have been rushed through in the dying days of the last Parliament; further believes that these sections have large repercussions for consumers, civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet; and calls on the Government to introduce early legislation to repeal those provisions.

At the time of writing the EDM has been signed by the following 12 MPs:

• Huppert, Julian (Liberal Democrats, Cambridge)
• Mulholland, Greg (Liberal Democrats, Leeds North West
• Wright, Simon (Liberal Democrats, Norwich South)
• Swales, Ian (Liberal Democrats, Redcar)
• Lloyd, Stephen (Liberal Democrats, Eastbourne)
• Corbyn, Jeremy (Labour, Islington North)
• George, Andrew (Liberal Democrats, St Ives
• Sanders, Adrian (Liberal Democrats, Torbay)
• Donaldson, Jeffrey (Democratic Unionist Party, Lagan Valley)
• Hancock, Mike (Liberal Democrats, Portsmouth South)
• Williams, Stephen (Liberal Democrats, Bristol West)
• Edwards, Jonathan (Plaid Cymru, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr)

We need to get as many MPs to sign the EDM as possible in order to raise the profile of the issues within the Government. As an example, the EDM that lead to the Climate Change Act 2008 was signed by 412 MPs. If we can get into the hundreds, it will put a deal of pressure onto those who control the schedule for the Governement’s agenda.

Please write to, email, telephone or visit your MP and ask them to sign EDM 17 – you can find their contact details via They Work for You.

Make it clear that we’re not asking for a wholesale repeal of the entire Act, just a targeted removal of the controversial clauses (9 – 18) which deserved to have had full Parliamentary scrutiny, but were denied such due to the pressures of the “wash up”.

We also need to get as many private citizens, rights holders, ISPs etc to back the EDM. This fight is going to be all about numbers, we showed during the early days of the campaign that there are a significant number of us – we need to get that fervour back for one last concerted effort. I’m hoping to get in touch with Jim Killock and the Open Rights Group team to see how best we can achieve this and will update this post as things progress.

Thanks to everyone who has continued to fight the good fight over the DEAct, it’s not over yet!

Update: If your MP is interested in getting more involved in the issues surrounding the Digital Economy Act, they may wish to contact Eric Joyce MP who is setting-up an All Party Group on the subject.

Courtesy of Amnesty

You can read the dirty details in Amnesty’s press release: Amnesty ‘disappointed’ by FT’s decision to pull ad targeting Shell

To understand just how bad things in the Niger delta are, Amnesty have produced this video.

In my view anything barring a name-only coalition, where the Lib Dems would be required to rubber-stamp anything put forward by the Tories, would be good for them in the long term.

The biggest win for the Libs will be the gaining of experience in the eyes of the electorate. One of the biggest question marks for many floating voters I talked to, when considering the LDs, was their lack of experience in actually governing the country. Having a term as the junior partner in a coalition would put them in a much stronger position for the next election, whenever that might be.

In terms of political strategy, the Lib Dems have a huge opportunity to have a guiding hand in the key economic decisions that face the next government. They also have the opportunity to ameliorate Tory policy on controversial subjects like immigration.

As junior partner they would escape the worst of the tarring over swingeing public spending cuts which would, again, put them in a better position for the next election.

Whether electoral reform should be a deal-breaker is perhaps the trickiest question. Many grass-roots LD supports feel that it should be a fundamental part of any coalition, but in putting their foot down they could miss out on the benefits of power-sharing. Electoral reform could wait for a term, economic stability can’t.

A coalition with Labour is unlikely to be successful, the fact that additional party support would be required in order to gain a majority will make the ability to get potentially difficult legislation through and will likely be a political disaster for the two biggest parties.

It has to be born in mind that there are major divisions in policy between Labour and Lib Dems as there are between the Libs and Labour. The key overlaps that I see are these:

• Big Government – Lib Dems and Tories agree on reducing government, scrapping ID cards and ContactPoint databases, reforming parliament. Tories may support Lib Dems Freedom Bill
• PR – Lib Dems and Labour agree on Proportional Representation, if not on the method.

Any agreement between the parties’ leaderships will have to be approved by at least 75% of Lib Dem MPs and their Federal Executive before a coalition can formally proceed.

Whatever happens today, I don’t envy Nick Clegg the decisions that he will have to make over the next 24 hours.

Clegg is due to meet his MPs at 13:00 this afternoon, it is hoped that he will be in a position to put a deal to them at that stage. David Cameron will meet his MPs at 18:00 and I would expect that there will be some sort of statement, if only a progress report in time for the late evening news.

The leaders will be looking to get a decision made as soon as possible in order to ensure that the City doesn’t get too twitchy.

In comparison, there’s been very little talk about the iPad’s main rival, the JooJoo Tablet, which is a shame as it’s shaping up to be a serious competitor.

Stylistically the two devices are very similar with minimalist black border, brushed aluminium back and slightly curved profile. For my taste the JooJoo has too high a widescreen ratio, leaving it looking stretched in portrait mode.

Courtesy of Fusion Garage

Courtesy of Apple

Looking at the specifications side-by-side, it doesn’t measure up too badly technically either – bigger screen, faster processor, built-in camera and a USB port.

Having not yet had my hands on either device it’s difficult to compare the real-world performance of the two, but press comments on the JooJoo have been favourable so far. After spending some time with it Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s Tech editor, described the JooJoo as “an iPad on steroids“.

So the JooJoo looks to be a serious contender in the tablet arena and, in the short term at least, the fact that it is available in the UK gives it a huge opportunity to grab some market share. Once the iPad is with us (current indications from Apple is that we should begin seeing it mid-May, but stock is likely to be short during the intial rush) the playing field gets a bit more interesting. The JooJoo is likely to be the winner on price, as Apple products in the UK tend to be around 20-25% more than their US conterparts, which would put the basic iPad at around £400. The iPad’s big plus-point will be the App Store and the larger on-board storage to accomodate files, making it a viable device even without Internet access; by comparison the JooJoo could feel a little limited. I suspect the final decision will come down to personal taste.

For me? It’s a difficult call, on paper the JooJoo looks like a good choice. My head likes the linux based system, USB and flash support. That being said, I think the iPad may have stolen my heart with this…

The Tories have Michael Caine (at least for their youth citizen plan), whilst Labour are punching above the belt with Sean Pertwee, David Tennant and current national hero Eddie Izzard appearing in their party political videos.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing your voting intentions with others, but I do feel that celebrity attempts to use their popularity for political influence are just a bit tacky.

So I was very pleased today when Robert Llewellyn corrected a Guardian online article which had him down as a Lib Dem supporter.

He explains his reasons very elegantly in a Wet Liberal Whenever video, that he posted on YouTube this afternoon.

“I don’t want to be aligned with any party…because they’ll do something stupid” and when it comes to May the 6th, “I just want everyone to vote…and vote for who we really believe in”. Couldn’t have said it better myself bobbyllew.

All of which segues nicely into a discussion I was having earlier about the “secret ballot” in the UK. A lot of people still seem to believe that it is impossible to trace how a person votes, so long as they go to a polling station (as opposed to the postal vote). This isn’t true, due to practices initiated in the name of preventing electoral fraud your unique electoral number is written on the counter-foil for your ballot paper – it is quite possible for the two to be tallied together. It is, however, against the law to do so without the permission of an Elections Court (as outlined in the Parliamentary Elections Rules in Schedule 1 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 according to an Electoral Commission factsheet (pdf))

“Have you seen this?” a friend asked brandishing a VHS Cassette, a tape that that appeared to have had many lives from the appearance of multiple layered labels. But it was the writing scrawled in in red felt tip, “Natural Born Killers” that got everyone’s attention.

“It’s Banned”, “It just came out in America” and other similar comments were spoken in hushed tones at the the sight of this audio visual “contraband”. This grainy, shaky, documentary style satire mesmerized us for the hours that followed.

Ultimately yes it was a pirate version of the film, a hand-held-camera-sneaked-into-the-back-of-a-showing-of-the-film-version, recorded somewhere in North America. Despite all of these “technical” flaws, all of Oliver Stone’s directorial brilliance shown through, it was and still is a masterpiece of satire. The video tape was viewed many subsequent times and referred to in high esteem over that summer. It was the “film we should not have”, we were quite tame suburban teenagers and this was the wildest thing we had ever seen.

Years later wandering through a high street “multimedia outlet” which has since gone the way of the dinosaurs, I came across a DVD version of “Natural Born Killers” and bought it immediately, ironically due to the fond memories it conjured. Excited by my purchase, I couldn’t wait to get home.

I should have known by the glossy case and sleek packaging something was terribly wrong. As soon as the film started it was clear, and that was the problem, the film was crystal clear, long gone was the grainy, voyeuristic layer of hand held camera filter. The “film we should not have” filter was removed and in it’s place was this for want of a better word was this “product”. Oliver Stone’s directorial skill and master storytelling was still present, it just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was rose tinted glasses but for me a lot of the magic had gone, disappeared with the cleanliness of the commercially released product. It was like falling in love with a rough and rugged live concert version of a song only to be let down by the clean shaven topped and tailed version offered on a studio album.

I don’t ever think it was the piracy aspect of the video that made it so risky for us, we had grown up in a tape / disk swapping culture of the 1980′s and 90′s, it sadly never felt wrong to do so. I don’t know what ever happened to that tape or the lad that owned it but I would give up my store bought DVD for it any day.

A similar thing happened to master film-maker Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” which was removed from distribution at his request, but when you are a teenager if it’s not available in the shops “it’s banned” and you want it even more (Government policy makers please take note). I can remember again seeing a similar tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-version of this which had been secretly passed around like some handwritten bible before the printing press had gotten involved. Again it had a “should we be seeing this” feeling about it, “you can get this as a book, in the library but why not the video?” was the subject of much speculation. People didn’t feel they were pirating they were fighting against censorship, quite the opposite of feeling bad for being “pirates” they were liberating art, or so it was thought.

Time moved on and DVD players replaced the VCR and entire collections of videos were simply left in the past. It was years later when I encountered a “A Clockwork Orange” again this time, I was a film student, and like the great cliché working in my local cinema and by then I had had a complete change of heart.

To my absolute horror and passion for the work of Stanley Kubrick “A Clockwork Orange” was given a cinematic release? Why not dig up his corpse and animate him like a Teddy Ruxpin for a press conference. Sorry, I was upset that the studios chose this film to release right after his death. I can remember boycotting working the the screen that was showing “A Clockwork Orange”. I completely refused to clean or man the door of a film that “we shouldn’t be seeing” and I risked being fired and was subsequently demoted for doing so.

So where do I stand on things like “piracy” now? I don’t tolerate it at all, my belief is when you download illegally / steal music, film or video games you steal peoples time, the time they have given up to create something for you to engage with. I’ll stop there I am not here to preach about my views. I just found it an interesting paradox that for me the grainy pirate version of “Natural Born Killers” added something to the mystique of the film, the dodgy way in which you had to access “A Clockwork Orange” did the same. Something their clean “commercial product” available in major supermarket counterparts lacked.

I also find it interesting that several films since the days of the VCR such as “Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield“ and countless others utilise this lo-fi grainy, hand held, cut in and out of badly tracked video tape approach to imply that your seeing something you shouldn’t, something that has been found, something special and a little bit risky. TV Dramas, music videos, documentaries and even main-stream news even use this approach, for this very reason. It’s not to say that piracy brought about this style of editing and “filtering” but I would certainly argue that it has helped make it more prevalent, and more understood by the modern viewer. It for me at least is a case of art imitating piracy, or is that art pirating art that is being pirated?

Matthew C. Applegate, widely known as Pixelh8, is a multi-disciplinary artist and chip-tune musician who has been a vocal opponent to the Digital Economy Act and has been a central figure in the campaign to save Bletchly Park. You can buy his music on iTunes, or via his website and for information on forthcoming performances and great conversation, you can follow him on Twitter.

There. I said it, and I suspect that anyone who follows me on Twitter will hardly be surprised by the fact.

I’ve been talking a lot about the Digital Economy Act lately, the way in which it became law, the lack of scrutiny the intense lobbying from the recording and other industries.

It may seem that I’m anti-artist, that I’m just another “freetard” who believes that they have a right to have whatever content they like without paying and without considering the consequences. This is far from the case.

I believe in the importance of art, I think it’s fundamental to society. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the works of Pixelh8 art is core to humanity and the way we connect with the complex world around us.

In order to artists to be able to fully pursue their vision, they need to be able to earn a living from their work. Copyright should support the artist, or creator, and enable them to make a living from their work without having to compromise their integrity.

Copyright law was (I believe) first introduced in the UK in 1710 with the Statute of Anne which endowed “exclusive rights upon the author of books not yet printed or published for a period of 14 years and for a further 14 years if the author was still alive at the end of the first period”. Today, thanks to copyright being increasingly held by large corporations, lasts for between 70 and 125 years depending on the circumstances.

Whilst copyright law has been amended over the years, it has not been updated to reflect modern society, business models and technologies.

It’s widely pointed out, for example, that copying the music from a store-bought CD onto your iPod is – technically – illegal. As is copying it onto tape so that you can listen to the music you’ve purchased in your elderly car stereo. In practice, people are not prosecuted for doing either of these things, but it acts as an accessible example for the need for copyright reform.

All this is by way of background for the following, I’m going to tell explain what I download, what I don’t and why.

Music

I have boxes full of albums that I don’t listen to, I bought them on the strength of the one or two singles that the label released to the radio, and expecting the rest of the album to be like those sample songs, I shelled out my hard earned money. The rest of the albums were not even remotely as good, and I was dissapointed, time and time again.
So now I download albums I’m interested in via the PirateBay, I listen to them and if I like them, I’ll buy it on iTunes. If I don’t, I delete the files. It’s a form of try-before-you-buy, and is far more meaningful than the 30 second clip that iTunes offers by way of a preview (which is often completely useless).

If the recording industry can find some way of allowing me to do this without resorting to P2P, I’ll happily do so. Low quality free versions, perhaps, or let me listen to it all online via streaming – there are ways of allowing the consumer to make an informed choice about how they spend their money, without risking loss of income for the artist.

Movies

I format shift, I’m of the generation where I have a sizeable collection of films on VHS. I can’t watch VHS cassettes on my laptop (nor can I watch DVDs – it’s a netbook, that’s another story) and I’m not willing to pay for a second copy. The movie studios didn’t have to re-film it in order to produce a DVD version so I’m not willing to re-pay for it. Again, if the studios made it possible to obtain a digital copy legitimately when you have bought a physical media copy, I wouldn’t resort to P2P.

TV Shows

I love the BBC, I think they’ve done great things with the iPlayer. But there’s a problem. Programmes are only available for 7 days from first broadcast. So if you’ve missed the first 2 episodes of the new landmark Attenborough series you’ll be able to catch the second, but the first has gone. If I still had a video recorder I could have taped it and could watch it whenever I wanted and as often as I wanted. So the way they’ve implemented the “new” technology is worse for the consumer than the old version.

The same comes with big American shows on DVD. We’re fans of Stargate Atlantis, and have bought all the seasons on DVD, but we still download them. Why? Because the experience of watching them is so poor. If I want to watch one 40-something minute episode, I have to sit through around 20 minutes of unskippable copyright warnings and advertisements (including a 4 minute ad for the programme I’m actually trying to watch). I can get the same AV quality (well, I can’t tell the difference, but then I’m not an audiophile) on a download with none of that, when I want to watch an episode, I double click the file and it goes straight in to the episode.

Yet again, the legitimate, legal option is a worse consumer experience than the illegal download.

These issues aren’t uncommon. Many people who download are doing so for similar reasons, were not depriving artists of genuine sales, but were not daft enough to pay for the same content over and over again. When recorded music came along it represented a threat to the sheet-music industry, music survived, artists thrived, the industry adapted.

If the film, music and TV industries genuinely want to reduce copyright infringement via the internet, they need to engage with the consumers who are fed-up of being milked for cash and delivered a poor experience. We need to amend copyright law in the UK and then we need to group together to tackle those who are making profit from reselling other people’s work.

Greater London is comprised of 32 boroughs and the City of London, each has its own council and sets the council tax rates. In addition to the rates set by the council in whose borough you reside, you also have to pay rates set by the Greater London Authority. This comparison includes both the GLA and council tax rates as they are collected together.

Where possible I’ve used data for the 10/11 tax year, I have excluded supplementary payments for preservation areas as these only impact a few residences within specified areas of a borough.

I’ve organised the data table with reference to the borough map below so you can easily see the price to borough size comparison.

I hope you find it useful, there’s a downloadable CSV of the data here if you want to play around with it.

I’m not going to talk about the final story of the Tenth Doctor’s reign, except to say that David Tennant did the best he could with the script he was given and that I was totally awed by Bernard Cribbins’ heartbreaking performance.

With Stephen Moffatt taking the helm for the new season, I’m very hopeful for the future of everyone’s favourite Time Lord.