The BBC’s Michael Crick can report that “the Leaders’ Debates at the forthcoming election have now been cancelled. Instead, over the past 2-3 weeks they’ve been quietly replaced with Prime Ministerial Debates. It’s a cunning manoeuvre, agreed by the three main broadcasters (the BBC, ITV and Sky) and the three main parties, to exclude the SNP and Plaid Cymru leaders from the debates.”

I’ve discussed in the past why the SNP cannot be excluded in Scotland.

It is also very well described in a comment to Crick’s story by DougtheDug:

If it is true that this renaming has been done to exclude the SNP and PC from the debates along with the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, (The Ulster Unionist Party will be represented via their link with the Conservatives), then it’s a clever ploy but once again done with no knowledge of the rules of the game.

Under OFCOM the SNP is classed as a major party in Scotland along with the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib-Dems. PC has major party status in Wales and the NI parties have major party status in Northern Ireland.

Party political election broadcasting is not worked out on the basis of a party’s UK standing but its standing in each of the constituent home nations of the UK. The debates, call them what you will, are multi-party election broadcasts and unless they are impartial in all four home nations then they will fall foul of OFCOM, the BBC guidelines and the law. The only way they can be impartial in Scotland is for all four major parties to be on the platform at the same time. Similarly for Wales and Northern Ireland.

What the broadcasters are trying to do is to apply the rules of impartiality in England which has three major parties to the four party setups in Scotland and Wales and the four party set up in Northern Ireland. It’s a classic case of the broadcasters thinking that England is Britain is England.

Share and enjoy:

When people go from storing their music on CDs to using harddisks and MP3-players, they can fairly easily convert their CDs.

I’m sure one of the reason the iPod got so popular was because iTunes makes this process really easy.

However, the same doesn’t really apply to books and films.

People don’t tend to rip all their DVDs and then consign them to the loft, and this is not just because typical harddisks aren’t large enough to store a family’s DVD collection, but also because the software doesn’t make it easy and intuitive.

And when it comes to books, scanning a book requires you to turn the pages, which means that it’ll take hours to scan a book, and if you also want to run OCR on the scan, it’ll take even longer.

So if the publishing houses are serious about getting people onto e-readers, and if the film studios want us to ditch the DVDs (and Blu-ray disks), they need to make it easy to migrate.

For movies, it might just be a software issue, but for books, something else is needed.

We either need to get cheap book scanners that can turn the pages themselves, or we need to be allowed to download electronic versions of our old books for free if we can somehow prove that we do indeed own the paper version.

I know that I would be very happy to throw out the vast majority of my books if I could quickly get them onto my harddisk, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Share and enjoy:

However, fewer people will be aware that the “Apple iPad” was already mentioned in July of 2006:

I wonder whether the producers of this sketch are going to try to sue Apple, too.

Perhaps Apple knew it already and thought that it was so funny that they’d make it happen?

Share and enjoy:

En af seriens to forfattere har skrevet et virkeligt interessant blogindlæg på Sprogmuseet.

Jeg husker stadig med fryd de tidlige Krister-serier i Mads Føk, så der er yderst fornøjeligt at få dem genopfrisket.

Deres nye bog kommer forhåbentlig til at ligge under mange juletræer i år!

PS: Dette indlægs titel er (naturligvis) fra en gammel Krister-stribe.

Share and enjoy:

It lets you make movies like this, and it’s quick and easy:

Share and enjoy:

On the back, it said: “All you need is a digital camcorder, a modern computer with basic video editing software and four actors (boys or girls). We provide the rest.” Pretty cool, I thought.

However, it was put aside and never used, but recently she finally opened the box.

It contained a bunch of booklets, a pirate’s eye-patch, a treasure map, a CD, some stickers and a director’s clapboard.

When we opened the Pre-production booklet, we were surprised to read this:

Certain props are included in this box, but some other small props will be needed:

• A clipboard
• Plastic swords (preferably cutlasses)
• A toy boat
• Some pieces of wood, to create a makeshift raft
• A broomstick, to make a mast
• A Jolly Roger flag (skull-and-crossbones)
• An inflatable parrot
• A biscuit-tin
• A supply of 2p-coins onto which you can stick the doubloons
• Rope
• A blindfold

It finally points out you’ll need costumes for all the actors.

Of course, given the size of the box, I didn’t expect it to contain four complete pirate costumes, but am I the only one who thinks that “We provide the rest” could lead the unsuspecting consumer into believing that you wouldn’t need to do any additional shopping?

I mean, most people probably have a biscuit tin, a broomstick and some 2p coins, so that’s perfectly OK, but I know that we own neither a Jolly Roger flag nor an inflatable parrot, and I haven’t seen our plastic swords for ages.

This is very misleading, and if the company can’t be bothered including all the unusual props, perhaps they should start selling downloadable PDF files on the Internet instead.

Share and enjoy:

Today it was announced that Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh are shutting down.

They have been producing dictionaries in Edinburgh for more than a century, but now it’s over.

The monolingual dictionaries (“Chambers”) will move to London, but the expertise isn’t moving with them, so I reckon they’ll just be republished without changes for a few years until they can be removed completely from the market.

The bilingual dictionaries (“Harrap”) will move to Larousse in Paris, where I guess they have a decent chance of surviving for a few years.

This leaves Collins as the only major dictionary publisher in Scotland.

According to the article I linked to above, Chambers Harrap have been “affected by the steep decline in the sales of dictionaries and reference books as people move away from print to go online where they can get their information, for the most part, free of charge”.

Surely this also affects the other dictionary publishers, so will today’s announcement be followed by equally bad news about the other famous dictionary publishers within a few years?

It’s a sad day for all of us who have given years of our lives to the dictionary industry.

Share and enjoy:

Léon fylder jo 4 sidst på måneden, og Anna bliver 2 lige før jul, så jeg tænkte, det måske ville være godt at skrive en liste over de bøger, de har og holder af.

Generelt elsker de alle billedbøger – vi læser fire bøger hver aften – så jeg vil opremse alle dem, de har, men jeg har fremhævet dem, som de holder mest af for tiden:

• Alexanders dårlige dag
• Babar mister sin krone
• Barbapapa: Vi har tre gamle bøger – den, hvor han som kuffert tager dyr tilbage til Afrika, den, hvor de laver frugtsaft, og den, hvor den langhårede dreng får lopper. Jeg mener, deres navne er ændret i de nye udgaver, så børnene bliver måske forvirrede, hvis vi får nogle af de nye.
• Bjørnen Bjørn i Zoo
• Bøger af Jørgen Clevin:
• Rasmus
• Rasmus får besøg
• Børnehjælpsdag i Bulderby
• Den grimme ælling (Der Var Engang-serien)
• Dick Bruna:
• Jeg kan tælle
• Miffis fødselsdag
• Dina Gellert: De Tre Bukke Bruse
• Domitille de Préssensé: Emilie og paraplyen
• Stephen Cartwright: Dyresnak
• Egon Mathiesen: Aben Osvald
• Glimmerbøgerne:
• Fyrtøjet
• H. A. Rey: Kom med i cirkus
• Ib Spang Olsen:
• Drengen i Månen
• Gamle fru Glad og hendes hund
• Jan Mogensen:
• Ti små cyklister (Åh Abe)
• Victor Banan
• Jill Murphy: En stille og rolig aften
• Kan du hjælpe, P.S. Bamse?
• Løb, kanin, løb
• Okker Gokker Gummiklokker og andre børnerim
• Palle Alene i Verden
• Pelle Haleløs:
• Pelle Haleløs på fisketur
• Pelle Haleløs på sejltur
• Peter Pedal:
• Peter Nysgerrig
• Peter Pedal
• Peter Pedal hænger i
• Peter Pedal i legetøjsbutikken (af Martha Weston)
• Peter Pedal på himmelfart
• Peter Pedal på hospital
• Peter Pedal sætter drage op
• Pipungerne:
• Saxe får en ven
• Storesøster Sille
• Politikens billedordbog for børn
• Rasmus Klump:
• Rasmus Klump hjælper Pips (ikke af Carla & Vilh. Hansen)
• Rasmus Klump holder høns (ikke af Carla & Vilh. Hansen)
• Rasmus Klump i Aladdins Hule
• Rasmus Klump i Fortidsland
• Rasmus Klump i Pyramiderne
• Rasmus Klump og det glemte tog (ikke af Carla & Vilh. Hansen)
• Sambo og tvillingerne
• Sig til lykke Amalie
• Spørge-Jørgen
• Strit
• Totte-bøgerne:
• Totte bager
• Totte bygger
• Totte klæder sig ud
• Totte og Malene
• Ulf Löfgren: Ludvig leder efter Bamse
• Willi:
• Willi holder fastelavn
• Willi og de nye sko

Share and enjoy:

Most newspapers seem to be losing money at the moment.

Their old revenue model doesn’t work, because more and more people are getting their news from the Internet or from free newspapers like the Metro, and they feel they have to give away their articles for free online, but online advertising doesn’t bring in nearly enough money to compensate.

Rupert Murdoch has now threatened to end free access to the online editions of his newspapers, and if he succeeds, most other newspapers will likely follow.

However, I seriously doubt it would work.

There are so many blogs, public-services news sites and other sources of information that people might just abandon the newspapers altogether.

The problem with paying for news is that most newspapers would want a lot of money (something like £100 or DKK1000 for a year’s access), which would mean that most people could only afford to read one or two.

Often pay-per-view is also offered, but again the price for one article is at least as high as buying the printed newspaper in the corner shop.

Also, the newspapers would have to spend lots of money tracking down plagiarism using an army of copyright lawyers, or all their expensive articles will quickly be republished with slight modifications on free blogs.

I don’t think newspapers will ever be able to charge serious money for news and other topics that are available in great amounts on the Internet.

Neither will they be able to make money on editing and presenting news.

The only area that some people might be able to pay money for is well-researched and well-written articles, but such articles will tend to belong more naturally in weekly papers like The Economist than in daily newspapers.

Even if the newspapers ganged up together and created a common pay-per-view model, it would just drive most of their readers into the arms of the free media (such as blogs), and they’d quickly start losing money again.

Share and enjoy:

The kiddie programme Balamory has eight main characters:

• Archie, a white English man in a kilt
• Edie, a white Scottish woman
• Josie, a black English woman
• Ms Hoolie, a white Scottish woman
• PC Plum, a white Scottish man
• Penny, a white English woman
• Spencer, a black American man
• Suzie, a white Scottish woman

That is, there are five women and three men. Four of them are white Scottish, two are white English, one is black English and one is black American.

That didn’t strike me as looking particularly as the Scotland I know, where the main immigrant groups are Asian (i.e., Indian and Pakistani) and Chinese.

So I checked the latest census figures. I’ll ignore the gender composition in the following, which of course should have been four men and four women.

If Balamory had been like Scotland in 2001, the composition should have been as follows:

• 7 white Scottish
• 0.8 white other (typically English)
• 0.1 Asian
• 0.1 others

If the BBC wanted to reflect the UK as a whole instead of Scotland, the figures are as follows:

• 7.4 white
• 0.3 Asian
• 0.2 black
• 0.1 others

Even if the casting was done in London, the figures are still skewed. Here are the figures for London in 2001:

• 5.7 white
• 1.0 Asian
• 0.9 black
• 0.4 other

So why did the BBC go for this set-up?

I’m all in favour of representing all of the country’s ethnic groups on TV, and of course you can’t have 0.1 Asian in a programme, but what’s the point in making the world look different?

Are they trying to make the UK look like America?

Share and enjoy: