Ross Parker » television

My media consumption

Ross — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:36:04 +0000

I wake up listening to Today on BBC Radio 4.
Waiting for the train, I catch up on my RSS feeds through SpeeedReader [sic] on my phone, which syncs to my Google Reader account. I subscribe to about 40 feeds, business and pleasure, split into categories.
On the train, I read whatever book I have on the go. These are normally borrowed from friends, gifts, or from Westminster Library, which I walk past twice daily.
To keep up to speed during at work, I dip in and out of BBC News Online, Google Reader and Google Finance UK.
At home I watch Freeview (live or recorded on my Media Center PC) or a DVD from the free DVD library I established at work.
If I’m doing the dishes, I’ll listen to more Radio 4, unless it’s The Archers. I dislike The Archers because I cannot commit to anything approaching every episode and I struggle to remember (or care) which character is having which crisis.
I don’t drive during the week. At weekends, I drive listening to Radio 4 (Friday night and Saturday) or a music station (local commercial or Radio 1) on Sundays. The same radio attention split applies to weekend running.
If I am working or studying at home, I’ll normally have earphones plugged in to a feed from Last.fm, a service I adore.
For some reason, doing DIY makes me want to listen to the type of cabbie talk-radio you find on LBC and BBC London.
At night, I go to sleep with Kai Rysdall on American Public Media’s Marketplace podcast (thankfully, my wife approves).

My media consumption keeps me fully up to speed of everything that interests and entertains me. The quality of much of this media is exceptional. Today, Marketplace, Marginal Revolution and Last.fm stand out especially.

Why do I mention all of this? Well, because I find it amazing that, aside from the TV Licence, I pay nothing for any of this media.

Hamsterdam

Ross — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:28:56 +0000

You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.

In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!

I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.

Call now to win

Ross — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:44:21 +0000

On Marginal Revolution, Bob Baxley asks a question I can answer: why do so many competitions have trivial questions attached? Do they only want clever winners?

In the UK, it’s because a game that you enter at a cost (i.e. premium rate phone call) is defined as an unregulated lottery if the result relies solely on luck. Introduce suitable skill and you’re now running a prize competition, with much less regulation. The problem, especially for participation television quizzes, is defining what is a suitable level of skill. Does knowing that 4 results from adding 2+2 count?

This was addressed by UK regulator Ofcom’s consultation into participation television in 2006-2007. Interestingly, Sky responded to this consultation with a claim that “call TV quiz programmes amount to illegal lotteries.”

According to this article, the 2008 Gambling Act made the situation worse, and the regulations more complex:

The result is that if TV quiz shows want to continue broadcasting then they must comply with these new laws by making their competitions more complicated and ensuring that a number of entrants are ‘knocked out’ in the first round. Participants must also be kept to date, and detailed information must be stored on resilient databases for cross reference purposes. Also, where appropriate, they could either obtain a lottery license from the Gambling Commission, which would require the broadcaster to donate 20% of all profits made to charity, or qualify as a ‘free draw quiz’.

I imagine something similar applies in the States.