Month: October 2008

naughty boys and lots of sheep

I Don’t normally write about this sort of thing, but this is crazy.

Trying to ascertain the facts is almost impossible, even though supposed quality broadsheets have written huge amounts about it.

So what happened?

  • Russell Brand has an evening radio show on Radio 2.
  • This is pre-recorded (really? every week? this is the biggest scandal!)
  • Last week he had Jonathan Ross on the show (presumably to promote his book), though it has never been made clear whether he was co-presenting or a guest
  • Andrew Sachs – an actor who was in Faulty Towers – was due to be interviewed on the phone to promote a TV show.
  • Andrew is 78
  • Russell phones Andrew while chatting to Jonathan, there is much banter going on, both are known for it.
  • When they are put through to the answer phone the banter continues, references about Andrew’s granddaughter are made, including implying Russell has slept with her, though these are done in a somewhat joking fashion (Brand: “Andrew Sachs, I did not do nothing with Georgina – oh no I’ve revealed I know her name”)
  • The Granddaughter is currently touring in Satanic Sluts burlesque group.
  • Various reports (including the Times, which is less inaccurate than most of the press) said she had slept with Russell.
  • Reports keep on referring to them talking about Andrew Sachs killing himself on hearing the talk about his granddaughter, though the one edited transcript I have seen does not mention this at all.
  • After the show was recorded, the Times claims that a junior produce contacted Andrew Sachs to confirm it was ok to be played on air (which I understand is actually normal practice), though does not state if they actually got permission, i.e. what his response was. (from the times) Apparently a senior executive (or senior editor – to me there’s quite a difference between an executive or editor) vetted the recording before going out, presumably due to the new guidelines which mean senior staff (above the show’s producer) have to sign off controversial content.
  • After the show went out there were, apparently, two complaints.
  • Roughly a week later the Mail reports on it, and then 18,000 more complaints are made, one wonders how many have actually listened.

Since Tuesday this has been at the top of every major UK news site, including the websites of the ‘broadsheets’. Ultimately it is all about a few minutes of talk left on an answering machine.

Many news outlets are playing on the actor’s age – how dare they leave comments on the answering machine of an old man! Setting the scene as if they picked on him at random, and insult his innocent granddaughter too! They implied Russell had slept with his granddaughter, how dare they! I was already bored of hearing about all of this before I had heard that it was not a random call to a random old person, and something had happened between Brand and the granddaughter.

Some articles

Ineresting quote: “I have not seen or spoken to Georgina yet. She’s very upset at having put her family through this and she feels very guilty,” – hmmm, if two family members are wrapped up in a media storm, and one has continually spoken to various papers to say she is worried for her Granddad, it seems surprising she has not yet spoken to him at all. (also of note, that direct quote from a Times article ends with a comma, bit of hasty commenting there of their part, what did they decide to cut?)

He also says, from the same article: “Jonathan Ross has personally delivered a letter of apology and some flowers. He made no excuses and was very frank and open. He’s in a lot of trouble and I don’t want to pile any more on him.

Gordon Brown was silly to step in, it trivialises his position, especially if he hasn’t heard it. Of course Journalists will ask him during a press briefing, it’s up to him to say ‘I’m not going to comment on something I have not heard’.

This really wasn’t a very unusual thing: a couple of well known presenters, known for their edgy and sex based banter acting like kids and leaving inappropriate messages. I’ve heard worse. The fact the whole media has pushed this to the top of the news agenda is amazing and disappointing, and anyone who acts on complaints from those who didn’t hear a particular broadcast but did read about it a week later, is making a bad judgement or simply weak.

It’s ironic that the Daily Mail, who are the most ardent that our TV Licence fee is being badly spent, should provoke 18,000 complaints, the processing of which (and dealing with the media uproar) will probably be one of the biggest waste of licence fee money I can think of. I’m always slightly confused why people are so aggressive about the licence fee, how its spent, and its supposed logical entitlement for us all to be the BBC’s owners, yet at the same time the same people are happy to pay far more to Sky and yet have no feeling of ownership or entitlement. Why do people not feel it is their right to demand the sacking of those at Sky when they do something we don’t like, yet we do of the BBC?

It seems that the press have almost chosen which facts to report and which to ignore, and yet they seem crucial in deciding if this is a storm in a teacup or a genuine issue. When were those complaints made? did Andrew Sachs give permission for it to go out? Had he complained about it, and had anything been done (or in process of) as a result?

My main fear is such storms in a teacup kill creativity. If every producer and comminisher lives in fear of this sort of thing, then any risky show will be axed or curtailed to keep within tight restrictions, then new and originally programs will suffer. It’s not about letting childish DJs be rude to an old man. It is about letting them be themselves without having to follow a pre-approved script, sometimes those who create original shows put a step in the wrong direction. That’s the nature of doing something different.

Will the controller of Radio2 take on someone like Brand of Ross again, or give them such freedom? Probably not (in the near future at least), instead ‘safe’ DJs. A sad thing.

UPDATE: Mark Lawson has a good comment piece which manages to cover much of what I was trying to say in a much more elegant manner.

Posted on by chriskeene 3

ircount : new location, new functionality

A while a go, I released a simple website which reported on the number of items in UK repositories over time. It collected its data from ROAR but by collecting it on a weekly basis could provide a table showing growth week by week.

First it has a new home: http://www.nostuff.org/ircount/

Secondly, it now collects data for every institutional (and departmental) repository registered in ROAR across the world. Not just the UK. It has been collecting the data since July.

The country integration isn’t perfect, you have to select a country, and then you are more or less restricted to that country (though you can hack it, see the ‘info&help’), and there is a lot of potential with improving this. There are also a couple of bugs, for example when comparing four repositories it seems to (a) forget which country you were dealing with, and (b) it stops showing the graph/chart.

I’m currently looking at trying to make an educated guess at how many fulltext items are in a given repository. This is proving to be a steep learning curve in the joys of OAI-PMH, and how the different repository systems (and the different versions on these systems) have allocated information about the fulltext in to different Dublin Core (DC) elements. But this is for another post.

In the mean time, I hope the worldwide coverage is of some use, and feel free to leave any comments.

Posted on by chriskeene 1

Top UK Universities : Combined Rankings

There are various  league tables out there for UK Universities. I’ve collected the results from a number of them, a league table based on league tables. This should hopefully help to remove any biases or weaknesses in particular methodologies. The results are further down this post.

I collected results for just 53 Universities, not the full 120 odd that exist in the UK. This was due to laziness, and to be honest I’m more interested in the higher end of the numbers. However I’m fairly sure no university I’ve excluded would come higher that those I’ve included In fact it was originally going to be 50, but as I collected from the various sources I added a few more around the cut off point.

For each ranking, I’ve recorded the position (e.g. 5th) , and then converted it to a score. To a create a score I simply subtracted the ranking position from ‘101’, which ensures that the University ranked first will get 100 points. A good University (according to the rankings!) will have a low number ranking and a high score, e.g. a University ranked 5th will get a score of 96 (101-5=96).

Let’s just be clear at this point, I’m not a statistician, this isn’t remotely scientific, or fair, or well thought out, or thought out at all in fact. Did you get that? Perhaps read it again to be safe. These numbers are crap, and any conclusions drawn on them are without foundation! I’m also no Higher Education expert.

Sources:

Comment on Sources:
I’m not going to go in to detail about each source, you can follow the links, and if that seems like too much effort, then this Wikipedia page provides an overview for some.
I’ve provided two totals, one for UK only based rankings, and the other includes the international rankings.

The UK only rankings –  and it is my impression that the Guardian in particular – focuses on Teaching. They are, after all, aimed at prospective students. Though there is a danger in focusing two much on teaching resources, as ultimately one University may have fantastic teachers, amazing classrooms and great support, but ultimately is seen as a bad University by employers and the public at large (and to be ‘highly respected’ normally requires a good research record, not to mention being very old). You see, that could be rubbish, I don’t really know, you’re taking this with a pinch of salt right?

The ‘Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers’ from ‘Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan’ is perhaps the most controversial. A major ingredient is citation/impact factors from SCI and SSCI, so those stronger on the Humanities will suffer due to these disciplines being excluded . Interestingly those who focus on the Social Sciences also seem to suffer as well, notably the LSE and Warwick. As I added these numbers in last, it was very notable that some Universities moved several positions due to its inclusion.

The Result:

Click on one of the two following links:

Combined UK University Rankings (excel) (recommended)

Combined UK University Rankings (via Google docs) (as a spreadsheet)

You can order the list by any field. There are two totals: the first using the three UK only rankings, and the second, one of the middle columns, is a total which takes in to account both UK and worldwide rankings.

The rest of the columns are either raw league table data – in black text, or scores – in red.

A score is: 101 minus the ranking. The scores just make it easier to add up and order the totals by highest score, though working in this was does make things a little messy.

The worldwide rankings have an extra column, they include the world ranking as well as the UK only ranking (A University may be the 4th UK university in the list but the 28th University overall). You could potentially do something with the world ranking, e.g. if one comes 10th in the world results, the next comes 11th and the third comes 98th, then clearly it suggests that the first two are broadly similar while the third is not at the same level, though my method simply treats them as first, second, third, and does not take this in to account.

Some Universities did not appear in all the world rankings. Simply giving them a zero score seemed a little harsh, so I hacked it a bit. If, say, the lowest score was 60, then any University without a score may get 40. I know just about everyone will be pulling out their hair out at such random stupidity, though it seems to avoid those not appearing on certain tables being heavily penalised. Especially as some Universities do seem to be randomly missing from certain worldwide tables.

As mentioned above, the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers is perhaps the most controversial here, and perhaps should not be excluded (comments welcome)? They do explain on their website the pros and cons of their method: The Humanities are more or less ignored, while the Social Sciences are treated like the Sciences, however, as they note, the datasets they use include far fewer Social Science journals, which means these subjects will score relatively lower than the sciences.

This seems true, the LSE amazingly does not appear at all (it normally appears in the top 5), and Warwick appears very low in the list, even though it has a medical school, something they say helps pull Universities up the list. In fact, before this data was added, the LSE was fourth over all, now I’ve added this data they are twelve! I’ve created a column which shows totals ignoring this ranking.

Top 20

UK-only rankings

  1. Oxford
  2. Cambridge
  3. LSE
  4. Imperial
  5. St Andrews
  6. Warwick
  7. UCL
  8. York
  9. Durham
  10. Loughborough
  11. Bath
  12. Exeter
  13. Edinburgh
  14. Leicester
  15. Nottingham
  16. Kings college
  17. Lancaster
  18. Southampton
  19. Bristol
  20. SOAS
 All Rankings
1= Oxford/Cambridge
3 Imperial
4 UCL
5 Edinburgh
6 Warwick
7 Kings college
8= St Andrews/Bristol
10 Nottingham
11 LSE
12 York
13 Manchester
14 Durham
15 Southampton
16= Leicester/Sheffield
18 Birmingham
19 Glasgow
20 Bath

.

My thoughts:

  • First, a week a go, I asked on this blog for people to provide their top 20 lists, you can see them here. My question was badly phased, but the replies are interesting. It includes my results in the first comment (I wrote this without looking at any of these rankings first).
  • Looking at my guesses, I clearly have an aversion to Universities starting with L. Completely missed out Leicester, Loughborough, and Lancaster. The Scots also faired badly from my off-the-top-of-my-head list: St Andrews was no where to be seen, and yet is near the top of both lists. Aberdeen and Dundee both are close to the top 20, yet I would have probably failed to include them in a ‘top 30’. Oh, and somehow forgot Durham.
  • I think I’ve always put UCL as the ‘one after oxbridge’, yet according to these results Imperial, LSE, St Andrews and Warwick are more or less on an equal pegging.
  • I’ve also thought of the groupings a bit like the football league tables: Russell Group, then the 94 group and then the rest. With people joining/leaving these groups as they progress or stagnate. These results show this to be wrong. Looking at the UK-only top 20, 9 of them are 1994 group (and so coming out better than many Russell group Universities). In fact the LSE and Warwick were both in the 94 group until recently, which would have lead to the majority of Universities in the top 20 being in the 1994 group! There are Universities in neither of these groups who are easily ahead of some of those in the Russell group.
  • As you can see from my guesses, I put Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton higher than their actual results, so why were MY expectations high for these organisations? The first two being grand old Universities and Southampton perhaps being accounted for because the one department I know something about – Electronics and Computer Science – is very highly regarded.
  • If these results really do reflect the Research (and teaching) ability of Universities, and if the Russell group is, as it is often portrayed, the leading research Universities, and the 1994 group being smaller research Universities, then there is argument that their should be some movement in group membership (I shall leave it to the reader to look at the excel file and decide who should move up and down!).
  • Having said this, the Russell Group website reports that the group accounts for 68% of all research income, so not doing that badly.
  • Oxford and Cambridge were equal in the international results, Oxford just one point ahead in the UK-only results. So no conclusions there.
  • The Times notes in its own assessment how there is almost a clear split between pre and post 1992 Universities, the list starts with the ‘old’ Universities, and then the ‘new’ universities, with only a couple of exceptions.

And Finally…

I have tried to provide some comment, but this is just my personal view based on near total ignorance. By all means laugh, but don’t get upset.

Link to the results excel file again Combined UK University Rankings.

(this post was slightly updated in November 2008 to improve readability)

Posted on by chriskeene 15

Navel gazing

I was having a quick think about the categories I use here. I have tried to use categories which match people’s interests. e.g. someone from Brighton can choose to read (and subscribe to) ‘Brighton’, same for technology or libraries.

I’ve recently started to blog a bit more about things related to my work. Which is best summed up as where technology (& web) and libraries (& information management) meet. This includes searching, metadata, cataloguing, making data and information accessible, and scholarly publishing (and changing it to be less stupid). My rule of thumb is that if I feel something would only be of interest to those in the library (or HE) tech area, I stick it in ‘libraries and technology’, if it could be of interest to those who are generally interested in techy stuff then it is added to the technology category.

So if you are interested in reading my ill informed rants relating to libraries and technology (but don’t wish to have to suffer the rest of the crap i post) then you can subscribe to the following feed:

http://www.nostuff.org/words/category/information-searching-and-libraries/feed

oh, but that’s a good point. I have started to talk about the Library world more, in a ‘I’m presuming you know what I’m talking about‘ type way. I’m hoping that hasn’t alienated my huge previous user base (if you were that reader can you let me know). Some keep a seperate blog for work and home. I’ve resisted this, my thoughts about the things I encounter due to work, and those I encounter due to outside interests are all basically me, if you like one or the other (but not both), just follow the rss feed for the appropriate category (maybe I need one called ‘not work’). By the way, you can subscribe to a feed for a category by going to the categories main page, and then added ‘/feed/’ to the end.

(would be great if you could create a feed which is a combination of several categories you are interested in). Oh and one weakness of the blogging model is that one person’s output is distributed and not easily connect-able. so all the comments i have made in other blogs are disconnected to this blog (of course the alternative is to reply via this blog and rely on ping/trackback) and this is one of the reasons why I don’t run multiple blogs, there’s no easy way to say ‘this blog should include any content i post to another specified blog’ or ‘include my comments in other blogs’ or ‘when posting this, also post it to blog X’. but i digress.

I occasionally chatter on about politics, but also talk about more general stuff happening in the world today, this can be anything from shops, to phones to education. I tend to stick all this under ‘politics and current affairs’, but it is a broad church and really need a better category for the ‘stuff around me today which takes my interest’, any ideas?

Peter Suber recently described me as ‘anonymous’ blogger in a post of his. Which turns out to be true, so I have updated my blog theme (see earlier post) to show a mini profile at the top of the page.

You can also find me at:

And randomly some embedded stuff:

Friendfeed

Dipity

Posted on by chriskeene

Radio Pop

Radio Pop is an interesting experimental site from the fantastic BBC radio labs.

It is a sort of soical network site for radio listening. It only records your listening through the ‘radio pop’ live streams. I (like many) mainly listen to listen again and the radio iplayer, and they are working on intergrating with both. You can see my profile here.

Screenshot of radio pop
Screenshot of radio pop - click for a larger version

You can ‘pop’ what you are currently listening to (basically a ‘i like this’ button). I’ve added my ‘pop’ rss feed to my dipity timeline.

Posted on by chriskeene