Glengarry Glen Ross

Written by David Mamet - Directed by Tony Kennick

14th to 17th October at the University Drama Studio doors open at 7pm for a prompt 7.30pm start.

Lies, flattery, threats, intimidation, four desperate estate agents will do anything to sell.
Mamet's Pulitzer Prize winning play is edgy, exhilarating and blackly comic as the characters plot, plead, and betray each other in a paradigm of the energy and cruelty of capitalism in action.
Contains very strong language throughout.

Our online Box Office is now open

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As Neil Gaiman would say:

"I'm closing a few tabs"^[1]

• http://timetric.com/ - simple idea elegantly done, collect data sets, graph them, let people add more data sets, produce their own graphs etc.
• Kevin Anderson on Visualisation for news and community discovery the Visualisation landscape from a journalism point of view, with some very interesting examples and a reminder to me to look into the google visualisation API
• Resetting Expectations: Some Augmented Reality Links an O'Reilly Radar article doing pretty much what it says on the tin.
• A skim-read introduction to linked data The blog post is pretty brief just a background to what the slides are, but do click through to them (they are in s5)

^[1]Yes I know I should be doing this in a more geeky way by pulling in from my delicious feed but hey *shrug* what you going to do?

Channel switching

Sunny Hundal asked

Observer columnists asks readers to follow Archbishop Dr John Sentamu. But fails to link to his twitter page. WTF?

and this got me thinking. I assume that this was in response to Vicky Coren bringing it up, I'm not sure if the plural was a typo or if someone else had mentioned it as well. Now a lot of this is speculation, I don't know the minds of the people involved if I were a real journalist I could go as far as to ask but...
The strongest reason I suspect is that the piece was written for a real ink on paper newspaper, and newsprint currently rarely has the extensions installed to make links clickable and have the request handled by an adjacent web browser. So you have the problem of how to communicate such a link:

• In full? That is quite a lot of typing to get right and there isn't much in the way of error correction if you miss a letter^[1].
• As a shortened URL using tinyURL or similar? This reduces the amount of typing but is even less forgiving of error when glancing between page and keyboard to type it in from the page.

No the easiest thing to do is to let people use search. It took a matter of moments using a popular internet search engine to find what I was after even with a spelling error. I expect that the set of people who actively use twitter but couldn't find Dr Sentamu without the help of a printed link is very small indeed.
This is actually a current trend in getting people to channel shift from offline to online, look at the next billboard poster for a blockbuster movie for example and it is more likely to have a stanza starting "search online for:" and some carefully chosen keywords than one starting "www" (and heaven forfend anyone use the dreaded "http://"). Previously attempts to get you online where more information can be fed to you, and in a marketing context you can interact enough to help them target you, have included 'innovations' such as posters with infra-red transmitters that would send you a link to online information and two dimensional barcodes such as the QR Code neither of which really caught on here.
Now back to naked unjustified assumptions, suppose Sunny wasn't reading a paper copy of the Observer but the online edition, in which a hyperlink has been added to the text which links to the guardian.co.uk aggregation page for the Archbishop. Now it could be reasonable to expect that this story could have had a link to the twitter profile in question, it would have been virtually uncontroversial to add it to the piece, there is no doubt that it would fit. But I suspect that if you had the job of trying to mark up stories in this way on the site as they transitioned from print to online more often than not you would need to consult the author of the piece to confirm that what you were linking to was correct.

^[1]Some ISPs catch requests for non-existant domains and redirect you to a search page in the guise of being helpful but this breaks a number of things that expect when a domain doesn't exist to be told so. Luckily although my home ISP does this it also allows me to opt-out.

Media oversight from the unexpected angle.

Much has been written about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart can often be the hardest hitting political show on the American networks despite being produced by and aired on a cable comedy channel. In terms of television output luminaries such as Marcus Brigstocke and Iain Lee & Daisy Donovan have tried to mine the vein of satirical current affairs but none of them have worried Jeremy Paxman and television satire in this country remains mostly the preserve of impressionists and panel games.

There is one area in this country in which a programme you might not expect is doing a fine job at holding people to account. More or Less goes out on Radio 4 after the World at One on a Friday lunchtime and is a co-production with the Open University. This seemingly unassuming half hour of statistics can be (glibly) described as doing for numbers what Ben Goldacre does for medicine. While not the first important figure they have picked apart (there is a very good piece about how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK for example) they hit the geek headlines over the weekend over "7m illegal file sharers". After first finding out that the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property was quoting a figure that came out of unpublished research commissioned for the BPI which had been laundered through another report from the same research outfit via UCL they then examined the methodology and numbers from which it was derived which brought both the small sample size and seemingly overstated overall population figure under scrutiny.

The programme is also blessed in that it has its archive online going back to 2003 so the good work can be cited.