Can’t help thinking there might be a missing word in this headline or something.
Either that or property prices back home have taken a massive hit…
Category: Shoddy Journalism
In the olden days it was a lot easier for newspapers to pass off ridiculous claims as facts because anyone who wanted to verify them would have to go to some serious effort to do so. These days, however, we have teh internets, and fact checking has suddenly become a whole lot easier.
So if you’re going to make claims about teh internets, then you’d better be pretty sure that your claimed facts are, you know, actually true.
Case in point number 247 is this article in the Daily Mail: Google threatens to destroy not only pop sensation Adele, but Britain’s film and music industries.
Scroll down towards the end of the article and you’ll find this astonishing claim:
One only has to switch on the computer, call up the Google search engine and type in the name of a star like Adele to understand why the digital channel is such a threat to the UK’s performers, and for that matter our whole creative industry.
Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.
In effect, Google has granted these piracy sites a licence to steal. Instead of the proceeds going into future investment in artists, it ends up in the hands of internet buccaneers.
Really? Nine out of the top ten search results for “Adele” are “run by pirates”? Did you really think you could make a claim like that and nobody would check?
(And by “far more cheaply”, I presume you mean “free”, no? Unless you really believe your claim that any proceeds are someone ending up in the hands of “internet buccaneers”…)
Anyway. So I turned on my computer and “called up the Google search engine” and did just that. Your mileage may vary, because Google now gives you geographically specific and personalised search results, but when I try that very search I get her official website, her wikipedia page, her MySpace page, a YouTube link, her Facebook page, last.fm, a lyrics website and Amazon.com.
Hmm. No pirates there.
Now I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible to find copies of Adele’s music by doing a Google search, but you do have to specifically go looking for it. And until someone releases an album called “BitTorrent Download”, you won’t really be able to accuse Google of promoting piracy.
Actually, that’s sort of the point of a search engine–Google’s job is to index the internet, not to pick and choose what is worthy of inclusion in their index. Blaming them for the fact that certain websites show up in their search results seems to be the very definition of shooting the messenger.
Unless you have some other specific reason to be annoyed at Google. Oh, hang on…
So dominant has it become that it has helped to destroy great swathes of other media in its wake, from regional newspapers in Britain and the United States to business directory companies.
Ah. I see.
Categories
Logic
Curious article here from the normally sane Charles Arthur in The Guardian, which opens with:
The invitation to Apple’s event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar, with a soundhole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there’s a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple from an also-ran computer company into a force in the technology world.
The latest sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9m sold – the lowest quarterly number since 2006. In short, the iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. While Apple is unworried – sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming – the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: the music companies.
Some slightly disingenuous logic there, I think. I don’t see how you can consider iPod sales in isolation and use those as a basis for doom and gloom pronouncements on the state of the music industry as a whole.
For starters, you can’t just take iPhone sales out of the equation and pretend like that doesn’t matter, given that it is essentially an iPod with phone functionality. Why would any of those people contributing to the booming sales of the iPhone bother buying an iPod too? Surely no one loves Apple that much…
But more importantly, what does a decline in sales of the iPod have to do with downloads anyway? Isn’t this an issue of market saturation? There are only so many people in the world after all. How often does Charles Arthur think you need to replace your iPod?
But as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too.
Why? My chunky 2005 vintage iPod still does a perfectly good job of playing music downloads.
Just because there are fewer and fewer people left who don’t own some form of iPod, it doesn’t mean that digital downloads are doomed.
Of course the small matter of whether people choose to download music legally, and whether they choose to pay for it is another issue entirely…
Some more quality fact checking from The Age, today, where I spotted this in their “Complete Guide to South Africa 2010”:
I must have missed the announcement that the home nations have now begun competing as a single unified team, under the Union Flag. I hope The Age’s knowledgeable football writers have informed the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Football Associations that they will no longer be required.
I guess it does solve that old problem about us never being able to send a team to play football at the Olympics, though, hey…
Right. So a ten year study into the possible link between mobile phones and brain tumours finds no evidence that phones cause cancer. How do you report that then, newspapers of the word?
The Daily Mail: “Long conversations on mobile phones can increase risk of cancer, suggests 10-year study”
Daily Express: “CANCER LINK TO HEAVY USE OF MOBILE PHONES”
The Daily Telegraph: “Half an hour of mobile use a day ‘increases brain cancer risk'”
The Times: “Heavy mobile users risk cancer”
The Age: “Study unable to rule out link between mobile phones and brain cancer risk”
Leave it to the excellent NHS Choices blog to talk some sense, with its usual sober and sensible reporting of the actual science behind the tabloid hysteria. I do hope that they survive whatever massive cuts are on their way for the NHS under the new regime…
[Take home quote for me from the NHS Choices report, btw, was this one: “The researchers say that much of the research into a supposed link between mobile use and cancer is to address public concern rather than any particular biological principle: the frequency of radio waves used in mobile phones does not break DNA strands, and therefore cannot cause cancer in this way.” Hmm. I wonder where the public got that idea?]
Categories
Gems From Today’s The Age
Clearly The Age have given up on proof reading altogether…
“Gangland daughter Katie Peirce found dead“:
Mr Ser, an outreach worker with the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, told The Age in the statement that rumours of the overdose “are yet to be made official”.
He said the family were dismayed at the rumours “as it is totally out of character for her to have died from an alleged overdose”.
Er. Yeah. I’m pretty sure she’s never died from an overdose before…
“Flying off the handle: a day with the Dalai Lama, a night with Jetstar“:
“I’d just spent three days with the Dalai Lama and just looked at him really dismissively and said ‘f— off’ and we kept going,” she said.
That’s not a very nice way to treat the Dalai Lama, now, is it?
Categories
Headline Fail
Courtesy of yesterday’s mX, the shabby Murdoch freesheet that is distributed at train stations in Melbourne, comes this gem of a headline: “Police grill 3yo boys”.
Really mX? Are you sure? I prefer to use a BBQ myself for my cannibalistic needs, but those crazy police will try anything, won’t they…
I read this story about a teenager getting a cabinet (when she wanted a cab, init–DYSWTDT) in the Metro of the bloke sitting next to me on the tube this morning. It’s also for some reason made it into El Reg (er, technology angle?) who appear to have just copied it out of the Daily Mail.
How many ways is this clearly the fabrication of a desperately unfunny PR department at the furniture company?
Let us count the ways…
– This “19 Year South Londoner”. What has her name? No? Funny how you’ve managed to get in the name of the company that supplied the cabinet, though, isn’t it?
– Since when did teenagers not off of Eastenders use cockney rhyming slang? I’ve never heard anyone call it a “Joe Baxi”. Have you?
– If she lives in London, home to 6 major airports, why was she flying from Bristol?
– Didn’t they ask her what type of cabinet she wanted? Size? Colour?
– Did the people selling her the cabinet not think it was odd when she said she wanted this cabinet to take her to Bristol? (And why travel there by cab in the first place?)
So well done, display company PR people. I’ll give you a B+ for effort, but next time you want some free publicity, maybe try something that’s moderately believable, ok?
And this is also notable for some speak your branes level commentary from the unwashed illiterates who read the Mail and the Metro:
“Looks like this is another one who will be kept by the taxpayer for life on benefits. How can these people expect to get a job when they can’t talk the language?” — Brian Lightfoot, Birtley Co. Durham
“She definitely should not have received either an apology or a refund. The woman is one of our Nulabour illiterates, a product of our wonderful education system taught by teachers who have threatened strike action because they are “underpaid”. Unfortunately good English is seldom spoken or understood by the text generation. God help Britain because our children will not be able to.” — Ken, South London
“Serves the idiot right.” — Mr. J. Smith, Birmingham, England
“Well, if she had asked properly, then no mix up would have occurred. A sign of the times, I suppose, innit?” — Sandie Seward, Basildon U.K.
“Why should the furniture company apologise? If the idiot girl had spoken correctly in the first place she would have got the taxi she wanted.” — Simon, Nottingham England
So that’s “benefit scroungers”, “the yoof of today”, the “text generation”, “Nulabour”, and “striking teachers”… If someone could just find a way to pin this one on the immigrants then I’d have a full line of my “right wing middle england” bingo card.
Thanks, one and all, for thinking carefully before responding rather than just trotting out your lazy prejudices. Well done everyone!
Categories
Comedy Headline of the Day…
Excuse me while I put my grammar hat on for a second here, but I couldn’t help spotting this in the indie on Saturday:
“Two held over woman’s head found on beach“. I can’t see how dangling the suspects in the air is going to help solve the crime, but what do I know about modern policing. (Perhaps this is some kind of bizarre pagan ritual…)