Russell Davies

This week in references: Tom, Laurie, Kurt

Still close

Previously

Businessfunk

I don't know about you, but I've been listening to a lot of BUSINESSFUNK recently.

Education and persuasion

This is thoughtful piece with a terrible headline.

"For decades, governments have responded to everything from obesity to drug abuse to fake news by treating public awareness and understanding as an all-purpose silver bullet. Sometimes, this works. The introduction of high-quality relationship and sex education helped reduce teenage pregnancy in England by 55 per cent between 1998 and 2015. Fifty years of drink-driving campaigns cut deaths by 90 per cent. But these sustained, cross-political successes are rare. More frequently, the effort increases the burden on teachers and students, without producing noticeable results. Few examples illustrate this better than saving for retirement."

I guess governments default to education in the same way most organisations default to marketing/persuasion. 

Table tennis lessons

This is Heston Blumenthal. This has never occurred to me but he's right; there are some things that seem like acceptable things to be taught and some things that don't.

This week in references: echoes, breakbeats, the new sound of music

Going deep

One of the things I love about the web is it's ability to host someone who really wants to 'go deep' on a topic. It's really good at that.

That gets forgotten because the social medias are also really good at letting people skate across the surface of things (which, I can't deny, has its own appeal).

I'm trying to remind myself of those deep joys though and to collect and savour those moments of slightly too much information.

Here's a good one: Oh My Gosh It's Covered In Rule 30s.

Snappy title

"An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author"

I think this is equally true of those instantly catchy strategy lines. Seductive, but often more trouble than they're worth.

Rockford

 

We went to see Tranmere on Boxing Day. We were in the area. They beat Fylde 4-1. It was festive.

We were slightly mystified by the music they played when the teams came out. Couldn't place it. And I've just remembered to look it up. It's The Rockford Files theme! For no especially good reason. 

I love this stuff.

Speechifiying

Here's yesterday's newsletter. For the RSS crew. It's all old news for you lot, except for the Speechification nostalgia.....

Thousands of years ago I did Speechification with Steve Bowbrick and Roo Reynolds. It was a podcast of interesting speech radio. Other people's radio. We didn't own the rights but it was the days when no one even understood what we were doing so it didn't seem to matter. Then, slowly it started to matter and we got scared and stopped. But people loved it because 'discovery' for interesting bits of radio is hard. It's still hard.

The twitter account still sits there. I'm not sure who has the login details. The links have all broken. And there's a tumblr from a point when we tried to make it into a 'curation' of Radio 4 rather than a pure rip-off, so a lot of those links still work. There was a Facebook group too, I occasionally get a notification about that.

It's still an itch I want to scratch so I've started 41256. A similar thing but with fragments of audio, not whole programmes. It's less than 5 minutes long, that seems an under-explored podcast length. You can subscribe via iTunesor find it on Soundcloud. Let's see how long this lasts before I get scared.