Archive for January, 2006
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
Peter Kavanagh, brother of the late poet Patrick, has died in New York, where he was a professor of English literature. It was to Peter that Patrick dedicated his Collected Poems, and after Patrick's death Peter put much energy into keeping his reputation and poetry alive, eventually succeeding in ...
Posted in Society and culture | Comments Off on Peter Kavanagh, brother of Patrick, dies
Monday, January 16th, 2006
Yay! Looks like I'll be presenting my paper on an early - 6th century A.D. - Irish copyright case at the ICA conference in Dresden. [Yes, I'm aware it's a rather specialized topic.] More fun - it appears that Jürgen Habermas will be one of the keynote speakers.
Posted in Intellectual property issues | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 16th, 2006
From InterWorldRadio:Mobile phone operators in Bangladesh have been ordered to stop offering free late-night telephone calls in response to requests to protect the moral values of young people. The move followed complaints by parents to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission who said their childrenÂ’s behaviour had changed as a result ...
Posted in Media regulation | Comments Off on Free phone calls endangering morals in Bangladesh?
Monday, January 16th, 2006
I wonder who's going to buy CanWest's share of TV3.
Posted in Corporate media | Comments Off on New shareholder for Ireland’s TV3?
Monday, January 16th, 2006
Courtesy of Simon, an odd story on the Toasted Heretic website, about how they have been sent a cease-and-desist in response to their use of (a parody of) the Tayto-man logo on their new album, Now in New Nostalgia Flavour, which is essentially a reissue of their 1980s albums, which ...
Posted in Intellectual property issues | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
The Freakonomics blog has had a number of posts about Deal or No Deal, a television show that had passed me by until I came back to Ireland for Christmas. I've now seen parts of several episodes of the British version, which I'm guessing is fairly close to the U.S. ...
Posted in Trivia | Comments Off on Risk aversion on television
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
You couldn't make it up. Greg Palast draws attention to some of the questions on the standardized test for third-grade students in New York. Or, rather, since the test is currently taking place, the official practice test:The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena ...
Posted in Education | Comments Off on Class bias and ‘standardized’ testing
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
I'll be giving a talk to the Radio Society in NUI, Galway tomorrow (Wednesday) evening. The topic is "Community radio: the position of the sector in the twenty-first century." OK, it's not the most catchy title ever, but it was the best I could come up with.
The content should be ...
Posted in Alternative Media | Comments Off on Community Radio in the 21st century
Monday, January 2nd, 2006
Just before I came home for Christmas I was Paul's guest on MediaGeek on WEFT. We had intended, originally, to talk about the state of community media in Ireland and Europe generally, but ended up spending most of the show talking about the Data Retention compromise that had just passed ...
Posted in Computing Technology, Freedom of the press, International Affairs, International law and structures, Media regulation, Prisons and crime | Comments Off on Data retention and vehicle tracking