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Alia Sheikh of BBC R&D at Mashed08

Alia Sheikh was part of the BBC R&D team who brought their wares from Kingswood Warren down to Alexandra Palace for Mashed08 with the intention of showing how easy it is to hack video and audio when it's served up digitally. Alia showed us a stunning visualisation of the audio of a radio show:

Alia was also instrumental in bringing the O'Reilly Makezine Weekend Projects to the two Mashed TV channels which were broadcast over the specially-built DVB-T network over the two days, (still are in fact - I'm writing this at 1am on Sunday morning).

When they bring back Tomorrow's World, Alia would make a fantastic presenter!

Speechification - Radio Archive

Speechification is the brainchild of Steve Bowbrick and Russell Davis, with the generous help of Dan Hill, Roo Reynolds and Bobbie Johnson, among others. They specialise in finding and bringing to your attention the arcane glories of UK (and Australian) speech radio.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a ridiculously fascinating discussion of the wonders of the footnote, led by Ben Schott and with comments by Terry Pratchett and Lynne Truss. A week ago I listened to a series of four essays by Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy on the relationship between music and maths, (One. Two. Three. Four), and a couple of months ago I spent an hour contemplating a lecture by Oxford Uni ethical geneticist Julian Savulescu advocating for genetically modified human beings, (his point wasn't necessarily that we should go ahead with it, just that the science is nearly in place to make it feasible, and he was really advocating for having the discussion now of whether this is a good idea or not).

These are the kind of shows that air once and then are lost to the ether. The ability to listen to the pieces via the BBC website for a week after airing at least allows us a second chance to catch certain programmes. Speechification is the next step, archived for all time, allowing us to listen when suitable rather than when broadcast, and also, just as importantly, allowing us to recommend programmes to friends. I've listened to considerably more speech radio since Speechification came along - I'm listening to a fantastic programme about the Dundee-based comic publisher DC Thompson as I type - and I can say categorically that Speechification is my favourite website of the moment!

 

Pandora Halt Streaming to the UK

On the 15th of January 2008, Pandora will stop broadcasting in the UK. They have been unable to come to an agreement with the MCPS/PRS Alliance over royalties for radio play, and as such have to pull the plug. Pandora founder Tim Westergren sent an email to UK listeners apologising for letting them down:

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Pandora and Last.fm were spoken of as the two golden hopes for the future of music over the Internet. Both were innovative and fun, and both seemed to simultaneously represent the interests of the record companies, the musicians and the audience. With Last.fm, that interest is skewed now it is owned by the media giant CBS. And over here in the UK, Pandora's benefits clearly went unseen by the record industry. What seems obvious to the rest of us, that Pandora's services will promote new music, will create new markets and therefore will generate new revenue streams, somehow escaped the PPL and MCPS/PRS' notice. I wonder will the people and companies they represent also be unable to see Pandora benefits, other than the immediately financial. One thing's for sure, it comes to something when we have a less progressive licensing set-up than the US.

Open Source event at the European Broadcasting Union

Daniel James writes:

The EBU training department in Geneva is hosting a free software seminar this autumn, on 1-2 October. I will be presenting a talk on Ardour in a post-production environment (a.k.a. editing, mixing and mastering). There will also be a workshop on using our 64 Studio GNU/Linux distro, which features Ardour and many other content creation tools.

The event is open to EBU non-members. More details are on the EBU website.

Resonance FM Fundraiser - 14th March

Resonance FM Fundraiser on the 14th March at Madame Jo Jo's on London's Brewer St.

Resonance FM Fundraiser

A fundraiser for Resonance FM is taking place in Kilburn, London, on Tuesday the 13th February. For those who haven't come across Resonance before, it's London's first art radio station, run by London Musicians' Collective, broadcasting on 104.4FM.

For those outside London, (or those in London who prefer to listen to the radio online) they have various ways in which to hear them, including plenty of podcasts to get your teeth into, such as this three part interview with Alan Moore.

LUG Radio

Latest LUG Radio features Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Matt Revell, Ade Bradshaw, and special studio guest Scott James "Three  Shot" Remnant talking about Linux and open source and a variety of other stuff:

Naked Scientists in Book Form

The Cambridge-based (the UK Cambridge) Naked Scientists have published a book called Naked Science. Naked Science is written by Chris Smith - his first book no less - and is priced at an attractive £7.99. For a flavour of the book:

"What could be more attractive than magnets . . . and swallowing them?
American radiologists in late 2004 warned parents of the dangers of swallowing more than one magnet at a time. Swallowing foreign objects is common among all children, but luckily, 80% of the swallowed objects pass harmlessly through the gastrointestinal system on their own, single magnets included. Consuming more than one magnet can spell disaster, however - because the magnets are attracted to each other across the walls of the intestines, with the result that loops of bowel become locked together. The ensuing life-threatening tangle can lead to tissue death and/or perforation of the intestinal wall."

(Note to self: only swallow one magnet at a time from now on!) Buy the Naked Science at BMTMedia, (who offer free UK delivery), Amazon, Foyles and Blackwells. There's also an Australian version, called The Naked Scientist, available from Dymocks for $29.99.

Check out the latest radio show, or read the text summary:

"With a new year comes a whole new stack of science questions to challenge Dr Chris, Dr Dave and Dr Kat. This week they explain where the sand in the Sahara comes from, whether mirrors can reflect x-rays, if it is dangerous to live near a phone mast, and whether splitting water could solve our energy problems. We are also joined by the editor of Chemistry World, Dr Mark Peplow, who talks about labs the size of a postage stamp, nanoparticles in exhaust fumes, and how putting milk in your tea might not be such a good idea, and sticking with chemistry, Dave Ansell discovers which household liquids make dirty pennies look like new. In the fourth part of our series on science and colour, Anna Lacey how wearing red could turn you into a world-class sportsperson."

BBC Backstage and Five Live

BBC Backstage have teamed up with Five Live:

"Over the next couple of months backstage and Five Live are teaming up to try and produce some amazing ideas and prototypes. The idea is to place old media and new media right next to one another, compress, mix, add a spoonful of sugar and see what happens.

Five Live produces some amazing content, content that lends itself perfectly to being mixed and mashed with a whole hosts of feeds we already provide, and several which we'll be announcing for the first time with this project."

Last.fm and BBC Backstage

It's great to see BBC Backstage has stepped up again, after a period when it all went a bit quiet. I'm sure loads of things were going on in the background, but looking in from the outside, with only the web site and an RSS feed for information, it did seem at times that the impetus had gone.

Backstage have just announced the beta of the BBC Radio Player and Last.fm widget that will harvest details of the songs played on the radio and add them to your last.fm profile.

Chris Bowley, who wrote the Last.fm widget, writes:

"One of the main reasons why these projects were developed as widgets is that they allow you to make client-side cross-domain XMLHttpRequest calls. The Last.fm widget makes calls to two different domains and therefore cannot be hosted as a web page. Widgets can also make calls to control installed applications, such as streaming audio through Real Player, and display OS information such as laptop battery life or WLAN coverage. In essence widgets provide a sandbox with fewer restrictions than web browsers but they do have their disadvantages."