I just heard your conversation about the finals systems used by the various codes, and it's one of my hobby-horses so I just have to jump in. The McIntyre system is better without a shadow of a doubt in my mind as it correctly gives the higher ranked teams a deserved advantage in the first week. I think it is completely reasonable to force sudden death on the bottom two teams, and give only the top two teams a guarantee of a second week.
The unpredictability of the McIntyre system is also much more interesting for the fans than the AFL's system.
Ultimately though, as you said, if you win your games, you will progress.
Who will criticise A Current Affair first? Today Tonight or Media Watch.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has found that General Television Pty Ltd, the licensee of GTV, breached the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice 2004 (the code) by failing to present factual material accurately in a segment of A Current Affair about a debt recovery company broadcast on 6 January 2009.
Dear today for day of lovely for all of do readings today,
Mrs. Porrit of the English teachings did do say to me of concern for my story of previous about Mr. Boss doing go away for week sot interstate after I did do the compostings for him as she was do think that maybe and perhaps Mr. Boss was doing the firings and not the going away times but was not of sure how to be to do be doing tell.
This did do much concernings for me as I was do see of possible and was doing worry of how to be do find new job and then also to be doing payments of the renting as I am much good at the gradenings but not of the best of for do the Englishes which does do cause of problem when doing the look for jobs of workings.
The newses though are much good as Mr. Boss did do come back to the Sydney yesterday and did vist of my house which was much lovely and he met nice cat Slavcatchski in his bed which pleased Slavcatchski and Mr. Boss for as they are much usually do only meet of when I am do take Slavcatchski to the workings of occasional times. Mr. Boss did do say that relatives are doing of the better and he will be go back away in soon for some of week and that but he is to be still do like for me to be doing the work of gardrens and did do give of keys to gradren for the workings, which is much wonderful as I am of many long times behind in the workings of gradren and must be do many plantings and jobs with also build of the compostings.
Mr. Boss did do stay for the afternoon tea time which was with lovely neighbour Mrs. Lesley of next door who did do come over with the scones as I did do make of the cups of tea and coffee as well also the pumpkin and orange cake which is much lovely of the tastes and Mr. Boss did do say of reminding him for of the carrot cake which is not recipe I am do have done make and must now be do try and also of do some the testings of different. I am do think maybe of one day I should do open of restuarant which would have many foods of not the common much in this country.
I am must do go so please to be having wonderful week and lovely.
From Maritz
Ms. Maritzkrozlavsky Throrglasnishozly
5AA Adelaide’s Bob Francis is a bit like Stan Zemanek on steroids. He knows where the line is, he knows how to negotiate it, and he knows how to get his audience to respond in a way which doesn’t involve official complaints. Put simply, he is a professional shock jock who could teach a few people in the radio industry a thing or two.
Bob stirred the pot last week when a woman named Sylvia called him to give him a piece of her mind, which resulted in him responding with a string of “insults” from which The Sunday Mail decided to remove most of the letters. In fact, the way the article was written, you’d think Bob had rung up the local seniors club and abused them for breathing, when in reality the woman gave as good as she got and is probably younger than Bob.
But enough of my interpretation of it, judge for yourself (viewer discretion is advised…you know what to expect).
It is wrong of me to put Bob Francis and Kyle Sandilands in the same category because, quite frankly, one is a media professional with a well-honed sense of what his audience expects and tolerates, whilst the other is an arrogant buffoon who keeps blindly yelling at a potential avalanche. There is a mild similarity of style though…and I think Kyle could escape from the current witch-hunt (a deserved witch-hunt) if he were to learn a thing or two from Bob Francis. Firstly, he needs to be seen to be targeting an older demographic, which probably means he should take a night shift…secondly there is a significant difference between having fun at the expense of somebody else, and having fun with somebody who is getting as much out of it as you. Kyle needs to learn to master the latter and stop doing the former.
Kyle could make it as a shock jock, but he needs to seriously reconsider his act first.
Anyhoo, back to Bob, I was surprised to see a University lecturer being quoted by a newspaper who actually made sense…maybe I just far too used to them all droning on about global warming.
UniSA communications lecturer Dr Jackie Cook said the foul-mouthed exchange “should not surprise anyone”.
“Conflict creates good radio,” she said. “It’s performance, it’s persona, it’s not him, and sometimes they push it a bit far.”
But of all of it, Bob deserves the last word on this.
“It’s after nine o’clock and under the rules of radio you can do almost what you like,” he said. “She was harsh on me, I didn’t say a thing. I let her go and she kept having a go.”
Francis said Sylvia’s call “lit up the switchboard” and was “one of the best calls I’ve had”.
“She made my day. I wish that would happen every night of the week, I’d have the best bloody rated radio show in the world,” he said.
[..]
“It was absolute entertainment and if anyone didn’t like it they can go and get f—ed,” he told the Sunday Mail.
Re: your recent story about Murray-Darling communities suffering due to water buybacks…it's great to see the national media taking an interest in the story at long last. Communities in the Murray-Darling region have been complaining about this for a long time without getting much coverage.
I was in Deniliquin recently working as a journalist for radio 2QN and a couple stories from my fortnight there are related. Firstly, you mentioned areas which are heavily reliant on agriculture. Conargo shire, near Deniliquin, has the highest concentration of employment in a single industry in the country according to a recent Bankwest study, with 81.4 per cent of people in the area employed in agriculture, far exceeding the next highest concentration which is 31% in Holroyd, Sydney, working in manufacturing. The same study found that the Goulburn Ovens Murray region is one of the hardest hit by the financial crisis, with employment levels dropping by ten percent since November 2007. The study is available from http://www.bankwest.com.au/library/scripts/objectifyMedia.aspx?file=pdf/53/98.pdf&str_title=Employment%20Growth%20Corridors%20Report.pdf
Also during my recent fortnight there, Penny Wong had a publicity stunt of a flying visit to the region, in which she spoke to almost nobody and avoided answering media questions, preferring to waffle on about her peculiar announcements. Dr. Sharman Stone MP, Federal member for Murray, made a very interesting statement to me about how farmers need better policies than the whole "waving dollars in front of desperate farmers" water buyback scheme. I have the audio of her statement around here somewhere, and I'll send it through to you shortly.
The Australian Christian Lobby are quite upset about a raft of proposed changes to the codes of practice which govern free-to-air commercial television in this country, and in some ways they may have a valid point, especially when it comes to the proposed ways of submitting and handling complaints, however the rest of their points seem to be along the lines of “there’s too much violence and sex on television, and there should be less, much less”…I think they’ve missed a crucial point in their attempt to further their crusade against naughtyness on the box.
One of the proposed changes which has caused significant alarm in the ACL ranks is the idea of, on the extra digital channels, removing the restrictions which require G rated programs to be shown at certain times of the day.
The commercial TV stations are trying to change the Code of Practice to allow PG programs to be screened at any time on their new digital multi-channels (which everyone has to switch over to by 2013). If this happens it would mean there would be NO set time of the day when commercial stations had to screen G-rated programs – representing a big deterioration in standards. We already have the problem of PG-rated programs containing greater levels of sex and violence. Do we want parents to NEVER have a guaranteed time when they know they can let young kids watch TV?
Oh goodness, how horrible it is that parents might actually have to monitor what their children are watching!
I have massive reservations about the blocks of time which are allocated to “child friendly” programming as, just because a program doesn’t contain violence, swearing or people being intimate, doesn’t mean that it is suitable for children to watch, and too many parents just turn a blind eye to those blocks of “child-friendly” programming because “the TV guide said it was OK for my child, who is under 15 years of age, to watch”.
Many of the shows push a particular world-view or attitude, and this can very easily differ from the values which parents are trying to instil in their children. Removing these blocks of “child-friendly” programming might just force parents to actually parent their children by paying attention to what their children are consuming from the box. Possibly more importantly, if parents notice that television programs aren’t suitable for their kids, the kids might just go outside and play.
I actually think that forcing a “the world is wonderful and everyone stands around sharing songs about the alphabet” view of the world on kids through “child-friendly” programming, especially once the kids have reached the latter half of primary school, is harmful, as an incredibly important part of growing up is finding out that you can’t trust everyone, and that bad things do happen. Children need to learn about the real world…obviously not all of the details all at once, but if they don’t learn about the real world, they will grow up to be overly trusting and ignorant.
The Australian Christian Lobby seem to favour the “wrap everyone up in wool” approach, which is unfortunate for a group which wants to positively influence the direction of the country. I fail to see how anybody can keep the many bad influences in the world at bay, if they are wrapped in enough wool to not be able to understand the problems with the bad influences.
I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that I am declaring the photo gallery to be dead, meaning that no more photos will be uploaded to it ever. This is due to yet another issue with the software which runs it.
The good news though is that it will remain online in an archived form, in its current location, and I will launch a new gallery in the near future.
Gallery version 1 is a decent application for what it does, but it is old, inefficient, hopeless at providing any useful information in errors, and virtually impossible to fix when it has anything other than an obvious problem.
The current issue (and the proverbial straw of an issue) that I am currently having with it is that it won’t create thumbnail images (the smaller versions of images that you see on the pages which show many images)…or to be more precise, will get them created by ImageMagick, but fails to recognise that they have been created. As far as I can tell, Gallery is sending a mangled command to ImageMagick which is causing ImageMagick to create the thumbnail and then spit out an error, which is causing Gallery to assume that creation of the thumbnail failed, and ignore the created thumbnail image. Bizarrely, the older version of the Gallery software which I had installed until a few weeks ago completely abandoned processing the images upon receipt of the error from ImageMagick, whereas the current version treats it as a minor error which means that it accepts the image and just doesn’t show a thumbnail.
This issue has been bugging me for a while, and as I couldn’t sleep last night I had plenty of time to play around with the Gallery installation, but didn’t really get anywhere. I did, however, manage to prove that it is a fault in my Gallery installation and not in the Gallery software as distributed, nor a problem with ImageMagick, as a clean Gallery installation does not have the problem in the same environment with the same settings.
As such, I now have the incentive to do what I have wanted to do for a while but could never be bothered to mess around with…upgrade to Gallery 2, or possibly even a different photo gallery application. Gallery 1 has a horrifying and archaic file structure, and upgrading an existing installation to the more elegant Gallery 2 is a rather appalling process, and would mangle the page layout in ways which I would prefer to never have to think about.
Leaving the gallery in its current form is not an option due to the fact that it relies on an aging, and soon-to-be-unsupported, set of PHP scripts which will undoubtedly be exploitable in the near future. Thankfully Gallery has an “offline mode” where it can be easily archived in pure HTML and images form, which will allow me to keep it online without having to worry about updating the software which runs it.
The next thing for me to do will be to play with some newer photo gallery software to decide what I will use for the next incarnation of the gallery…and you can rest assured that, due to my aversion to placing my important online data in the hands people like Flickr who have proven that they can not be trusted to leave photos in their intended form, I will be running the next gallery myself, just like the current one.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Comission has won the first legal battle against Powerballwin.com.au, which claimed to be able to predict the Powerball numbers in a way which expands on a theory I have had for some time.
A SYDNEY company promising a guaranteed win at Powerball has had its assets frozen by court order following legal action by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
Powerballwin.com.au Pty Ltd offered a “100 per cent guarantee” to provide the correct Powerball number and help subscribers choose the next five numbers, Federal Court documents show.
The company claimed its system was based on “mathematics, statistics, computer modelling and the complex study of the theory of random probability”, court documents said.
However, the ACCC this week won a court injunction against the company and four men, suspending the scheme and freezing their bank accounts until a further hearing tomorrow.
The promoters disputed the theory that lottery balls fell in random patterns and promised subscribers a system to help them win “all divisions of Powerball”, court documents said.
[..]
However, the ACCC said in court documents the promoters did not have insider information, and were engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct.
[..]
One of the company’s ads included in the [ACCC] application stated: “Win Powerball this Thursday! The first Australian Powerball draw was conducted at 8.28pm on May 23, 1996. After analysing each number drawn excluding the Powerball number since its introduction, we have made an amazing discovery that disputes the theory of random probability and has totally shocked experts.”
I have disputed for a long time the notion that lottery numbers are drawn in a purely random manner for the simple reason that, for this to be true, the balls would all need to weigh exactly the same amount, have the exact same shape (including surface area covered by numbers) and receive an equal amount of the air being pumped in to the lottery machine.
Predicting lottery numbers accurately is, in my view, a simple (OK, simple might not be the right word) matter of knowing the original position of each ball, knowing the precise characteristics of each ball and the machine being used, knowing the characteristics of the air being pumped in to the machine, and then putting it all together with some physics modelling.
That said, knowing all of this information is more-or-less impossible, and knowing it far enough in advance to run a simulation which can predict the lotto numbers is even less likely. Knowing a subset of the information and making a “close enough” prediction is much more likely (and is similar to predicting the weather). I suspect that this lottery prediction service, if the people behind it are being honest, has monitored enough Powerball draws to gather a significant subset of the information.
If they are on the level, then they should have a high enough accuracy rate to prove their case in court…and if they’re feeling generous they might even give the ACCC a complimentary prediction so that the ACCC can cover the court costs without burdening taxpayers.
One thing about this court case will be very interesting though…if the lottery prediction service is legitimate, then it will be interesting to see how much of their research and formula ends up in public court documents. If enough of it is made public, then the business model will be void, as anybody would be able to predict the numbers for themself without the aid of the lottery prediction business. If that happens, you can expect the ACCC to be sued for destroying the business, and quite possibly for the value of every Powerball jackpot in the next decade or three.
News Limited papers today are carrying a story by Glenn Milne about Kevin Rudd’s latest outburst, and it’s rather interesting to see the various adaptions of it which are being run by the various editors of News Limited newspapers.
News.com.au is running the story from Melbourne’s The Sunday Herald Sun with the headline “PM Kevin Rudd swears at MPs over allowances”, Adelaide Now (Adelaide’s Sunday Mail) has the headline “Cranky Kev blasts MPs in @$%#! tirade”, while over at Sydney’s The Sunday Telegraph it’s “Rudd’s ‘f***ing’ rant at factions”.
The Adelaide and Sydney papers are running the same version of the story with minor alterations from the papers’ editors. The opening paragraph of the Adelaide edition reads:
KEVIN Rudd has had another expletive-laden brain snap – this time in front of a group of Labor’s faction bosses, including three women MPs.
Sydney is the same, except for using the term “brain explosion” rather than “brain snap”.
Anyhoo, the story…Kevin had another outburst, this time aimed squarely at his own parliamentarians.
The outburst on September 7, which shocked even the hardened ALP operatives who witnessed it, occurred after the faction leaders met in the Prime Minister’s Parliament House office to object to government plans to slash MPs printing allowances from $100,000 to $75,000 a year.
At the meeting were MPs Sharryn Jackson, Maria Vamvakinou and Senator Carol Brown, all from the Left faction and Senator Michael Forshaw, South Australian Senator Don Farrell and Senator David Feeney, from the Right.
Three of the MPs present put an initial case to the Prime Minister to retain the printing allowances, which the Government has decided to scrap after a report into parliamentary perks by the Commonwealth Auditor-General.
It was when Senator Feeney, a former Victorian State Secretary spoke up, that Mr Rudd “exploded”.
Mr Rudd then said: “I don’t care what you f—ers think!”
Singling out Senator Feeney, he said: “You can get f—ed”, before asking in regard to the printing allowance issue: “Don’t you f—ing understand?”
A much more detailed expletive-riddled verbal onslaught followed.
This is really a double-edged sword for Kevin Rudd. On the one hand, there are a lot of people who will identify with him as an “ordinary bloke” which will probably do his popularity a world of good in the short term, but more importantly it is another blow to the public image which Kevin and his PR team have worked hard to produce of a well-mannered diplomat with amazing negotiation and placating skills.
A lot of the credit for Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election victory belongs to his public image, and the fact that his public image is unravelling has to be a cause for concern…although as long as the opposition has a bigger concern in their rudderless leader Malcom Turnbull, Kevin’s job is almost certainly secure.
Every now and then somebody comes along and leaves a comment which leaves me a tad bewildered as to why they bother writing in the first place. It’s almost always the same theme, today is not an exception.
I’m amused by this one but have no intention of publishing it in the comments section of the post it was attached to, so it can have its own post, insulated from the more sane sections of this blog.
This comment is in no way related to the post “Jane Turner’s final day”
You are a complete duchebag – Why are you wasting a WordPress database with this pointless crap?
Nobody cares for your (very biased) opinions and they are totally irrelevant to the radio industry. Do you realise how much of a tool you look like posting stuff like “I’ve never heard any of these songs they play on FM104.7”? IT’S CALLED POP CULTURE MOFO!!! And it rates it’s ass off!
You wanna start a blog? Why not try something like “Boaring ways to spend a Saturday night” Because you clearly have no life!
Give up the community radio shift, too. Nobody listens to community radio (with a few exceptions of a couple of stations – No, not including yours!) and I’m sure that you are shit at it, too.
Do I work at one of the Canberra stations? No.
Sorry if this seems a bit harsh – But hey, I’m just sayin’
Ah, well, I should probably correct the record on a couple points. My opinions may be biased, but I don’t try to hide that fact, and I’m entitled to my opinion. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it.
Show me where I wrote “I’ve never heard any of these songs they play on FM104.7″…I’m sure that I said something similar at some stage relating to most of the music on that station (as I can’t stand most of it…some of it is OK though), but not all of it. And sure, it’s popular culture and it rates well…does this mean that I have to like it? No it doesn’t.
Seeing as you seem to want to know what I consider to be a good Saturday night…it’s a typical winter Saturday night with 2GB’s coverage of the 5:30pm rugby league game during which I would take Nattie for a walk, followed by 3AW’s coverage of the 7pm AFL game. Then at 10pm, a delayed version of The Bill, probably followed by listening to John Kerr for a little while on 2CC and, if I’m still awake at 3am, Casey and Heather on KXNT Las Vegas. I might even slip in a drive to nowhere in particular for an hour or so.
Occasionally, and I’m talking once every four or five months here, I may decide to go out on a Saturday night. Generally though, it’s not my scene.
As for community radio. I recognise that it has a limited audience, but audience numbers aren’t my primary motive for being involved in community radio. Personally I think the whole combination of licence types (eg. having commercial, community, narrowcast, public etc. radio licenses) is a joke and it should all be simplified in to one licence type…commercial (this doesn’t mean that station have to be commercial in nature), existing broadcasters should retain a commercial licence and more room should be made available for more stations. The stations to which people choose to listen would survive and be competitive.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope that you felt better after that rant. If pain persists, start a blog dedicated to refuting everything I write…that should keep you busy.
Geraldine Nordfeldt has written a short story on page 18 of today’s The Canberra Times about the Mike Welsh/Michael Thompson documentary All Talk which was launched on Tuesday. The article is rather good for a game of “spot the errors”.
OK, from the top.
spent three years interviewing five of their most passionate and quirkiest listeners.
It was probably three years or more from the time the idea was conceived to the final product, but filming started in 2007, not 2006.
Lon Morgan [..] spends many hours riding his bike with his radio strapped to the handlebars in Dickson, where he made a special crossing for his cat.
I’m pretty sure that you’d be more likely to find Lon’s radio dangling from his neck…but I’ll have to watch the video again to confirm it.
Lon’s cat crossing is on his driveway, not in some random part of the Dickson shops as implied by the article.
Former school teacher Betty Gill is not very tolerant of the current generation
When did she say that Geraldine? I don’t recall that being in the documentary, or being her general demeanour at the launch. She’s not afraid to use her sharp tongue on people who cross her, but that’s not the same thing.
while local blogger Samuel Gordon Stuart spends many hours recording radio and making news tapes.
Ummm, what? Firstly, you got my name wrong Geraldine. Blogger’s name + Google = Accuracy. Gordon hyphen ess tee eee double-you ‘ey are tee.
Secondly, if only I had the time and storage space of Media Monitors…I’d love to record hours of radio. I record it occasionally Geraldine, very occasionally.
And what in seventy-three types of manufactured magnetic audio cassettes are “news tapes”? Are you perhaps referring to the brief bit of footage from a couple years ago where I was reading the news for Australian Independent Radio News?
Unfortunately Bruce “The Goose” died during filming
The late Bruce “The Goose” Bennett sadly passed away on the afternoon of the 25th of June, 2007, a couple months before filming. (I sent an email to Stuart Bocking about it, which is why I can be sure of the date).
I suppose this all just gives me more reason to write about the documentary…and an angle to work with, as I’ve been struggling to decide how to approach it given that I don’t think I can write a review due to my involvement.
Whilst Jane presented her final news bulletin for 2CC and 2CA a few days ago, she is still working there. Today is Jane’s final day with Capital Radio. Susie Thompson takes her place on Monday.
Jane is heading back to Tasmania, and I, for one, wish her all the best. Her dulcet tones will be missed in Canberra.
A quick shout out to whomever it was that registered a user account on this blog earlier today under the name “Barack Obama” using an email address starting with “liarpresent”.
You may be surprised by the amount of data about you, is made available to the applications installed by your friends. This video explains, and also shows how to limit the availability of such information, albeit with the loss of some functionality.
