Serendipity Book

Big Brother at Alton Towers

So, it seems that I'm only 2 years late to the news that the British theme park Alton Towers has introduced RFID technology in wrist bands to physically track and video their customers using CCTV as they move around the park.

The technology is primarily intended to offer a service which creates a custom video of "Your Day at Alton Towers". Guests wear bracelets fitted with RFID tags that trigger surveillance cameras throughout the park. The video footage is then spliced together automatically with stock "B roll" footage from the park to produce a custom DVD for each customer with a run time of up to 30 minutes.

The surveillance cameras are also used for "safety and crime prevention".

Guests opt-in to wear the tags but the privacy implications for other guests who will feature as "extras" in other people's DVDs are worth reflecting upon. The Alton Towers privacy policy states the following:

Please note that personal data in the form of images of visitors to the Park is collected via the operation of closed circuit television ('CCTV'), ride photography and video cameras all of which are located throughout the Park. Your image will be recorded and processed for the purpose of producing photographic images and video recordings.

Data from video cameras is collected by the wearing by visitors to the Park of a radio frequency identification (RFID) wristband. Please note your image may be captured passively through other visitors to the Park who may be wearing an RFID wristband.

I'm torn. Is this an relevant, exciting and clever use of a new technology which offers a genuine benefit to guests or a gross invasion of privacy?

P.S. Did you realise that it now costs nearly £100 a head to get in to Alton Towers?

Via RD's Delicious links.

Spiked: "The ASA represents the tyranny of the minority"

Brendan O'Neill of Spiked reacts to the most recent ASA judgements against Ryanair with
trademark candour.

Noting that the ASA sometimes takes action against adverts on the basis of only four or five complaints, he repeats Ryanair's contention that the ASA are ‘bunch of unelected, self-appointed dimwits’ and goes on to note that the UK advertising regulators appear to be far too keen to apease a tiny minority of individuals who wish to act as censors for the majority:

"The existence of organisations like the ASA and the Office of Communications acts as an invitation to squeamish, easily-offended or even self-interested individuals and parties to force through their own personal censorship of things they don’t like. It empowers the prudish, giving their narrow-minded outrage the full weight of officialdom’s backing. The ASA and Ofcom represent the tyranny of the minority. Their starting point is that it is unacceptable to offend anybody."

Now I'm not defending Ryanair's work (or Woolworths similarly poorly judged Lolita bed for that matter) but aren't we long overdue for a backlash against such New Puritanism? Can we not let the market decide whether Ryanair and Woolworths made mistakes?

Scratching School

DJ Sara - 8 years old DJ Ryusei - 5 years old

Petrol consumption and prices

Wonderfuly simple graphic from The Economist. I wonder if this ever has an impact on U.S. foreign policy?

"Talk to your spin doctor about incarcerex today"

A wonderfully snide little bit of political satire from the U.S. "Common side effects include loss of civil liberties, police corruption, racial injustice, increased terrorism ..."

Via Boing Boing

PTC: An Army of Davids

It seems that the spirit of Mary Whitehouse lives on in an American conservative lobbying organisation called the Parents Television Council (PTC).

Arstechnica quotes a study which shows that the PTC accounted for 99.9% of all the complaints received by the FCC, the U.S. television censor!

In recent years complaints about TV have gone through the roof, from a mere 350 complaints in 2000 to a whopping 240,000 in 2003. It has long been thought that the advent of reality TV and the onset of "loose morals" in TV have pushed conservatives over the edge. And you know what, it's true. The problem is that, unfortunately, these massive numbers all boil down to one politically motivated group with an axe to grind.

Mass organised protest is one of the possibilities for citizen action fueled by the internet which was touched upon in Glenn H. Reynolds recent book An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.

BBC World billboards dividing opinion

The BBC have been running some great interactive billboards in New York to promote the idea that BBC World offers impartial, balanced coverage of world events.

Opinion on the ads is, of course, itself divided. One Digg commenter set the tone of the debate around the ad when he said "[The BBC is] the only news channel that actually shows news these days. But i do kind of miss the DD cupped bimbos of fox sometimes.

More here from Buzzfeed.

Picture Credit: badboyuk on Flickr

Blair's analysis of our post-modern media

Tony Blair made some very interesting observations in a speech yesterday about the changing nature of the relationship between the media and politicians.

Calling for more joined-up regulation, he branded the media "a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits", driven by "impact" more than accuracy which is "driving down standards" as it seeks to sensationalise events.

Blair said, "News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light. Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial." He went on to single out political blogs as being as bad, if not worse, than the mainstream media at seeing the worst in every situation: "the new forms [of media] can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five."

The Telegraph prints the full text of his speech here and compares Blair's complaints in it's leader to those of Stanley Baldwin who in 1931 asserted that the press excercised the "prerogative of the harlot - power without responsibility".

In contrast, however, Blair admitted the complicity of his government in bringing about the excessively adversarial relationship that currently exists between the press and politicians, saying that they "paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging and persuading the media".

As the The Financial Times notes, the government now has 3,200 press officers!

The best comment comes, as is often the case, from The Times leader:

"Mr Blair’s wider critique ... has much to commend it. The scale of change within the media over the past few years has been extraordinary. This has been positive in many but not all respects. It has hardly prompted a culture of humility. There has been a democratisation of content but this has come with a hint of the mess of postmodernism. It can lead to a collective stampede that is frequently an unattractive spectacle. The press should be more willing to admit that most politicians enter public life out of a sincere desire to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and that they often have to make decisions with less time and less information than they would wish. None of us is perfect in this respect."

"Mr Blair is on his strongest ground when asserting that news and views are too regularly cross-fertilised. Objectivity should always be the ambition of news even if the meaning of objectivity is inevitably subjective. The tendency of some so-called serious newspapers to act as viewspapers would have profoundly negative effects if universally followed. Journalists are right to hold politicians and companies to account, but journalists should not be afraid of being held to account themselves. Readers are intelligent and thoughtful, and hardly able to be fooled by an individual article or an individual politician, but if the traditional media exist as a separate, self-serving universe, then the distance from readers will grow and the size of the audience will shrink."

>The Times also includes a poll of media opinion on Blair's speech which includes this wise comment from Alistair Campbell:

"The question at the heart of all this is whether the public get the media they deserve? In increasing numbers, the public seem to think not. The politicians almost all think not. The media seem unable to see it."

Picture Credit: The Sun

BBC Business Podcasts I have known and loved

For those interested in getting a business briefing on your iPod on the way to work, can I recommend these three lovely programmes from BBC radio ...

1. Wake Up To Money (first broadcast on Radio Five Live on weekdays @ 5:30am) - Presented by Mickey Clarke and Andrew Verity, 'Wake up to Money' provides an ideal start to the day for the business news junkie. Available to download onto your iPod soon after 6am each morning, "the show gives managers, small business owners, investors and anybody else who is interested in business a briefing on the working day ahead".

2. In Business (first broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursdays @ 8:30pm) - Hosted by Peter Day, 'In Business' tries "to make ear-grabbing programmes about the whole world of work, public and private, from vast corporations to modest volunteers. In Business is all about change. New ways of work and new technologies are challenging most of the assumptions by which organisations have been run for the last 100 years. We try to report on ideas coming over the horizon, just before they start being talked about. We hope it is an exhilarating ride."

3. The Bottom Line (first broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturdays @ 5:30pm) - Started a new run yesterday with a piece on Toyota and Lean Production, 'The Bottom Line' uses a panel format tand promises to "cut through the confusion of modern life to find out what's really important to consumers and businesses: the gimmicks, the people, the products - and the relationships."

Each programme is currently only available for a 7 day period after broadcast and there is even the possibility that the BBC will pull their download service after the trial finishes. Boo on both counts.

Harold Macmillan: Nepotism on a grand scale

A shocking fact (from part 2 of Andrew Marr's excellent Modern History of Britain):

"Within months of taking office, Macmillan was leading a government within which 35 ministers, out of 85, were related to him by marriage including 7 in the cabinet; which was all male and had only two members who had not gone to a grand public shool, Eton being the most popular".