There’s no public benefit in BBC programmes being ‘distinctive’

Question 9 in the UK Government’s recent Green Paper on the BBC Charter review asked, “Is the BBC’s content sufficiently high quality and distinctive from that of other broadcasters?”. Patrick Barwise, Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department for Media and Communications at the LSE, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School, and former Chairman of Which?, provides his response

Disrupting the digital giants – advertisers and traditional media push back

The downside of digital giants like Facebook and Google includes the increase in fake news, political polarisation, the dumbing down of debate and the long-term decline in print journalism as newspapers lose readers and advertising to these platforms. But a combination of problems with digital advertising – fraud, mismeasurement, and programmatic ad placement on undesirable sites – means that advertisers and traditional media are starting to push back. The battle for advertising may be entering a new phase, with a better balance between old and new media. This post is based on a presentation by Patrick Barwise (London Business School) at the Oxford Media Convention 2017

Committee, Government Diverging on Convergence?

The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications begins taking oral evidence next Tuesday in its Inquiry on Media Convergence and its Public Policy Impact. It is a broad inquiry, attempting to take in some of the high level issues that the Communications Review and the Leveson Inquiry are unwilling, or unable, to cover. It proposes to cover very general issues related to convergence of media asking whether there should be some kind of over-arching regulatory framework for broadcasting and the internet, and asks for suggestions for a ‘guiding principle’ for policy on convergence

BBC Funding: Much Ado about the Cost of a Coffee a Week

BBC funding (the licence fee model and the funding level) has been turned into a big issue out of all proportion to the low financial stakes—equivalent to the cost of one takeaway coffee a week for the whole household, excluding those with free TV licences. This article first proposes and explores three possible reasons for all the fuss: that licence payers take the BBC for granted, underestimating the value they get from it; that the attacks on BBC funding are part of a wider ‘war’ against it, driven by commercial or political vested interests; and that at least some of the criticisms of the licence fee reflect genuine, although much exaggerated, disadvantages. The article then evaluates four alternative funding models: advertising, subscriptions, general taxation and a universal household levy. It argues that the best long‐term model would be a flat, universal household levy, with exemptions for those least able to pay, as in Germany, with the funding level set by an independent body organised by Ofcom; and that, because the licence fee is becoming harder to sustain, this new funding model should be introduced at the start of the next BBC Charter in January 2028

Quantitative localized proton-promoted dissolution kinetics of calcite using scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM)

Scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) has been used to determine quantitatively the kinetics of proton-promoted dissolution of the calcite (101̅4) cleavage surface (from natural “Iceland Spar”) at the microscopic scale. By working under conditions where the probe size is much less than the characteristic dislocation spacing (as revealed from etching), it has been possible to measure kinetics mainly in regions of the surface which are free from dislocations, for the first time. To clearly reveal the locations of measurements, studies focused on cleaved “mirror” surfaces, where one of the two faces produced by cleavage was etched freely to reveal defects intersecting the surface, while the other (mirror) face was etched locally (and quantitatively) using SECM to generate high proton fluxes with a 25 μm diameter Pt disk ultramicroelectrode (UME) positioned at a defined (known) distance from a crystal surface. The etch pits formed at various etch times were measured using white light interferometry to ascertain pit dimensions. To determine quantitative dissolution kinetics, a moving boundary finite element model was formulated in which experimental time-dependent pit expansion data formed the input for simulations, from which solution and interfacial concentrations of key chemical species, and interfacial fluxes, could then be determined and visualized. This novel analysis allowed the rate constant for proton attack on calcite, and the order of the reaction with respect to the interfacial proton concentration, to be determined unambiguously. The process was found to be first order in terms of interfacial proton concentration with a rate constant k = 6.3 (± 1.3) × 10–4 m s–1. Significantly, this value is similar to previous macroscopic rate measurements of calcite dissolution which averaged over large areas and many dislocation sites, and where such sites provided a continuous source of steps for dissolution. Since the local measurements reported herein are mainly made in regions without dislocations, this study demonstrates that dislocations and steps that arise from such sites are not needed for fast proton-promoted calcite dissolution. Other sites, such as point defects, which are naturally abundant in calcite, are likely to be key reaction sites

Completeness in hybrid type theory

We show that basic hybridization (adding nominals and @ operators) makes it possible to give straightforward Henkin-style completeness proofs even when the modal logic being hybridized is higher-order. The key ideas are to add nominals as expressions of type t, and to extend to arbitrary types the way we interpret @i in propositional and first-order hybrid logic. This means: interpret @iαa, where αa is an expression of any type a, as an expression of type a that rigidly returns the value that αa receives at the i-world. The axiomatization and completeness proofs are generalizations of those found in propositional and first-order hybrid logic, and (as is usual in hybrid logic) we automatically obtain a wide range of completeness results for stronger logics and languages. Our approach is deliberately low-tech. We don’t, for example, make use of Montague’s intensional type s, or Fitting-style intensional models; we build, as simply as we can, hybrid logic over Henkin’s logic.submittedVersionFil: Areces, Carlos Eduardo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: Blackburn, Patrick. University of Roskilde. Centre for Culture and Identity. Department of Philosophy and Science Studies; Dinamarca.Fil: Huertas, Antonia. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; España.Fil: Manzano, María. Universidad de Salamanca; España.Ciencias de la Computació

Good Empirical Generalizations

As well as being generalizations based on repeated empirical evidence, good empirical generalizations have five other characteristics: scope, precision, parsimony, usefulness, and a link with theory.empirical generalizations, research methods, science, knowledge development, replication, scope, phenomena, meta-analysis