Reforming consumer representation in UK communications

Communications consumers in the UK do not switch provider enough, and when they do they sometimes do so irrationally. As the government conducts a welcome review of the landscape of consumer representation in the UK, they should be aware that there is an ongoing, permanent need for consumer representation that is specific to the communications sector. The government’s proposals, by shifting consumer advocacy to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, are likely to result in an increase in costs to the public purse. Within the current model Ofcom and its consumer panel receive almost half their funding from the private sector. If the body is moved to Citizens Advice, the proportion met by public funding will be higher. The fast changing, technical complexity of the communications sector makes a consumer representative particularly important. Consumer advocacy in communications will be most efficient if it is within Ofcom, but has much more effective operational independence from it

Book review: European media: structures, politics and identity

Examining interactions between global, regional and national media processes, European Media emphasises the transformation of political communication in Europe and the alleged emergence of a European public sphere and identity. Damian Tambini finds it offers an excellent overview and reference on some of the big shifts that characterise the evolving media scene in Europe

The Communication Review will not result in a definite plan of action, but it provides a good opportunity for the government to build a solid base for considered and informed policies on regulation, infrastructure and plurality

With the deadline for the government’s Communications Review fast approaching, Damian Tambini highlights certain areas that the Review may touch on and advises policy makers to use this listening exercise wisely because potentially difficult decisions await in the fields of regulation and infrastructure, as well as the tricky BskyB – Newscorp merge

Awake Reactivation of Prior Experiences Consolidates Memories and Biases Cognition.

After experiences are encoded into memory, post-encoding reactivation mechanisms have been proposed to mediate long-term memory stabilization and transformation. Spontaneous reactivation of hippocampal representations, together with hippocampal-cortical interactions, are leading candidate mechanisms for promoting systems-level memory strengthening and reorganization. While the replay of spatial representations has been extensively studied in rodents, here we review recent fMRI work that provides evidence for spontaneous reactivation of nonspatial, episodic event representations in the human hippocampus and cortex, as well as for experience-dependent alterations in systems-level hippocampal connectivity. We focus on reactivation during awake post-encoding periods, relationships between reactivation and subsequent behavior, how reactivation is modulated by factors that influence consolidation, and the implications of persistent reactivation for biasing ongoing perception and cognition

A Selective Relaxation Method for Numerical Solution of Schr\"odinger Problems

We propose a numerical method for evaluating eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of Schr\"odinger operators with general confining potentials. The method is selective in the sense that only the eigenvalue closest to a chosen input energy is found through an absolutely-stable relaxation algorithm which has rate of convergence infinite. In the case of bistable potentials the method allows one to evaluate the fundamental energy splitting for a wide range of tunneling rates.Comment: 4 pages with figures, uuencoded Z-compressed ps fil

House of Lords Debate on Media Plurality: Calling for Government Action

Efforts are being made to address the issue of media plurality at both the UK and European level. Concerns about excessive concentration of media ownership rose to the surface in the aftermath of the hacking scandal, and Leveson’s recommendations for reforming plurality rules propelled the issue up the political agenda

Will there be a green paper?

The Leveson Inquiry is playing havoc with the government’s plans to bring forward proposals for a new Communications Act. This exchange yesterday in the Commons between newly appointed Shadow Culture Secretary Harriet Harman and Jeremy Hunt

Online rights debate: A laughing matter?

As Julian Huppert MP made the closing remarks at the Westminster eForum seminar on implementing the Digital Economy Act, he commented that the interested parties had not quite reached a consensus on the issue. It seemed an indicator of the state of the debate that his wry understatement was quickly greeted by a roomful of laughter. In the context of the implementation of the DEA, discussions on how to handle rights and piracy online still reflect severely diverging views, and some proposals are being laughed off as unclear and or unworkable

Murdoch’s Impossible Situation

His latest testimony in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee showed that James Murdoch is in an impossible situation. To Parliament he basically has to say he knew very little of the industrial scale illegal intrusions on privacy that we now know were going on at News International. To his shareholders however, he has to maintain that he and his executives were in control of the company. In his testimony he has now had to repeatedly claim that he forgot meetings, did not follow up on information given to him and in particular that he appears to have had a ‘cavalier’ approach to in signing off a number of out of court settlements that cost the company a total of several million pounds. The allegation is that the payments were knowingly made at such high levels in order to close down the story, but Murdoch has claimed throughout that he approved the astronomical payments without any knowledge of the wider implications of these cases to the company