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Where will voters on the Left go?

by Richard Elen 20 September 2010
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It’s been sug­gested that polit­i­cally, the views of the British peo­ple at large are some way to the Left of the major par­ties, which have been pushed right­wards since the Thatcher years at least par­tially as a result of pres­sure from the pop­u­lar press. Many of those vot­ers have grav­i­tated to the Lib­eral Democ­rats. How­ever, if they see the Lib Dems as hav­ing “sold out” to the Tories in the coali­tion gov­ern­ment, where will they go?

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When does ‘Skepticism’ become dogma?

by Richard Elen 18 September 2010
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I’m all in favour of “skep­tics” debunk­ing char­la­tans such as medi­ums and ped­lars of quack reme­dies, and tak­ing pseu­do­science apart. But when “skep­ti­cism” reaches the fron­tiers of real sci­ence, it some­times seems to fall into dogma — for exam­ple, sug­gest­ing that para­nor­mal abil­i­ties and phe­nom­ena do not exist, whereas in real­ity we sim­ply don’t know whether they exist or not. “Skep­tics” and pop­u­laris­ers of sci­ence need to be care­ful of this in their enthu­si­asm to debunk the obvi­ous fraudsters.

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Setting basic poetry in WordPress

by Richard Elen 12 August 2010

It would appear that one thing that Word­Press isn’t nat­u­rally good at is set­ting poetry. The default Word­Press action is that hit­ting Return inserts a line break, which is fine for prose arti­cles but not for poetry, where you want a bunch of lines with hard returns but no space between them. Leona has this […]

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Queuing Theory and radio playlists

by Richard Elen 12 June 2010
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To meet licens­ing reg­u­la­tions, inter­net radio sta­tions mustn’t play the same artist or album too many times in a three-hour period. Can you use Queu­ing The­ory to work out how many artists you need in a playlist to meet this require­ment? I wish I knew.

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On Delia Derbyshire for Ada Lovelace Day

by Richard Elen 24 March 2010
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Today, March 24 2010, is Ada Lovelace Day, the day when we cel­e­brate women in sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy and their achieve­ments – typ­i­cally by blog­ging about them. So today, I’m talk­ing about Delia Der­byshire, a supremely tal­ented pro­ducer in the BBC Radio­phonic Work­shop from 1962 to 1973.

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Connect or Die: New Directions for the Music Industry

by Richard Elen 22 March 2010

Marta Kagan of mar­ket­ing agency Espresso presents some pow­er­ful argu­ments about how artists can sur­vive in the new world of “Music 2.0″ I don’t think she has all the answers but there are plenty of use­ful start­ing points and cogent obser­va­tions here.

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The Digital Economy Bill: an engineer/producer’s view

by Richard Elen 20 March 2010

The Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill now being rushed through the UK Par­lia­ment is, in my view, a dis­as­ter area of lack of under­stand­ing of the issues, and will dam­age, rather than sup­port, the build­ing of a Dig­i­tal Econ­omy in the UK.

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Time to start work to save the BBC

by Richard Elen 2 March 2010
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The BBC is under threat, propos­ing to cut its own throat at the demand of the Con­ser­v­a­tives and their big com­mer­cial media back­ers. Here’s what you can do to to try and stop the emas­cu­la­tion of the Cor­po­ra­tion and to show your sup­port. There are also links to the Strat­egy Review and to the Online Con­sul­ta­tion where you can make your views known, along with my own entries to the online questionnaire.

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& Well Goddess: 1st February">Celebrating Brigit/Bride’s Day, Fire & Well Goddess: 1st February

by Leona Graham 1 February 2010

This web­site is ded­i­cated to Brigit! We hon­our Her and What She Sig­ni­fies, The Heal­ing of Our World Last night, on the 31st Jan­u­ary, the Eve of Brigit’s Day, I moved into action, re-invigorating a very ancient tra­di­tion of hon­or­ing the ancient ‘Celtic’ fire God­dess Brigit: Her name may be spelt var­i­ously, espe­cially as regards the […]

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Join Us for this Findhorn Workshop: ‘Paths to Inner Guidance’

by Leona Graham 12 January 2010

Join us at the Find­horn Com­mu­nity in NE Scot­land for a work­shop, ‘Paths to Inner Guid­ance’ 5–11 June, 2010. Pre­sented by Leona Gra­ham and Rhi­an­non Hanfman.

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