Kev

Post-9/11 conspiracy drama Rubicon is a slow burner helping to cement network AMC's reputation as a mini HBO

BBC4 has already delighted British fans of Mad Men by bringing forward the new series by six months, to September. Now viewers partial to slow-burning US dramas can look forward to Rubicon, the latest offering from Mad Men broadcaster AMC to be acquired by the channel.

Mad Men, the stylish drama set in the world of 1960s New York advertising, is nominated for 17 awards, more than any other drama, at this Sunday's 2010 Emmy awards. It has changed the fortunes of AMC (American Movie Classic), a cable channel once known for old movie repeats but now being likened to a mini HBO, the station behind The Sopranos and The Wire.

Post-9/11 conspiracy drama Rubicon is slow-paced, although that did not stop the debut episode in the US attracting 2.5 million viewers, the biggest audience for a new show in the network's history.

Its hero, a data analyst, seems to spend entire episodes lurking in dimly lit Washington libraries staring at crosswords waiting for hidden codes to materialise in front of his eyes. Code cracker Will Travers, played by James Badge Dale, is embroiled in a conspiracy that saw his boss dispatched in a train crash. Rubicon also weaves in Miranda Richardson as the widow of a tycoon whose husband changed his will to put her in charge of his companies and then killed himself.

The initial promise was that the series could stand shoulder to shoulder with such 1970s conspiracy classics as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Critics have said Rubicon is not as sexy as Mad Men, nor as brutal as AMC's second original drama, Breaking Bad, the lauded jet-black saga of a chemistry teacher with cancer turned crystal meth manufacturer. But it has confounded some US critics with its cast of shabby government underlings and its disinclination to plant a clear signpost as to where the story might be headed.

Its audience in the US has dipped, but both Mad Men and Breaking Bad started slowly and went on to build a loyal following.

After decades of anonymity, AMC saw the 2000s out as one of the prime purveyors of signature cable drama. For a long time, HBO had that market sewn up. Its slogan was: "It's not TV, it's HBO." The very name was a mark of quality. Something that differentiated it from terrestrial networks such as NBC and Fox, which still struggled to attract the widest possible audiences. But then perennial second-place cable channel, Showtime hit on its mums-with-problems formula (Weeds, Nurse Jackie, United States Of Tara).

FX, another undistinguished movie channel, took a chance with The Shield and quickly became the destination for anti-hero projects (Sons Of Anarchy, Justified, Damages).

And now AMC, producer of two prodigious series with nothing in common except their leisurely pace, has carved out its niche as purveyor of slow but endlessly involving dramas. Despite the show's Rubicon's mixed reception, AMC remains committed to commissioning original dramas. October sees the debut of The Walking Dead, a zombie thriller created by Frank Darabont and starring Andrew Lincoln. And, because its AMC, these zombies move slowly. Very, very slowly.

Nearly 90% of people watching timeshifted shows fast-forward the ads, but TV remains the most memorable form of advertising

Nearly 90% of television viewers always skip through the adverts on their digital video recorder but TV still remains the most memorable form of advertising, according to new research published today.

More than half (52%) of respondents said television was more memorable than any other form of advertising medium, followed by 10% who said newspapers and just 2% for online video adverts and 1% for online banner ads and on iPhones and iPads.

While digital or personal video recorders have increased the amount of television people watch, the research suggested that 86% of people always fast-forward through adverts while watching timeshifted shows.

Respondents said shorter ad breaks (highlighted by 48% of people), more memorable campaigns (32%) and shorter ads (17%) would encourage people to watch more advertising.

The research by YouGov for Deloitte was carried out for the MediaGuardian Edinburgh international television festival, which begins on Friday.

"Questions over the relevance of the traditional television advert have been raised for years, yet when asked about their most favoured video format, respondents voted for the standard 30-second commercial," said James Bates, media partner at Deloitte.

"Online advertising's poor showing relative to television may surprise, given that the former has often been portrayed as television's nemesis.

"What television does best – display and brand building – is what online struggles with. Online advertising is best at search, which previously newspapers, particularly for classified, had excelled at."

"However, despite the positive perception of television advertising, its bed of roses is not free of mildew," added Bates.

"Among television advertising's greatest preoccupations is measurability. While television generates billions of commercial impacts every day, it is hard to measure precisely how many of these are viewed."

TV advertising appealed most to 18- to 34-year-olds and least among over-55s, a third of whom said no form of advertising had a great impact on them (compared with 13% among 18- to 24-year-olds).

The survey of 4,199 respondents was carried out by YouGov, based on questions set by Deloitte, between 9 July and 12 July this year. It was conducted using an online interview.

Full findings will be distributed to Edinburgh TV festival delegates on Friday.

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I recently had an interview with Radio Wales‘ “Good Evening Wales“. Following media interest in the migrations of some Welsh surnames such as “Jones”,  BBC Wales wanted a little more information from our own World Names Profiler project.  The project’s website allows visitors to type in their own surname and generate a map of it’s global distribution. You can also do an ethnicity search to simply map where Welsh names, for example, occur (see map below).

From the website you can find some interesting facts. For example, you are more likely to meet someone with a Welsh name in Chicago than London, and 6 out of the “top ten” regions with the most Welsh surnames (outside of Wales) occur beyond Europe. One of the most successful migrations (in terms of preserving the Welsh language and culture) was of course to Patagonia and this is shown by Argentina appearing in the top 10 most likely places to find many Welsh Surnames. So, although the main focus of yesterday’s interview was the movements of Welsh surnames within the UK, I think the global migrations we can track using Welsh surnames are far more interesting.

That said, to illustrate a little more the media interest in the Welsh surnames within the UK, I recommend people visit the National Trust Surname Profiler Website (link) that provides historical and contemporary maps of most surname distributions in the UK. The data behind this website have been the focus for much of my research and I have produced some maps related to Welsh names already. I have and included a couple with a little commentary below. If you would like to make your own you can visit the websites I mentioned above (Worldnames, National Trust).

The map above shows the % of the population with a Welsh surname (left) and an English surname (right). Darker brown means higher percentages and lighter colours represent lower percentages. You can see clearly how the more urban Southern  Wales and the Welsh border have been infiltrated with English surnames.

I have featured the above map before on this blog. I have rescaled the UK so that the size of the area is proportional to the number of people with the Welsh surname “Lewis” that live there. As you can see from how much larger Wales has become you are still most likely to find the Lewis name in its country of origin.

I've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably … problems:

• The schedule was too aggressive and too short. We need more time!
• We ran into unforeseen technical problems that forced us to make compromises we are uncomfortable with.
• We had the wrong design, and needed to change it in the middle of development.
• Our team experienced internal friction between team members that we didn't anticipate.
• The customers weren't who we thought they were.
• Communication between the designers, developers, and project team wasn't as efficient as we thought it would be.
• We overestimated how quickly we could learn a new technology.

The list goes on and on. Reasons for failure on a software project are legion.

At the end of the development cycle, you end up with software that is a pale shadow of the shining, glorious monument to software engineering that you envisioned when you started.

It's tempting, at this point, to throw in the towel -- to add more time to the schedule so you can get it right before shipping your software. Because, after all, real developers ship.

I'm here to tell you that this is a mistake.

Yes, you did a ton of things wrong on this project. But you also did a ton of things wrong that you don't know about yet. And there's no other way to find out what those things are until you ship this version and get it in front of users and customers. I think Donald Rumsfeld put it best:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

In the face of the inevitable end-of-project blues -- rife with compromises and totally unsatisfying quick fixes and partial soutions -- you could hunker down and lick your wounds. You could regroup and spend a few extra months fixing up this version before releasing it. You might even feel good about yourself for making the hard call to get the engineering right before unleashing yet another buggy, incomplete chunk of software on the world.

Unfortunately, this is an even bigger mistake than shipping a flawed version.

Instead of spending three months fixing up this version in a sterile, isolated lab, you could be spending that same three month period listening to feedback from real live, honest-to-god, annoyingdedicated users of your software. Not the software as you imagined it, and the users as you imagined them, but as they exist in the real world. You can turn around and use that directed, real world feedback to not only fix all the sucky parts of version 1, but spend your whole development budget more efficiently, predicated on hard usage data from your users.

Now, I'm not saying you should release crap. Believe me, we're all perfectionists here. But the real world can be a cruel, unforgiving place for us perfectionists. It's saner to let go and realize that when your software crashes on the rocky shore of the real world, disappointment is inevitable … but fixable! What's important isn't so much the initial state of the software -- in fact, some say if you aren't embarrassed by v1.0 you didn't release it early enough -- but what you do after releasing the software.

The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That's what you need to get good at. Not the platonic ideal of shipping mythical, perfect software, but being responsive to your users, to your customers, and demonstrating that through the act of continually improving and refining your software based on their feedback. So to the extent that you're optimizing for near-perfect software releases, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

There's no question that, for whatever time budget you have, you will end up with better software by releasing as early as practically possible, and then spending the rest of your time iterating rapidly based on real world feedback.

So trust me on this one: even if version 1 sucks, ship it anyway.

What kinds of music does BBC radio play? Which bands are played most? Which DJs play 70s music? Radio Waves is a prototype visualisation that takes data about music played recently on BBC Radio and creates a time profile for any individual radio network, musical genre or radio show. The graph shows, year by year, how many albums were released by the artists recently played on BBC Radio.

Click here to explore the visualisation or read on to find out more.

After our recent hackday on music visualisation we ran a quick two week sprint with the R&D Prototyping team to develop a combination of the best and the most feasible of the ideas that came out. Radio Waves is the result of that sprint.

What it does

Initially the visualisation represents all four of the BBC radio stations we are using; BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC 1Xtra and BBC 6 Music. The graph represents how many albums were released by the bands and artists recently played by shows on that network - so if it has a peak in the 1950s then that network has played artists who were active in the 50s. The visualisation can then be filtered to show the graphs for a particular radio network, a genre or show.

Individual years within the graph can be selected to show a list of artists who released albums in that year and have been most played by the selected radio network or show. Clicking on an artist will show more detail about them and reveal the complete list of albums they released and when.

How it works

We start by collating the data for what music BBC Radio has played over the last few months - from tracklistings like this. Note that this prototype is only using a static data set for now. From this we can link to /music data about these artists, and from there to releases from each artist. From the complete list of releases we try to only use albums, not compilations, EPs or singles, as we believe that albums sufficiently represent an artist’s historical profile (this is arguable). We can then take the release dates of all these albums, and the number of times each artist has been played on that radio network or show, to draw the graph. In total we're using about 300 shows, each with a play count and top artists for every year and a list of about 9000 featured artists.

We have to tidy up the data a bit; not all tracks played have MusicBrainz IDs attached, we have to remove duplicate releases (there are lots of “disc 1” and “disc 2” in the MusicBrainz data) and we also remove any albums from “Various Artists” because that's not particularly helpful for our purposes. And we've left out Radio 3, Asian Network and the regional services because we don’t have that much play data from them at the moment. Radio 3 in particular would be difficult because the "releases" they play don’t represent a composer’s active career in the same way as releases for pop and rock bands do.

It’s a prototype

Radio Waves was built so we could explore the possibilities of visualising our music data and we deliberately constrained ourselves to only use data that we have available right now. We think it has one major but surmountable problem. Our current architecture and data mean we can only go from a show » songs » artists » albums » release dates. So this doesn’t actually represent the release dates of the music that is played on the radio, rather it represents the careers of the artists whose music is played and that’s not completely intuitive. Ideally we would go directly from show » songs » release dates, and at some point, with the help of the MusicBrainz next-generation schema and some dedicated volunteers, we should get this data.

As an end note, we probably also need to tidy up which album releases we use. If you look at the graph for Elvis you can see his original career (he reportedly died in 1977) and then a resurgence in popularity (and therefore re-releases, sessions, best-ofs…) in the last decade. So maybe we should limit the data to releases within the artist’s (or bands) lifetime.

Oooh, it's be a busy radio morning, hasn't it? We've got Mr Moyles celebrating becoming the longest serving Radio 1 Breakfast DJ and Sir Tel announcing (after a little Daily Mail intervention) that he's abandoning his TOGs for a weekend show and letting that young whipper-snapper Chris Evans have another BBC breakfast show.

I don't think there's any particular surprise in the Radio 2 announcements – they've replaced a hugely successful presenter with the next most sucessful presenter on the network. Though, as Adam points out, there is a bit of a demographic issue.

What it doesn't do is help the arguments about Radio 2 moving younger in the commercial heartland. However, and I think we all know this, they really couldn't care less and so carry on regardless.

However, what I think this does do, is open up the opportunity to make a stab at turning drive into something a bit more public service-y. Already Drive with Chris has business and sports elements to make it more than pop and prattle, but with a likely move of Mayo to 2 from 5 there's a real opportunity to make it even more striking.

Though his heritage proves that Simon can do mainsteam pop really well it would be great to see him bring things like his book reviews and more in-depth interviews (along with the Good Doctor) to a new drivetime show. Radio 2 already does this marvellously at lunchtime, it would be in keeping with Tim Davie's recent announcement if they made their new drive show even more distinctive.

Meetings run over all the time. In fact, you might say that that's their natural state. Meetings think gases are lazy. Whereas a gas expands to fill its container, a meeting expands to exceed the size of its container.

It requires good management skills to keep all your meetings on schedule. And it takes great management skills to get them all to finish early.

Even someone with poor management skills sometimes valt met je gat in de boter and a meeting will finish early by some fluke. And unfortunately, I've been at meetings where the meeting organizer decides that this is not an acceptable state of affairs.

"Okay, it looks like we still have ten minutes, so Bob, why don't you tell us about Topic X," where Topic X might be "how your part of the project is doing" or "the meeting you had with Team Y." Whatever it is, it's something that wasn't on the meeting agenda. It's just there to fill time.

Of course, it takes Bob fifteen minutes to talk about Topic X, because a meeting expands to exceed the size of its container. What started out as a meeting that came in early turned into yet another boring meeting that ran over.

There's no law that says a meeting can't end early. If you're finished early, then finish early.