Posts

Posted on

Can we trust BARB’s viewing figures for Sgorio on S4C?

Yesterday The Telegraph printed a story about S4C viewing figures for the football programme Sgorio:

Sgorio – Welsh for score – turned into a no score draw on the night despite regularly pulling in tens of thousands of viewers on other nights.

It is a regular show on Channel Four in Wales featuring top matches from the German, Spanish and Italian leagues.

Under the TV rating system, any programme with fewer than 2,500 viewers is regarded as “making no impact”.

Today the Western Mail ran a very similar story. Before we get into a discussion about what this might mean, let’s examine the figures. According to The Telegraph:

The figures were compiled by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board.

The body surveys viewing habits of 11,300 viewers in 5,100 British homes, and weights them according to the rest of the population.

How many homes own television sets in the UK? Let’s use BARB’s own figures:

In 2009, 25.9 million homes own at least one television set out of a total of 26.6 million homes in the UK.

Let’s concentrate on television-owning homes. According to this 97% of homes in the UK own a television.

The 5,100 British homes is 0.02% of the homes that own a television. BARB is collecting these figures by sampling one house in every 5000 television-owning houses in the UK, roughly speaking.

That may be adequate for popular programmes but is it enough to gauge the popularity of a minority language programme?

S4C publishes a top 20 chart. It would be good to have figures for other special interest programmes for comparison, but BARB doesn’t publish these figures free of charge. (Subscribe if you want.) Regardless, how meaningful are these figures in light of the sample size? I’m not aware that BARB has more fine-grained techniques for sampling S4C viewing, anyone know?

How many people live in Wales and in the UK? Let’s take the population figures from the Office for National Statistics:

Wales: 2.9 million
United Kingdon: 59.8 million

Let’s now look at sampled viewers. BARB’s sampled viewers make up a proportion of the total number of viewers in the UK. Let’s assume BARB has picked a fair distribution of sampled viewers in Wales. We could then expect the proportion of sampled viewers in Wales to match the proportion of the UK who live in Wales.

As a proportion, Wales makes up 4.8% of the UK population. Therefore we would expect BARB to have sampled approximately 548 viewers in Wales (which is 4.8% of 11,300).

I’m going to make an assumption here. I’m going to assume that out of the 2.9 million people in Wales, 97% have access to a television in their own home. This reflects the 97% of households who own a television in the UK. Therefore we calculate that around 2.8 million people in Wales have a television in their own home. My aim is to get an approximate impression of the scale here – the order of magnitude – to decide how trustworthy the statistics are. The figures may be slightly off, so please let me know if you have more accurate figures.

Therefore, each sampled viewer in Wales represents roughly 5000 of the television-watching population in Wales. This is similar to the figure for households above. I’m also assuming S4C’s heartland is Wales, although it is sometimes available in households outside Wales.

BARB’s threshold is 2,500 viewers for a programme “making an impact”. These are not real viewers, but figures extrapolated from the comparatively tiny sample size.

So according to this analysis, the conclusion that Sgorio made “no impact” rests on just ONE of the sampled viewers in Wales.

Again, is this enough to measure the reach of a programme, in particular one in a minority language?

UPDATE 21/10/2010: Comments are off but trackbacks and pingbacks are on.

Posted on

Gabriel

The tune Gabriel by cosmic disco band Kindness is probably among the more intriguing musical releases from 2009. (You should be able to play the whole track above. If not, try Kindness on Myspace or the Pitchfork blog post where I found it.)

Although lyrically apt, it’s not a Christmas song as such. But this is the year we were reminded that seemingly any tune has the potential to be picked up, redefined and – without touching the contents – “remixed” into a Christmas tune, purely by presenting it in a different context.

So there goes. It sounds wintery and ultimately it’s a Christmas song to me because I’m listening to it and posting it here.

The festival of Christmas itself is a remix anyway – of older winter festivals… Enjoy it and make sure your version is a righteous one.

Back to the music. If the song sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a cover version of the original Gabriel, the classic 2-step garage tune by Roy Davis Jnr and Peven Everett (Spotify / YouTube). The original’s gospel roots are a lot more obvious. Like a lot of good gospel music it sounds like it’s caught between Saturday night, in the club, and Sunday morning – in church.

Nadolig Llawen! Merry Christmas!

Posted on

Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz?

This article on “difficult languages” is The Economist at its absolute best.

My title above is Turkish and apparently means “Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian?”.

I especially liked the bit about different kinds of “we” in Kwaio, which is spoken in the Solomon Islands. We need something like that in English! That’s “we” as in all of us.

The suggested “hardest” language appears to be the result of some pretty extensive research. Let’s just say there is no mention of Welsh, nor should there be.

(Hat tip: languagehat.com)

Posted on

Flags are not languages (Easyjet website is wrong)

Easyjet have recently changed their website. Now you get a language selection screen. So far so good I guess (for a website).

But unfortunately instead of just the names of languages, there are flags as well.

The flags on this page may look colourful, but having them there is WRONG.

I’m not being pedantic here. It is simply wrong.

If you don’t get the flag screen when you visit easyjet.com and you want to see it, it may be because of your browser’s language setting. (In Firefox for instance, go to Tools | Options | Content | Languages.)

Failing that, look for and delete a browser cookie that stores Easyjet’s language setting. (In Firefox for instance, go to Tools | Options | Privacy | Show Cookies then search for “easyjet”.)

Here’s a slightly dated but classic web page about flags and languages (summary: don’t).

I’m not going to point out every case of this, but when a big company does it then it’s closer to becoming a de facto standard. It has an influence on other people and companies. This isn’t a particular beef with Easyjet, it’s just a clear example of this problem. My patience here is flagging. Etc.

Posted on

All Wales Convention – Closed!

Remember the recent All Wales Convention? Yesterday they sent me this message via Facebook:

Diolch am ymaelodi a’r Grwp hwn. Gan fod yr Adroddiad wedi ei gyhoeddi bellach, rydym wedi cadw cofnod o gynnwys y Grwp Gweplyfr a’i ddirwyn i ben.

Thanks for joining the Group. Since the Report has now been published, we have kept a record of the Facebook comments and closed the Group.

What?

Closing the Facebook group is probably a mistake.

Part of the reason for using social media to get people’s opinions SHOULD be open access to the original stuff. The Convention achieved that during their work – to an extent – but what now?

Where can we read the opinions that were submitted via Facebook? (I’ve replied to ask and will blog the response, if any. But I suspect they’re filed in a dusty box somewhere.)

It’s not only about reading them – but quoting them, scrutinising them and linking to them. The group now has the text: “The work of the All Wales Convention is now complete”. That’s correct, but its recommendations and conclusions will affect Wales for a long time to come.

There are lots of UNKNOWN reasons why you’d keep something live on the web, and preferably with its own unique URL. Who knows what future purpose it might serve? It’s cheap, so why not? Incidentally here’s: the URL to the blog post you’re reading.

Real time web is exciting but it doesn’t diminish the value of persistence. And if all this is undesirable for someone, they have the option of writing you a letter or email instead.

Weirdly, for some reason, there are only three members in the group now and most of the submissions have already vanished. As for the discussion forum on the All Wales Convention main site, it’s being closed for comments – but kept live for future reference. Does this mean your comments via Facebook are worth less than comments on the main website? I hope not.

For me this brings to mind major weaknesses in Facebook as a tool for political engagement. Sure, it’s fashionable right now and it does offer access to large numbers of people. I’m not saying Facebook should never be used for this sort of project. But it’s very difficult to export your data for archival purposes like this. It’s also impossible to deep link to a specific comment. Facebook itself makes no guarantees about the persistence of your data either.

UPDATE 11/12/09: The group has gone, along with everyone’s comments. I received a short reply saying they only had a paper copy and would get back to me about how it could be accessed. I hope future government projects emulate the good parts of this example (attempting to engage with people, mainly) and leave out the bad. Lots of potential blog posts there…

Posted on

Sleeveface book out now in German edition

Sleeveface German edition

Entschuldigung! Germany now has its own edition of the Sleeveface book. The book is out now through the Cadeau imprint of German publisher Hoffmann und Campe.

You can get more info on the German edition at the main Sleeveface site. The original version of the book is also out now.

Still on the web: my original post about the book, with a little bit of help from Malcolm McLaren.

And finally: Bagism.

Posted on

Vote for Twitter to be translated into Welsh

At the moment Twitter’s web interface is only available in four languages – English, Japanese, French and Spanish. Also on the way now are Italian and German.

So Twitter Inc have decided to increase support for the world’s languages, which is an excellent move. They’ll be asking users to collaborate on translating the interface, which again is good. The language community, made up of fluent users and some professional translators, knows best. Then everyone wins.

Twitter Inc haven’t said exactly how they’ll choose the next languages. But we can ask for Welsh. Here’s how.

  1. Go to http://twitter.com/translate
  2. Click the link “Sign up with your username and language”.
  3. Type your Twitter username.
  4. Select “Welsh” from the list.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Welsh speaker or not. Welsh can belong to everyone!

I’m calling it a “vote”. You might as well use your vote for a language you’d like to see supported, even if you’re not a speaker.

Let’s not wait months and months for Welsh to get support – we can ask now. If they receive a high number of requests, it may spur them into offering Welsh.

Facebook made a similar move a while back. The whole thing was a game, with scores and a leaderboard for contributions. This resulted in a very rapid translation, completed in around three or four weeks as I recall. Twitter will be even quicker, I think we’ll do it in mere days.

In fact, Welsh was among the first languages to be supported by Facebook. This was mainly because there was a lot of demand expressed noisily, via a group.

“The squeaky hinge gets the grease.”

Posted on

Stuff worth reading about openness

Tim O'Reilly

I maintain another blog called Open Season which is all about openness and open source. I’ve been using it to share links to articles, along with a sample quote each time. Each post takes 25 seconds or so with Tumblr.

I wrote about it here in June 2009. Just mentioning it again as some of the recent articles I’ve read have been splendid.

I make no claims to comprehensiveness there, it’s just my own findings on themes related to openness. And conversely, closedness and proprietary systems.

I have a feeling these themes will come to define not only technology, but our wider culture and society in many ways.

If you want to follow a “proper blog” on this stuff, read Open by Glyn Moody.

And of course everything written by Tim O’Reilly and his colleagues is worth a read. (He’s pictured here, perhaps questioning a future web that isn’t small pieces loosely joined.)

Posted on

Google Translate is now instant. But still fun (and dangerous).

Google Translate has already accelerated my Welsh learning. It helps to decipher a daunting piece of text.

Now Google Translate is instant. They changed the interface slightly and it flashes up the equivalent translation as you type. Boy.

In other words you get the same flawed “translations”, now even faster!

Try it for Welsh to English.

Example phrases:
Dw i’n cyfieithu.
Defnyddia yn ofalus.
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri

I wish there were a proper online Welsh-to-English dictionary that did instant look-ups. It would take some of the friction out of reading difficult books. Just leave the laptop open, type a difficult word and get the meaning NOW.

Having to click is too slow a method because it breaks the flow of the book. Reaching for a dictionary is even worse. The look-up needs to be as near to the speed of thought as possible.
🙂

I say “proper dictionary” because Google still gets words wrong y’see. It’s based on statistical translation and uses the “most likely” translation based on a corpus of text equivalents in both languages. It also seems to have a limited vocabulary.

And a reminder…

Don’t use it for roadsigns! But you can use it to check the gist of a professional’s translation…