It is certain that not enough children are reading books if by that you mean that children aren’t reading as many books as adults and particularly their parents would like but a BBC report of a new National Literacy Trust survey rather exaggerates and distorts the evidence.

The main problem is that it is a survey of 8-17 year olds but the statistics quoted aren’t broken down by age. Naturally eight year olds (who may not even know how to read adequately) are going to be significantly behind and will make the figures look worse. Also, the headline for the story given on the BBC News front page is “Pupils ‘prefer emails to books’” – a quotation that appears nowhere in the report. In the news piece and executive summary of the report it says “text messages, magazines, emails and websites were the top leisure reading choices of young people” which implies that’s what they like to read most but in fact the survey just shows that it’s what they read most often.

Lastly, I noted that the journalist said, “more girls admit they read text messages, magazines, emails, fiction, song lyrics and social networking message boards and poems than boys” – why “admit”?!

The pictures that have been circulating for several months of the DIY weapons put together by Libyan rebels tell a great story about the plucky underdog but when I read “@tim_libert: these are the DIY weapons that won Libyan civil war, courtesy of The Atlantic” I was a little stunned. As he noted himself a few minutes later, “Libya also had a LOT of western air support”. Indeed. And it is worth noting that that air support is still presented, officially at least, as being merely “enforcing a UN resolution to protect civilians“. Surely after 7,400 sorties that’s a rather inadequate figleaf for NATO action by now?

This is not to say that I have any way of judging how things really played out in Libya, that the Libyan rebels were not valiant fighters or that NATO is unjustified in intervening as it did – it’s just an observation that as with any war press coverage is inevitably subject to spin.

I didn’t realise how much I have come to rely on and expect that moving around Europe would be an easy, smooth, and familiar process until I touched down in Istanbul for the IAMCR conference starting tomorrow. The first sign of impending  disturbance? I didn’t receive one or more welcoming SMSes from different telephone companies telling me what their mobile phone rates were and how much it would cost to call, text, or send and receive data. Moreover, this reminded me that since it is not part of the EU, the rates charged by these companies would not be regulated by EU law. Things got more disconcerting when I got to the end of the queue with my passport and I was told that I needed a visa in my British passport. So that’s why the line for visas was so long! And of course it was no good my raiding my cookie jar full of euros for travelling–I’ve got a pocket full of lira.

Of course this is hardly chaos, and were I going a bit further east or south none of this would have caught me by surprise, but I seem to be a little bit ahead of the authorities in welcoming Turkey into the European Union–at least in my head. Time to recalibrate and look for somewhere to get a decent meal.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the great British public falls in love with this in the same way that Americans seem to have done with the HuffPo on its home turf. I suspect that since we already have a vibrant “opinion sphere” in our National press and (perhaps as a result?) the blogosphere here is rather less influential, it may struggle. I would have hoped that they could produce and highlight a few exciting exclusives for their first day but the page I saw this morning was reliant on the Press Association for several of the top stories, and aesthetically I found the layout much too garish and busy. That said, Tom Zeller’s feature piece on air quality in London was admirably thorough, the article about how you can print your own newspaper was interesting, and the story about the council who paid £100,000 to help schoolchildren get to McDonald’s was entertainingly quirky.

It’s early days–I look forward to seeing what the site comes up with and how its competitors react.

While doing  a little research into the state of the journalism industry globally (with a little help from “The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy“), I came across the following striking figures:

Between 2004 and 2008 newspaper circulation increased 16.4% in South America, 16.1% in Asia, and 14.2% in Africa according to a report by the World Association of Newspapers. afaqs!, an Indian media, advertising and marketing organisation, said print media readership in India rose from 232 million in 2000 to 302 million in 2007. The 2010 China Media Industry Report estimated the total value of the country’s media industries in 2009 was 490bn yuan (£47bn), up from 211bn in 2004.

Of course journalism faces well-publicised challenges from the internet and from the greying of its consumers in the developed world but across much of the developing world burgeoning middle classes, democratisation in many countries and an array of new communication technologies are contributing to major growth in the size of media industries. Not all of this by any means will get fed back into the kind of journalism publics need around the world but some at least should…

The LSE recently hosted Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo who delivered a talk (MP3) about their new book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.  I had already read about some of their interesting findings– that a small incentive  to attend would encourage a big increase in immunisation among poor people (and reduce the cost per immunisation) and that even hungry people when given more money tend to spend it on better tasting food rather than more nutritious food.   I didn’t expect them also to comment on academic streaming and on electronic voting but in both cases they had interesting things to say about them from the developing world perspective.

Whatever the problems with electronic voting (and there have been many identified) there is some evidence that because they are more user-friendly for the less literate,  in Brazil they apparently helped  to increase successful voting by the poor and thus changed the political complexion in their favour.

As for academic streaming, a common argument against it is that the students who are less capable if they are all lumped together are not inspired by the example of more able pupils, and that the able pupils tend to get neglected because teachers have to concentrate on teaching to the lowest common denominator. This may be the case in some educational systems, but one study they highlighted found that less able students benefited significantly from streaming because, they suggest, teachers in India tend to concentrate on helping the most able students.

Although their work has been criticised in some quarters for neglecting the macrolevel systemic and political problems that cause difficulties for the poor, this seems to be mere quibbling–it is beyond the scope of even the most able scholars to give a complete picture of how to tackle poverty. Their approach which concentrates on finding the best solution to a series of common problems of the poor in different contexts using randomised controlled trials seem to me a refreshing and thought-provoking one and if you can’t afford the book I recommend you have a look around their extensive website which includes links to a profusion of relevant studies.

A recent episode of the almost always excellent Radiolab documentary series ended with a brief explanation by Marcelo Gleiser of how puzzling it is that there is any matter at all in the universe.  As I understood this explanation, energy can become matter as we know, but any created matter also has to create the corresponding antimatter at the same time. Thus, while after the big bang plenty of matter was created, one would expect it all to have been fairly quickly “cancelled out” as it ran into corresponding antimatter and annihilated itself. Except, as it turns out, there is a tiny imbalance in favour of matter when energy becomes matter. Roughly, for every billion particles of antimatter, 1,000,000,001 particles of matter are created, and the entire universe of matter we have today would appear to be as a result of this tiny “leftover” matter.

It seems to me bizarre that a rule of physics which I normally think of as being mathematical and therefore perfectly balanced should have a tiny “flaw”. And, alarmingly, it appears that science does not yet have an explanation for this! Have I misunderstood the explanation given? What is the name of the law or phenomenon that is being referred to? Is there a layman’s guide to it in more detail out there on the web? Or is the phenomenon itself a scientifically disputed one?

In this week’s New Yorker podcast, Nancy Franklin takes the update of Upstairs Downstairs as an excuse to go back and laud the original series as one of the highlights of television drama of the 1970s. I, too, fondly remember the series but I made the mistake of watching it once when it was repeated and I found I just couldn’t take more than a few minutes. At all levels – the writing, acting and aesthetically – recent dramas like The Sopranos, Lost, Babylon 5 and my current favourite, Rubicon, are markedly superior.

I found it interesting that Stephen King’s experiments with e-book publishing seem to have been interpreted quite differently by two different authors I’ve been reading recently. According to Kovac’s “Here Comes the Book: Never Mind the Web: The Printed Book is Alive and Kicking” (p. 50, referencing Gomez “Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age“), when, at the end of 1990s, King published his novel ‘The Plant’ electronic only “the outcome was disastrous, with sales … being at least five times lower than the usual sales of his printed books.” On the other hand, according to John B Thompson in “Merchants of Culture“, publisher expectations of the success of ebooks “…were also raised by the startling success of one of Stephen King’s experiments with electronic publishing. In March 2000 he published his 66 page novella ‘Riding the Bullet’ electronically, available only as a digital file that could be downloaded for $2.50: there was an overwhelming response, resulting in around 400,000 downloads in the first 24 hours and 600,000 in the first two weeks.” (p. 313). More recently, in 2009 (and too late for either author) Stephen King released “Ur” in Kindle-only form and it sold “five figures” in three weeks.

I’m unimpressed at Harper Collins’ move to limit the number of times an e-book that is bought by a library can be loaned to 26. Most limits on distribution of content are at least partly justified by the fact that they are designed to prevent new copyright infringing uses of that content (even if in practice they also limit fair uses of that text). However, this new rule limits libraries from operating in perfectly normal, legitimate ways. One might conceivably argue that some limit could be set to account for the fact that physical books bought by libraries have always had the physical limitation of only being lendable for a certain number of times before they deteriorated (that’s why they tend to buy more hardbacks). But would a hardback become effectively unreadable after 26 readings as a Harper Collins e-book now will be? And is that the rationale they are offering libraries?