Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Apple TV

    Some people get very excited about announcements from Apple.  I don’t. 

    The truth is that I am not going to rush out and buy any of these fine gadgets, and anyway Hong Kong doesn’t appear to feature in Apple’s plans (we still don’t have the iTunes store or the iPhone) – so although the new version of Apple TV seems like a step in the right direction, it isn’t all that much use in Hong Kong because we can’t rent (or purchase) films though the device.

    However, it may be quite a significant development.  It seems to me that rather than a battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, what we are really seeing is a 3-way battle – the different flavours of DVD vs. illegal downloads vs. legal downloads.  For the last of the three. the concept of Apple TV seems exactly right – thousands of movies and TV shows that can be downloaded to a small box to watch on TV, and no horrible computer.   

    Meanwhile, there are plenty of bits of hardware coming along that make it very simple to play Divx videos on your TV.  The movie companies must surely realize that if they don’t offer legal downloads in a convenient form (whether through Apple TV or something else) people will find alternatives.  Hence their decision to work with Apple, at least in the US.

    Given that it’ll be a long time before iTunes Store comes to Hong Kong, why don’t PCCW do something similar using their Now TV service?  They have technology, but currently all they offer is a pathetically limited selection of "on-demand" movies from HBO, most of which are old or rubbish (or both).   

  • Mad

    This really is the gift that keeps on giving…

    I thought Newcastle’s board were going to spoil the fun when they said that they would take their time finding a manager and might consider appointing a foreigner.  Gérard Houllier was mentioned, and then Didier Deschamps was suddenly installed as favourite.  They even turned down Alan Shearer’s bid for the job.  So far, so good.

    Then last night they announced (drum roll) that, er, Kevin Keegan is returning as manager.

    That’s more like it.  The best part is that in a few months Keegan will get upset about something and resign, and the whole circus can start up again.

    scan0002  Incidentally, the SCMP continue to cover this story in their very own special way.  Today’s paper has a tiny story announcing Keegan’s appointment, but on Tuesday (I think it was) they managed to find a prominent position for the bizarre ‘news’ that “former Newcastle United manager Graeme Souness insists he would return to St James’ Park “in a heartbeat”.”

    scan0001Well, yes, but only as a spectator, I think you’ll find.  This is a very thin story from the Press Association (Souness keen on Newcastle return) that certainly didn’t merit the prominence given to it by the SCMP.  It’s just possible that Souness will find another job, but it ain’t gonna be somewhere he failed in the past.

    The Newcastle board may be crazy, but they’re certainly not as crazy as that.

  • The dream team

    I see that Harry Redknapp somehow managed to resist the temptation of a few months up on Tyneside followed by the inevitable departure "by mutual consent".  Makes you wonder why they were in such a hurry to sack Allardyce if they didn’t have a replacement lined up.   

    Mark Hughes now seems to be the firm favourite – which makes sense if they really are looking for a British manager working in the Premiership.  By my reckoning, the other options are Steve Coppell (who certainly doesn’t want that kind of hassle), Alex Ferguson, and a bunch of managers who have been in their current jobs for only a few weeks. 

    Although Alan Shearer doesn’t want the job and is not likely to be offered it, newspapers are not giving up just yet.  Harry Redknapp says that he’d give Shearer the job ("I think he’s perfect for it") though I don’t think anyone’s interested in his opinion.  Then there’s the enticing possibility of a "dream team" with Kevin Keegan (who has also "refused to rule himself out").  Well, that would be fun.

    Which reminds me that Everton were once so desperate that they considered appointing ex-player and TV presenter Andy Gray as their manager, though he was wise enough to turn it down.      

    Martin Kelner had more on mutual consent in The Guardian:

    It seems there is more mutual consent going round the world of football than at a meeting of the Barbra Streisand Appreciation Society in a Brighton nightclub. As always, for clarification in these matters, one turns to Sky Sports News, which became your 24-hour Big Sam station (slogan: All Sam, All Day, Don’t Touch That Dial), as soon as the news broke. A clue that consent had not played a major part in the termination came from the fact that Big Sam did not realise he had given his consent until he was told he had by a Sky reporter.

    The departing manager’s first interview, through the window of his car as he drove away from Newcastle, in which he said "I’m shocked, I didn’t expect it", was a further indication that Big Sam had not actually consented to anything, unless they are serving Rohypnol at board meetings up there these days.

    [..]

    The whole business is uncannily reminiscent of the story, possibly apocryphal, of Tommy Docherty’s departure from Derby "by mutual consent". "Now then lad," one of the directors is supposed to have said, "we don’t want any blabbing to the press. Let’s keep it all amicable," handing Tommy a cheque. The Doc studied the figures on the cheque for a moment, shook his head and said: "You’re going to have to be more amicable than that."

    It is all about money, I suppose.

  • Fired by mutual consent

    Yet another Premier League manager has been fired, and once again it is by ‘mutual consent’, as if that meant anything: 

    “Sorry, Sam, you’re fired.”
    “OK.”

    It was a shock, but not a surprise.  For several weeks Sam Allardyce has looked to be under a lot of pressure, but I think everyone assumed that he would be given a bit longer to prove himself. 

    After all, he was given a 3 year contract at the start of the season, and Newcastle are in mid-table, so you’d hardly think that panic measures were indicated.

    Yes, the fans didn’t like the football Newcastle were playing, and some of Big Sam’s signing haven’t looked too clever, but was it really necessary to make a change right now?

    Newcastle fans were apparently looking wistfully in the direction of Alan Shearer, but that always seemed like wishful thinking – things are considerably different to how they were when Kevin Keegan was drafted in.  Apart from anything else, Shearer doesn’t have the coaching badges he would need, and having spent his time since retirement playing golf and being on the telly, he certainly doesn’t have the excuses that Gareth Southgate was able to offer up. 

    The speculation is that Harry Redknapp is the man that Newcastle want, but does he really want to work so far away from his family home in Dorset?  OK, it’s a big challenge, and I’m sure they will pay him handsomely, but so many top managers (and Graeme Souness) have been sacked by Newcastle that Redknapp must know how it’s likely to end.

    Here’s an idea.  Hire a good young manager and give him enough time to sort things out.  No, it won’t happen.

  • Slow train to Hamburg

    Most of the products that are exported from China to Europe go by boat.  Yes, some go by air, but that’s an expensive option.

    Yesterday an agreement was signed to set up a regular freight train service that will take 18 days to get from Beijing to Hamburg, less than half the time it takes by sea.

    China Daily has the details:

    Railway authorities from six countries Wednesday signed a memorandum on expanding cooperation on railway transport that is expected to boost trade and cargo flows between Asia and Europe.

    The six countries – China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany – agreed to create conditions that will pave the way for a regular container train service between Asia and Europe.

    Makes sense, I suppose. 

  • Eat, drink and be merry

    Two recent studies say that drinking moderately is good for you (and that exercise helps a lot).

    The first survey also concludes that it’s OK to be overweight as long as you eat your sprouts:

    People who adopt four principles for a healthy lifestyle can add as much as 14 years to their lives, a study revealed today.

    Researchers found that not smoking, taking exercise, drinking in moderation and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day can have a huge impact on life expectancy.

    Academics at Cambridge University monitored the health of 20,000 men and women aged between 45 and 79 from Norfolk between 1993 and 2006.

    The study concluded: “The results strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK and other European countries.”

    The research showed that a person’s social class or body mass index (BMI) had no role to play in life expectancy.

    Moderate drinkers are at 30% lower risk of heart disease than teetotallers, according to a study of nearly 12,000 people. And those who combine a mild tipple with regular exercise are even less likely to die of the disease. Their risk is between 44% and 50% lower than couch potatoes who abstain from alcohol.

    The second survey is specifically about heart disease.

    The team behind the 20-year study said that previous research has shown that moderate drinking and exercise both lower the risk of heart disease. But this is the first time scientists have quantified the benefits of both together.

    “We’ve known for years that physical activity is good for you and it prevents heart disease. And the same for alcohol – a small amount of alcohol is good for the heart,” said Morten Grønbæk, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Copenhagen.

    “The new thing about our study is that we look at the combined effects of drinking alcohol and being physically active compared to, for instance, only being physically active and not drinking or drinking but not being physically active … it’s the only study on this issue,” Grønbæk said.

    His team used data from 11,914 people in Copenhagen. Participants were recruited between 1976 and 1978 and were asked questions about alcohol intake, physical activity and other factors that might influence the results, such as whether they smoked, their education and marital status. Over the next two decades 5,901 of the participants died of a variety of causes and 1,242 developed heart disease.

  • Wrong again

    Gotta love it when they get it so spectacularly wrong.

    This morning (Hong Kong time) it seemed like a done deal – Barack Obama’s convincing victory in the New Hampshire primary was very bad news for Hillary Clinton.  Then over the next few hours the headlines changed, first pointing to a dead heat and then to Clinton’s victory.

    Oops.  Opinion polls?  Wrong?  Well, that’s never happened before, has it.  Except perhaps when Labour was headed for victory in 1992, or when Zogby confidently called the Presidential Election for John Kerry in 2004.  

    All this was changing while British newspapers were being printed, so the early editions will have been stuffed full of articles about the drastic things that Hillary Clinton would have to do to have any hope of reviving her campaign.  Articles that suddenly disappeared from the front pages of their websites and were hastily rewritten for the later editions.

  • No more ADBS

    Danny Baker’s podcasts (which I mentioned before) have come to a sudden halt.  They started on Wippit on an occasional basis back in March, and became regular in May.  Then in September they started charging £2 per week, but technical problems with the downloads from Wippit caused them to suspend it almost immediately.  They did restart a few weeks later, only to stop it again in December – this time permanently, the two parties having fallen out in a big way, with Paul Myers of Wippit putting his side of the story in The Guardian and Baker replying on the ADBS website.

    Danny Baker is unhappy because he has not received any money for the shows he has done (indeed it has cost him money because he paid for the production of the podcasts), whilst Wippit apparently feel that Baker should have quit his shows on BBC London so that the podcasts would be "exclusive".  Somehow, I don’t think that was the problem.

    No figures have been released for the number of paying subscribers, but it seems that there was no realistic chance of generating enough revenue to make it worthwhile.  This can’t have been helped by technical problems – although they did eventually came up with a method of being able to download the shows through iTunes, it wasn’t as easy as it could have been, and there were still complaints.  I’m sure that a lot of people just gave up.   

    Then there is the added complication of Wippit subscribers (who pay £50 per year for unlimited downloads of the bewildering array of old and obscure tracks offered by Wippit).  Even if you didn’t want any of that old rubbish, it still made sense to pay £50 per year rather than £2 per week.  The question is how much of that money would have gone to Danny Baker and his team.  Not much, I guess.

    However, the fundamental problem seems to be that people are reluctant to pay for podcasts.  Well, why pay when there are so many available for free (notably from the BBC)?

    It’s also interesting that Ricky Gervais – who also started with free podcasts (on The Guardian website) and then started charging, has now gone back to giving them away.  If he can’t make money from selling podcasts, what chance has Danny Baker got?

  • Bad Science

    I highly recommend Ben Goldacre’s website Bad Science and his column in The Guardian.  He is a (medical) doctor, and has taken it upon himself to expose quackery and the appallingly sloppy way that science is reported in newspapers and on TV.  He does it effectively and entertainingly.  A good place to start is his Self-indulgent retrospective – 2007:

    Nobody listens to a word I say: I’ve been saying it for so long now that I think I’d be sorry if they did. Scaremongering season kicked off with the Panorama WiFi special. Among its many crimes against sense, this program featured “independent testing” by – oh, hang on – a campaigner against WiFi, who also sells his own brand of special protective equipment to those frightened about WiFi. The BBC have since upheld complaints. Immediately after the show was broadcast, the Independent were promoting elaborate quack devices to protect against WiFi: these will take off in 2008.

    The media’s MMR hoax – as it will come to be known – was kept alive on the Observer’s front page; the Independent cried “suppressed cancer report shows GM link to potatoes” about a research paper which didn’t mention the word “cancer” (not once!); and the scattergun scaremongering of the Daily Mail peaked when they demanded the banning of a chemical which had, rather brilliantly, already been banned.

    Combatants in the drug war continued to chip away at their own credibility. The Independent on Sunday repeatedly announced that cannabis is 25 times stronger than before (in fact average potency has doubled). That was followed with “cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis”. Then the MHRA pushed a scare about “nitrous oxide” claiming that “the ‘rush’ users experience is caused by starving the brain of oxygen” (it’s a drug which acts on the opioid and NMDA neuroreceptor systems).

    I’ve enjoyed his pieces on homeopathy and of course he has had fun at the expense of "Dr" Gillian McKeith:

    In the face of all this, the homeopaths’ melodramatic whining about some kind of special vendetta against them looks pretty weak. Of course this year marked the rebranding of Dr Gillian McKeith PhD as a pantomime figure rather than an academic expert, but the wider project of deliberately overcomplicating diet in order to create a new profession called “nutritionists” – and thus paradoxically disempower us all – went so far that by christmas, the media were cheerfully pushing chocolate and booze as health foods, on account of their antioxidant content.

    Worth reading.

  • Soup of the day

    shoot-to-translateNew Scientist reports that Nokia are going to launch a new phone which will be able to translate menus from Chinese to English.

    IF YOU think you are ordering ice cream from a foreign menu, you don’t want to end up asking for a plate of sheep’s eyes by mistake. A cameraphone Nokia plans to launch next year will set you straight.

    Snap a picture of, say, a dessert menu and the phone will recognise the characters and translate the words within a few seconds . The prototype shown to New Scientist can translate 9000 Chinese and 600 Japanese food-related words into English, with more language versions to follow.

    However, if you closely at the photograph you can see that it may not be all that helpful – the English translation manages only one word – soup (湯).