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Staffers of Sina Weibo promote the site at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in April in Beijing. Three Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video.

Staffers of Sina Weibo promote the site at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in April in Beijing. Three Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video.

China tightens online video controls

BEIJING Three popular Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video after censors complained it contained improper comments on sensitive issues. The move prompted a sell-off in the U.S.-traded shares of Sina Corp. and its microblogging service, Sina Weibo.

Thursdays announcement adds to efforts by President Xi Jinpings government to tighten media control ahead of a Communist Party congress late this year. Xi is due to be appointed to a second five-year term as party leader.

Video streamed by users of Sina Weibo, AcFun and Phoenix New Medias Ifeng.com contained negative comments about unspecified sensitive issues, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio Film and Television said. It ordered them to stop the services.

Communist leaders promote Internet use for business and education but try to block access to material deemed subversive or obscene.

Beijing has been especially wary of social media since some sites were used by organizers of the Arab Spring protests that spread across the Middle East in 2010 and led to the downfall of the Egyptian and Tunisian governments.

Rules that took effect June 1 bar private or foreign companies from directly disseminating news or investing in online news services. Those that want to work with foreign partners must undergo a security review.

In January, the government announced a 14-month crackdown on cloud-hosting and content-delivery services. The technology ministry said it forbids use of virtual private networks and leased lines to circumvent government filters and access banned websites abroad.

On the Nasdaq Stock Market, Weibo shares fell 6.1 percent and shares of Sina fell 4.8 percent after Thursdays announcement. Both regained less than 1 percent Friday.

The company is communicating with the relevant government authorities to understand the scope of the notice. It intends to fully cooperate with the relevant authorities, Weibo said.

Sina Weibos main business is a microblogging service similar to Twitter. It is one of the worlds most popular social media services, with 313 million users as of December, according to the company.

Weibos stock market value surpassed Twitters early this year. It stood at $15.8 billion after Thursdays sell-off or more than double the $6.2 billion market value of its parent company compared with $13.2 billion for Twitter.

AcFun is a video-sharing site that is popular with young Chinese, and Ifeng broadcasts brief news and entertainment videos.

In a statement on its Weibo account, AcFun promised to carry out a comprehensive rectification of its website management to create a clear and bright online environment.

Joe McDonald is an Associated Press writer.

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China tightens online video controls - SFGate

According to the newly released Heritage Committee report on Canadian media, we are a nation smothered under the power of excess media concentration. The data available on this subject indicates that media concentration is increasing in Canada to the point where Canada has the highest vertical and horizontal media concentration in the world.

Wow. Thats terrible. Theres nothing worse in liberal economic circles than corporate concentration, unless the concentration is in the hands of government. Then its okay, even desirable. In this case, the committee is zeroing in on alleged concentration of private industry control over the telecommunications, broadcasting, social media, web browsers, wireless, desktop operating systems, newspapers, pay TV, etc.

The committee says it has the data to prove that Canada is under the heels of the most concentrated media structure in the world. If it has the data, then it must be fact, right? Unless, of course, the data is a little shaky as is often the case in the area of economics and law that covers anti-trust, monopolies, competition enforcement, market power, industrial structures, control and concentration and other bogeys of the alt-left.

So what is this data and how did the (Liberal majority) politicians on the Heritage Committee come up with its alarming conclusion? It gets complicated. Some math is involved, along with a lot of massaging and manipulation of media ownership and market share numbers.

The supplier of the data, it turns out, was Dwayne Winseck, director of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project at Carleton Universitys School of Journalism and Communications. The institutes name sort of gives away its lack of objectivity and Winseck has been cranking out claims of media concentration for many years.

For the committee, Winseck employed a basic data head-spinner called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. It was developed by U.S. researchers more than 60 years ago and adopted by U.S. Justice Department anti-trust enforcers.

Heres the basic math exercise: To determine market concentration, begin with a list of all the firms in the business and their market shares. Lets say there are four firms supplying widgets: Firm One has 40 per cent of the market, Firm Two has 30 per cent, Firm Three 20 and Firm Four 10.

From this data, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of industry concentration (widely known as the HHI) calculates the square of each firms market share. Firm Ones data point then becomes 1,600, while the square of each of the others is 900, 400 and 100 respectively. The total, 3,000, is the HHI for the widget industry.

Under HHI theory, if the total of the squares of the market share in an industry exceeds 2,500, then it is already excessively concentrated, even oligopolistic.

Whether this makes any sense or not has been hard to discern from the economic literature. There are dozens of YouTube videos on how to calculate the Herfindahl index, but none that explains why it matters.

The foundational point appears to be the old perfect competition myth of corporate organization. If there are 10 firms in the market, then the market is perfectly competitive. Ten times 10, 10 times, equals a 1,000 HHI score, perfect competition. If theres only one firm with 100 per cent of the market, the HHI is 10,000, monopoly.

If this strikes you as the mathematical flapdoodle that it is, never mind, because it gets more complicated. A key to the Herfindahl index is determining the market thats being measured and squared. In Winsecks analysis, cited by the Heritage Committee, the definition of markets are narrowed down to the point where just about every nook and cranny of the media world is a self-contained concentrated market. When it comes to todays media industries, that approach makes no sense.

For example, Winseck runs an HHI on Social Network Sites and comes up with a score of 2,762, thereby creating the idea that Twitter, Facebook and a few other sites are standalone examples of highly concentrated media. Separate HHI calculations are done on broadcast television, mobile web browsers, pay and specialty TV channels, newspapers, mobile wireless, desktop operating systems, and many more. All but a few (magazines, radio) hit HHI scores of below 2,100 (moderately concentrated) while most top 2,500 and up to 8,300 (highly concentrated).

But breaking off each little segment and sub-segment of todays media industries makes no sense. Many of these isolated industries are part of vicious inter-industry and inter-market competition. Consumers are constantly shifting from one medium to another, one technology to another, from YouTube videos to magazine sites to print newspapers to radio to cable channels to Netflix to Twitter to wireless videos its an endless and giant smorgasbord of content and technology.

In a 2014 law review paper, California attorney Toby Roberts commented that Orris Herfindahl, creator of the index, warned that there are many factors that play into the complex business of industrial competition and that the index suffered the deficiency of considering only two indicia of industry behavior. Roberts added another point: The precision and sophistication of the HHI may cloak its limitations and create a false impression of scientific accuracy in the courts.

And, one might add, among researchers and politicians who are in the business of policy-based evidence making, one of the hallmarks of junk science.

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Junk Science Week: Little data on big media - Financial Post

Dr Neil Murray of Redx

Bosses at Redx Pharma are working on a deal to take back control of the drug discovery and development company after the shock appointment of administrators last month (May).

Jason Baker and Miles Needham from FRP Advisory were appointed as administrators of Redx and subsidiary Redx Oncology by secured lender Liverpool City Council, which lent 2m to the business five years ago.

The AIM-listed company's chairman, Iain Ross, called the timing of the council's action "extremely unfortunate and quite baffling".

This morning Redx told the stock exchange that the joint administrators were working with its advisers on proposals to rescue Redx and return the company to the control of its directors.

In turn, this would lead to the restoration of trading in Redx's shares, which was suspended upon news of the administrators' appointment.

Redx added that discussions regarding the proposals were at "a relatively early stage" and that there was "no guarantee that these will be concluded successfully in the short term".

Redx, which is led by chief executive Dr Neil Murray, completed an initial public offering on AIM in March 2015 with a market capitalisation at admission of 55.2m. Since then, it has relocated to Alderley Park in Cheshire.

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Redx directors in talks to take back control - Insider Media

In the end, I think the margin of victory were people who were determined not to allow the news media and Nancy Pelosi and Hollywood liberals to defeat Donald Trump in their district, Newt Gingrich said.

With the votes counted and Republican Karen Handel declared the winner in Tuesdays special election to fill the vacant seat in Georgias 6th Congressional District, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday that the media were right about the race all along: It was a referendum on Donald Trump.

Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff, keeping the district under GOP control after the most expensive House race in history. Democrats, eager to seize the seat vacated by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, poured money into the race. In the run-up to election day, polls showed Ossoff and Handel in a dead heat just months after Price had won reelection by more than 23 percentage points.

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The race was characterized in some corners as an early bellwether of support for the president, who won the district by a single point over Democrat Hillary Clinton in November. Handels nearly 4-point win, along with other GOP victories in special elections across the country, proves that the president is more popular than many in the media think, Gingrich said.

So the news media had it right. This was a referendum on Trump. He won, Gingrich said. The problem for the news media is they can't come to grips with the fact that in five different specials, the Republicans have won, and that sort of says maybe Trump's doing a lot better in America than he is in the news media.

The glut of money from outside Georgia that funneled into Ossoffs campaign ultimately became a weapon against him, said Gingrich, who once represented the suburban Atlanta district that Handel won Tuesday. Ossoffs residency outside the district that he was running to represent counted as another strike against him, the former speaker said.

In the end, I think the margin of victory were people who were determined not to allow the news media and Nancy Pelosi and Hollywood liberals to defeat Donald Trump in their district, and I think that was probably the margin of victory, Gingrich said.

The former speaker joked that he would hate to see Democrats make a change in leadership away from Pelosi, their current minority leader in the House. We have all the ads done, Gingrich said. We know exactly how to run against a Nancy Pelosi-run party.

Pelosi's leadership has also faced challenges from inside her party. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who mounted an unsuccessful challenge last year to unseat Pelosi as minority leader, said Thursday on MSNBC that it will be hard for Democrats to win back the House with Pelosi at the party's helm.

Democrats have a "toxic" brand nationwide, Ryan said, allowing the GOP to tie individual candidates to Pelosi and other Democratic leaders. On Fox News, Gingrich suggested that Republicans would take exactly that strategy for as long as Democrats let them.

I hope they keep Nancy for 10 more years. I want her there for at least another decade, he said. We'd love to have the question be, in 2018, Nancy Pelosi versus Paul Ryan, and I hope that the Democrats keep her right where she is for a long, long time. At least a decade.

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Gingrich: The media were right Georgia race was about Trump - Politico

A Cornish inventor has launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring an innovative new pest control product to market.

Dr Toby Bateson, an emergency doctor at Royal Cornwall Hospital and founder of Hammer Technologies Ltd, has designed RatMat said to be the world's first humane electrified rodent repellent flooring.

He is seeking 65,000 through the Kickstarter platform to manufacture the first order for the product, following six years of design work and two years of product testing.

Using similar principles to an electric fence the RatMat device is made up of inter-lockable tiles with a conductive steel surface that lie flat on the ground.

Dr Bateson said: "I have spent six years researching and developing the RatMat to provide classic and valuable car owners with a cost-effective and long-term solution to costly and inconvenient damage caused by rats and mice.

"I have a prototype and evidence that it works, but now I need help to raise the initial funds to help make this long-term, humane pest control a reality."

Dr Bateson previously achieved a Guinness World Record in 2016 for the world's smallest vacuum cleaner, at 5.7 cm in length, and also successfully brought ZenPlugs Moulded Ear Plug Kit to market in 2009.

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Inventor launches crowdfunding bid for pest control product - Insider Media