British Bungling Corporation

 The mess at BBC runs long and deep and the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and Chief Executive Deborah Turness are unlikely to solve the Hydra-headed crisis. US President Donald Trump suing for $1 billion is uncharted territory for the publicly funded broad­caster, unlike its American counterparts, but BBC’s problems—or what board chairman Samir Shah called an “error of judg­ment”—didn’t begin with the spliced-together footage of Trump’s comments made 52 minutes apart at a January 6, 2021 event that gave the impression the president was inciting a riot. Nor did it begin with Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone where the 13-year-old narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official. Or that BBC Arabic is a law unto itself. Or the Huw Edwards sex abuse scandal. Or the Gary Linekar saga. The Prescott memo’s leak only made the rot public. Once renowned for its edito­rial rigour, BBC seems to have forgotten journalistic ethics. Even its staunchest defenders acknowledge a reckoning was overdue. Old BBC hands and media ana­lysts blame non-editorial management (Davie’s back­ground was marketing). Then there is government interference. The damage won’t be undone but as Mary Harrington writes in Unherd, the world BBC represented is passing. Both will be missed.

On Blended Wings

It is said no big innovation happens in commercial aviation because of the Boeing-Airbus duopoly stifling new ideas. But the idea of blended-wing aircraft isn’t new. The Westland Dreadnaught was the first and crashed on its first flight in 1924. Design complexities ensured only the US military pioneered the technology for bombers. But research on blended-wing airliners— where the wings and fuselage are a single structure—is in full swing because such design is not only more aero­dynamic but NASA estimates it will burn half the fuel of current commercial aircraft, reducing emissions. Cabins can be almost half as large again. Two companies, Long Beach-based JetZero and Seat­tle-based startup Outbound Aerospace are leading with test-flights of smaller models based on the Boeing/NASA X-48 co-developed by Robert Lieback in the late 1980s. The biggest technical complexity, however, is that a bomber doesn’t need a pressurised cabin. A commercial airliner can’t do without one. Pres­surised vessels have circular cross-sections to reduce stress.

Flat surfaces, as with a boxier design, could be structur­ally vulnerable. As an expert recently told BBC, blended-wing design has turned into the “holy grail of aviation”.

 The First Algocracy

 Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has put the Balkan nation on the path towards becoming the world’s first ‘algocracy’, where algorithm runs the country by running its government. An avatar named Diella, the “AI Minis­ter”, will pick private contrac­tors/ suppliers for govern­ment in a land riddled with corruption. Diella’s‘unbiased’ judgment is supposed to be the panacea. But as former Google chief Eric Schmidt co-writes in the New York Times, it’s the “wrong reflex” for fixing failing democratic systems: “Algorithms can optimize efficiency, but they can’t decide between competing values—the very choices that lie at the heart of democratic politics.”