The scans included the first edition of the magazine (left) and a copy listing the BBC’s first television shows (right)

The BBC Genome project is designed to help the organisation identify shows missing from its archive.

Most early output was not recorded and many later tapes were destroyed.

It will be used to create an online database allowing, where possible, the public access to old broadcasts – or available photos, scripts and other materials for missing shows.

The scheme was given its name because the corporation likens each of it programmes to “tiny pieces of BBC DNA” that will form a “data spine” once reassembled.

Missing material

The project has involved scanning in the pages of about 4,500 copies of the Radio Times. They date from its first issue in 1923 to 2009. For later dates records generated by the iPlayer catch-up service are used.

The BBC archive development team has identified about five million programme records involving 8.5 million contributors.

That compares with roughly one and a half million shows listed in the current archive database – the numbers are not completely comparable as the listings include repeats.

The data must also be treated with care as the magazines only reveal what the BBC planned to broadcast and not late changes to the schedules.

Information is also missing for the first nine months of broadcast before the magazine was launched. Other records will be used at a later point to fill this gap.

The researchers hope the project will lead to shows being recovered if the public realises they have audio or video recordings of missing programmes.

“Clearly not all the material will exist out there anyway just because lots of the programmes in the early days weren’t even recorded – they were just broadcast live,” said project manager Helen Papadopoulos.

“Lots of things were also recycled or disposed of.

“Part of it is to recover some of the lost programmes but it’s really about having a comprehensive history of the BBC and its schedules.”

Delayed data

Part of the digitisation effort was outsourced to a French team that scanned in the magazines’ pages and then used optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the information.

It used specially designed software to make sense of the Radio Times’s changing layouts so that the information could be presented in a uniform fashion in a database where it could be checked and validated by Ms Papadopoulos and a small team of workers dedicated to the project,

The work was originally due for completion by August 2011, but proved more complicated than envisaged because the team had not accounted for issues raised by listings showing stations broadcasting different material at the same time. Examples included when BBC Radio 4 split its schedule to put the news on its FM radio frequency, but the cricket on long wave.

Other one-off issues also had to be checked.

“One of the last few files that we checked showed that there was a whole day of listings missing – the date was Tuesday 28 January 1936,” said Ms Papadopoulos.

“It was the King’s funeral and so we kept thinking our suppliers had somehow missed all the listings or that there was a page missing from the Radio Times for that issue.

“But when we went back and looked at the magazine it said something to the effect that ‘The King’s funeral arrangements would be announced over the microphone’.”

Online shop

The BBC Genome database will initially be restricted to the corporation’s staff, but the project team said if all goes well it could be accessible to the public online by the end of 2013.

It will then feed into another scheme called Project Barcelona, which plans to offer BBC archive content via an online shop.

The BBC Trust has still to decide whether to allow it to go ahead.

Other broadcasters may be concerned about the disruptive effect that providing so much content online would have on the market.

By Leo Kelion

Technology reporter

Data matching could be used to fill in gaps in the electoral register ahead of the launch of individual voter registration in 2014.

Ministers say the technique is as accurate as ID cards – but it has raised privacy concerns.

Labour peers said it would have been easier if ID cards had been introduced.

The ID card scheme was scrapped by the coalition government on privacy, cost and civil liberties grounds – but electoral registration officers are now faced with the problem of verifying the identity of millions of voters without a central register.

‘Astonishingly cheaper’

Labour peer Baroness Hayter said the government “is no doubt ruing the day” it decided to scrap ID cards.

“All these hurdles they are now trying to go through to get a more accurate electoral register would not have been there if we had kept ID cards,” she told BBC News.

Labour peer Lord Maxton has called in the House of Lords for “smart card technology with a central database”.

But Lib Dem minister Lord Wallace of Saltaire said it was possible to verify people’s identities using information held on existing government databases.

He told peers “we do not rue the day when ID cards were dropped” because new techniques for comparing databases allowed “identity assurance and a simpler relationship between the citizen and the state, which would not only be more efficient but astonishingly cheaper than the original ID scheme”.

Under the government’s voter registration plan, each member of a household would have to register individually.

At the moment, one householder supplies details of other people living at the address.

The aim is to cut down on electoral fraud – but it depends on being able to track down individuals who have never been on the electoral register or who have moved house and dropped off the system.

An Electoral Commission investigation in Northern Ireland, where voter registration has been in use since 2004, found there had been a “serious decline” in the accuracy of the electoral register because officials have been unable to keep pace with people changing addresses.

Student accommodation

The watchdog says a canvas of households should be carried out urgently, rather than just relying on voters to amend their own details.

The Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, which is due to resume its passage into law shortly, includes an annual canvas for the UK when the scheme is first launched – but the Electoral Commission is urging the government to make it a permanent feature.

The hardest to reach group is young people who are coming up to 18 or who may be living in temporary student accommodation.

Once they have been identified and contacted, in some cases by a visit from an official, they will be invited to join the electoral register – they can refuse but face fines if they do not respond at all.

Under the data matching trial, 22 local authorities in England and Wales will be allowed to share data from the Higher Education Funding Council, the Royal Mail, the Student Loans Company, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Education Department and the Welsh government.

“Identity assurance is something you can now do by matching information in different databases without sharing the contents of that data,” Lord Wallace told BBC News.

‘Data overlap’

Checking names and addresses against the DWP’s National Insurance database and other databases held by government agencies could “knock fraudulent entries out of the system”.

For example, university halls of residence currently submit lists of residents to the electoral register, meaning many foreign students, who are not entitled to vote in the UK, are on it – something that would not be the case with individual registration, he said.

But he admitted there are concerns over privacy – particularly if the trial is extended to privately-owned databases such as those belonging to credit reference agencies like Experian or tenancy deposit schemes, as some people want.

“How you manage the overlap between public and private data” was a “delicate area,” he told BBC News.

“National sovereignty goes completely out of the window,” said the peer, because “it is quite possible your data is being kept in a server in Seattle”.

Nick Pickles, of Big Brother Watch, warned against sharing data held by government agencies with private companies, saying it could be used to target direct mail or for other commercial purposes without the individual’s consent.

By Brian Wheeler

Political reporter, BBC News

Venturing that the investigation will look at whether the digital television  feature has “adapted to changes in technology, media and audience behaviour,”  the iconic broadcaster said it will conclude its review on 23 January, 2013.

Launched in 1999 as BBC Text – part of the recently deceased Ceefax teletext infrastructure – BBC Red  Button was last scrutinised in 2010, when governing body the BBC Trust deemed  that it was “widely used.” But earlier this autumn, the British public service  institution aroused speculation that the interactive feature was on the way out,  saying that the plan was “”ultimately to replace the red button.”

The BBC has backtracked on that statement since, now claiming that recent  decisions to scale back red button streams on Sky, FreeSat, and Virgin systems  “in no way signals the demise of BBC Red Button. The BBC is committed to  maintaining a vibrant and popular red button service.”

As a result, one possible scenario is that BBC  Red Button and BBC Online will find themselves integrated into a new, more  comprehensive service that takes into account recent developments like iPlayer, smartTV capability, and the explosion in mobile.

“The BBC’s digital offer is constantly evolving – last time we examined BBC  Online, the now firmly-established iPlayer did not even exist – so it is  particularly important to review these services regularly,” said BBC Trustee  Suzanna Taverne, who is leading the review.

If the Red Button as we know it is slowly being phased out, it certainly had  a terrific swan song. Typically most popular  during simultaneous action events like Wimbledon and the Glastonbury  Festival, the BBC’s interactive switch really came into its own this summer,  forming a vital part of the network’s Olympics coverage that reached over 50  million traditional viewers as well as a further 11.5 million mobile spectators  and led to record-breaking data delivery of 2.8 petabytes at the height of  London 2012 coverage – not a bad last stand for the grizzled digital  veteran.

A camera capable of visualising the movement of light has been unveiled by a team of scientists in the US.

The equipment captures images at a rate of roughly a trillion frames per second – or about 40 billion times faster than a UK television camera.

Direct recording of light is impossible at that speed, so the camera takes millions of repeated scans to recreate each image.

The team said the technique could be used to understand ultrafast processes.

The process has been dubbed femto-photography and has been detailed on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab’s website.

“There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” said Andrea Velten, one of the researchers involved in the project.

Scan lines

To create the technique, the scientists adapted a “streak tube” – equipment used to take data readings from light pulses.

It works in a similar fashion to the way pictures are created on traditional television cathode ray tubes, scanning one thin horizontal line at a time.

Since each image is only equivalent to one scan line on the television set, many hundred scans had to be taken to create a single frame.

The scientists did this by repeating each shot, angling the camera’s view with mirrors to record a different scan line of the object.

As a result, the technique is only suitable for capturing an event that can be recreated exactly the same way multiple times.

A pulse of light can be seen as it reaches the top of a soft drink bottle

Laser illumination

To create a moving picture, a laser pulse was used to illuminate the scene – flashing briefly once every 13 billionth of a second.

These pulses triggered the streak tube, which captured the light that returned from the scene.

The laser and the camera were carefully synchronised to ensure each pulse was identical. When the scan lines were stitched together, they appeared to have been taken at the same time.

It took about an hour to take enough shots to make a final video representing a fraction of a second of real time, leading one member of the team to dub the equipment “the world’s slowest fastest camera”.

Light analysis

Software was then used to turn all the images into movies lasting roughly 480 frames.

One showed a pulse of light, less than a millimetre long, travelling through a soft drink bottle at a rate of half a millimetre per frame.

Another showed different wavelengths of light rippling over the surface of a tomato and the table it was sitting on.

In addition to revealing new ways of seeing the world, the MIT scientists say the process could have some practical uses.

“Applications include industrial imaging to analyse faults and material properties, scientific imaging for understanding ultrafast processes and medical imaging to reconstruct sub-surface elements, ie ‘ultrasound with light,’” they say on their website.

The BBC have released an updated version of its iPlayer application for Apple’s iOS devices.

The new version enables streaming over 3G on both the Apple iPhone and iPad, which is a feature that’s been missing since its release.

In the past 3G support was omitted because in order to stream video you need a strong 3G connection, which was lacking in many parts of the UK. However, with the 3G network improving BBC felt the time was right at add 3G support to the iPlayer.

The BBC have also taken steps to ensure the streaming is smooth by automatically detecting your connection speed and adjusting the video quality to suit.

We advise anyone using a 3G connection on the iPlayer to be very careful not to incur huge data charges because streaming video is incredibly bandwidth intensive.

The new version also adds support for Apple Apple Airplay, which will enables you to stream content from your iPhone to your TV..

Sadly. Android users still have to stream over WiFi, but the BBC did confirm they are working on bringing 3G streaming to the Android version of iPlayer. We’re not sure when, but once we hear any news we’ll let you know.