I took some time off yesterday and ended up in Trafalgar Square during the broadcast of the memorial service for the victims of the July bombings. There were a lot of cameras there, both TV and press. Most people watched and contemplated, except for 2 I noticed. The first was a guy who wondered round striking up dramatic poses, arms outstretched, clapping his hands between poses to get the photographers’ attention. The second was far more unassuming, just wandered around clutching a large picture of Princess Diana for some reason, in a kind of tribute. He too was the subject of many photos.

I nipped into the National Gallery whilst there and had a quick scoot round. The Gallery is trying to do some customer research; every person looking at one of the new aquisitions, Madanna of the Pinks, was asked to fill out a card. Instead of asking questions there and then, which is what I expected, it askedfor demographic detials and then permission to contact you for further research – so I guess they are going to do focus groups instead of a straightforward questionnaire. My reaction – How much!!! At around £340000 per square inch it’s a very expensive aquisition, even if a nice painting.

The Government are starting a citizenship test from today, to test applicants knowledge of the culture, laws and lifestyle of the country they wish to be join. I took the BBC’s pretend version of the test. Unfortunately I only scored 66%, not the required 75%…right, I’ll get my coat then..

Although I think Debenhams is just slightly too early for me…let’s get Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night out the way first. The decorations were going up all over the street today, with much of the pavement roped off to allow the men access to the trees along the street in complete safety. Of course, the people who will remove the big golden baubles over the next few months probacly won’t use the same safety precautions.

Whilst on the subject of the increasing female interest in all things geek, Danah Boyd posts about a Long Tail Camp. In keeping with an open-souce camp, there’s a page asking for topics to be discussed. Somehow I think this particular topic may not be that popular in open forum…

Long-Tail Camp Requests
How to get laid at these damned camps.
Having only two girls at each camp isn’t helping. -NeilDrumm
Well, this is Long-Tail camp, in aggregate we’re gonna have way more girls than is usual. -EranGloben

Update: according to a Eran, the first comment was added by a woman…which for some reason doesn’t surprise me

Interesting little snippet in the Telegraph today, about how women now make up 51% of viewers on the SciFi channel. Adam Roberts, a professor in English gave an insight into his reasoning about women watching The Matrix..

More women are tuning in to see the relationships develop between wittily-written, complex central characters they can identify with. A film like The Matrix attracted female viewers partly because it was about complicated concepts of life and death. It also had Keanu Reeves running around in leather, which helped.

The other person quoted was Ann, whose take on the whole interviewing and editing down of speech can be found in her post

My heart sank when I read the article yesterday, and I knew I’d have to write a rebuttal, but this became particularly urgent this morning since it seems to have (if I’m honest, probably justifiably) upset some of the lovely denizens of slashdot

So, the actual article seems to have been rather too heavily pruned at the sub-editing stage, because given that Elizabeth was a previous winner of the young journalist of the year award, I’d really hope that the standards for that were a lot higher than the quality of the resulting article, entitled “Adventures of Buffy and Lara see female sci-fi viewers outnumber males”.

She then proceeds with her take on the story, concluding:

So the lesson for today is – just because it’s a “quality” newspaper doesn’t lessen the likelihood of being misquoted, taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented.

In a complete waste of advertisers’ money*, to ‘celebrate’ the 400th anniversay, an ITV programme made an accurate reconstruction of the Palace of Westminster as it was in 1605 and then proceeded to blow it up, using the same amount of gunpowder that was packed into the cellar in that failed plot. Somewhat predictably, the 36 barrels of gunpowder did indeed destroy most of the building.

If it had succeeded, the celebrations that take place on 5th November every would probably be different. But the significance of the date reduces, as burning old Guido is no longer PC (and is probably against most clean air legislation), bonfire parties become more organised and less ‘throw a few things together in the back yard and burn a big hole in the lawn’ variety. Growing up, it was interesting to realise that some of the plotters, including the leader Robert Catesby, had met their end at Holbeche House, which is only about a mile from where I grew up. It’s a nursing home now, but I recall thinking about the plot this time every year as we drove past it.

*If the BBC had done this, you can guarantee that many of the papers would have called it a waste of licence payers’ money.

I’ve been following Clayton Cubbitt’s Operation Eden blog, about his family’s life after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. Today, he posts about an act of generosity

I received the email from a guy named Kenny…In it, he told me how his “sweetie”, Elizabeth, had stumbled upon Operation Eden, and how she related to my mom’s life, and to her plight, and had been moved to tears by this post. He told me about how they had been aching to reach out and help someone that had been displaced by Katrina since the storm first hit, and had, like many others, been rebuffed by bureaucrats. He told me Elizabeth’s daughter, Toni Marie, had just purchased a rental property, and wanted to offer it to my mom and little brother for a year, rent free, until we could rebuild my mom’s Eden.

With officialdom’s failure to get to grips with the problems, hope can come from unexpected sources. Read Rachel’s story about the group that has formed post the London bombings to see the same kind of support.

I’m refreshing my car insurance and one of the sites (and now I can’t remember which one) had the following list as one of it’s pre-screening questions. These type of questions usually point to increased premiums or people they will not insure – an interesting list putting together professional models and fast food deliverers.

– performer or presenter in films, TV, radio, music or other performing arts;
– professional model;
– professional sportsperson, manager or coach;
– non UK armed forces or diplomatic staff;
– taxi or minicab driver, proprietor or controller;
– connected with gaming, nightclubs, circuses, fairgrounds, amusements or street trading;
– scrap waste; or second hand dealing;
– fast food delivery

Very busy working and meeting up with people – lots of fun but tiring. Not going to have anytime this trip to do sightseeing or shopping, although a rarely do any shopping when I’m here. Normal service may be resumed later.

I met up with Lee Wilkins yesterday in New York, who was here to attend Blogon. By one of life’s strange co-incindences we were in hotels next door to each other. Spent a nice evening tlaking blogging and podcasting and plans for the future (and sucking up the W’s free wifi in the bar!)

The BBC are reporting that a Ministry of Defence worker left his gun in a public toilet in Sainsbury’s. What was he doing to take the gun off? And why was it loaded with blanks – what use is a gun loaded with blanks!

Yesterday my sister and her husband decided to reinstall Windows 98. All was well, it was working a lot faster and they were happy. Until they rebooted this morning and it asked them for a product key. Which they could not find and did not know it was needed. This resulted in a call to me and a lot of spelling out of command line typing until we found it and got them back working. They won’t be doing that again!

Currently sitting in a hotel lounge after a day’s team building. The hotel is one of the nice country houses that got converted after the war to a hotel. During the day we’ve been disturbed by camera crews filming various people. At one point I stopped to see if I could recognise anyone, only to report back to the rest of the team that is was a blond guy with a stripey jumper whom I did not recognise. However, on closer view, it was Gary Barlow, who is currently sitting 10ft away with Mark, Jason and Howard for a Take That reunion which is being filmed (or at least bits of it are – the dinner and drinks weren’t). Robbie did not make it.

Lloyd Davies has a write up from a talk by Theordore Zeldin on the art of conversation, both face-to-face and online.

conversation is an art, so there is no guaranteed way of becoming a good conversationalist and everyone develops their own style. Until recently people had to fit into fixed categories. Now the individual is accepted and the mystery is what is going on for you.

So challenge yourself – the question is not what do you want to talk about, but what do you want to converse about, what do you want to share.

Ethan Zuckerman comments on the the book Brand New Justice, by branding expert Simon Anholt. But this is not marketing brands, but countries as brands. What does a country mean to a person, what brand does it carry. How can a country change thier branding, change the perception in the mind of potential visitors or investors. In London, you can see a conscious effort taking place to bring people back in after the July bombings. But this can be seen as a short term blip; how about countries that have a long history of negative branding, how do they turn themselves around. Ask yourself – is Croatia a war-set country that you cnanot visit, or a beautiful holiday destination? Anholt uses the ‘Nation Brand Hexagon’ to measure countries: ” which evaluates a national brand on six key characteristics, as well as a ranking score based on a sum of all those scores”. By measuring, it allows a country to put in a framework to change.

From the New Yorker, an article looking at the evolving admissions policy of the US Ivy League, primarily Harvard. When the university changed to standard entry tests in 1905, it was a pure merit test, based on academic ability. There were no other criteria present. But quickly this lead to an undesirable situation as perceived by the leading social class of the time. In 1922, personal characteristics started to come into play – the university was looking for certain types of people, not just academically successful ones. This was still going in the 1960’s:

At Harvard, the key figure in that same period was Wilbur Bender, who, as the dean of admissions, had a preference for “the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physical vigor and coordination and grace.” Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of ‘pansies,’ ‘decadent esthetes’ and ‘precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems.”

And the process is still there today, but maybe not so obvious! There is still a personal selection criteria going on – will the student fit in, will they be successful And not just successful in college, but in life. For many of the top universities, that is a key measure of success. The article goes onto explore success of graduates post-college as being one of the reasons why subjectivity apppears to work. You can see the same practice in the UK – especially with grade ‘inflation’, where so many people are getting multiple A grades – the personal characteristics come into play and subjective choice can always be challenged.

The weather in Britain is about to get better – or at least that is what the weather presenters are going to be telling us. The Meteorological Office have issued new guidelines, to ensure the presenters emphasise the positive and don’t dwell on the negative. So instead of Occasional Showers, it’s going to be mostly dry. Instead of Often Cloudy, it’s going to be Generally Clear. Doesn;t matter though – what ever they call it, we’ll still talk about it

A colleague at work had an interesting experience last week; the Evening Standard (local London paper) rang her to ask her to submit a letter to the paper on a specific subject (the resignation of newsreader Philip Hayton over personal clashes). She’d sent in a letter about a year before, so they had her details on file. She spent some time writing the letter and sent it on through, where it got published in the next issue. With edits – including additions. Although it had not changed the sentiment of the letter, she did wonder why she had bothered putting time into it if they were going to change things.

Do newspapers normally solicit reader letters? On specific subjects? I’ve never heard this before. But in this case, it’s ensured that my colleague is unlikely to do something similar again, and raise doubts about the rest of the stuff in the paper.

There’s an annular solar eclipse today, which will probably not be visible from much of the UK due to cloud. The BBC are again requesting everyone’s photos, a cheap way to get photo stock as well as incuding people. Meanwhile you can watch the eclipse over the web, instead if damaging your eyes, via various national scientific societies.

..or something like that ;o). Via the BBC, DDB London* have conducted a poll about the ‘average’ persons** knowledge of new terms, iincluding blogging, podcsting and broadband. “Our research not only shows that there is no buzz about blogging and podcasting outside of our media industry bubble, but also that people have no understanding of what the words mean. It’s a real wake-up call.”

It doesn’t surprise me; very few people I talk to know what a blog or a podcast, but they do know broadband. But why is it a wake up call. Before this year, how many media agencies were aware of blogs?

*unfortunately they have their site down for updating – not a good idea they day you release a story!)
**The average person appears to be a taxi driver, a hairdresser or a pub landlord.