Lightning never strikes twice

Shame the same can't be said of the RMT.

In fairness, they haven't gone on strike so far this year, which by their standards is pretty good. It doesn't take much for Bob Crow to throw his toys out of the pram and get members to strike, often for the daftest of reasons.

This time it's a more conventional strike over wanting a 5% pay rise. But hang on a minute -we're in the middle of a recession, no? People all over the place are losing jobs while others are asking for over the odds. RMT members often seem to be unhappy with their lot but it's questionable as to how much this is justified. Don't like your unsociable hours? Try working for the police. Don't enjoy dealing with drunk/aggressive members of the public? See if you can hack it as a paramedic. Feel your pay doesn't reflect the value of the public service you provide? Try living on a Healthcare Assistant wage.

For once I find myself in agreement with Boris; his description of this action as a 'ludicrous and unnecessary disruption' hits the spot. I'm impressed by the contingency plans that they are trying to put in place, with guided cycle routes and shared taxis. It's just a shame resources have to be deployed to this end. And it's not just commuters and their employers who are going to be inconvenienced - all the businesses that would have got passing trade will be affected... all those cups of coffee and sandwiches that would have been sold to people who will choose to work from home. I wandered through Covent Garden this evening and it was relatively quiet - presumably evening diners had decided to get home before their tube carriages turned into pumpkins.

Still, every cloud... at least Tube strikes have the pleasant side effect of allowing me to be smug. All those people who turn their nose up at South London and declare it to be rubbish cos we don't have the tube are going to struggle to get to work tomorrow. And I can catch my usual train, have a short walk, and hopefully not add more than 10 minutes to my journey.

Club Sandwich(board)

Oxford Circus
Originally uploaded by diamond geezer

The great big fluorescent 'Golf Sale' sign could be a thing of the past. At least if Westminster Council get their way. There is a plan afoot to ban them from the West End, and fine offending companies up to £2500 for non-compliance. The Council argue that not only are they an eyesore, they also make life difficult for pedestrians.

Ok, so they're a bit shabby, but I'm not sure I agree with the latter. Cutting through Covent Garden, yes, there are a few advertising cheap theatre tickets that one might have to navigate around, but far more tricky are (i) tourists (ii) people pretending to be statues and (iii) the hoards of people who erroneously thing that outside Covent Garden tube station is a good place to meet (been there, done that). Heck, they even serve a purpose - one helped me find a DM stockist on Garrick Street when Covent Garden was without one for a while. And that's, like, totally crucial information. ;-)

Actually, if Westminster Council want to ban things that make one's transit from A to B on foot problematic, may I suggest targeting the following as a greater priority:

1. People proffering The London Paper and London Lite
2. Chuggers
3. The Scientologists on Tottenham Court Road who try to lure you in by offering a stress test (presumably to detect how stressed they've made you by getting in your way)
4. People who stop at the top of escalators to plan their next move, oblivious to the pile-up behind them.
5. Loved-up couples who think that meandering along, holding hands, is acceptable behaviour on Oxford Street/in mainline stations during rush hour.
6. Users of those suitcases with extendable handles, who ignore the existence of everyone else, to leave a trail of chipped ankle bones in their wake.
7. Cars
8. Groups of 50+ exchange students who manage to block off entire chunks of pavement at a time
9. Stationary rickshaws
10. Boris Johnson. (Oh alright, maybe this isn't his fault. But I've got to try...)

I mean, lets look at the positives: at least a great big placard is more environmentally friendly than a load of fliers. And if you were feeling desperate for a cut-price nine iron, then they could serve you very well.

All this does remind me of a question I have pondered before. What exactly is it about golf that prompts this kind of advertising, far more than the sale the any other product? Do people who play golf respond well to that kind of thing? Whatever the answer is, I hope that the people who were probably employed on a sub-minimum wage to do this manage to find other work. Or else there might be a protest. With neon placards.

A Mature Response

Still struggling to come to terms with the implications of the election result, I decided to channel my energies into a mature and deep response. Then I decided to ditch that idea, and convey my dissatifaction in the medium of lolcat-ese.

With thanks/apologies to lewishamdreamer and koltregaskes, whose Creative Commons licensed photos I modified.

What do *you* reckon?

During an innocent conversation about the merits of the various radio stations we listen to at work, a colleague commented that she found the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 rather annoying. "Oh yes!" I agreed. "I hate those programmes where members of the public are allowed to phone in with their opinions".

The reaction was: "That is such a [Ginger] thing to say!" Which has me slightly worried. Surely I don't have a reputation for favouring oppression of free speech, or a disinterest in what Joe Public has to say? I was all set to explain here in detail my defence, comprising points such as (i) such programmes favour polarised opinions and just aren't interested in the calm middle ground (ii) the sort of people/opinions that get aired just conform to the most obvious stereotypes of both ends of any debate and (iii) I get annoyed at such opportunities being presented as though the actual opinions really matter when, in the great scheme of things, they don't change a thing and are just a tokenistic way of filling airtime.

But it seems that others can say it far better than I:

Hmph!

I wouldn't normally waste blogspace on reality TV, but if I'm honest I have a very soft spot for Strictly Come Dancing. I am therefore one of the disgruntled masses who are incredulous about the premature eviction of Gabby and James. Not that Penny and Ian should have gone either, but it was ridiculous that this was the composition of the dreaded 'bottom two.'

I mean seriously, let's compare this (skip to 1:30):


with this horror (skip to 1:15 if you want to spare yourself extra pain):

In one word: hmph!

(It's ok, guys, normal service will resume shortly)

What would Noah do?

It seems that SPCK, a Christian publishing firm and chain of booksellers, has been having trouble lately. Following a takeover from a charitable trust, various changes have been made to the management that have unsettled things to the extent that vast numbers of shop staff are resigning, and the chain looks as though it might go under. I won't go into all the ins and outs (of which you can read more here and here), but I was rather struck by one of the quotes on the Cartoon Church blog:

“Every time someone buys from Amazon, rather than from a bookshop, that is
another nail in the coffin of a Christian retailer.” - Wesley Owen* Spokesperson

This made me feel a bit of a pang of guilt, given that I have used Amazon on more than one occasion to purchase 'Christian' books. So, I went to have a look at the SPCK online catalogue to see what they had in the way of youth ministry resources.

What I found was...nothing really. Which isn't to say that they don't sell anything I would want to buy, but that their website is rubbish. The only options are to look at 'New Releases', 'Bestsellers' or to do a search for titles, authors or publishers. There is a 'category' search, but you have to use one of their predefined terms which, although containing a wide range from 'Adventists' to 'Zoroastrianism', manages to completely omit 'youthwork' or 'youth ministry'. So how am I supposed to find anything, if I don't know that it exists in the first place? How are you supposed to browse? At least Wesley Owen's site allow you to do that.

It doesn't take a genius to make a business useful to its customers. And much as it would be sad to see the demise of a Christian bookshop chain, it doesn't seem that they want to actually help their customers. So what should I, as a Good Christian^TM, do to help keep them afloat? I guess the only option is to do my browsing on Amazon, and then search by title on the SPCK site, and buy the books at a higher price. I'm not really convinced, though, that a business should rely so heavily on Christian charity to keep its head above water.

*Another Christian bookshop chain.

Coming of age

I'm not sure I like personalised marketing. Well, I'm not sure I like marketing in general, but the personalised sort can get just a little bit too...personal.

I turn 25 quite soon, and I haven't yet decided whether this calls for a quarter-life crisis. Someone, however, seems keen that I should have one. I possess a loyalty card for a well known high street purveyor of cosmetics, medicines and the like. Periodically they send me vouchers to get money off or acquire more points on products I frequently buy, or more expensive equivalents (what a surprise).

The most recent mailing I received from them, however, offered me discounts/extra points on the following items:

• Own brand pain relief tablets
• Glycolic Peel
• Dermatological eye patches - 'a temporary eyelift effect without surgery'
• Support tights.

What do you think they're trying to say?

Anatomy of a PhD

Most PhD vacancies in the UK come with 3-4 years funding attached; even if you haven't written up your thesis in that time, the research council will stop paying you.

Now the layman might reasonably assume that this structure suggests that the student spends 70-90% of the available time gathering data, and the remainder writing this* up in the form of papers and a thesis. Fourteen months into my lab-based PhD, I'd like to suggest an alternative structure:



Year 1
Month 1
- Learn where stuff in the lab is kept.
-Try to understand the title of your research project.
Month 2-12
- Learn the basic techniques for your research. This may involve having them demonstrated, trying them for yourself, then repeatedly needing reminders of the finer points of which you forget a different one each time you carry out the experiment.
Month 2-8
- Potter
Month 8-12
- Feel like you're starting to get some command of what you're doing. Then learn a whole new bunch of techniques and feel like a newbie again.
- Have an unsettling conversation where someone says to you 'Oh, did nobody tell you that X is done like this...?' Feel a bit peeved/confused/stupid.
- Be told that something is easy/straightforward and then come up with every mistake in the book.

Year 2 Getting down to some serious work. This may involve:
- Generating weird data that prompts every senior/more experienced person you consult to say, "Ooh, that doesn't look good. I don't know what's causing it though."
- Fail to find any helpful advice for your problem in the literature. Know deep down that your bizarre data is ten thousand times more likely a glitch in the experiment than a significant discovery.
- Develop a force field that causes every piece of equipment you want to use to break or malfunction.
- Write 15 drafts of your transfer report (to have your study upgraded from 'MPhil' to 'PhD' status)
- Have serious doubts about (i) your research methods (ii) the validity/importance of your overall study (iii) the purpose of your own existence.
- Discover that coming in on a Saturday is no longer a weird concept.

Year 3 (please, God)
- Finally get some of your experiments going.
- Bid farewell to any residual social life
- Generate that much longed-for data.
- Write up.

So I'd estimate around 6 months of useful data generation in the whole process, and a few marbles lost along the way. I hope the taxpayers are happy.

*Yes, I know 'data' is a plural, but talking about 'these data' sounds a bit unnatural and poncy outside of the context of a research article.

Too much information

I'm really not convinced by the notion that in a free society, everything that can be reported should be reported. I'm not suggesting press censorship. More like a little media responsibility. Three recent stories have made me come to this conclusion:

1. MMR

In the UK, the rate of uptake of the immunisation for measles, mumps and rubella has suffered a serious knock in the wake of media hysteria surrounding a small, highly contested study that suggested that the vaccine could trigger autism. Ignoring the fact that the study was questionable for so many reasons, the media managed to instill a sense of paranoia in the majority of parents whose children were approaching immunisation age. If I had been in the parent position at that time, I'd have been pretty worried on the basis of what was being said in the mainstream media.

Fortunately the scaremongering seems largely to have died down, but unfortunately the damage is still tangible. Uptake rates are still lower than they were prior to the scare, with a consequent rise in the number of cases of measles. Just a few days after reporting that, however, the BBC decided it was a good idea to run a story headed "MMR overdose given to 93 pupils". Oh heck, think I, imagining misplaced decimal points resulting in a bunch of 2-year-olds being given 10 times the recommended dose. But then I actually read the story. Turns out that the pupils in question were a pretty robust 14-15 years of age. And the 'overdose' they referred to is not too high a dose, but a third dose when the pupils had already had the requisite two, due to a mix up where parents signed their kids up for another dose by mistake. No harm done. I doubt the kids in question even experienced any side-effects. So why put a story like that under an alarmist headline and stick a link to it on the front page of BBC News? What were they trying to achieve?

2. Northern Rock

So, a UK bank borrows some money from the Bank of England, and all of a sudden there's mayhem with customers clearing out their accounts, making the bank far more likely to go bust than it ever was in the first place. I can't help but wonder whether the initial reporting could have done more to prevent the chaos, or whether the media secretly love a bit of panic from the general public. Admittedly, the message from early on was 'nothing to worry about', but when the story is simultaneously front page news, then it's hard to expect people not to react adversely.

3. Too much information in general

There was a case recently where a British actor was found guilty of downloading and viewing inappropriate material of children on his computer. His sentencing took place last week.

It is fine that this was reported. It was fine that they described the nature of the material as being 'class 5' i.e. the worst type of material in the classification system. What I consider to be of highly dubious merit was for the reporter to then describe the nature of material that falls into all the five classes. I cannot tell you how bad the material in this case was, because I had switched off the TV by the time they were halfway through class 3. Who gains from that kind of reporting?

Who gains from any of the above, in fact?

UK Students: In your interests to read this.

Just a heads up to UK graduates that the interest rate on student loans has increased today from 2.4% to 4.8%. This will remain the case until 31st August 2008.

I don't think there's really much of a case for complaint given that the terms and conditions have stated all along that the 'interest' on the loan is tied in to the Retail Price Index. But the point that the information is poorly communicated is a valid one.

The only reason I'm aware of the change is that I earn less than the threshold for repayment, but I've been wondering for a while whether I should start making voluntary repayments to get shot of some of my debt. For the last year the interest rate has been 2.4% so it made more sense to put an spare money into savings instead. I figured that there would be a bit of a hike this year, because of general increases in interest rates/inflation, so I've been keeping an eye out for news of a change. Finding out the information isn't very easy though. It takes quite a bit of digging around on the Student Finance Direct site to find the right page and even then the information isn't very well highlighted. But then I don't think they're very interested in helping you keep track of your debt. For example, here's one of the FAQ answers:

Finding out your balance
You can estimate your balance in between statements by looking at your most recent statement and taking off any deductions noted on your wage slips and P60.

Thanks for that. Couldn't have figured that out for myself, oh no. Why can't they enable online accounts that can be checked without too much hassle? It's not like the Student Loans Company have exactly inspired confidence over the years, with delays in loan payments, mislaid repayments, concerns (albeit mistaken) that students are being overcharged, and instances of people still being charged after their debts are cleared.

I guess the assumption is that students are too lazy/ignorant to check up on these things. I hope that's not actually true.

Foul Play

So you're in charge of a football club. Both your men's and women's teams are in the highest leagues in the country. The women's team in particular are very successful - they finished third in the league and were runners up in the cup.

In contrast, the men's team have been slipping over the last couple of years and come the end of this season they actually get relegated. It's probably not entirely a bad thing - they could do with a year with less pressure in order to sort themselves out. It means a drop in income, but they've never been the sort of team to be wildly extravagant in their spending.

Nonetheless, the powers that be decide that they need to raise some more money for the next season. There are some good players that will be sold, because they can't really justify keeping hold of them when they're not in the top flight. But still they want more money. So what do you do? Get rid of the entire women's side. Everything from the title winning first team down to the training academies at the bottom.

Sound a bit daft? Well, it's exactly what Charlton Athletic have just done. As the (now ex-) captain of the women's side said, "the men get relegated and we get punished".

Hmph