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ProJ |
This is a far more urgent message for the UK. We mustn't get trapped in a downward spiral. University tutors are dismayed that so many young people aren't sufficiently prepared by schools to qualify for the most challenging courses. Businesses find that many aren't qualified for apprenticeships. That's because there are too few good teachers. Pupils in many secondary schools don't get exposed even to one. And less than a third of primary schools have even a single teacher with any scientific qualifications.
We need, too, to enliven what is taught. Newton, when young, made model windmills and clocks - the hi-tech artefacts of his time. Darwin collected fossils and beetles. The young Einstein was fascinated by the electric motors and dynamos in his father's factory. Fifty years ago inquisitive children could take apart a clock, radio set or motorbike, figure out how it worked, and even put it together again.
Or not.
Over the past few months I've been helping the recruitment for a software firm. It's a small company that has produced award-winning products and is run by two smart and talented individuals. They have a decent amount of cash in the bank, a full order book, a lovely working environment, great people and are at the forefront of some very cool technology. (No, I can't name them.)
His role in this is to impart the importance of the covering letter and how critical it is to get your CV looking spick and span. More directly related to our discussion here is the process he outlined - which mainly centred around building a database of companies you would like to work for, writing a cover letter and hassling each of the companies in turn until one of them gave you a job.
What's (generally) wrong with agencies
This is
One good way to do this (to return to the example of my client at the top of this article) is to have a detailed job spec on your site, together with contact information and tons of information on the product or the company.
It's nearly 30 years since the word "cyberspace" first appeared in print, in a short story by William Gibson for the July 1982 edition of the now-defunct science fiction magazine Omni. In an interview in this summer's Paris Review, Gibson describes, not for the first time, how he came up with the word: "The first thing I did was to sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling - infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, oh, that's a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth - I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow." The trajectory from Omni to the Paris Review says less about the way Gibson has changed in the intervening years than about the way science fiction has, both in itself and in terms of its status in the wider culture - in large part thanks to Gibson's nine novels. The last six of them - (1993),
, Cayce has been brought to London to give her opinion on a new logo for the world's second best-selling brand of running shoes. She has an unusual gift: she is, for want of a better word, allergic to branding; the stronger the brand, the worse her reaction - the first time she saw the Michelin Man, as a child, she was nearly sick. This makes her invaluable as a marketing consultant. After she gives the new trainer logo the thumbs down, Bigend makes her another, less conventional proposition. Cayce is a fan of "the footage", an abstract film that's being uploaded to the internet in short segments, which appear unannounced and at unpredictable intervals in various quiet corners of the web, "somewhere where it's possible to upload a video file and simply leave it there". (The novel, set in the late summer of 2002, was published in February 2003, more than two years before the first video was uploaded to YouTube.) Bigend wants Cayce to track down the maker of the footage. Cayce agrees, not least because she'd like to know who's behind it herself, and sees that with Bigend's resources she may be able to find out. It's also, in Cayce's head at least, complicatedly bound up with the disappearance of her father, a retired spook last seen heading towards downtown Manhattan on 11 September 2001 (the Los Angeles Times recently called
for that music/musicians. And paying for commercials is (obviously) fairly common. Is it really so crazy that some in the industry want to "buy" spots? I get the argument concerning the lack of transparency. And, in fact, as technology becomes more widespread, and as the next generation of services launches, radio stations are going to be forced to move away from payola not because they don't like the practice... but because people won't be relying on radio so much for leaning about new songs. For the time being, it's likely that these kinds of situations will last. But consumers just aren't going to stand for it that much longer.
In protest at BBC Radio 4's plans to reduce its short-story broadcasts, Joanne Harris and Neil Gaiman are among authors joining Twitter users to produce collaborative tales
Authors including Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman and Sarah Waters are teaming up to celebrate the appeal of the short story in a new campaign aimed at persuading the BBC not to cut back on its coverage of the literary form.
Rankin kicked off the campaign today, with the line "I woke up on the floor of a strange bedroom, clutching a single bullet in my right hand. I couldn't see any sign of a gun". Tweeters have 30 minutes to submit their tweets, with the best line to be selected by judges before the next line is tweeted. Sentences cannot exceed the 140-character limit, including the hash tag #soatale.
One problem for site owners is that the definition "trolling" can be in the eye of the beholder. As some of you may well know, it isn't uncommon for the phrase "tory troll" to be bandied about on Comment is free in the direction of anyone who dares to disagree with what can be perceived as the "party line" of the paper. Disagreement, though, isn't trolling in my view. Moderation can help, although it can also be divisive. I think of moderators as being analogous with referees in football - of course they sometimes make mistakes, but then they wouldn't be having to make decisions at all if the players weren't constantly trying to circumvent the rules of the game. And, of course, newspaper comment sites aren't averse to publishing pieces designed to be extremely provocative. It is surely no coincidence that James Delingpole actually rhymes with "troll", a gift to limerick writers the world over.
To understand the growth of social media one first has to realise from where it came. Around the middle of the 1990s internet service providers gave millions of home computer users the chance to explore the internet. Technology has since progressed so that it is possible to pick up emails or update one's social media status on a mobile telephone or tablet computer that fits neatly into a bag.By the time Twitter emerged as a 140-character microblogging service in 2006, most home users were familiar with the 'netiquette' of social media behaviour, whether sharing photos with friends and family or sharing opinions with like-minded peers. Twitter now boasts more than 200 million users.
Siok soon realised that the story wasn't in the microblogging site itself, but more in the relationships between the people using the social media platform. The documentary would avoid delving into technological issues and concentrate instead on narratives. Siok would need to convince Twitter users to step out from behind their avatars and share their real-life experiences. Siok set up the Twittamentary website in August 2009 and asked users to contribute story ideas and videos. The initial reaction to the project suggested such crowdsourcing would not be a problem.
News breaking through Twitter has in part led to a reassessment of the traditional news media's role as the gatekeeper of information. To some extent, editors were able to set the news agenda with the stories they covered. Although they can still choose their stories, newsrooms must now be ready not just to break a news story, they must also monitor it online in real time. News providers are using the immediacy of Twitter by curating, as Carvin did, prominent Twitter voices to build up a picture of events as they happen. The resulting story is then digested by heavyweight analysts or columnists.
is currently seeking more film festival premieres and other screening opportunities, if you are interested in hosting a screening for the film, please get in touch with the filmmaker on Twitter
While Microsoft showed off Windows running on ARM-based systems, Intel and Google on Tuesday launched a development partnership to get the Android mobile operating system to run on Intel's lower-powered Atom chips.
But Intel's chief executive Paul Otellini, speaking at the conference, said the smartphone market is still in its early stages.
"The smartphone business is not established in terms of the ultimate shakeout of who's going to win and who is going to lose," Otellini said. "You saw what happened in terms of how fast Android took share from Apple. So good products on good platforms can really still make a big difference in this industry."
