provides links to information management, information sources and other "useful stuff" with a strong bias towards the management of information in a careers guidance context.
As of 17 July 2017 I include mental health information and comment.
I tweet as @careersinfo and am on LinkedIn and Facebook as Hazel Edmunds
“The cry we hear from deep in our hearts comes from the wounded child within. Healing this inner child’s pain is the key to transforming anger, sadness, and fear.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
We all have a wounded inner child. Recently, my wounded child was hurt that my sister hadn’t called or texted me for several weeks. It seems like I’m always the one who has to reach out to her, and my wounded child feels like she doesn’t really care about me.
My wounded child was also scared the other day, because I didn’t have a lot of work in the coming week, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t have enough money. The wounded child inside me felt frightened and alone in a big, scary world.
And then my wounded child was angry, but I really know it was about fear and hurt again. You see, my ex-husband is refusing to send the spousal support he’s supposed to give me, and he won’t answer my emails. Feeling helpless and victimised, my wounded child wants to yell and scream and get even with him!
a column by Lubos Pastor and Pietro Veronesi for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Economic anxiety and insecurity are often cited as drivers of populism, so why has populism emerged over the past few years in rich countries and in good times?
This column, part of the Vox debate on the topic, argues that income inequality plays a role. When the economy is strong, everyone fares well but the rich fare especially well, fuelling inequality and resentment.
Populism in the form of anti-globalisation may reduce everyone’s consumption, but it affects the rich disproportionately and thus appeals to many voters in richer countries. In poorer countries, however, voters are less willing to give up consumption for equality.
People who score high in the personality traits narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy can empathize, but generally lack the disposition to do so, according to a recent study.
These traits are part of the "dark triad" of personality, which has been used to study malevolent personality traits since 2002.
The results suggest it might be possible to encourage psychopaths to empathize more, but no evidence shows this is effective over the long term.
Lack of empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of others – is one of the most often cited traits of psychopaths. This inability is also common among individuals who score high in the "dark triad" of personality traits: narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and deceit) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism).
But new research suggests that these individuals are able to understand and share others' feelings – they'd just rather not.
a post for EurekAlert from the University of Southern California [via ResearchBuzz Firehose with grateful thanks]
New tool from the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society at USC aims to prevent suicide among youth
According to the CDC, the suicide rate for individuals 10-24 years old has increased 56% between 2007 and 2017. In comparison to the general population, more than half of people experiencing homelessness have had thoughts of suicide or have attempted suicide, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported.
Phebe Vayanos, assistant professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has been enlisting the help of a powerful ally -artificial intelligence- to help mitigate the risk of suicide.
"In this research, we wanted to find ways to mitigate suicidal ideation and death among youth. Our idea was to leverage real-life social network information to build a support network of strategically positioned individuals that can 'watch-out' for their friends and refer them to help as needed," Vayanos said.
Vayanos, an associate director at USC's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS), and her team have been working over the last couple of years to design an algorithm capable of identifying who in a given real-life social group would be the best persons to be trained as "gatekeepers" capable of identifying warning signs of suicide and how to respond.
an article by Jennifer Fleetwood (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) published in The British Journal of Sociology Volume 70 Issue 5 (December 2019)
Abstract
Street harassment is recognized as an ‘everyday’ form of violence against women. Influenced by contemporary sociologies of everyday life, this article examines women responses to street harassment, drawing on over 500 first person narratives submitted to the website of Hollaback London.
The narrative structure highlights women’s actions, which (like street harassment) have generally been considered inconsequential.
Quantitative content analysis reveals the extent and variety of strategies employed by women, including speaking back, calling on others for help, physically fighting back, walking away and an array of ‘small’, everyday actions and gestures that aim to resist harassment.
I argue that these responses comprise everyday self‐defence practice. Furthermore, the notion of narrative habitus is employed to argue that Hollaback narratives do not just describe harassment, but that reading narratives can generate dispositions for self‐defence.
Narrative analysis reveals the way that satire is employed to make space for women’s successful self‐defence. I argue that Hollaback narratives do not just offer storylines or scripts for resisting street harassment but foster a style for doing so.
Analysis considers the limits to narratively motivated self‐defence.
This research demonstrates that, in order to ‘see’ women’s resistance, we need to pay close attention to the everyday as the site of both oppression and moments of liberation.
a column by Jacques Melitz for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Why did the Lydians decide, in the 7th century B.C., to coin electrum?
On the face of it, this alloy of gold and silver would seem a particularly poor choice for coinage since its natural gold content varies and is hard to gauge with precision.
This column suggests that it is the very uncertainty of the value of electrum, and the close control that the Lydians had over its gold content in coin form, that were the keys to the benefit of its coinage. It also suggests that the subsequent decision by the Greeks to coin silver was driven by the government's plan to subsidise the lower denomination coins, perhaps in order to economise its own transaction costs in its budgetary affairs.
an article by Laura Stefanut published in Eurozine
Photo by Laura Stefanut via Balkan Insights.
‘Sweatshops’ are usually associated with labour outsourced to east- and south-east Asia, but they exist inside the EU too. Gruelling working conditions in Romania’s low-pay garment industry, which supplies clothes for mid-market and luxury retailers alike, force many people to go abroad in search of a real living wage.
This article was published in IWMpost #124. Fall/Winter 2019.
a column by Ariela Caglio, Sébastien Laffitte, Donato Masciandaro and Gianmarco Ottaviano for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
One of the most important challenges of globalisation is to adapt regulations to new conditions imposed by global competition. This column argues that the introduction by UEFA of its Financial Fair Play regulations, with their break-even requirements for European football clubs, represents an exemplary case of how a change of accounting measurement rules motivated by international competition in the sports entertainment industry can shape businesses’ decisions by redefining their preferences and incentives towards better economic performance. Continue reading
an article by Daniel McArthur (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK) and Aaron Reeves (University of Oxford, UK) published in Sociology Volume 54 Issue 6 (December 2019)
Abstract
Recessions appear to coincide with an increasingly stigmatising presentation of poverty in parts of the media.
Previous research on the connection between high unemployment and media discourse has often relied on case studies of periods when stigmatising rhetoric about the poor was increasing. We build on earlier work on how economic context affects media representations of poverty by creating a unique dataset that measures how often stigmatising descriptions of the poor are used in five centrist and right-wing British newspapers between 1896 and 2000.
Our results suggest stigmatising rhetoric about the poor increases when unemployment rises, except at the peak of very deep recessions (e.g. the 1930s and 1980s).
This pattern is consistent with the idea that newspapers deploy deeply embedded Malthusian explanations for poverty when those ideas resonate with the economic context, and so this stigmatising rhetoric of recessions is likely to recur during future economic crises.
FOIMan corrects some common assumptions in handling FOI requests in this article for the Freedom of Information Journal.
In any line of work, particularly one which is labour intensive, it is common to develop shortcuts and rules of thumb to keep things moving. Over the last fifteen years a number of assumptions and ‘principles’ have grown up around the handling of FOI requests. Some of these are genuinely useful, at least some of the time, but others can make life harder for confused practitioners, chip away at the rights of applicants, or even actively hinder compliance.
In this article published in the Freedom of Information Journal in October, I examine four common assumptions about the handling of FOI requests and explain why they shouldn’t be taken at face value. The article looks at the following assertions:
requests should always be handled in an applicant and purpose-blind manner
if the requested information has been published, it doesn’t have to be provided
if the information requested is incomplete, it is not held
if someone asks for correspondence from an individual, letters signed by their secretary can be discounted.
If you were surprised to see any of the points listed here, do please have a read of Mythbusting FOI (PDF 3pp)
Validation and guidance help individuals, organisations and Member States adapt to career challenges and create successful lifelong learning systems. However, little is known about how they are linked in practice and how this connection can be made more efficient.
Building on Cedefop’s expertise in the two areas, this study – based on analysis of 13 practices from 12 countries – explores how coordination between career guidance and validation of non-formal and informal learning can be improved. Results point to three factors:
comprehensiveness: provision of adequate information and guidance before a decision to undergo validation is taken, throughout the entire validation process, as well as after it;
coherence: use of common qualifications or competence standards, occupational standards or other reference frameworks in all the stages of the practice to identify, document and assess skills;
quality of staff, resources, competences, and tools used.
The study concludes with policy recommendations on how to improve the link between guidance and validation.
Downloads
Coordinating guidance and validation (PDF 110pp)
Coordinating guidance and validation: executive summary (PDF 4pp)
Lables: career _guidance, validation_of_learning, skill_assessment,
Discovering Degas
posted by Morgan Meis in 3 Quarks Daily: James Lord at The New Criterion:
What a surprise to discover that modernism starts with Degas! And all the while we’d thought that Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, even Gauguin were the ones who readied the diving board for the great plunge. They had the obvious influences, of course, but a radically original, authentically modern means of making images into works of art was already fully formed in the creations of Degas while all the others were still testing their talents. To be sure, he was older, far more precocious. He also had a gift for modesty and the wit to know that artistic consummation is not to be had through technical virtuosity. Above all, he had the strength of character to measure his progress according to the pitiless standard of tradition. No innovator of the modern era has known better than Degas what full resources for future originality could be gleaned from self-effacing concentration upon great attainments of the past. It was his luck, perhaps, to come along at just the right time; it was his genius to make the rightness of the time hinge upon his own imperious and fleeting vision of a world real to him only because his pictures looked like it. Continue reading
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How Posters Became Art
via Arts and Letters Daily: Hua Hsu in The New Yorker Alphonse Mucha’s “Sarah Bernhardt / La Plume” (1896). On loan from the Richard Fuxa Foundation. Image courtesy Poster House
It’s a story of the collective dreams that circulate in society, connecting the Lamborghini Countach to Paris in 1968.
Around Christmas in 1894, the actress Sarah Bernhardt called Maurice de Brunhoff, the manager of Lemercier, a publishing company in Paris that produced her promotional posters. Bernhardt was one of the most famous entertainers in Europe, in part because of her talent for self-promotion. She needed a poster for her play “Gismonda,” which was reopening in a few days. Most of the Lemercier illustrators were on vacation, so the task fell to Alphonse Mucha, a Czech émigré. Mucha designed a long and narrow poster, filled with soft pastels and gold accents, avoiding the bold colours that were typical of the era. Bernhardt, dressed in the style of Byzantine nobility, was flanked by white spaces, as though she had stepped out of the ether. Her surname arced above her head, like a halo. Continue reading
NOTE 1: The New Yorker limits the number of articles an individual can view in a month.
NOTE 1: The article provides information about an exhibition at the Poster House in New York which took place from June-October 2019. Wikipedia has some information here.
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The National Service: Buttons, boots and gleaming brasses
via The National Archives Blog by Jane Flood WAR: National Registration Act, 1939: manpower organisation and national registration
After the Second World War in 1945, the young men of Britain were called upon to meet new challenges. In a rapidly changing world, the armed forces still needed the manpower to manage the considerable obligations of its Empire and to deal with new threats posed by old allies. And so, in 1947, National Service was introduced as a standardised form of peacetime conscription for all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 30.
More than 1.1 million were conscripted for a one- or two-year stint as national servicemen to help the Army, RAF and to a lesser extent, the Navy. For many young men it was a revolutionary time, giving them experiences, sights and emotions that they would otherwise never have seen or felt. And with the motto being ‘discipline is the end – drill is the means’, all new recruits were in for a shock. Continue reading
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10 of the Best Poems about Wives
via Interesting Literature
Previously we’ve offered ten of the best poems for husbands, so now it’s the other spouse’s turn. Here are ten of the greatest poems about wives, poems for wives, or poems which otherwise concern uxoriousness (love of one’s wife). Continue reading
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A look back at the sales training for Radio Shack's Model 100, a groundbreaking early laptop
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
When Radio Shack released the Model 100 in 1983, it was a breakthrough for portable computing: an AA-battery-powered laptop that you could fit in a briefcase, with a built-in modem and an instant-on Microsoft OS that contained the last production code Bill Gates ever wrote himself. Continue reading Memories of an easier time. I loved my TRS80 – never upgraded to the Model 100 a) cost and b) by the time I might have afforded it I was working with computers all the time.
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Landscape of Scottish Mythological Gods, Goddesses and Giants
via Anceint Origins by Ashley Cowie
Scottish mythology and folklore make a finely woven tartan (travel) rug threaded with a collection of colorful and sometimes dark tales that have emerged from the long history of Scotland; each one elaborated and bettered by successive generations of storytellers. But what if some characters among the pantheon of fairies , helpful and troublesome spirits, demons, angels, mermaids or the malevolent entity of an ancient mountain giant reported as haunting the Cairngorms mountain range, are real? Continue reading
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Heath Robinson: WW2 codebreaking machine reconstructed
via BBC News Due to secrecy surrounding the work of codebreaking at Bletchley Park illustrator W Heath Robinson never knew the machine was named after him
A World War Two codebreaking machine has been reconstructed after a seven-year project so it can run in public for the first time.
The Heath Robinson has been restored at The National Museum of Computing in Milton Keynes by a team of six.
The machine was an early attempt to automate code-cracking and, due to its complexity, was named after the illustrator W Heath Robinson.
Phil Hayes, of the museum, said the work was "quite an achievement".
He said it was completed using a hand-drawn circuit diagram along with replica circuits based on 1940s technology. Continue reading
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Five of the Best Poems about Boats and Ships
via Interesting Literature
The best boat poems, selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘There is no Frigate like a Book’, as Emily Dickinson once said, ‘To take us Lands away / Nor any Coursers like a Page / Of prancing Poetry’. And the link between poems and boats or ships is further strengthened by the wealth of great poems about voyaging on a ship, from the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ through to the twentieth-century modernist poet Ezra Pound’s rewriting of that poem – and beyond. Here are five of the very best poems about ships, boats, and other ocean-going vessels… Continue reading The selection includes 'The Owl and the Pussycat' but does not include one of my personal favourites (it is obviously not a "best")
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‘The White Crow’: Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West
via The National Archives Blog by Liz Bryant
This month [March 2019] sees the release of Ralph Fiennes’ film ‘The White Crow’, written by BAFTA-winning screenwriter David Hare. The movie tells the story of legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev, focusing on his upbringing and his love affair with dance, building up to the extraordinary moment of his defection at the height of the Cold War. Press photo of Rudolf Nureyev at his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961. Source: Wikimedia Commons
16 June, 1961: members of the Kirov Ballet company were gathered at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, ready to fly to London, the next stop on their cultural tour representing the Soviet Union. Among them was Rudolf Nureyev, a 23-year-old dancer who had been astonishing Western audiences and delighting critics with his athleticism, technique and extraordinary dedication to the art form. Continue reading
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Farmer Discovers He’s Been Using a Meteorite As a Doorstop…And It’s Worth $100,000
via Ancient Origins by Cat Bolton, The Epoch Times Source: chagpg /Adobe
When an anonymous farmer in Michigan purchased his property roughly 30 years ago, the previous owner claimed that a massive rock on the property – being used as a doorstop at the time of the property transfer – was actually a meteorite. Now, he’s found out the space rock could make him rich!
The meteorite had fallen in the 1930s, claimed the original farmer, with a “heck of a noise”. Instead of selling it, though, he had passed it on to the new owner when he sold the farm, claiming it was a part of the property. Continue reading As is frequently the case there are some stunning images and also a video of meteorites.
Octopus Arms Are Capable Of Making Decisions Without Input From Their Brains
posted by S. Abbas Raza: Michelle Starr in Science Alert: (fotokon/iStock)
With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart. But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pretty much every other type of organism on Earth.
Rather than a centralised nervous system such as vertebrates have, two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are spread throughout its body, distributed between its arms. And now scientists have determined that those neurons can make decisions without input from the brain. Continue reading
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Explaining the Fall of the Great Akkadian Empire
via Ancient Origins by Wu Mingren Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire. Source: Dave LaFontaine / CC BY-SA 2.0
The Akkadian Empire was an ancient empire that existed towards the end of the 3 rd millennium BC. This was the first empire in Mesopotamia , and some consider it to be the first true empire in world history. The Akkadian Empire was established by Sargon of Akkad , arguably its most famous ruler, and dominated Mesopotamia from its capital, Akkad. The influence of the Akkadian Empire was also felt beyond the borders of the empire. This mighty empire did not last very long, however, as it collapsed about a century and a half after it was founded. Continue readingand discover that one of the possible reasons for the disintegration of this empire was a drought that lasted for 200 years!
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How a quartz watch works
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
How do quartz watches keep time? Steve Mould gives a great demonstration explaining how they work. Quartz is piezoelectric, which means when it is deformed it generates an electrical signal. A quartz watch has a tiny quartz tuning fork that's been calibrated to vibrate at 215 cycles per second. This signal is fed through a series of 14 flip-flop circuits, each of which divides the frequency of the signal by 2. By the time the signal goes through the 14th flip-flop, the frequency is one cycle per second.
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Interview with Terry Castle
via Arts and Letters Daily: Daniel Cohen in The White Review Oops! I picked this item primarily for the image at the top but I cannot do my usual copy and paste! Click through if you like brightly coloured flowers.
Like many people, I discovered Terry Castle through her essay on Susan Sontag. Published in the London Review of Books in 2005, just a couple of months after Sontag’s death, it was an account of the two women’s ‘on-again, off-again, semi-friendship’. In a series of hilarious scenes, Castle makes good on her claim that Sontag was a ‘great comic character’. After skewering her subject, however, she comes full circle: Sontag, she admits at the end, had an enormous – unparalleled – influence on her, long before the two even met. In its messy, conflicted way, it’s one of the finest tributes to anyone that I’ve read. Continue reading
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Moriarty Meets Derren Brown: Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Guy Boothby’s fiendish fin de siècle creation
What happens if you cross Professor Moriarty with his arch-nemesis Sherlock Holmes, add in a bit of Svengali from George du Maurier’s Trilby, a dash of archetypal James Bond villain, and a smidgen of master-conjuror and illusionist Derren Brown? The answer is Dr Nikola, the creation of the prolific Australian writer Guy Boothby, who was once a hugely popular author and the protégé of Rudyard Kipling. Continue reading
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Secrets of 829-Year-Old Post-Viking-Era Shipwreck Revealed
via Ancient Origins by Artec 3D Discovery of Viking shipwreck studied by experts. Source: Paul Moore / Adobe.
During the extension of the seaport of Wismar in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany, archaeologists discovered a number of shipwrecks. One of them, the last to be discovered, was resting in only 9.8 feet (3 meters) of water.
The Baltic Sea water and silt of the harbour had almost perfectly preserved the wreck’s timbers, due to the harbour's seafloor environment being anaerobic, with very low alkalinity, almost no bacteria or rot, and no woodworms. Continue reading
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The weird beauty of fungi: time-lapse videos
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
National Geographic's Hostile Planet series focuses on the "world’s most extreme environments to reveal the animal kingdom’s most glorious stories of survival on this fast and continuously shifting planet." This Boing Boing exclusive excerpts beautiful and creepy time-lapse videos of day-glo coloured slimes and glistening tentacled mushrooms as they erupt, spread, and decay. The highlight of the video is the tragic fate of an ant that gets infected by a cordyceps fungus spore, which highjacks the ant's nervous system, causing it to climb to the top of a stem, where it freezes in place. In a few days, a cordyceps mushroom bursts out of the ant's head, and begins to produce spores that will eventually infect other ants.
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The Cambridge Philosophical Society
via the OUP blog by Susannah Gibson Cambridge-Architecture-Monument” by blizniak. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
In 2019, the Cambridge Philosophical Society celebrates its 200th anniversary. When it was set up in 1819, Cambridge was not a place to do any kind of serious science. There were a few professors in scientific subjects but almost no proper laboratories or facilities. Students rarely attended lectures, and degrees were not awarded in the sciences. The Philosophical Society was Cambridge’s first scientific society. Within a few years of its foundation, it had begun hosting regular meetings, set up Cambridge’s most extensive scientific library, collected and curated Cambridge’s first museum of natural history, and begun publishing Cambridge’s first scientific periodical. Continue reading
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10 of the Best John Clare Poems Everyone Should Read
via Interesting LIterature
The best poems by John Clare selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
John Clare (1793-1864) has been called the greatest nature poet in the English language (by, for instance, his biographer Jonathan Bate), and yet his life – particularly his madness and time inside an asylum later in his life – tends to overshadow his poetry. So here we’ve picked ten of John Clare’s best poems which offer an introduction to his idiosyncratic style and wonderful eye for detail, especially concerning the natural world. Continue reading
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Early History of Carthage
via About History
Carthage was founded by immigrants from the Phoenician city of Tire in the late IX century B.C.
According to legend, the city was founded by the widow of a Phoenician king named Dido. She promised a local tribe to pay a gem for a piece of land, limited to the skin of a bull, but on condition that the choice of place was left to her. After the deal was concluded, the colonists chose a convenient place for the city, ringing it with narrow belts made from a single bull hide. In the first Spanish chronicle “Estoria de España”(1282 or 1284), prepared by King Alfonso X on the basis of Latin sources, reports that the word “carthon” in that language meant skin, and because she called the city Carthago”. In the same book are the details of the subsequent colonisation. Continue reading
Joseph Heller: Eight years, two titles and one well-timed war: how Catch-22 became a cult classic
via the Guardian by Mark Lawson
As George Clooney’s new adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel comes to TV, Mark Lawson looks at its unlikely path to success – and why Heller thought everyone got it wrong Christopher Abbott as Yossarian in George Clooney’s adaptation of Catch-22. Photograph: Philipe Antonello/Hulu
When Joseph Heller, a 38-year-old New York advertising executive, published his first novel in 1961, an urgent query came in from the Finnish translator: “Would you please explain me one thing? What means catch-22? I didn’t find it in any vocabulary. Even the assistant air attaché of the USA here in Helsinki could not explain exactly.” Within a couple of years – after Catch-22 had become a million-selling paperback in the US and UK, and done well in Finland and most other countries – nobody needed the phrase translated. It is likely to be familiar to those who watch the new six-part TV adaptation on Channel 4, even if they do not know the book. Continue readingA fascinating and intellectually stimulating piece which took up a lot of my time. It was well spent! And the mini-series is available on DVD but it is not cheap unless you can score a second-hand copy
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How the Escalator Forever Changed Our Sense of Space
Sure, the 19th-century invention transformed shopping. But it also revolutionised how we think about the built environment
via Arts and Ldetters Daily: Megan Carpenter in Smithsonian Mag Commuters ride up escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro Station in Washington, D.C.(Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Great technological developments create a universe. The invention of the escalator was, literally, ground-breaking. It expanded our concept of space and time—and, accordingly, redefined the possibilities for commerce.
For those within the intellectual property system, the escalator is famous for its association with “trademark genericide.” Genericide occurs when trademarks become so famous that they cease to identify the source of goods or services in the minds of consumers and instead become names for the goods themselves. “Escalator” is right up there with “aspirin,” “cellophane,” and “kitty litter” as an example of a brand that morphed into its product. And it’s true that the intellectual property story of the escalator is, in part, how Charles Seeberger’s brand of moving staircases grew to symbolise the thing itself. But the larger story is about the cultural phenomenon, an invention that transformed the way we interact with the world. How people move. How sales are made. How the built world is constructed. Continue reading
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Sneaky Blinders: Edgar Wallace’s Complete Four Just Men
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle escapes to early twentieth-century London with the crime-fighting Four Just Men
There is something irresistibly inspiring about an author who rose from humble beginnings to become popular and successful. J. K. Rowling is the most notable recent example. Charles Dickens went from being put to work in a blacking factory aged 12, after his father was imprisoned for debt, to amassing a fortune of £93,000 – quite a few million in today’s money. But perhaps my favourite ‘rags to riches’ story is that of Edgar Wallace, who was born out of wedlock to two actors in 1875 and adopted by a Billingsgate fish porter. Wallace rose up the journalistic ranks to become a hugely popular – and prolific – writer of thrillers in particular, and was perhaps at one stage the most famous author on the planet. Years later, when he had become a household name, Wallace was asked to contribute to a celebrity feature in a newspaper, titled ‘What I Owe My Parents’. Wallace’s postcard-reply was as long as the feature’s title, at just five words: ‘sorry, cock, I’m a bastard’. Continue reading
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An undiplomatic diplomat: Morton Howell in Cairo
via The National Archives Blog by Dr Juliette Desplat George Lloyd to the Foreign Office, 1 March 1926 (catalogue reference: FO 371/11608)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a diplomat is ‘a person who can deal with others in a sensitive and tactful way’. But what happens when they don’t? In the 1920s in Cairo, the British Residency had many a problem with Dr Morton Howell, the American Minister – some amusing, others with more serious political consequences.
On 1 March 1926, George Lloyd, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, asked the Foreign Office to make representations to Washington and to secure Howell’s removal from Egypt – a request he would subsequently make numerous times. The American Minister, he reported, had called on Egyptian nationalists and was spreading anti-British propaganda. ‘Dr Howell’s obtuseness and lack of savoir faire makes his activities here ridiculous perhaps rather than dangerous,’ he wrote, adding that he would still ‘be very grateful for anything that [the Foreign Office] could do to secure a change’ (FO 371/11608). Continue reading
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Carcassonne: Europe’s Largest Medieval Fortified City Was Defended by Straw Soldiers
via Ancient Origins by Wu Mingren Medieval Carcassonne town view, France. Source: Nejron Photo / Adobe
Carcassonne is Europe’s largest fortified city that still stands today. It is located in Aude, a department in the southern French region of Occitanie. The city is divided into two parts by the Aude River, the Ville Basse and the Cité - the latter being the finest example of a fortified medieval town in Europe. These well-preserved fortifications are the city’s main attraction, drawing tourists from near and far and earning it a place in UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Continue reading
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Watch: How traffic light programming helps manage congestion
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
From Practical Engineering:
Traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. However we accommodate it now or in future, traffic will continue to be one of the biggest challenges in our urban areas and traffic signals will continue to be one of its solutions.
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Seeing better
via McGee’s Musings
When I was in the fourth grade, we figured out that I needed glasses. I was complaining about having trouble reading what was on the blackboard and after moving to the front row didn’t solve the problem, I was dispatched to an eye doctor. Sure enough, I was nearsighted. A few weeks later I got my first pair of glasses.
I particularly remember the sense of wonder at discovering that street signs were something you were supposed to be able to read from inside the car as you drove by. My eyes weren’t shaped to see the world in 20/20 on their own but I inhabited a world where a simple prosthetic compensated for that limitation. Continue reading
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Crusoe in Concrete: J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reappraises J. G. Ballard’s 1970s masterpiece
‘Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.’ This remark by J. G. Ballard, who has a claim to being one of the most important English writers of the second half of the twentieth century, strikes at the heart of what drives his fiction. And although it’s not his most famous book, for me the remarkable tour de force that is Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island best demonstrates this. Continue reading Note: this is a much longer read than we normally get from Dr Tearle. Well worth the time.
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4,000-Year-Old Teeth of Egyptian Papyrus Maker Speak of Hard Work and Chronic Pain
via Ancient Origins by Ashley Cowie Ancient human skeleton missing teeth ( gerasimov174 / Adobe Stock )
Mendes was once the capital of Ancient Egypt and it was in the necropolis here in the 1970s that archaeologists discovered the remains of a very special, but common woman, who lived around 2181-2055 BC.
In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Cooper Beeches , Sherlock says to Watson: ”Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! Well, “tell a weaver by his tooth” is exactly what a team of historical detectives have just done in Egypt. Continue reading
Standing in Galileo’s shadow: Why Thomas Harriot should take his place in the scientific hall of fame
via the OUP blog by Robyn Arianrhod Night sky in Hatchers Pass, Alaska. Photo by McKayla Crump. CC0 via Unsplash
The enigmatic Elizabethan Thomas Harriot never published his scientific work, so it’s no wonder that few people have heard of him. His manuscripts were lost for centuries, and it’s only in the past few decades that scholars have managed to trawl through the thousands of quill-penned pages he left behind. What they found is astonishing – a glimpse into one of the best scientific minds of his day, at a time when modern science was struggling to emerge from its medieval cocoon. Continue reading
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SOE and the art of blending in
via The National Archives Blog by Neil Cobbett SOE Mid East-Balkans April-Dec 1944 Capturers of Gen Kreipe – Crete.
Catalogue reference: HS 7/273
The methods used by Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents to pass as members of the local population in Nazi-held territory were carefully thought out; they were never used lightly or over-egged, and required subtlety and understatement. Disguises or camouflage were used in a number of cases but there were alternative means by which SOE agents managed to ‘pass’ as locals in the area they operated, or in the identities they had assumed.
The incidence of cases where agents needed to use disguises was thus relatively small. Disguises were usually adopted where an agent had to return to the place where they had been active, after narrow escapes from Axis personnel and where their identity had become known. Continue reading
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The Fate of English Witches: From Water Torture to Divine Retribution
via Ancient Origins by Charles Christian Hecate: Procession to a Witches' Sabbath by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) (Public Domain)
During the Early Modern period of European history – from the Renaissance (1500) to the French Revolution (1800), hundreds of thousands of witches suffered the terrible fate of being burned at the stake for their beliefs during the so-called ‘Burning Times’. Modern estimates suggest a revised figure of between 40,000 to 50,000 over a period of 300 years, however, following my own researches into witchcraft trials in England , it would appear the reality was far less dramatic, albeit not for the individuals convicted of witchcraft! Continue reading
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Half-tonne birds may have roamed Europe at same time as humans
via the Guardian by Ian Sample, science editor
Huge thigh bone in Crimean cave belonged to largest bird found in northern hemisphere An artist’s impression of the giant bird whose remains were found in a Crimean cave. Photograph: Andrey Atuchin
Giant flightless birds that dwarfed modern ostriches and weighed nearly half a tonne roamed Europe when the first archaic humans arrived from Africa, scientists say.
Researchers unearthed the fossilised thigh bone of one of the feathered beasts while excavating a cave on the Crimean peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. It is the first time such a massive bird has been found in the northern hemisphere. Continue reading
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Wheat, wine and wool: What old account statements reveal
via ResearchBuzz Firehose: University of Wurzburg in EurekAlert To explore the Egyptian temple economy through a particular genre of sources: This is the aim of the DimeData research project. The project is led by Professor Martin Andreas Stadler, holder of the Chair of Egyptology; Dr. Maren Schentuleit, research assistant to the Chair, will be responsible for the concrete work. Credit: Gunnar Bartsch / Universität Würzburg
Imagine archaeologists working 2,000 years from now to decipher the account statements of a large commercial enterprise that ended up in the bin in 2018 and have been forgotten since. The majority of these notes are in a deplorable condition: eaten by mice, glued together, torn and fragmentary, and written in a strange script that cannot be found in any other place. What makes the work even more difficult is that the individual scraps of paper are not neatly collected in one place, but are distributed across many museums and libraries in Europe. Which is why, for example, no one has yet noticed that the upper half of a rather unfortunate note is in Vienna, while the lower half is in Berlin. Continue reading
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Starchild’s Play: John Wyndham’s Chocky
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a classic story of alien possession by the master of British science fiction
What if your son had an imaginary friend with whom he often conversed, answering questions that nobody had apparently asked, and behaving as though this invisible and seemingly immaterial Other were the most natural thing in the world? Many parents will probably have observed such a thing with their own children. But what, then, if the idea started to take root, a small but nevertheless nagging doubt, that this imaginary friend was not imaginary at all, but something objectively real, which had inhabited your child’s brain and was capable of speaking directly to him through some form of thought-transference? Continue reading
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Preaching as teaching in the Medieval church
via the OUP blog by Christopher Cannon Church Dom Chapel by Tama66. Public Domain via Pixabay.
We have long assumed that medieval sermons were written for the laity, that is, those with no Latin and probably minimal literacy. But most of the sermons that survive in English contain a significant amount of Latin. What did a medieval lay person understand when he or she heard a sermon?
The function of such Latin is just one part of the blurry picture we have of the nature of medieval literacy. Walter Map (1140-1210) described a boy he knew whose family was clearly of some means (the boy later became a knight) who was, on the one hand, illiteratus, but on the other hand was praised for his penmanship because he “knew how to transcribe any series of letters whatever.” Margery Kempe says in the book she wrote, by dictating her words to a priest, that she is “not lettryd,” but that book describes how she was hit on the head by masonry in a church while she has “hir boke in hir hand,” and her book itself contains Latin quotations she should not have been able to understand. Continue reading
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Black Caesar: The African Chief Who Was Captured by Slavers and Became a Pirate
via Ancient Origins by DHWTY Source: grandfailure / Adobe Stock
Black Caesar was a notorious pirate who lived between the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Originally from West Africa , Black Caesar was captured and sold into slavery. The ship he was in, however, sank off the coast of Florida but Black Caesar survived, and began his career in piracy, eventually rising to notoriety. Eventually, Black Caesar’s reign of terror came to an end in 1718, when he was convicted for piracy and executed. Continue reading
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Corroborating evidence that Herodotus wrote accurately about a boat
via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
Prior to its recent discovery the baris was a ship best known through "the father of history," Herodotus' description. There were other references in literature but no physical sign this type of craft ever truly existed. A recent discovery shows Herodotus was no liar. Continue reading
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Fantasy Book Review: Leigh Brackett’s Sea-Kings of Mars
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the rich and rewarding planetary romances of a forgotten pulp writer
What happens if you cross the Martian adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the pulp fantasy of Robert E. Howard? You get the planetary fantasies of Leigh Brackett, the underrated writer of ‘science fantasy’ who penned a number of hugely entertaining short stories and novellas set on Venus and Mars. Leigh Brackett hasn’t quite been forgotten, at least by those (including the fantasy and SF author Michael Moorcock) who have championed her work and, in the case of Moorcock among others, been inspired by her: Moorcock himself wrote a trilogy of Martian novels, Kane of Old Mars, which were influenced by Burroughs but also, I suspect, by Brackett. (Leigh Brackett also inspired, and later collaborated with, a young Ray Bradbury: one of their co-authored stories, ‘Lorelei of the Red Mist’, is included in the edition I mention and review below.) But nor has she ever quite got her due. Like another queen of the golden age of pulp fantasy, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett has been allowed to fall out of print. Much of Brackett’s best writing goes unacknowledged: she also worked with Jules Furthman and William Faulkner on the critically acclaimed screenplay for the 1946 film version of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Big Sleep, one of the classics of the noir genre. Continue reading
In Pablo Picasso’s Studio During the Nazi Occupation of Paris
Françoise Gilot Recalls Her Life with the Artist
via Arts and Letters Daily: Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake in Literary Hub
I went to a little village called Fontès, near Montpellier, which was then in the Free Zone—not occupied by the Germans—to spend my vacation with Geneviève. While I was there, I passed through one of those crises young people sometimes experience in the process of growing up. Picasso wasn’t the cause of it; it had been coming on for some time before I met him. It was a kind of mental stocktaking brought on by the conflict between the life I had led up until then and the vision I had of the kind of life I should be leading. Continue reading
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Cenobio de Valeron: 350 Small Caves Create Confusion in the Canary Islands
via Ancient Origins by Alicia McDermott Cenobio de Valeron, Gran Canaria Source: Tamara Kulikova / Adobe Stock
The strange appearance of the cavities that comprise the immense Cenobio de Valeron archaeological site in the Canary Islands caused confusion for Spanish colonizers and early scholars. They misunderstood the odd-looking site on Gran Canaria for a pre-Hispanic monastery. And though the true purpose of Cenobio de Valeron is arguably more worldly than spiritual, even today people are still amazed by the unique appearance and history behind the cavities hewn out of volcanic rock by the hands of the island’s indigenous people. Continue reading
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Ancient Siberia was home to previously unknown humans, say scientists
via the Guardian by Nicola Davis The archaeological site near the Yana River in Siberia where two 31,000-year-old milk teeth were found. Photograph: Elena Pavlova/Nature
DNA analysis reveals hardy group genetically distinct from Eurasians and East Asians
It was cold, remote and involved picking fights with woolly mammoths – but it seems ancient Siberia 30,000 years ago was home to a hardy and previously unknown group of humans. Scientists say the discovery could help solve longstanding mysteries about the ancestors of native North Americans.
While it is commonly believed the ancestors of native North Americans arrived from Eurasia via a now submerged land bridge called Beringia, exactly which groups crossed and gave rise to native North American populations has been difficult to unpick.
Now scientists say they might have found some answers to the conundrums. Continue reading DNA profiling being used for something other than catching criminals!
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Watch Chewbacca talk to Han Solo in Cockney English
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
While shooting a scene in "Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back," the late Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) talks to Harrison Ford (Han Solo) in his own Cockney English so Ford can respond more naturally.
Of course Chewie's grunts and growls – an amalgam of bears, lions, badgers, seals, and a walrus – were overdubbed later. (More on that in this post.)
(via Laughing Squid)
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A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘The Boarding House’
via Interesting LIterature
‘The Boarding House’ is one of the 15 stories that make up James Joyce’s 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself). You can read ‘The Boarding House’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of the story. Continue reading
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How historians research when they’re missing crucial material
via the OUP blog by Matthes Selimann HMS Illustrious on Loch Long by Pepe Hogan. Public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. via Ministry of Defense.
How do you write about an historical topic when the principal sources that would reveal what happened and why no longer exist?
Good case studies exist in the Royal Navy’s efforts in the run-up to the First World War to reform the spirit ration (the alcohol allocated to members the Royal Navy) and to suppress homosexuality. In both these instances, policies were in place and actions taken, but there is a near void in the government records.
This may be deliberate. The Admiralty Record Office Digests, the huge leather-bound volumes in which all of the files sent for safe-keeping to the Navy’s central document repository are carefully listed, contains detailed and specific references to numerous important papers with a bearing on what was then euphemistically termed “unnatural crime”. So there can be no doubt that substantial paperwork on this topic once existed. Moreover, some of the annotations in the digests strongly imply the Navy intended to retain the most important of these files for posterity.
Yet, none of them are available today, having been ‘weeded out’ by the end of the 1950s. Accidents do happen and people make mistakes, but it is hard to avoid the impression that these documents are no longer present because someone did not want them to survive. Continue reading
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Bronze Age Ship Found in the Mediterranean is World’s Oldest Shipwreck!
via Ancient Origins by Ed Whelan The 3,600-year-old shipwreck found in the Aegean Sea. Credit: Anadolu Agency
Archaeologists have announced the discovery of a shipwreck loaded with copper ingots in the Aegean Sea that dates back 3,600 years, making it the oldest shipwreck ever found. It is the most important finding in underwater archaeology in at least the last decade.
According to Anadolu Agency, the discovery was made by a team of experts from the Underwater Research Center of the Akdeniz University (UA) in Turkey.
It was found in 160 feet (50m) of water off the western coast of Antalya, a well-known tourist centre. The wreck is over 50 feet long (15m) and was made out of wood. Despite its age, much of the ship is still intact and still carries its precious cargo. Continue reading
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Watch this film of magical hand shadows from 1933
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
"Just a pair of hands -- and a whole lot of clever imagination." (via Juxtapoz on Instagram)
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A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Princess and the Pea’
via Interesting Literature
On a well-known fairy tale
‘The Princess and the Pea’ is one of the shortest of the classic fairy tales. It also manages to be simultaneously one of the most straightforward and one of the most baffling. It’s straightforward because its plot is so simple, but it’s almost too simple. What are we to make of this tale of royal oversensitivity to bed-dwelling vegetables? Does the fairy tale (if it even is strictly a fairy tale at all) have any discernible moral? Continue reading
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The saviour of the sewers
via The Naational Archives Blog by Sally Hughes Joseph Bazalgette
Thursday 28 March [2019] marks the bicentenary of the birth of Joseph Bazalgette – one of the most illustrious Victorians, but someone you may never have heard of.
Think of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Mrs Beeton, Alexander Graham Bell, Mary Seacole or Benjamin Disraeli – they all made their mark but it is the sound you hear every time you flush that is Joseph Bazalgette’s legacy. Bazalgette was the Chief Engineer with the London Metropolitan Board of Works and the man responsible for creating the sewerage system which still serves London today. Without Bazalgette life in London would have been a lot more pungent (even noxious), and you might well have died from typhoid or cholera. Continue reading
a Policy Brief from Eurofound by Isabella Biletta, Tina Weber, Julie Vanderleyden and Nils Brandsma published by Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.
Abstract
Employment statistics consistently show that having a foreign background has an influence on people’s employment prospects. Less is known about the types of jobs workers with foreign backgrounds hold and their working conditions.
This policy brief contributes to filling this gap. It compares the experience of workers with a foreign background to that of native workers; it also distinguishes between the experiences of first-generation and second-generation migrants and between those of women and men.
The evidence shows that having a foreign background can have a negative impact both on labour market integration and working conditions.
However, significant differences emerge between different groups of migrants.
The findings highlight the clear need for a nuanced approach to policymaking to ensure a level playing field in the labour market for workers with a foreign background.
Labels: in lieu of being able to use Blogger’s labelling working_conditions_and_sustainable_work, sustainable_work, working_conditions, inclusive_labour_markets, migration_and_mobility, labour_market_participation,
an article by François Facchini (University Paris, France | Panthéon‐Sorbonne, Paris, France) and Mickael Melki (Paris School of Business, France) published in Policy and Politics Volume 47 Issue 6 (December 2019)
Abstract
This article provides a new explanation for the current democratic crisis by focusing on the growing opposition of citizens to political elites.
Modern democracies are basically representative democracies in the sense that citizens are represented by a governing political elite.
We argue that democracies are in crisis because this political elite cannot possess the knowledge necessary to manage the complexity of the social order and implement rational choices. They fail in dealing with knowledge and thus cast doubt among citizens on the very legitimacy of democracy.
This produces generalised distrust toward elites, who were thought to be able to deal with social complexity. As a result, democracy is considered to be responsible for societal problems while they actually stem from elites' overestimation of their ability to deal with societal complexity.
Labels: (in lieu of Blogger being able to label anything at present)
A Short Analysis of Ted Hughes’s ‘Telegraph Wires’
via Interesting Literature
‘Telegraph Wires’ belongs to Ted Hughes’s middle-late period, before the publication of Birthday Letters shortly before his death in 1998 but after his classic earlier work such as ‘The Thought-Fox’, Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’, and, of course, Crow. Published in 1989 in his collection Wolfwatching, ‘Telegraph Wires’ requires some close textual analysis to untangle some of its language and imagery. Continue reading
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‘The General Prologue’: The Very Beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
via Interesting Literature
The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales is one of the most powerful and evocative poems about spring in all of English literature, from its first reference to the rejuvenating qualities of April showers through to the zodiacal allusions to Aries (the Ram). Here it is, in the original Middle English: a time machine taking us back to a spring more than six centuries ago. Continue reading[in Chaucer’s English]
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A Short Analysis of William Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’
via Interesting Literature
‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem from William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘The Little Black Boy’. Continue reading
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‘Easter Day’: A Poem by Oscar Wilde
via Interesting Literature
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is not now principally known for his poetry (indeed, it might be said that he is still less famous for his writings than he is for … having been Oscar Wilde), and his one enduringly famous poem is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. However, early in his career he wrote more poetry than anything else, and ‘Easter Day’ is one of his finest verses – a nice sonnet about Rome on Easter Day. Continue reading
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‘The Easter Flower’: A Poem by Claude McKay
via Interesting Literature
Festus Claudius McKay (1889-1948), better known as Claude McKay, was a Jamaican-American writer and an important poet in the Harlem Renaissance which also included Langston Hughes. McKay was an atheist (‘a pagan’, as he himself puts it), but one who could enjoy the scent of the Easter lily though he cannot believe in the Easter story. This is what ‘The Easter Flower’ is about. Continue reading
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A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Wild nights! Wild nights!’
via Interesting Literature
‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it. Although ‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ is not perhaps the opening line of Emily Dickinson’s that most readily springs to readers’ minds, the poem is worthy of close analysis. Continue reading
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A Short Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 41: ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance’
via Interesting Literature
Written in the early 1580s, Astrophil and Stella is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature, and sees Sidney exploring his own life-that-might-have-been with Penelope Rich (whom he turned down), through the invented semi-autobiographical figures of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’) and ‘Stella’ (‘star’). Sonnet 41, which begins ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance’, may have been inspired by a real-life tournament at Whitehall in May 1581, and sees Astrophil attributing his success as a jouster and horseman to Stella, who ‘Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.’ Continue reading
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A Short Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Elm’
via Interesting Literature
Like many of her poems, including her mature poems from her late period, ‘Elm’ is an obscure Sylvia Plath poem which resists straightforward analysis. Plath’s complex and ambiguous use of symbolism renders ‘Elm’, if not impenetrable, then at the very least, challenging. Continue reading
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‘Frost at Midnight’: A Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
via Interesting Literature
Wordsworth’s great collaborator on the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written in 1798, the same year that Lyrical Ballads appeared, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a night-time meditation on childhood and raising children, offered in a conversational manner and focusing on several key themes of Romantic poetry: the formative importance of childhood and the way it shapes who we become, and the role nature can play in our lives. Continue reading
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‘Anecdote for Fathers’: A Poem by William Wordsworth
via Interesting Literature
‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is not one of William Wordsworth’s best-known poems. First published in the landmark 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth co-authored with Coleridge, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is narrated by a father who recalls going for a walk with his young son, and coming to realise that the boy’s innocence contains more wisdom than the father’s senior years. ‘A father can learn from his son, too’ might be a concise way of summarising this poem. Continue reading
My career in information management started back in 1987 working on the Training Access Points project. Nearly thirty years later I am still concerned to ensure that end users, and their mediators, have access to appropriate, relevant information in a form that they can understand, at a time and in a place that is right for them. The Internet seems to be for everyone and everywhere but the digital divide gets bigger. By pointing advisers in the direction of resources I hope to increase what can be done to help clients/customers.
I ran my own company for 16 years but am now a semi-retired freelancer.
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