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Is ‘elf and safety’ destroying community responsibility?
The other day I was browsing the online edition of the Sunday Times and came across a brief quote from Jeremy Clarkson : “I mean, if you really want to serve the nation, you could stop whining about the council gritters and shovel some snow off a school playground yourself.” This set me thinking back
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Bust the brainy kids – you know it makes sense!
Although this little gem of a story happened in the US, I have no doubt that given a few more months it’s likely to happen here. Well…I don’t know…at least the Yanks encourage science and technology enough to actually organise things like science fairs… However, back to the story. Smart kid builds a motion detector
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Myleene Klass, ‘PC’ and PCs
This is a long story in celebrity terms…but stay with me. It’s one of those tales where we can’t tell who’s version of what happened is actually the right one – so many versions of what happened it’s like a Celebrity Rashomon! It starts some weeks ago when Myleene Klass commented that immigrants to the UK
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Google does the right thing (for Google, that is)
For a long time I’ve taken the mickey out of Google’s famous slogan ‘Do No Evil’. I mean, most companies and individuals go through life with their ethical and moral compass intact and manage to perform this simple piece of behavioural calculus every day of their lives. To me, it takes a particularly arrogant bunch
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Enough toys for the boys (and girls)?
I’ll be honest; I’m rarely rising the bleeding edge of technology. Despite being professionally involved in IT and electronics since 1982, it’s safe to say that I’m not one of the guys who gets calls to become an ‘early adopter’ of some thrilling piece of technology that I can’t live without. I use what I
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When Twitter gets like TV – lots of repeats!
As some of you may know, I’m a newbie at Twitter. indeed, my first efforts were not impressive, I stopped, then re-joined with better results. My saga and comments are briefly recorded in these two blogposts, here and here. I’m now getting in to an almost regular Tweeting habit, though I’m still a consumer rather
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The pleasure of the period-piece detective
I think my interest in what might be called ‘period piece detectives’ started many years ago, when I watched the big screen version of ‘Death on the Nile’ featuring the wonderful Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I stunned my wife (and myself) by actually solving the murder pretty early on. Since then, I’ve been rather
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Over-reaction or Appropriate Response?
The recent arrest of 2 men on an Emirates Airlines flight for making a verbal bomb threat and for being drunk and disorderly is really nothing new; it’s happened a few times since 9/11. Up until about 1999, I was one of those smart alecs who would make the witty comment about being careful with
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Online Exhibitionists affect privacy for us all…
I came up with the title for this piece after reading this article on the BBC Website about people who the authors of a paper called ‘online exhibitionists. The idea is that much privacy legislation is based around the idea of what levels of privacy someone can reasonably expect to have when out and about