Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

67.68.69.70.71.72.73.74.75.76 77.78.79.80.81.82.83.84.85.86 87.88.89.90.91.92.93.94.95.96 97.98.99.00.01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08

Now this is what I call an audacious heist:

A lioness and two Arabic-speaking parrots have been kidnapped from a zoo in Gaza. Gunmen overpowered the zookeeper before flinging a blanket over the lioness, called Sabrina, and the two birds.

Interesting German product; shelves shaped like letters. You can even see what your own chosen word(s) will look like with the Flash-based Konfigurator;

Yani and Oti showing off their 5 metre swimming badges. They go to a class once a week on Thursdays after school.

I've been playing with GoogleMaps and have created a map of places I've been. I hope to add some photo links and comments to the pop-up flags when I get time (Xmas?).

Strangely, while I was doing this I noticed that Hong Kong island doesn't appear on the Google Map. I'd heard that Google was sucking up to the Chinese authorities and shopping dissident bloggers or something, but removing whole islands seems a bit extreme! See for yourself below - notice the gap between Lamma Island and Kowloon and my poor little flag floating in the South China Sea?

Much to my chagrin, Monday's high hopes seem distant and I've lost two days this week to soaking up and disseminating the trickle of organisational bull from above. Tomorrow urgently needs to be the day for the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack to save my sorry ass before the weekend...

How could this be happening?

The violent, narcissistic thug who was placed behind bars amid much rejoicing 24 years ago is not the same man who will have chemicals pumped into his veins in three weeks time. The Stanley Williams who faces death has undergone a dramatic change in personality, a rehabilitation that has seen him develop into an influential writer on the receiving end of five Nobel Peace Prize nominations and four for the Nobel Prize for Literature. More...

Update: Governor Schwarzenegger is holding a clemency hearing on December 8th having received a petition with 30,000 signatures, including that of Snoop Dogg.

This week my head's been in knowledge management and social networking as tools for creation of cultural identity in organisations. Some of the reading material I've identified to shape thinking on this task is available on the web from University of California at Riverside. A lot of it is heavy duty statistical modelling, but the softer parts that overview the discipline are worth a browse, especially on ego, power and cliques;

Preface
1. Social network data
2. Why formal methods?
3. Using graphs to represent social relations
4. Working with Netdraw to visualize graphs
5. Using matrices to represent social relations
6. Working with network data
7. Connection
8. Embedding
9. Ego networks
10. Centrality and power
11. Cliques and sub-groups
12. Positions and roles: The idea of equivalence
13. Measures of similarity and structural equivalence
14. Automorphic equivalence
15. Regular equivalence
16. Multiplex networks
17. Two-mode networks
18. Some statistical tools
After word
Bibliography

Tentative hunting for a house on the other side of the Pennines on Sunday. After a drive over the tops we had a stroll around Langsett Reservoir and a play on a rope swing, we entered Sheffield from the North-West, through areas like Oughtibridge and Stocksbridge. There's some nice countryside up there but I don't fancy living anywhere too close to steelworks; reminds me too much of Deerhunter.

After lunch in Hillsborough park we trekked into town a bit and things started to look up. The area around the botanical gardens seems OK-ish, a bit gloomy and cramped, though, and a few too many fucking SUVs for my liking. I think the area's called Greystones. Jo likes the student-y areas on Ecclesall Road around the university's Collegiate Crescent campus.

Not got a feel for what Sheffield market is generally like, yet. Some places seem rather underpriced compared to Manchester. The house of the day in High Storrs, for example: good area, good schools, lots of space and nice views, but it's only £235,000, more than I want to pay, but strangely low-looking nonetheless. Did I miss a meeting?

Anway, I've created a Google Map to collect places of interest and facilitate future reconnaissance. Next time my friend Cathy has promised to do a guided tour so I'm sure the picture will become much clearer soon.

A study has concluded that being in regular email contact with a shrink does as much good for sufferers of anxiety disorders as face-to-face sessions:

Preliminary results, based on more than two years of research, showed that internet therapy was comparable with face-to-face treatment in reducing disturbing thoughts and improving stress and anxiety.

When undertaking internet-based therapy, sufferers of panic disorder have an initial face-to-face consultation with a psychologist and are then in regular email contact with the therapist.

The Slow Leadership blog asks 'Are you a workaholic?', and provides 12 questions to help you answer. At first glance I thought I fared quite badly, but on reflection a few days later I realise that work probably doesn't have as much of a grip as I feared.

Although I have been juggling too many balls for a while now, I wouldn't have any difficulty relinquishing them. Also, getting home at 6pm everyday is probably the envy of most working men in this day and age. However, as I write this post at 5.30 in the morning having already been up a couple of hours, one question definitely causes a big red warning light to come on;

You often wake several times in the course of most nights, or have trouble going to sleep, because your mind is occupied with thinking about work and work issues.

In The Guardian, Sid Lowe lauds Ronaldinho's demolition of Real;

It was the Madrid-Barça clásico, Spain's bi-annual Game of the Century, and the Brazilian produced a moment of genius so inspired that even Madrid's fans couldn't help themselves. On the hour, he dashed from inside his own half, left Ramos on his arse (again), glided past Iván Helguera and beat Iker Casillas. Quarter of an hour later, he repeated the trick to round off a 3-0 demolition of the galácticos ... and Madrid's fans, jaws on the floor, did something strange - they began to applaud a Barça player.

Headlines round the world last week as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT launched his One Laptop Per Child initiative at the UN Summit in Tunisia. The new machine creating all the excitement is a lime-green, hand-cranked Linux-based $100 laptop for poor kids. However, a considered reality check a couple of days later from the Fonly Institute - consultants on sustainable IT development in the developing world - whose blog speculates on the potential for problems with the $100 laptop.

Trinidad and Tobago have beaten Bahrain and qualified for the World Cup, meaning that the Seecharan family now have an interesting choice of who to back next Summer. Ideally, there will be a little Caribbean fun in the group stages - conveniently, this is also likely to be the time when the English lads are trashing bier kellers - but we'll still have a proper team to switch to when it comes time for massive over-expectation, anti-climax and recrimination during the quarters. My favourite quote of the day on the triumph of the Soca Warriors comes from the Trinidad Guardian;

In just one and a half hours, T&T was transformed. Crime took a back seat.

Another excellent post from Godfrey Parkin, this time on E-learning 2.0, which Stephen Downes calls an age of 'freedom, informality, creativity, transparency, and revolutionary chaos';

Learning is not the end result of a series of training events; it is an evolving capacity enabled by personal learning networks that are characterized by user-created content, intuitive search and retrieval, and social interaction at any distance.

Holland really is becoming a less tolerant society;

A sparrow knocked over 23,000 dominoes in the Netherlands, nearly ruining a world record attempt before it was shot to death. The unfortunate bird flew through an open window where employees of television company Endemol NV have worked for weeks setting up more than 4 million dominoes. Only a system of 750 built-in gaps in the chain prevented the bird from knocking most or all of the dominoes over.

The bird was shot by an exterminator with an air rifle while cowering in a corner.

Update: The 'exterminator' has now received death threats and Dutch website has offered a bounty for anyone who knocks over the other dominoes in revenge for the death of the sparrow.

What a great find - Soviet-era maps of Western cities including Manchester and Crewe (?) made during the Cold War. The Soviet topographic PDFs are so detailed they even have special symbols for lichen and citrus groves. I wonder if we can get to Gresty Road in Cyrillic in a couple of weeks; more likelihood of success than away goals.

Didsbury
Oti and Yani play in the graveyard of St James church in Didsbury, next to Fletcher Moss park. I like the evening shadows.

Warner Brothers have streamed a film direct to Japanese cinemas for the first time; it was Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. How long until it's available straight to keitai? Which reminds me, I've been watching the recent O₂ ad campaign and looking forward to finding out what i-mode is all about. I remember reading an article by Jakob Nielsen a few years back which sang its praises, particularly for the ease with which it made micropayment possible. Unfortunately, micropayments are all I can afford.

Video of a Japanese game show where the teenage girl group are all lined up in front of a giant lizard with pork chops strapped to their foreheads. Believe it.

I was preparing for an international trip, and I thought, 'what can I do tell as many people as possible in other countries that many Americans vehemently disagree with the policies of our own government?' So I made this shirt, and various wonderful people translated it into all of the official UN languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Buy one for your own international travels.

Much more interesting stuff going on at StarBelliedSeech right now...

In a dream like state I found myself drifting through the constellation of freckles that lay beneath her eyes and searching for my star sign within them.

Article in The Observer entitled 'A law the Stasi would have loved', which describes the full implications of new government efforts to create a police state. It is quite topical to me, since a friend's son was arrested the other week, eventually released without charge, but in the meantime had a DNA swab done. He's 12.

Now comes the sinister part. For all but a truly minor crime, the officer is empowered, using force, if necessary, to take a sample of the suspect's DNA from his mouth, to photograph and fingerprint him and, finally, to take impressions of his footwear. Remember, at this stage, the suspect is just that - a suspect. He has not been found guilty by a court and, under British law, is therefore presumed innocent. And yet he has been forced to submit to a humiliating process as though he were about to enter prison.

That's a lot of crap movies;

Boeing's 777-200LR jetliner lifted off from Hong Kong's International Airport two minutes early today headed toward London, 13,423 miles, 22 hours, 22 minutes and a world record for commercial flight away. With Boeing chief test pilot Suzanna Darcy-Hennemann in the command seat, the big jet lifted off Runway 07R at 10:28 p.m. today turning south across the Pacific Ocean -- a route calculated just three hours before flight time to catch the best tailwinds for what is to become the longest flight ever by a commercial jetliner. More...

Update:

In a trip that included two sunrises, a new long-range Boeing 777 flew more than halfway around the world nonstop on Thursday, breaking an aviation distance record set by a B-52 bomber 43 years ago. The flight, lasting 22 hours and 42 minutes, demonstrated for the first time that a new generation of jetliners would leave no two cities beyond a nonstop flight - though a handful of flights may need to carry fewer passengers to make the distance. More...

Here's our model of Gary Doherty melting away into the flames shortly after today's Molineux debacle, much like our chances of promotion.

I was heading for a lunchtime stroll today when I picked up a flyer for SHU's International Week that fell open on the Caribbean in Britain: Cultures of Resistance lecture starting in the next ten minutes. I ditched the fresh air and headed promptly over.

It was delivered by one of our History professors, Barbara Bush, and despite the low turnout, it was worth the effort to hear her trace the maintenance of West Indian culture from the slave ships through to present day Britain. It was illustrated with various media, including some moving photos of 50s immigrants posing proudly in their new nurse and bus conductor uniforms for the folks back home.

As the Professor described the race riots of the 70s, I smiled as she quoted lyrics from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a hero of my youth;

Broke glass splintering, fire
Axes, blades, brain blas'
Rebellion rushin' down the wrong road
Storm blowin' down the wrong tree

The smile was rapidly wiped away, though, in the Q&A near the end, when one of our (black) nursing lecturers laid into the (white) presenter for mistaking 'curry goat' for 'goat curry'; one of several rather pointed and pointless observations that seemed to be a product of cultural territoriality.

More: http://www.movinghere.org.uk/ - Caribbean and Asian Immigration website.

Tonight's session at the Cornerhouse was another box of delights. Looking back at last week's Ride the High Country, we discovered how it exploited our expectations of the Western genre to mourn the passing of the mythical West; an early scene, for example, where a car unexpectedly rolls through a shot.

Opinions differed on the female character in the film, a naive, closeted preacher's daughter who has to be saved from the unwanted attentions of her fiancee's depraved brothers. I was rather chuffed to be the only person who had seen any other Peckinpah films - Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia and Straw Dogs - and was able to point out the use of sexual violence in all three works, sparking a short discussion about how Peckinpah's misogyny divides audiences.

After a short break spent hovering over cut-price sushi for Jo in the nearby Sainsbury's wandering whether to chance its freshness for a couple more hours, we finished up on genre by looking at horror; vampire films to be exact.

The lecturer - Andy Willis of Salford University - did a clever thing here, and as a trainer I was full of admiration. First we watched a clip of Dracula from the 50s with Christopher Lee and spent ten minutes focussing on the iconography - garlic, crosses, virgins, bats. Then we were told we were going to watch an unnamed modern vampire movie, and were again invited to predict. The inevitable guessing included Lost Boys, Blade and Buffy, but it turned out to be Mr Vampire 2, a goofy Chinese vampire film; not what we were expecting at all.

It was a brilliant move, elegantly highlighting the culture-specific dimension of genre and finishing the session with a flourish.

Norwich City eased the pressure on their manager Nigel Worthington with a 1-0 win at home to Cardiff, but they needed a Neil Alexander own-goal. The goalkeeper was struck on the back of the head by a Darren Purse clearance and the ball rebounded into the net.