Charles's Bits and Bobs

A Different Type of Lateral Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:44:00 +0000

I've heard a lot said about lateral, blue sky and out of the box thinking, but rarely seen it put into action.

The Economist reports on an project in High Point, North Carolina designed to make a rough neighbourhood liveable in again. By adopting a new and alternative strategy, they have been able to make a difference.

The area had been taken over by drug dealers and the police department standard reaction was to come in once in a while like an invading army, grab the dealers and leave again. While this shut down drug dealing for a couple of hours, it did poisoned communutity relations

But then they tried something different. On the advice of David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, they started talking to community leaders in West End. They found out who the street drug-dealers were. There were fewer than they had expected: only 16, of whom three were habitually violent. Patiently, they compiled dossiers on each of them. Then they arrested and prosecuted the violent ones, and invited the rest in for a chat.

The young dealers were shown the evidence against them, and given a choice. If they stopped dealing drugs and carrying guns, they would not be prosecuted. A “community co-ordinator” sat down with each of them and asked him what he needed to go straight: a job? Drug treatment? A place to stay? An alarm clock to get to work on time? The community promised to help with all these things. The dealers’ neighbours and even grandmothers stood up and told them that what they were doing was wrong, and had to stop. Then prosecutors warned them that if they did not stop that day, they would be sent to jail, possibly for the rest of their lives.

It worked. Nearly all the dealers reformed, bar the odd bit of shoplifting. You can still buy drugs behind closed doors in High Point, but the intervention was never about drugs. It was about making the neighbourhood liveable again. Fears that the open-air drug market would simply move elsewhere proved unfounded. As the same technique was tried in other neighbourhoods and for other types of crime, such as gang-related muggings, the city’s overall violent crime rate fell noticeably, from 8.7 per 1,000 people in 2003 to 7.3 in 2008.

14% Drop In People Believing Climate Change Is Man Made

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:38:00 +0000

This weeks George Monbiot column in Guardian explores the worrying trend that more and more people think that global warming is not man made.

As he says

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

Its worth reading the whole article, especially for the work by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker who suggest that the more we get confronted by bad news, the more strongly we stick to our own world view and reject ideas that suggest that we may need to change.

As he says in the final paragraph..

And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the last two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

When Comics Are A Force For Good

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:17:00 +0000

There's an interesting new exhibition taking place at Lazarides Gallery on Greek Street in Soho, London.

Entitled Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption the exhibition

"brings together an eclectic mix of comic book and graphic novel work in a bid to politicise a new generation of activists through the medium of popular comic culture. It will feature a powerful range of political stories created by some of the world’s best comic and graphic artists such as Dave McKean, Pat Mills, Peter Kuper and Dan Goldman. It will also include a collaborative piece of work by acclaimed musician and writer Dev Hynes (aka Lightspeed Champion) and Luke Pearson, the winner of the 'Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption' Competition which ran back in August.

There's also an anthology of the best of the work available from the 5th of November

Ctrl.Alt.Shift was setup last year by the international development agency Christian Aid and aims to use art – whether comics, film or music – to create a new generation of activists.

The Guardian covered this this in an article called Pow! Comic-strip heroes fight against corruption

Think You're Having a Bad Day?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:40:00 +0000

If so, try reading this sobering article about life in Katine, Uganda and how its residents put up with issues that are hundreds time worse than what most of us have to deal with with on day to day basis.

To quote from the concluding paragraph

I've learned a little of something I have seen a lot of: patience. Many of the women I have met have a capacity for endurance that is extraordinary. No doubt they know that frustration can send people mad – remember the last time you were exasperated by some incompetent service, and then multiply that a thousand times. In lives this constrained, survival requires a strict emotional economy. And yet, along with that so often comes a wonderful warmth and an irrepressible humour – so many smiles, so much laughter. It is why every time you leave, you immediately want to come back – because the immediacy and strength of human connection, often so elusive at home, is tangible there.

More Technical Support Humour

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:39:00 +0000

Another cartoon from Private Eye

Perhaps I'm emphasising a little too much with the son here, but if you're going to act as unofficial technical support, you might as well have a uniform

What Does the Financial Sector Actually Produce

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:27:00 +0000

Considering the billions that have been poured into the world financial system to stabilise and cancel out all the bad bets that the financial whizz kids made, you have to ask what does the financial sector produce.

Go back 40 years, before the Big Bang and the stock market did a good job of allowing companies to raise money via share issues. While it was a bit of all old boys club and insider trading common place, decisions made on the markets didn't reverberate as much as they do today. That money would be used to invest in more plant and machinery and ideally employ more people.

Skip forward to today and what happens to the trillions flowing around the system. While some is still used to invest in new plant, you do wonder what the money invested in credit default option and swaps was for and for whom.

Add into the fact that a lot of the investments were made by banks on their own accounts and you start to question the actual benefits of the financial services. They were too blind or stupid to see the huge risks they were taking, yet we had no choice but to bail them out as otherwise they would have taken us all down. According to the Observer today, the FSA was hours from shutting down cash machines

Their defenders will point out all the tax they have paid over the years, but surely this is no where near the money we have paid out to bail them out.

One last thing - just think of the worlds problems we could have made a start on solving, if all the brain power that went into building algorythmic trading systems went into looking at the issues of global poverty, clean water and climate change

The Secrets Behind Technical Support

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:21:00 +0000

If you're one of those people who ends up doing technical support for parents, grand parents, wives etc simply because your job has some degree of IT, I think you'll appreicate this image from the guys at the web comic xkcd

The Difference between OK and Great

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:28:00 +0000

Producing something that people will remember always requires a little more effort than doing something that is just OK.

Seth Godin uses the example of cooking an egg to perfectly illustrate the difference between the two in his blog post - Quality, scale and the regular kind

Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:19:00 +0000

Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

The local greengrocers have started stocking Gower broad beans and after last years failures to make an interesting salad out of them, I went in search of another recipe.

The following is an minor adaptation of a Nigel Slater recipe from his The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen book and I've reduced the amounts needed.

800g broad beans in their pods
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
juice of half a small lemon
Small handful of dill

1 .Pod the beans and drop into boiling water for 8 mins
2. Drain and then pulse to a coarse puree in a food processor
3. Add olive oil, lemon juice and the dill
4. Pulse until you it is almost smooth

The Computer Whisperer

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:45:00 +0000

From this weeks Private Eye

This Is Art

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:27:00 +0000

If you're getting a bit tired of diamond skulls, tracy emin and video installations, then feast your eyes on this oil painting from friend Liam O'Farell.

Its been accepted into the Royal Academy Summer exhibition and sold on the first day

Liams got a unqiue style and you can see more examples of work in his online gallery

Who Set The 160 Character Limit For SMS Messages?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:18:00 +0000

160 characters seems a rather arbitrary limit, but according to the LA Times article Why text messages are limited to 160 characters, a lot of research went into this.

When the SMS standard was agreed, network bandwidth was was expensive, so uncapped messages would have cost too much and all the carriers agreed to a limit.

Three things helped them determine the 160 characters

Typing out random sentences always seemed to come in around 160 characters
Postcards often had less than 150 characters
Telex messages also only had 15o characters

From this they surmised that a message could be communicated in 160 characters or less

Could Google have caught swine flu earlier?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:58:00 +0000

Interesting piece in Wired about how Googles Flu Trends team managed to miss the increase in searches from Mexico on flu

Makes the point that computers are often only useful once they know what to start looking for, although you think they might have picked up the trend below.

Read the full Wired article - Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early

The Joy of Words

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:44:00 +0000

Over the last couple of years, the TV and papers have loved to analyse politicians speeches to see which are the most popular words that are used.

Worldle allows you to do this for any piece of text - the larger the word, the more often it has been used

This is a breakdown of all the tags in my delicous account.

Want to sell more chips - stick a salad on the menu

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:10:00 +0000

New research indicates that presence of healthy dishes on a menu can lead some people to choose dishes that aren't necessarily good for them.

A a study, students were given two menus, one with salad and chips and the other with just chips. The menu with salad and chips was three times as popular.

You can read more at in the New York times article - Want Salad With That? Make It Fries

Everything Search Engine - The very useful file finder

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:32:00 +0000

If you're like me and good at naming files, but not so good at remembering exactly where you left them on your computer, the Everything Search Engine is an excellent tool.

Unlike heavy weight applications such as Google Desktop Search which searches the contents of the files, Everything simply indexes the file name and can index the contents of a whole hard drive in seconds and best of all its free.

The only downside is that it only works on NTFS drives and not FAT32

This is a screenshot showing all the files on my PC with the word mumbles in it

Not that I'm trying to scare you...

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:27:00 +0000

Just thought I'd draw your attention to this graphic from the Guardian about what happens if we don't start doing something about global warming.

When The Crowds Are Not So Wise

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:42:00 +0000

James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" came up with some interesting points in his article How the bandwagon wrecked the wisdom of market crowds in Tuesday Guardian when talking about the credit crunch and why the wisdom of crowds didn't kick in.

Namely

The link between pay and non long term performance was not existent - people were paid on the instant short return results
The long term consequences of failure did not register in people minds
People outsourced responsibility to others such as ratings agencies rather than check into it themselves

The fact that Bernie Madoff 'ran' a $50,000,000,000 fund that barely traded any equities over a 20 year period would suggest that there is some truth in this.

Learning from Bees and Ants

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:54:00 +0000

Looks like instead of learning from the birds and the bees we should have learning from bees and ants instead.

According to the BBC website

Bees and ants are true team players unlike other creatures who seek safety in numbers for selfish reasons, according to researchers.

Scientists from Edinburgh and Oxford Universities used mathematical models to study "swarm behaviour".

They found that bison or fish want to get to the centre of large groups to keep themselves safe from predators.

Ants and bees worked together as a single unit, and were prepared to die for the greater good of the colony.

You can read the full article at

Bees and ants 'operate in teams'

The Journey of a Carrot: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Last year, I blogged about how far the humble carrot travelled between the field it was grown in to your local supermarket. Now using Google Maps we can illustrate this.

View Larger Map

How far away is your emergency?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Seth Godin whom I have posted about before has a knack of writing short pithy posts. His latest called How far away is your emergency asks why we always wait for a disaster to happen before actually thinking about how we could prevent it

While you're reading it, try his post called Direct from Consumer Marketing about the stupidity of ignoring those customers who complain

A Whole New Way to Build A House

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:15:00 +0000

How authors choose which cars their characters drive

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:07:00 +0000

Post from William Gibson about why his characters use Apple Macs and drive VW's. Its written in response to those people who said he was taking product placement money.

William Gibsons novels are great as he has a knack of describing the alternative worlds his character exist in and as he says "I have to convince myself, before I can hope to convince you", so writes about the products he uses.

Flower - The First Game about Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Wired.com writes about a new game called Flower where you control a flower petal and guide it across a ravaged landscape. As you touch other flowers, they gently come to life, as does the rest of the landscape.

Certainly makes a change from all the other games on the market at the moment and looks like an interesting way of getting people to think about it.

Read the Wired Article - Flower Power Blooms in First Climate-Change Game

Wired Magazine: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Just like to thank a certain staff member at Wired (you know who you are...) who picked up on my blog post and is arranging for my missing issues to be sent out to me. Its good to see that a least one company is monitoring the blogosphere to see what is being said about them.

Shame on the customer service department who took 5 days to answer my original email which was submitted via their CRM system and who chose not to answer my questions.