So, since my last post, everything has changed. I don’t just mean that I’ve finished my dissertation, and am therefore free. I have, and am, but that isn’t it. No… I’ve managed to get a job, and a proper one too!

A little over a month ago, not long after I wrote my last blog post come to think of it, a friend sent me a link to PricewaterhouseCooper’s recruitment page. You see, he was concerned about what I was doing with my life, and saw that PwC were still recruiting for this September, and thought that I should at least consider it. Mired in the depths of academic depression, I thought that an attempt to get into the real world made a great deal of sense, so I filled in an application and sent it off.

I’d never really thought about a career in accountancy before, perhaps as my educational choices demonstrate, but it seemed to make sense. They train you in the dark arts of finance and business over three years, getting the hallowed ACA qualification at the end of three years hard toil, and then you’re unleashed on the world as a chartered accountant, armed with perhaps the best understandings of business available, apparently. As an avid Dragon’sDen watcher, and Apprentice addict, this sound business founding sounded great so an application actually sounded like a very good idea! And besides, my sister, brother-in-law and flatmate are all accountants, and they seemed to be doing pretty nicely for themselves…

Well, a matter of minutes after I’d sent in my form, I was pinged back an email asking my to dust off my reasoning abilities and take a maths and logic test. I took them. I then got another email me thanking me form my time, and that they’d be in touch soon. It was quite late by this stage, so I went to bed.

The next day I’d decided to get up early to ‘crack on’ with my dissertation, so the alarm went off at 5:00am. Fate, though, seemed not to want me to get cracking though. As my eyes struggled to focus on the overly bright laptop in the early morning gloom I saw I had another email: it was an invitation from PwC to attend an interview in a few days time!! Well, I accepted of course, arranged a time, and then went straight to the shop to buy the FT!

Well, long story short, after a long series of interviews, reasoning tests, individual and group exercises, and networking sessions, I now sit here in front of a conformation of my start date in the Bristol office of PwC! It really is a very odd feeling: to have a future, that is. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed being a student, but really the MSc was a step into student-dom too far. I’ve enjoyed it, but really I’d had enough of the whole student thing, and was beginning to get a bit depressed about job prospects to boot. I guess, as I said in my first post here, the reason I dived into an MSc was to avoid the recession, but it actually seems that taking it face on may have been a better strategy! It still doesn’t seem real that I’ll be walking out of the office, this time next week, after my first day, but there it is!

So, IU guess that this is probably my last post on here. If this blog is still active, I might pop up a couple of posts to keep you up to date with what life after uni is like. Nevertheless, all change please… How’s that for closure?

Well well, chastised into action once again! I’m ashamed to admit that it’s taken another email reminder from Blog HQ to prod me into fulfilling my commitments. Shame on me. How on earth has two months gone by since my last post?

Well, as you may have seen on Maciej’s latest post, this blog site can now claim to be “double-award winning”. At the recent EduStyle Awards in Chicago, Imperial Student Bloggers site walked away with the prizes for both “Best Student Blog” and “Most Innovative Website”. Great, eh? Of course, this has really very little to do with us bloggers, and a great deal to do with the Imperial College Communications Division who have put in so much hard work in getting this site looking so good and working so well. Massive congratulations due to them, and good CV points for us bloggers. Who would’ve though it, I’m a regular contributor to an award-winning blog!?

So, what have I been up to recently?

Well, the last couple of moths has seen the end of our third term which obviously brings with it a slew of deadlines. The two most important of these were for my two practical options I’m taking this term: website and exhibition design. Basically, for each of these, we had to produce, from scratch, a design for a site/exhibition that was either to do with something we had produced or something that we were interested in. Hopefully, I’ll bang out a blog post soon that outlines what we produced for both of these projects, but quickly, I made a website (that will hopefully go live soon) that displays our group project from last term (which I also hope to describe in a blog post…) and an exhibition all about the science of intelligence. Both of these projects took an extraordinarily long time to produce, but I was really happy with the results. Again, I promise to describe these in more detail soon! You have my permission to end me rude emails if I don’t get round to it.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on my dissertation. This, I’m afraid to say, is a fairly dry affair. It’s all about the relationship of expertise to society. My project aims to look at the reasons why scientists believe that science needs to be communicated to the public, and then contrasting these beliefs with the way experts in other fields (particularly finance) problematise their relationship with society. See, I told you it was dull. It’s involved a great deal of library time, and now I’m sitting down and trying to thrash out 10,000 words in time for the deadline. But there’s one things that’s trying to do its best to stop me from achieving this (apart from my unbelievable ability to procrastinate, and obviously not this blog…): placements.

As you may have seen from Annabel’s blog, all of us on the Science Communication and Science Media Production MSc’s get the chance to do a placement somewhere in industry fro an indeterminate length of time. Jacob, for instance, got to do a couple of weeks at The Guardian (see some of Jacob’s handy-work here). I’ve been lucky enough to actually get a couple of placements, one working for a month as a copy writer for Seven Stones, a healthcare advertising agency, and another working for two months (with Annabel and another of a our colleagues) at the Mekong River Commission in Laos, SouthEast Asia. My ad agency placement kicks off very soon, and will be really full on, and the MRC  placement starts after the dissertation deadline. Although neither of them have started yet, all the interviews, articles and personal statements needed for these have been quite time consuming!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I hope it’s enough to explain why I’ve not posted in a while! However, as a way to make up for it, and as a further aid to putting off my dissertation, I promise to do the posts I’ve promised above very soon!

You may remember that, sometime ago, I wrote a pretty vitriolic defence of the ‘new’ Facebook, and Google Street View too. Well, if you do, you’ll know that I like ‘net-based innovation. I think it’s great. To say it’s ‘changing the face of society’ or whatever doesn’t seem to do it justice. So it was in this spirit that I joined Twitter some time ago. It was new (at the time) and it was different. It seemed to be a really nice development of blogging, text messaging and concise communication all rolled into one. I’ve since revised my opinion about ‘net-based innovation… at least for social networking sites.

As I said, on the face of it, Twitter seems to be a really good thing. It forces people to condense their thoughts so they can communicate them in 140 characters. This is undoubtedly a good thing. Verbosity is a sin, and it’s time it was punished. But Twitter also allowed you a snap-shot of the lives of the rich, powerful, influential and famous. Everyone knows of Stephen Fry’s addiction to tweeting, and if you go to his page you can find out pretty much everything that he’s doing. I challenge even the snobbiest celeb-basher not to find that even slightly entertaining. You can even try to talk to him if you want. It’s this democratisation that makes Twitter a really pleasing thing. It allows people who have nothing in common, or from wildly different social positions, to talk to each other. Hell, Amanda Holden apparently managed to get Demi Moore to come to the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ final with a well aimed tweet. Impressive, but it desn’t make me like her any more.

But this Tweetocracy can be used for much more than stalking celebrities. When I joined a few months ago I was able to follow the science Minister, Lord Drayson. I got his thoughts about his daily activities, but I also got to talk to him. I got into a couple of conversations with his Lordship, admittedly one was about illegal copies of the latest film about Le Mans (read into that what you will re Expenses…), but also about serious matters of science policy. I don’t know whether my thoughts made a difference, and why should they, but at least he actually heard them. That, I feel, is a genuinely good thing.

What isn’t such a good thing is that this open arena seems to be being squandered. The chance for you to interact with people like Lord Drayson is great, but increasingly Twitter is being used by people to send banal ‘look at me’ style tweets to the likes of Stephen Fry to simply be noticed. For instance, every time Mr Fry posts a new picture, the comments box quickly fills up with comments that try to out-manoeuver previous commenters in terms of wit and quirkiness to try and tempt Mr Fry into sending them a congratulatory message. This is a shame. Facebook’s going a similar way. It’s got fantastic functionality for arranging parties or meet-ups, but now one of its major uses is for taking quizes that tell you what character you would be in ‘Star Wars’. This stuff in itself doesn’t bother me so much except for the fact that people have actually invested time in sending these messages and taking these quizzes. Why? What do they gain out of it? What else could they have been doing? I’ve only got suspicions about the answers to the first two, but as for the third it’s definitely ‘alot’. That bothers me.

The increasing importance of the ‘net in my life is slowly destroying me, or at least what makes me an interesting person to know. For instance, instead of going to a shop and buying a newspaper, where I may at least encounter another human being, I can now stay in bed and read* it from their website. Aside form financially ruining these fantastic institutions, this isn’t healthy. There have been days where I haven’t left the flat because I can get everything I want online, even food. Sometimes Imperial even posts lectures online so that I don’t even need to go to College. And this is where Facebook and Twitter’s claims to being ’social’ begins to break down in my eyes. Admittedly they’ve got some very useful aspects but I think that they really just make you stay inside more, staring blankly at someone-you-used-to-know’s update about what they had for breakfast, how they should never be allowed to drink again or what character they are from ‘Star Wars’.

So, as I’ve said, I’ve always been a big fan of ‘net-based innovation. I’m now not so sure. I still love practically everything that Google do, and the like, but I’m now somewhat wary about these social networking sites. In fact, I’ve deleted my Twitter account and I’m trying to wean myself off Facebook. I’ve been clean for 4 days now. It’s tough. But do you know what the most fantastic thing is, I now have time! I now don’t worry about checking Facebook every few minutes to see what X has been doing. I now get my work done when I’m sitting at my laptop, and then I go outside to, perhaps, encounter another social networking refugee. I’d encourgae you to give it a go, and even if you don’t want to go outside, you may disciver the rest of the internet. Believe it or not, there are things outside Facebook. I know it comes as a shock, but it’s true.

* When I say ‘read’ I don’t really do that properly any more: ‘grazing’ is more accuate I think. I skim some of the articles in my RSS reader, often getting little further than the first few paragraphs. That’s not good, and it’s all because I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of information available. I now do these when I ‘read’ a book, quickly getting bored and flipping ahead. Hmm.

Well, don’t ever let me say I didn’t get my money’s worth here at Imperial. I had the remainder of the week off after exams, and now we’re back at it - and this term’s shaping up to be a corker. Here’s a quick run-down of what you can expect me to be complaining about over the next few months.

This term we have to take two practical modules, and I’ve chosen to do website and exhibition design. The former is really just your basic HTML/Dreamweaver class. We’ve only had one lecture so far, but I already know 100% more web-design stuff that I did before (which was nothing). I’ve even learned enough in the first session to redesign my photo webiste. Take a look here. What do you reckon? The end product of the course is some sort of science-based website of our own design, so that should be pretty interesting/challenging!

The other course, exhibition design, also seems to be really interesting. I’ve had two lectures of this so far, and it’s already changed the way I see exhibitions. Apparently, we can now call ourselves curators. Check me. Every week we have a lecture/field trip to a different museum as a class, and also have to visit an exhibition of our own choice to produce a weekly journal of our thoughts. Along with  this we have to work in groups to produce an exhibition brief for the temporary exhibition space at the Wellcome collection on any topic we want. As if that wasn’t enough, we then have to pitch it, for real, to the people who decide on the actual Wellcome exhibitions. Blimey!

To pop a real cherry on the top, we’ve also got to get working in earnest on our dissertations this term. Perhaps out of foolishness, or maybe pure faux-intellectualism, I’ve chosen to do a really theoretical dissertation about the position of science in society and in relation to other theoretical disciplines, especially economics and finance. It’s going to be really interesting, but also pretty demanding. It’s lucky that the deadline isn’t until September. Had my first meeting with my supervisor today, and luckily he seems to agree with me that there’s something in what I’ve chosen to look at.

So that’s what’s going on at the moment. Not many lectures, but one hell of a lot of work to be gettin on with. So, on that note, I better get back to it!

Later.

Much as everyone else has been saying, I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I had exams and I was revising. Well, they’re done now, and more to the point, they may very well have been the last exams that I will ever have to do, ever again. That’s not insignificant. As I’m sure most of you are well aware, our education system is absolutely obsessed with exams. I’ve been taking them every year, without fail, since I was 12 years old. I’m now 23. Not only does that mean that I haven’t had a relaxing Easter holiday for 11 years, but it also must stand to reason that I have a lot of qualifications under my belt. Well, yes and no.

My exams at 12/13/14 were really just in-school formalities. They determined what class I got into the next year. Of course, they didn’t tell us that, so we worked as if they were important. Damn. Then 15 and 16 were GCSE’s, and they seemed like the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You were going up against everyone else your age in the country. Tough. But then I found out when I was 17 and 18 that A-Levels were worse. Hell, my future depended on these ones apparently. Well, when that future came true, I went to uni and the exams of 19, 20, 21 and 22 got me a BSc. They said that was all the education I’d need for the rest of my life. I was done. Well, perhaps they were right, but I decided that I knew better, hence 23 sees me half way to an MSc, hopefully.

So yes, I do have a lot of qualifications. But is there anything you notice about this, apart from the sheer repetitiveness of the process? Every year trumps/cancels out the year before. Once you have GCSE’s, none of the exams you’ve done before matter. A-Levels then render these meaningless, but then even they become redundant too when you get a BSc/BA. You probably get what happens when I graduate from Imperial. So actually, I only have one qualification that matters: my BSc, soon to be my MSc.

Now, I recognise that it would very difficult (impossible?) to base a system of education around anything other than exams. You need some way of gauging ability, some way of making sure people meet the benchmarks. We all have to jump through the hoops to show that we’ve got the nous to get an A*/A/1st or whatever, and employers need these grades to effectively differentiate between candidates. That’s fine. It also makes sense that you have to pass GCSE’s before you are allowed to go onto A-Levels etc. It would be silly otherwise. But my problem with this ladder-climbing system of education is that it doesn’t really seem to be about education: it’s about being able to say that British children are well educated because they’ve passed the exams.

I’ve had the privilege of being taught by some excellent teachers, especially during my A-Levels, but, no matter their quality, they ultimately had to teach me to pass exams. By placing the emphasis of the education system on ‘getting the grades’ it’s not surprising that virtually all of the homework I was set from 15-18 was based around past exam papers. I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the exam paradigm. It therefore follows that, although I’ve learnt a few things along the way, first and foremost what I’m qualified to do is pass exams. I’ve taken a lot of them, but I’m damned if I can tell you much of what I learnt for my History GCSE. I’d actually be quite surprised if I could tell you much of what I learnt for my exams on Monday and Tuesday. What I can tell you how to do though is answer a ‘compare and contrast’ question properly, or what sort of answer to give when the question has ‘discuss’ in it. How handy.

What this leads me to suspect is that teaching for exams isn’t actually a very good way of educating people. It not only encourages people to limit their learning to what they ‘need to know’ and then cram it all into their heads in the weeks before the big day, but it also actually takes the fun out of it. Knowing why things work the way they do, or why we live in a country that functions the way it does, or even knowing the opening sentense of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can actually be remarkably satisfying, but it isn’t if you know you’re only learning it to get another of those all-important marks from the examiner. In my opinion, and I do recognise that this is horrifically idealistic, education should be about encouraging and nurturing curiosity, not stifling it with prescriptive pronouncements from Whitehall about what we all need to know and how it should be taught. I recognise that the role of education is really to get people ready to live in the world as finctional human beings, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could also incorporate into that a genuine appreciation for and equality in knowledge?

But it’s not just the intellectual satisfaction that exams take out of education, though: it’s the bredth. As I said above, as you go up the ladder the qualifications you earnt on the previous rungs becomes redundant, but what comes with this in our system is a relentless and early specialisation. Right from the time you choose your GCSE’s you’re on a long road that may only end nearly 7 or 8 maybe even 10 years later with a BA/BSc/MA/MSc/Phd. Your GCSE choices narrow down what A-Levels you can do and these then, in turn, determine what Degree you can get. Now, call me melodramatic if you want, but I reckon that 14 is FAR too young to be making such important choices. There is no way of getting around it: these choices limit what you do in the future and I speak as one who has made mistakes in these choices to my great regret.

Fortunately many careers allow entrants from almost any background, so if you’re a career-minded sort then there is no inherent problem here. As long as you get something, you can get that job in advertising or marketing or whatever. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter what happens in the education system as long as you pass though it. A genuine if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it argument. But I reckon that it is ‘broke’: I like to think that life is about more than just money and work. Yes these are important, some may even say fundamental, but I like to think that knowing things outside of what is immediately relevant to my career is a good thing. You may disagree.

So what’s been the point of all this? I’m not sure to be honest… Since I was 12 I’ve been faithfully jumping over all the hurdles laid out in front of me and I’m now running down the finishing straight, but, as this rather hackneyed metaphor is telling you, I’m now quite tired. Jaded even. And you can probably tell that it’s made me a little cynical too: I’m really rather confused as to the point of running the race in the first place. What I can tell you, though, is that I now owe the government just over £20,000 for the privilege of calling myself degree-level educated. Great. Even better, because of their misguided economic and educational policies, I owe the government all this money (which is fast accruing interest thanks to them raising the interest on student loans) at precisely the time when the job market has imploded and I will be one of tens of thousands of unemployed graduates. Fantastic.

In my opinion, then, it would be much better to take the emphasis off exams, decrease the amount of inherent specialisation in the system, and to make the whole thing a good deal more intereting. How this would be enacted on a policy-level, I have no clue. What I will say, though, partially to acknowledge the irony of writing this on the website of an educational institution, but also to acknowledge my gradtitude towards them, Imperial (and UCL and Cambridge) have all done a great deal to help me shake off the failings of the system I’ve been harping on about. At institutions like these, knowledge rules, and that’s good. There are still exams, and they’re still unpleasant, but at least you get credit for knowing things outside of the syllabus. All I’d say to those of you planning on coming here, make sure you apply for the right thing and make sure you love it: jumping through degree-sized hoops without enthusiam must be rubbish.

I know that I promised that this blog wouldn’t dissolve into a series of rants. I do, really, intend to keep my word. But, as with the Facebook thing last week, another Internet invention has caused another ridiculous ruckus this week, and I need to vent. I’m sorry about this, I really am. I’ll try harder next time.

So, Google Street View.

As I’m sure you all know, Google launched their Street View feature last week which, basically, allows you to zoom in on a map to see a view of the street as if you were standing there. The title really gives it away, if I’m honest. What this means is you can now virtually stand anywhere in London and virtually see every front door, shop front or tube station virtually.

Ostensibly, this is a rather useful feature. It translates a flat map into an actual, useful street-eye view. Not bad, when you need to get somewhere. I remember when I went to UCL for an interview years ago, and when I came up from Warren Street tube I was complete disorientated. The map print-out I had didn’t bare any resemblance to what I saw in front of me, and besides, I didn’t know which way was north. Now, being a savvy Londoner, I naturally know which way is North merely by the destination on bus fonts, but that’s besides the point. Back then, if I’d had the option to virtually come up out of the tube station before I actually did, I may have made it to my interview on time. But, already, there’s been hundreds of column-inches and blog-pixels spewed out to attack this, frankly rather clever, bit of software. Why?

Why is such a useful feature making so many people so angry? Well, privacy they say. It’s obviously unavoidable that in making this service, Google-cam recorded hundreds of thousands of people going about their daily lives on the streets of the UK. Now, Google used a nifty bit of software to blur-out all these people’s faces, even car number plates to try to maintain a bit of privacy for them, but it hasn’t been entirely successful. Some people are better hidden than others, and for those caught coming out of ‘adult-only’ establishments, such as the chap in the picture on the right, I can understand why they’d be a bit peeved about this going up on the ‘net for the world to see, even though you can’t see his face. These pictures have now been removed as a result of the world’s largest incident of beta-testing. I can understand this.

What I don’t get, though, is why people who have been snapped doing perfectly innocent things, or merely those who live behind front doors that appear on Street View have been complaining so much. Yes, I can now go onto the internet and see that someone with a blurry face whom I have never seen before and therefore have very little chance of recognising is coming out of the Oxford Street branch of Top Shop. I can also take a virtual walk down any residential street and see that a certain door is of a certain color. Big deal. I could do this before, if I so wished, with the magic combination of my own free-will, an oyster card, and the motive power of my legs. And their faces wouldn’t be all blurry.

Really, to me, all Google Street View is is a useful tool for aiding me in getting to places that I have never been to before. I’m sure that there are some people who, out of a lack of better things to do, will surf it looking for stupid pictures like the one I posted here. (I lifted this from a Daily Mail article and didn’t go looking for it myself. Please also be assured that I don’t read the Daily Mail.) Although I admit that this aspect of it is slightly unsavory, I really don’t understand why, now that these pictures have been removed, there’s an issue with the service. It provides nothing that we didn’t have access to before, but merely presents it in a way that is much quicker to access.

Really, I don’t mind people complaining. It’s their right to do so, and it mustn’t be taken away. Again, as I said last week, democracies like ours rely upon it. What irritates me about this is that people are so resistant to innovation, especially when it comes to the internet. When new services arrive, such as this or the ‘New Facebook’, and people complain about them, it gives people who are aginst the who shebang a platform to speak from that they never had before. For instance, I saw a “security expert” (I put him in “”’s because, as far as I can tell, his only claim to expert status is that he used to present a TV programme called ‘How Safe is Your House’) on the BBC news the other day talking about how the whole enterprise of Google Maps and Google Earth is inherently unsafe becasue the ’satellite view’ allows burglars to spot potential targets and plan escape routes. Of course not being an expert and therefore being on a level with this guy, is this not something that they did before, but merely by going there? I agree that it has probably made the process easier for them, for instance by using a satellite snapshot of a swimming pool as an indicator of potential wealth, but then it’s also made it alot easier for the rest of us law-abiding folk to find a better way to cycle to college.

In my uninformed opinion, the internet is an inherently open thing. This means that whatever you put on there is bound to be used, by someone somewhere, for purposes that you did not intend. I understand that this means that you have to be careful with what you show. Therefore it is perfectly right and proper that people have asked for certain photos to be removed from Street View, and that Google have complied. They will, no doubt, replace these images soon with cleaner, emptier ones. However, extending this idea of vulnerability of information to worrying about putting mere aerial photos on the interent seems bizarre.

I remember when I was a kid, a guy used to come round the neighborhood once a year peddaling aerial photos of the town for you to hang on your wall. No one complained that a burglar might be buying those to plot their escape route. Google Street View is offereing nothing that couldn’t have been obtained by other means, in some cases simply by using your legs and eyes, it just makes it more available. If this is a problem for you, I suggest that you move to the countryside where there is no Street View, yet. There you will be able to go to the pub and complain, along with like-minded souls, about the constant erosion of privacy and civil-liberties while the rest of us get on with living our lives, getting to the places we want to go that little bit quicker thanks to Google Street View.

Right, well, ahem… sorry.

I know that so many of you, literally one or two, count on my blog for an inaccurate and uninspiring account of life here at Imperial. I’m sorry to have deprived you of it, yet again, by getting distracted by work. Damned  work. Pesky. I think work should be abolished. It’s inhuman. Who’s with me? Let’s get this revolution started.

Well normal service shall now be resumed.

Talking of revolutions, do I sense one in the air? I’m sure you’ve noticed, being an astute university sort, the anger that’s beginning to boil over this week. Petitions are being arranged and signed as we speak, but I fear it’s only a matter of time until trouble starts. People are getting angry with a constantly meddling, “change-for-change’s-sake” regime, and they want shot of them.

For once, though, it isn’t New Labour. I am of course talking about this week’s changes to Facebook, that vital student resource. We’ve all been getting very angry! Take a look at this petition. You see? Angry. We’d only just got used to the ‘old’ Facebook. Why bring in a new one? It wasn’t broke, so why did they fix it? Now, when we want to see a friend’s photos, note or event, we don’t have to search through a thicket of status updates, profile picture changes and the like. No. Now they’re thoughtfully arranged on the right hand side, most recent at the top, older at the bottom, so we can find them easily. Even worse, there’s now a constant, chronological stream of status updates in the middle. They’ve actually gone and separated out the most interesting part of Facebook, and made a feature of it. Why should We have to put up with this! I mean really, trying to make Facebook a better, more user friendly environment. The cheek of it. We want the old Facebook back, and NOW! 134,830 people have said so, the last time I looked. Except, I haven’t.

As you may have gleaned from the above, I don’t have much truck with these people. Shockingly enough, I actually like the new Facebook layout. Its is, really, easier to use, which is good because hopefully now I’ll spend less time on it sheerly because I’ll be more efficient. Also I don’t spend my life on the stupid website, which probably makes a big difference! What puzzles me most, though, is why people are getting so angry about it. Why are people acting as if Facebook have just spat in their faces? Perhaps it’s because the new layout genuinely is worse, but, as I’ve said, I don’t think that’s true. Perhaps it’s because people just don’t like change. That’s more likely, but I’m still not sure that’s it.

I reckon that it might have something more to do with people getting used to being able to influence the things that they never could before. Now you can vote people off TV shows with your ‘red button’, you can be a ‘citizen journalist’ by ‘having your say’ on the BBC’s website, or you can broadcast your ill-informed opinion over the interweb in blogs, much as I’m doing here. As a result, I think many people, including myself, come to believe that their opinion somehow matters. On the whole, I think that this is a good thing. People’s opinions do matter. After all, we live in a democracy, believe it or not. But Facebook isn’t one. We are users of their service, which they very kindly provide for free I might add, so why do 23,294 (and counting) people believe that they’ve been punched in their virtual kidneys?

They’re busy bashing their ‘red buttons’ to try and ‘vote off’ the changes. Well, call me a cynic, but I don’t think it’ll work. It didn’t work with them the last time they changed the format (for the better), or the time before that, or the time before that. If, (prospective) students and Facebook users of Imperial, you don’t like the new layout, close your account. Commit Facebook-suicide. Then Facebook might actually listen because they’ll lose their precious advertisers. It’s a tried and tested way to influence business, the free-market. Jumping up and down in a virtual tantrum won’t really achieve anything. Or you could, perhaps, give the new layout a chance? Just a thought. You got used to the last one, didn’t you?

Anyway, I’m off to finish off (or start) my last essay of term.

Later.

Hello again. Forgive the lack of blogs recently, but it’s all become rather hectic. I’ve got a quick succession of essay deadlines coming up now, group projects are beginning to mature, started cracking on with my dissertation, and, to make matters worse, I’ve gone and got a job. Well, you have to pay the bills.

Anyway, here’s a quick run down of what I have to do:

I work as the ‘Brand Manager’ at Imperial for a company called CampusMags, a publishing services company that supplies cut-price issues of major magazines and newspapers to university shops and newsagents. I have to keep in touch without the shop at Imperial to make sure that they never run out of titles like The Guardian, The Economist and the like, and report back to them about how well they’re selling. Mostly, though, I have to promote them by putting up posters, creating Facebook groups etc etc. It’s not much, but it takes up the time!

If you want to know more about it, here’s a link to the group I set up that’ll keep you up-to-date with all the promotions that’ll be going on around campus. Join the group, if you’re interested!

For instance, we offer massively reduced student subscriptions to The New Scientist (51% off, and a free USB key… click here) and The Economist (60% off… click here) Anyway, enough of this before I get into trouble for misusing this blog.

Other than that the past couple of weeks have been pretty dull, I’m afraid. We had a really interesting seminar the other day about careers in Healthcare Advertising, and I think that it speaks volumes that this is the only other exciting thing that’s happened to me recently…

So before I talk myself into manic depression, I think I’ll sign off… ‘till another time.

It can’t have escaped your notice that it snowed the other day. Quite a lot too. Inches and inches of the stuff. And, as always happens when a bit of adverse weather strikes, London shut down. The tube stopped working, the buses were cancelled, and the trains didn’t even leave their depots. Even my lectures were cancelled. There’s an up side to everything. But I don’t want to bore you with yet another rant about how poorly London apparently was for this climatic cataclysm. There’s more than enough of this carping all over the ‘net. Instead I’m going to talk about why they’re all talking rubbish. Not a rant at all, I think you’ll agree. And to make it seem more friendly, I’ll decorate this non-rant with a few pictures of the snow. Aren’t I generous?

Our street

I think that Monday was the best day that I’ve ever spent in London. I’ve lived here for nearly five years now, and the majority of that time has been spent ignoring every other human being in this place. It’s not that I’m antisocial, although I am a little. It’s just the way that everyone goes about their lives here. You don’t talk to people you don’t know. If you do, you’re weird, and obviously not a Londoner. This, as I learnt in my sociology classes at UCL, is actually quite a well documented social phenomenon called Civil Inattention. Ignoring people is the only way that we can go about our daily lives without worrying ourselves to death about what everyone else is doing, or perhaps more importantly, what they may want to do to us. But on Monday, this all changed.

Because my flat mate couldn’t get in to work, and I had nothing to do, we went to the park to build a massive snow ball. Obviously. But on the way, walking through the unrecognisable side-streets, we got involved in five or six snowball fights. We didn’t know these people. They didn’t know us. But they quite happily pelted us with snow, and we gladly returned it. We were ambushed by some kids hiding behind garden walls, fought pitched battles through people’s back gardens, and even (gently) exchanged a few with some of the residents of the local old people’s home. The park was only five minutes walk away, but it took us two hours. This wasn’t the London that I thought that I knew.

Me on our giant snow ball. If you were wondering about the scale, I'm 6'4". I also fell off shortly after.

Without any work to go to, or indeed any cars on the roads, everyone was completely relaxed. We all laughed when people fell over, borrowed sledges from each other, and even didn’t mind when someone shoved snow down the back of your shirt. The snow offered a common experience that allowed people to actually communicate with one another. The civil inattention was gone, and was replaced with a healthy (and, it has to be said, extremely pleasant) sense of community and fun: something that’s usually sorely lacking in London. It really is amazing what a bit of snow can do. So why was it that so many people seemed to find monday the single worst day that they have ever experienced?

I was on a train back from Dorset when the first flakes of the great white disturber began to fall. With incredible predictability, ripples of “Look, it’s snowing!” began to roll up and down the carriage, interspersed with gloom-ridden phone calls to loved ones warning of impending tardiness and the dangers of driving in these treacherous conditions. But to everyone’s surprise, South-West Trains did something incredible: they got us to Waterloo on time.

One of many

We Brits seem to expect, and even hope for the worst. Sure, I was happy that I didn’t have to sit on that train for longer than necessary, but there was a part of me that felt disappointed. I’d had a valuable opportunity to complain dangled in front of me, only to snatched away by a piece of excellent service. But, never a people to be perturbed by such rotten luck, one hero of British pessimism complained to me, whilst we queued at the ticket barrier, that we were early, and so he’d wasted his phone-credit telling his Mum that he wasn’t going to be home for a while. Worse still, he wasn’t going to get any Tea.

The belly-aching continued as I waited for a bus to get back to my flat. By now it snowing heavily, and it was getting pretty chilly. But the no. 68 steadfastly refused to come for 45 minutes. The usual muttering began some ten minutes into the wait, but when the bus turned up, the poor bus driver was it for a hail of abuse. At every stop, people berated him for making them wait for so long, and when he had to turf everyone out because he couldn’t get his 12-tonner up Champion hill (about 4 miles from the proper end of the line), people were furious. But I don’t really understand why.

There are opportunities to complain, and then there are instances when it’s not someone’s fault. Like in this case, it wasn’t the bus driver’s fault that he couldn’t get up the hill. He didn’t deserve the agro. It wasn’t the fault of the council for not gritting the roads properly. When so much snow falls in such a short period of time, no matter how much grit you put down, it simply won’t make a difference. It wasn’t even Boris Johnson’s fault, even though a lot of people would have liked it to have been. This was, genuinely, an example of a blameless phenomenon. There was nothing that could be done about it.

It even made the walk to Sainsbury's nice

As we’ve all seen, though, a lot of the media coverage of this ‘fiasco’, ‘nightmare’ or ‘cataclysm’ blamed Monday’s transport problems on improper preparation. London should have got hold of some proper snow-ploughs, laid on more gritters, and generally been faster to respond. Sure, there were some cases where things may have been done better (for instance, clearing the entrances to the bus depots so that they could out in the morning), but it’s a losing battle. If London had invested in a fleet of snow-ploughs, as somewhere like New York or Berlin did years ago, then there would have been no problem. But it barely ever snows here. Wouldn’t it be an enormous waste of tax-payers money? Yes, it would.

Confused geese

As for schools closing their doors, I really don’t have any truck with the parents who have been saying that head-teachers have irresponsibly taught their children to cave in when the going gets tough. Get real. When my school closed for snow when I was a kid, that was the last thing on my mind. I was busy building an igloo.

I recognise that businesses probably lost a lot of money yesterday, and I’m sure the precise figure will soon be splashed all over news bulletins, if it hasn’t been already. But, if you ask me, the break down of London’s civil inattention, the chance to get out and meet the neighbors, made this cost thoroughly worth paying.

Not the most intersting week this week, so I’ll keep this short. Very short actually.

As Jacob mentioned in his last post, we sci-com students have been working on our group ’sci-art’ projects. They don’t really have to be art, but something that takes an interesting angle on some aspect of science and society or science and… well, long story short, brain-storming these ideas is time consuming. It’s great to flex a bit of creative muscle, and I’ve been getting into a bit of  photo-shopping (unfortunately I can’t share the results with you, as we’re trying to keep our idea to ourselves. Know what I’m saying?), so all’s looking pretty good.

Lectures are even starting to get interesting this term! Doing some documentary theory at the moment, so watching lots of old documentaries and learning the difference between the expository style and cinema verite. It’s interesting if you’re addicted to Attenborough and the likes anyway. Start some science policy in the next couple of weeks though, so perhaps I should make hay while the sun shines?

Anyway, that’s what’s going on with me at the moment. Lots of good “academic” stuff, but not much else.

So, short it is. Over.