I like the idea of time-limited project-based local history research groups, based in local museums but open to the interested public with suitable research skills. I can’t say I’ve heard of such things before, but one is being advertised locally — to research the life of a town during Elizabethan times and to coincide with the 2012 Jubilee. It seems like an interesting departure from the traditional ongoing “local history club”, which over time can become crusted over with a unwelcome tangle of personalities and cliques. Perhaps local university libraries could offer a year’s free membership and off-site ejournals access (vital journals like Midland History are behind a paywall) to people volunteering for such research groups?
Blogging wormholes
Running pro-active blogs on multiple topics, I seem to have found a strange law of blogging. There’s usually about a thirty percent chance, while actively searching on a topic, of finding something that can be posted to one of the other blogs. Odd.
Creative graduates’ career opportunities across creative disciplines
An interesting new Working Paper from the Creative Regions in Europe team, which partly encompasses the University of Birmingham. “Winning and Losing in the Creative Industries: an analysis of creative graduates’ career opportunities across creative disciplines“.
Table 3 is especially interesting: “Distribution of creative graduates by subjects across UK regions”, showing the national strength that the West and East Midlands have in producing Crafts graduates. Although that strength then has the effect of depressing the statistic for the post-graduation earnings of our creative graduates1, and Crafts graduates may have more difficulty than other graduates in entering different job markets2.
Also interesting is Table 11 on “Earning equations”, which tallies earnings of creative graduates to degree classification. Earning a First does matter, even today.
The authors conclude that during the Labour years…
“Hard selling the creative industries as a leading [industry] sector [to politicians] has created expectations too hard to deliver[,] and a more realistic take into [i.e.: understanding of] the development of the future creative workforce is needed.”
- Crafts graduates earn less than other types of creative graduate ↩
- I would imagine that such courses draw a lot of students from the rural parts, who return home on graduation and some may then find themselves “stuck” out in the sticks or in a low-paying rural job. That factor might be one aspect of such low earnings after graduation. I wonder if a large annual “summer camp”, just for Midlands recent-graduates in Crafts who are rurally-based, might be one means of bringing them together for networking and advice? It might even piggy-back on existing countryside-based festivals, acting as a “fringe” and offering free tickets to unemployed Crafts graduates? Sorry if this idea upsets people who would say: ‘crafts is high-tech now, take them to New York’, and that such a venue would pander to the woolly old stereotype of what Crafts is. I’m just trying to think of how to do it cheaply and locally. ↩
On the Buses
In a recent ridiculous legal ruling at the Patents County Court, the court found that the firm Temple Island (top picture – they sell hideous plastic knick-knacks) had its copyright infringed by the firm New English Tea (bottom picture). But these are wholly the products of different photos taken from different spots. The ruling would seem to make any such B&W photo of a red bus with Parliament in the background a ‘copyright infringement’. Which seems the thin end of a very dangerous wedge, for British photography in public places. Do we need a mass Photoshop campaign of making and posting similar “red bus and Parliament” images on Flickr and elsewhere?
Tactful Calling
Voice phones are an archaic method of communication, but Tactful Calling might just start to make them a little more bearable…
“Tactful Calling is an Android application on the mobile phone that lets callers indicate the urgency of their call, as well as the time frame they would like to have for the conversation.”
Footnotes for WordPress
D’log now has a very nice new footnotes plugin1. It doesn’t break square brackets [like this], as it only works if there’s a number at the start of them.
To get the smaller font size on the footnotes, paste this CSS into your theme’s styles CSS.
TIGA attacks
New figures from TIGA on the videogames industry in the UK. TIGA’s new figures show that between 2008 and 2011, 197 videogame studios and development firms closed in the UK. While film is lauded and lavishly funded with tax breaks pick-ups, training health-boosts, and cool overseas marketing weapons… the animation and videogames industries are allowed to play without armour and get stomped on by the monsters of the recession.
Hyperlocal NESTA
Open Call for Strategic Partners: HyperLocal Media (PDF link)…
NESTA is launching a new programme to understand and stimulate the development of a UK hyper-local media sector. Prior to the launch of the programme we are seeking partnerships with organisations interested in the development of this nascent sector. If you would like to register your interest in becoming a strategic partner, please send your partnership proposal to deborah.fox@nesta.org.uk by 31 January 2012.
Internet statistics for 2011
2011 in Internet and Web statistics, a round-up by Pingdom. Some numbers that caught my eye…
* $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in [permission] email marketing in 2011.
* 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
* 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
* 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide. [of which only 100 million were active Twitter users in 2011]
* 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
Many more global stats at Pingdom.
And here’s some UK Internet statistics I’ve tracked down myself just now…
* £68 billion – spent by UK online shoppers spent in 2011 [likely to rise to over £80bn in 2012].
* £1 in every £8 spent on UK retail is now spent online.
* 13 million hours – spent by UK shoppers finding, choosing and ordering stuff online.
* 61% of UK internet users do not want to engage with brands on social networks.
* 30 million unique users on Facebook in the UK.
* 1.3 million eBook Readers and Tablet PCs were gifted in the UK in December 2011, with Kindles at 92% of the market share.
* 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day 2011 in the UK.
* 82% of the UK adult population was an Internet user of some kind, by the final quarter of 2011.
* 850,000 UK children have no Internet access at home
* 8.4m Britons have never used the Web
The Science of Magic
Obvious, when you think about it. Teach the basics of science (and a little healthy skepticism) to children, by teaching them how magic tricks work…
The Science of Magic is a series of easy to do magic tricks made available for the purpose of teaching students about how to apply the scientific method in, what I hope will be, a fun and informative way.
Only 16 locals work at BBC’s MediaCity in Manchester
This news might make people in Birmingham slightly happier about being bypassed by the BBC in favour of Manchester…
“Of the 1,846 jobs created at the BBC’s MediaCity in Salford only 26 have gone to local people. Of the 26 locals who did get a job, eight were on six-month ‘ambassador’ contracts for 16-19 year olds, which involve meeting and greeting and pay between £3.64 an hour and £4.92 an hour.”
Going down under
On the back of a booming economy, Australia is offering one million working holiday visas to unemployed young (18-30) Brits with talent.
Birmingham as a suburb of London
After the completion of High Speed 2, writes Ellis…
“Birmingham will be quicker to reach from central London than some of London’s own suburbs”
But he urges the avoidance of cheap journalistic squits about Brummie accents and the regional differences in taste. Instead he point much more interestingly to that intensely focused “third culture” that has developed among regular rail commuters…
“We’re the ones who have favourite seats in carriage B, can intuit from the point we step off the tube whether the 0723 is going from Platform 3 or platform 14, and develop an aching familiarity with the unique smell of a Virgin Pendolino train’s toilet. We split our days between the Bull (Ring) and (Shepherd’)s Bush slipping seamlessly between Queensway to Suffolk Street Queensway barely registering the 150 miles of twixtness between rattling through emails and hogging the Virgin wi-fi.”
Low New Enterprise Allowance rates in Birmingham
In the whole of Birmingham, in the last six months, only just over 100 new traders have started up on the New Enterprise Allowance. Why such a low figure? Possibly because of the terms of the deal. As I wrote here back in Sept…
“if your business doesn’t take off in just three months, you’d essentially be punitively punished [under the NEA] — since what amounts to your dole money would [then] be chopped in half. You’d also be saddled with a £1,000 debt. The NEA thus seems a very unfair choice to foist on young graduates, in incredibly difficult trading conditions.”
Coffeeware
Fab. Needs to be on the British high street next week…
Also looking fondly at…
The Alt.Ctrl.Del set needs to have complementary chocolates that look the same, but are smaller.
BJoP surveys national photo collecting costs
The British Journal of Photography takes a close look at what the leading national galleries are spending on collecting photography, based on Freedom of Information requests.
JURN fully updated
My JURN search engine has been thoroughly link-checked (by running Linkbot on the Directory) and URL-checked (by running dark-side SEO software on the Search index) for continuing presence of URLs in Google Search results. Repairs have been made, and JURN is now as free from link-rot as it’ll ever be. The JURN project is coming up on its third birthday, and it indexes and searches the full-text of 4,328 free ejournals in the arts & humanities.
DIY Book Scanner
DIY Book Scanner. Open source plans, shopping list, macro photos of components, everything you need for a non-destructive book scanner that can tackle the scanning of a large private library or archive.
The Victorian photo-cycle