Counting down the days

Planning Calendar on My Wall, originally uploaded by Chris Campbell.

How's your working week? Your Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 routine? Can you last it out until your next couple of days off? There's a drivetime presenter on a local radio station near me who regularly counts down the days until the weekend.

At twenty past four today he said: "You're nearly through Monday, well done, only four more days 'til the weekend." Well, thanks.

I've heard him do similar links before, at various times in the week, and less than an hour later he again congratulated me for making it through Monday. Of course he's trying to connect with the listener, but isn't this a bit misguided and maybe even old-hat? What about people who enjoy their work, have a laugh with colleagues and escape from their families for a while?

To suggest that we all dislike work, and will feel solidarity with a man paid to talk a bit in between the records, seems to me to be underestimating your listener a bit.

And then what about shift workers getting ready to leave for night duty or who work over the weekend? Continuously counting down to the traditional weekend doesn't seem to fit in with the way that more and more of us are working outside of the nine to five.

And if you do work a vanilla five day week, do you really need reminding on a Monday afternoon that your week has only just begun?

GridPoint GB

Maps are cool. Being able to read a map is even cooler.

We're lucky in the UK to have the Ordnance Survey making beautiful, useful maps. Compared with maps elsewhere, such as the yellow covered Michelin maps available in France, OS maps are elegant and easy to interpret. Having a local map can make a day out so much more interesting, and you have the added bonus of being able to use the map to actually help you find your way around.

Being able to find places on a map, or tell someone else where a location is on a map requires you to understand and be able to use six figure grid referencing (link to pdf file). This isn't too tricky, and most of the time when you're outside you can use landmarks around you to work out where on the map you are and so get a grid reference. But when the weather's bad or it's dark or there aren't many useful landmarks it can be tricker. This is where GridPoint GB comes in.

GridPoint GB, originally uploaded by westy48.

GridPoint GB is a free app for the iPhone that takes GPS data and converts it into an OS grid reference. It's simple and easy to use. Yesterday we were walking on the coast between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, and I wanted to know where we were. I narrowed it down to two places a few hundred meters apart, and GridPoint GB confirmed which of the two spots we were at.

GridPoint GB overlaid on OS map, originally uploaded by westy48.

It's a good little app that simply does its job without trying to be too clever. Out and about with a map it's a useful extra tool to have in your pocket. Obviously, given that it uses OS data, it's only useful in the UK.

GridPoint GB (iTunes Store link)

From Rocket to Bullet

We were at the rather excellent National Railway museum in York yesterday. It's one of the children's favourite days out, and like most museum's entry is free* so it's also one of my favourite days out.

I'm always impressed by the red polo shirted Explainers who are on hand to tell you about the exhibits, whether as part of a formal talk or as they're accosted by curious visitors wandering around the cavernous exhibition spaces.

Yesterday we saw a performance of From Rocket to Bullet, a 30 minute long science talk explaining the physics that make it possible for different types of trains to move. It really was a perfomance too, with lively presentation from the duo of explainers involved.

The talk was a canter through Newtons 3 laws of motion, with interesting demonstrations of each and how they apply to getting big heavy hunks of metal (or trains) to move. Elephants were catapulted, (small) explosions were set off and Barbie was shot out of a steam cannon. Twice.



The watching children were absorbed by all this, and the Explainers involved their audience in most of the demonstrations - apart from the ones involving fast moving doll projectiles. The museum often has unexpected events and activities for children and adults to take part in, especially during the school holidays. Unexpected if like us you just turn up and don't plan your visit, but the Museum's website does have information about all the demonstrations and events. Summer may be over, but there'll be more at half-term in October.

Remembering happier times in Pakistan

Busy street, originally uploaded by westy48.

In January 1997 I went to Pakistan to do technical things for the BBC's coverage of the general election there.

After a couple of days in Islamabad I was sent to Larkana in Sindh province, to meet up with a reporter. On polling day we travelled around the area, visiting polling stations in the towns and villages outside Larkana. Wherever we stopped small groups of smiley boys would follow me down the street practising their English with calls of "Hello, how are you?" At every stop we were offered tea, and at every stop we drank it.

Now I can't help but wonder how those smiley children are doing after the floods. They'll perhaps be parents themselves now, with families to try to look after. If the pictures on the telly haven't persuaded you about how bad this is have a look at Mudassir Ejaz Khan's photos here.

If you haven't already done so, please consider making a donation to help the people in Pakistan. There are plenty of places where you can do this online, here are a few choices:

The Disasters Emergency Committee
Unicef
Islamic Aid

What does Martin Parr know?

Gathering dust, originally uploaded by westy48.

With a Bank Holiday looming the Guardian printed some advice from Martin Parr about how to take better holiday photographs. I really like the main thrust of the piece that your photo collection should not just be positive propaganda of family life, but should also reflect the fed-up children and moments when your holiday doesn't seem quite so good. Now that we're (almost) all shooting digitally this makes sense. With film each shot cost money, but taking more digital pictures is effectively free, and even if you fill a memory card new ones are cheap and a re-useable resource.

The last paragraph of the piece, however, doesn't fit in with how we use photography now.

And the other thing you must do is print them. We are in danger of having a whole generation – and this will continue into the future – that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted. You have to print them and put them in an album or a box, otherwise they could be lost. And write captions. You might think you are going to remember what is happening in a picture, but you probably won't in 10 years' time.

I don't agree with the need to print. I'll admit that there is something satisfying about handing round a packet of 36 photos, but with laptops, smartphones, iPads and digital photo frames we're always close to a screen to view images in a new shared way. We've got drawers full of packets of Jessops prints, and a box under the bed with more. I definitely browse the old photos on my laptop a lot more than I rummage around in the box under the bed.

Parr's statement that "people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted" is a bit odd, or maybe badly subbed. How will they suddenly be deleted? I'm no more likely to delete the photos off my computer than I am to chuck the wallets of 6x4s in the bin. Yes, my hard drive might fail, so I run back-ups. I'm not a back-up zealot, I don't have a daily or even weekly routine, but I do make back-ups and especially make the effort after loading a big new batch of photos from the camera such as after a holiday. I also have a Flickr account where my favourite photos go. As a paid account holder I could put all my pictures on the cloud for a full remote back-up which would be neat.

As for writing captions, well I used to scibble a not on the wallet of prints with a date and location (Northumberland 1994), but the meta-data with digital photos exceeds that by a country mile. Date and time, camera used and then in iPhoto I can tag who's in the pictures and add geo-location data too. I can find digital images very quickly, and have "Smart Albums" in iPhoto that help sort the 8,898 items (16.3GB of data since you asked) into usefully small collections.

I make a trip once a year to the photographer in town to get a few prints made to enter in the village show. That's it, the rest is staying digital. Am I right or wrong?

Scottish compassion doesn't just apply to high profile cases

When Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds it caused a lot of passionate feelings to come forward. Radio phone-ins, online message boards and newspaper letters columns were full of people venting opinion both in agreement and against Kenny MacAskill's decision.

My feeling was that the Scottish Justice Secretary had got it right, and that our society is better for showing such compassion. Of course conspiracies abounded and unusually there was some truth to this as Jack Straw has said that oil and trade considerations played a part in setting up a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya.

I did wonder how common it was for prisoners to be released on compassionate grounds, and whether the nature of their offences affected this at all, but I hadn't seen any information about this anywhere. So I went to www.whatdotheyknow.com and used the guidance available there to make my first request under the Freedom of Information Act. I wanted to know how many prisoners in Scotland had applied for release on compassionate grounds, how many were granted their freedom, what crimes they had been convicted of and how long their sentences had been. To provide a limit to the scope of the request I asked for information going back to the start of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Today I got a response, exactly 20 working days after making my request.

The headline is that 33 prisoners applied for early release on compassionate grounds and that 26 had this granted (79%).

Five of the 26 were serving life for murder and one for culpable homicide.

15 were due to be in jail for five years or more - assuming they'd serve their whole sentence.

So what does this add to the debate? It looks as if Mr MacAskill was acting along the line of other such decisions made by theScottish government, and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi certainly isn't the only person to be treated with such compassion by Scotland.

Reporting Statistics - when 25% isn't 25 out of 100.

Statistics often raise problems for journalists. Clearly some journalists don't get numbers, or find the concepts involved difficult to communicate.

Drive on BBC Radio Five Live today ran an interview with Jillian Satin on this story linking depression with reduced cancer survival rates. It's on the iPlayer here for the next week or so (about 2 hours 52 minutes in).

At the end of the interview I didn't feel much more informed than before. Some of that has to be down to Anita Anand who did the interview, but the contributor didn't do much to help either. For instance, when asked about the significance of the increased risk, she said "When we hear 25% we think of 25 out of 100, and that's not the right way to interpret it."

That made me stop and think for a bit, and put me off the rest of the piece. What I was hoping for was a clear explanation of how I should think of this 25% increase in probability. Unfortunately that wasn't forthcoming. Part of this is a problem with the format - Five Live tends to favour brevity, but on this occasion the item, and contributor, deserved more time.

As a listener I felt let down - the story is interesting and deserved a proper explanation, but Jillian Satin's answers didn't help explain her work and Anita Anand's questioning didn't give her the opportunity to tell the story.