Here's a heart-warming story I thought you might appreciate seeing.
Who says culture is not a big issue?
Thursday 22 January 2009
Monday 17 November 2008
This page will let you get started on Twitter.
The first thing you need to do is to join Twitter.
Go to this site: http://twitter.com/
and pick a name and password.
Tip: Try to keep your name as short as possible - it makes it faster for you and others to type and will not take up so many of the 140 you have to post when you are sending messages.
Tip: Try to keep your name as short as possible - it makes it faster for you and others to type and will not take up so many of the 140 you have to post when you are sending messages.
Next, you need to know about the 'sister site' http://search.twitter.com./
This site will allow you to not only search for people's username in the future, but also to look for particular topics in the whole of the 'twitterverse' (I know, I know - but I didn't create the word).
Go to search.twitter and type my twitter-name into the search box: "bbplesc" (but without the quotes) and then click on the "Search" button. This will take you to just my posts. Click on my picture or my name and you will be taken to a page where you will see my posts and a picture of me (or my icon) on the top left. You will also see a button marked "Follow". Click on the "Follow" button and your in. That's all it takes!
OK, where do you go from here and what can you do next?
First, you will see in the middle right of the screen some little boxes of all the other people who are following. You need to click on all individual boxes in turn. As you get to their site, click on the box to follow them too. This gets you wired in to the community. It lets you see all their conversations within the 'tribe'. You can now read the posts of everyone in the tribe, make a contribution, ask questions - anything.
I will get a notification from the system I have set up which lets me see that you are now following in our 'tribe'. When I get that I will follow you back. We can then send each other DM's (direct messages) - just like emails (so nobody else can see them) but they are only allowed to be 140 characters long.
Next, if you click on my icon on the top right of the page you will get another page of just my 'tweets' (individual posts) - but importantly under the new picture it will say "Website". If you click on that link you will come to this blog, so you never have to remember the address of the blog, you can just access it quickly through Twitter.
We can use twitter as a kind of electronic notice-board. (NB: As this is a social networking site (though we are using it for business) your organisation may have a policy which prevents you from using Twitter at work. Be careful. Check it out. For what it's worth I posted a link on Twitter about a firm who have found a way to sell Twitter to the management as it made significant improvements in project working).
Now you might be wondering what you could possibly put on Twitter, so here are a few suggestions:
If you find a good explanation in a text book. . .
If you find a poor explanation in a text book. . .
If you find a blog with a good example. . .
If you see a news story and you have a comment about it. . .
If you see a news story or any other article you think is interesting. . .
If you find a reference which has helped you with your assignment. . .
If you want help with something. . .
If you hear a good podcast. . .
If you can pass on a useful website. . .
If there is a juicy Law problem. . .
If you hear some breaking news. . .
If you want to set up a revision session with your colleagues. . .
If you want to add to or correct what someone else has written. . .
. . . just post a tweet!
You can search on Twitter. If you wanted to find my posting about CSR, say, you would go to search.twitter and enter bpplesc CSR and click the search button and it would take you straight to it. If you just type CSR in the box you would get every reference to CSR on Twitter! Hmmm, interesting. . .
Look at the top right of your page and you will see a "Settings" tab. It does what it says on the tab. Here you can change things about your account and upload a picture. Please do upload a picture or even an icon. It just looks really boring and 'newbie' to just have the default o_O icon. It also makes it easier to identify you and to find you to send a DM.
You can upload any appropriate picture of .jpeg format.
What else? Well you can block people, so you don't need to fear stalkers (and you can unblock people if they start being nice to you again).
Please don't click the "Privacy" button in your settings unless you are really sure it is what you want to do. What this will do is to stop people in the timeline i.e. all the rest of Twitter, from seeing your posts. It also means that you won't be able to search on your own posts either. Not good if you want to find a brilliant article you posted some time ago!
Here's another really useful tip. There is another site you will find useful. http://tinyurl.com/
Here you cut the long URL from the site you have found and paste it into the box. When you click on Make TinyURL it takes the big address and condenses it down. This is really useful in keeping down your post into the maximum 140 characters. It is useful to give an idea of what the article is about in your tweet others won't know what the article is about and it will make it harder to search for it again too. So you might write "Here are the latest unemployment figures http:/tinyurl/qwerty"
At the end of each tweet line you will see two icons if you hover your mouse over them - a star and a curved arrow. Click the star and it will make a gold star appear. This is then saved as a favourite which you can find quicker next time. Clicking the curved arrow will allow you to reply directly to someone in the box above (it will automatically show their name). This is not the same as a DM - everyone will be able to see the reply.
Twitter will not replace email for official communications. I'm doing this off my own bat, there is no company liability accepted or implied. I am providing it as a service to students as a resource. If you don't want to use it, that's fine by me.
Finally, I am not going to be too heavy handed about the thread. There is one thing I am keen on, however - this is not going to have any hangers-on. If you are following, you need to contribute to the tribe. Every couple of months or so I will block those who have not contributed. It is not fair that someone can benefit from reading the articles that others are posting and not help in return. Also, I would ask that we keep tweets as useful and relevant as possible. Some questions and personal commentary are inevitable, useful and desirable, but I would like to keep it practical and reasonably professional and relevant. Personal comments and jokes or joke sites can best be put into a DM.
OK, where do you go from here and what can you do next?
First, you will see in the middle right of the screen some little boxes of all the other people who are following. You need to click on all individual boxes in turn. As you get to their site, click on the box to follow them too. This gets you wired in to the community. It lets you see all their conversations within the 'tribe'. You can now read the posts of everyone in the tribe, make a contribution, ask questions - anything.
I will get a notification from the system I have set up which lets me see that you are now following in our 'tribe'. When I get that I will follow you back. We can then send each other DM's (direct messages) - just like emails (so nobody else can see them) but they are only allowed to be 140 characters long.
Next, if you click on my icon on the top right of the page you will get another page of just my 'tweets' (individual posts) - but importantly under the new picture it will say "Website". If you click on that link you will come to this blog, so you never have to remember the address of the blog, you can just access it quickly through Twitter.
We can use twitter as a kind of electronic notice-board. (NB: As this is a social networking site (though we are using it for business) your organisation may have a policy which prevents you from using Twitter at work. Be careful. Check it out. For what it's worth I posted a link on Twitter about a firm who have found a way to sell Twitter to the management as it made significant improvements in project working).
Now you might be wondering what you could possibly put on Twitter, so here are a few suggestions:
If you find a good explanation in a text book. . .
If you find a poor explanation in a text book. . .
If you find a blog with a good example. . .
If you see a news story and you have a comment about it. . .
If you see a news story or any other article you think is interesting. . .
If you find a reference which has helped you with your assignment. . .
If you want help with something. . .
If you hear a good podcast. . .
If you can pass on a useful website. . .
If there is a juicy Law problem. . .
If you hear some breaking news. . .
If you want to set up a revision session with your colleagues. . .
If you want to add to or correct what someone else has written. . .
. . . just post a tweet!
You can search on Twitter. If you wanted to find my posting about CSR, say, you would go to search.twitter and enter bpplesc CSR and click the search button and it would take you straight to it. If you just type CSR in the box you would get every reference to CSR on Twitter! Hmmm, interesting. . .
Look at the top right of your page and you will see a "Settings" tab. It does what it says on the tab. Here you can change things about your account and upload a picture. Please do upload a picture or even an icon. It just looks really boring and 'newbie' to just have the default o_O icon. It also makes it easier to identify you and to find you to send a DM.
You can upload any appropriate picture of .jpeg format.
What else? Well you can block people, so you don't need to fear stalkers (and you can unblock people if they start being nice to you again).
Please don't click the "Privacy" button in your settings unless you are really sure it is what you want to do. What this will do is to stop people in the timeline i.e. all the rest of Twitter, from seeing your posts. It also means that you won't be able to search on your own posts either. Not good if you want to find a brilliant article you posted some time ago!
Here's another really useful tip. There is another site you will find useful. http://tinyurl.com/
Here you cut the long URL from the site you have found and paste it into the box. When you click on Make TinyURL it takes the big address and condenses it down. This is really useful in keeping down your post into the maximum 140 characters. It is useful to give an idea of what the article is about in your tweet others won't know what the article is about and it will make it harder to search for it again too. So you might write "Here are the latest unemployment figures http:/tinyurl/qwerty"
At the end of each tweet line you will see two icons if you hover your mouse over them - a star and a curved arrow. Click the star and it will make a gold star appear. This is then saved as a favourite which you can find quicker next time. Clicking the curved arrow will allow you to reply directly to someone in the box above (it will automatically show their name). This is not the same as a DM - everyone will be able to see the reply.
Twitter will not replace email for official communications. I'm doing this off my own bat, there is no company liability accepted or implied. I am providing it as a service to students as a resource. If you don't want to use it, that's fine by me.
Finally, I am not going to be too heavy handed about the thread. There is one thing I am keen on, however - this is not going to have any hangers-on. If you are following, you need to contribute to the tribe. Every couple of months or so I will block those who have not contributed. It is not fair that someone can benefit from reading the articles that others are posting and not help in return. Also, I would ask that we keep tweets as useful and relevant as possible. Some questions and personal commentary are inevitable, useful and desirable, but I would like to keep it practical and reasonably professional and relevant. Personal comments and jokes or joke sites can best be put into a DM.
All of us are better than any of us. If you find an article, podcast, news-report, graph, blog - whatever - which has been useful to you the chances are that other students will also find it useful. Hopefully they will be doing the same. We will then have multiple eyes bringing gold nuggets back to this wonderful noticeboard for us all to share. As I said, it should be a great resource if used properly.
Any questions, let me know.
Tuesday 11 November 2008
Gmail
Why I am impressed with Google Mail:
1. It's got over 7.2GB of storage for every user (yes, you read that right 7.2 Gigabytes and the available space is constantly rising!). This means that you never have to delete another email message ever, you can just put them into the archive and retrieve them later.
2. The search function is brilliant, simple to use and very fast.
3. You can access your email anywhere you can get Google - you don't have to be logged on to a particular computer.
4. It automatically includes a calendar which is very useful for scheduling and again is easy to use and customize.
5. It automatically includes "Google reader" which is a one-stop site to which you have all your RSS feeds sent, so every time your favourite websites update, the RSS is sent to your Google reader. If you want to know more about RSS you can find a video I have posted about it on Twitter.
6. It's good at identifying spam. If you get regular spam from a particular source you can put in a 'filter' which tells the mail system to automatically delete it and to not send it to you in future.
7. 'Labels' are easy to set up so that every time you get a message from a defined source (say, a particular friend or organisation) you can get the software to mark it with a label so that you can easily find it visually by scanning for that label (and you can make the colour of the label characteristic) or you can search only for that label and it will pull up only those messages with that label.
8. You can get any other email account you have to bounce messages to your gmail account and vice versa. This is very useful when you are crossing over from one main email account to gmail - it ensures that messages don't get forgotten in your old email box (a bit like redirecting the post when you move house).
9. You can 'star' any important messages with the click of a button, again for ease of finding or searching it.
10. You can add features to it via Google Labs which allow you to put in nifty little add-on widgets.
If you sign up for a free Google account you get gmail included and you're off and running.
Here's where you can sign up:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
1. It's got over 7.2GB of storage for every user (yes, you read that right 7.2 Gigabytes and the available space is constantly rising!). This means that you never have to delete another email message ever, you can just put them into the archive and retrieve them later.
2. The search function is brilliant, simple to use and very fast.
3. You can access your email anywhere you can get Google - you don't have to be logged on to a particular computer.
4. It automatically includes a calendar which is very useful for scheduling and again is easy to use and customize.
5. It automatically includes "Google reader" which is a one-stop site to which you have all your RSS feeds sent, so every time your favourite websites update, the RSS is sent to your Google reader. If you want to know more about RSS you can find a video I have posted about it on Twitter.
6. It's good at identifying spam. If you get regular spam from a particular source you can put in a 'filter' which tells the mail system to automatically delete it and to not send it to you in future.
7. 'Labels' are easy to set up so that every time you get a message from a defined source (say, a particular friend or organisation) you can get the software to mark it with a label so that you can easily find it visually by scanning for that label (and you can make the colour of the label characteristic) or you can search only for that label and it will pull up only those messages with that label.
8. You can get any other email account you have to bounce messages to your gmail account and vice versa. This is very useful when you are crossing over from one main email account to gmail - it ensures that messages don't get forgotten in your old email box (a bit like redirecting the post when you move house).
9. You can 'star' any important messages with the click of a button, again for ease of finding or searching it.
10. You can add features to it via Google Labs which allow you to put in nifty little add-on widgets.
If you sign up for a free Google account you get gmail included and you're off and running.
Here's where you can sign up:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
Friday 24 October 2008
The human race could be extinct by Christmas
You have to watch the weasel words!
How likely is 'could'?
Britain is on nuclear alert at the moment, did you know that?
Well, of course it is! The Defence Council, the RAF, Royal Navy and the British Army are on constant alert. The 'four minute warning' and all that. But are they on any more alert than normal? Not as far as we know.
But you see how saying it in a particular way can create an impression in your mind?
Let's take an example closer to home. Suppose you introduce your partner as 'my current boyfriend' or 'my first wife'. Word up - be prepared to spend the night on the couch!
Words can convey a message as much by what they say as by what they don't say.
Point 1 - watch out for weasel words.
How else can you check?
Point 2 - Do your homework. Pick apart the argument. Look for the facts. Listen for the justification.
Now do you know why MICA is important? To spot trends. To look at correlation (and to distinguish it from causation). To insist on metrics. To quantify the nature of the problem. To get at the whole picture.
Be aware that facts can be deceptive when deprived of context. That's why MSBC is not just Pestle, Swot and Porter - it's about context - putting the 'facts' in perspective.
How likely is 'could'?
Britain is on nuclear alert at the moment, did you know that?
Well, of course it is! The Defence Council, the RAF, Royal Navy and the British Army are on constant alert. The 'four minute warning' and all that. But are they on any more alert than normal? Not as far as we know.
But you see how saying it in a particular way can create an impression in your mind?
Let's take an example closer to home. Suppose you introduce your partner as 'my current boyfriend' or 'my first wife'. Word up - be prepared to spend the night on the couch!
Words can convey a message as much by what they say as by what they don't say.
Point 1 - watch out for weasel words.
How else can you check?
Point 2 - Do your homework. Pick apart the argument. Look for the facts. Listen for the justification.
Now do you know why MICA is important? To spot trends. To look at correlation (and to distinguish it from causation). To insist on metrics. To quantify the nature of the problem. To get at the whole picture.
Be aware that facts can be deceptive when deprived of context. That's why MSBC is not just Pestle, Swot and Porter - it's about context - putting the 'facts' in perspective.
Wednesday 22 October 2008
Balloon
This is taken from "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, written in 1928. The whole book is free online and makes for fascinating reading. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmnud Freud and used some of his ideas to establish the field of Public Relations. You can find the whole book here:
http://reactor-core.org/bernays-propaganda.html#SECTION6
This is from chapter 6 and gives an indication of what Lord Mandelson might be doing (I have emboldened the relevant text):
"The public actions of America's chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stage-managed. But they are chosen to represent and dramatize the man in his function as representative of the people. A political practice which has its roots in the tendency of the popular leader to follow oftener than he leads is the technique of the trial balloon which he uses in order to maintain, as he believes, his contact with the public. The politician, of course, has his ear to the ground. It might be called the clinical ear. It touches the ground and hears the disturbances of the political universe.
http://reactor-core.org/bernays-propaganda.html#SECTION6
This is from chapter 6 and gives an indication of what Lord Mandelson might be doing (I have emboldened the relevant text):
"The public actions of America's chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stage-managed. But they are chosen to represent and dramatize the man in his function as representative of the people. A political practice which has its roots in the tendency of the popular leader to follow oftener than he leads is the technique of the trial balloon which he uses in order to maintain, as he believes, his contact with the public. The politician, of course, has his ear to the ground. It might be called the clinical ear. It touches the ground and hears the disturbances of the political universe.
But he often does not know what the disturbances mean, whether they are superficial, or fundamental. So he sends up his balloon. He may send out an anonymous interview through the press. He then waits for reverberations to come from the public—a public which expresses itself in mass meetings, or resolutions, or telegrams, or even such obvious manifestations as editorials in the partisan or nonpartisan press. On the basis of these repercussions he then publicly adopts his original tentative policy, or rejects it, or modifies it to conform to the sum of public opinion which has reached him. This method is modeled on the peace feelers which were used during the war to sound out the disposition of the enemy to make peace or to test any one of a dozen other popular tendencies. It is the method commonly used by a politician before committing himself to legislation of any kind, and by a government before committing itself on foreign or domestic policies.
It is a method which has little justification. If a politician is a real leader he will be able, by the skillful use of propaganda, to lead the people, instead of following the people by means of the clumsy instrument of trial and error.
The propagandist's approach is the exact opposite of that of the politician just described. The whole basis of successful propaganda is to have an objective and then to endeavor to arrive at it through an exact knowledge of the public and modifying circumstances to manipulate and sway that public. . .
Sunday 19 October 2008
This is a test to see if I can upload some material. I already have it stored on my computer and I want to make it available to a wider audience. Here goes:
I got these from a BBC website. It was a story about the different education standards in China and the UK. As is indicated, the first is a maths question for Chinese students. It is for PRE-University students.
Now here is a question for UK students for first year undergraduates:
I got these from a BBC website. It was a story about the different education standards in China and the UK. As is indicated, the first is a maths question for Chinese students. It is for PRE-University students.
Now here is a question for UK students for first year undergraduates:
Welcome to the blog
Hi Everyone!
Thanks for looking at this blog.
I will try to put additional details on this site and I welcome your input too. Any diagrams that you have or articles that you want to include on here, either upload or send to me and I will do it for you. It will be a fairly eclectic mix of stuff, obviously related to the course and syllabus, but maybe some other stuff you will find interesting or useful, or both.
Let's see how it goes.
Take care.
Les.
Thanks for looking at this blog.
I will try to put additional details on this site and I welcome your input too. Any diagrams that you have or articles that you want to include on here, either upload or send to me and I will do it for you. It will be a fairly eclectic mix of stuff, obviously related to the course and syllabus, but maybe some other stuff you will find interesting or useful, or both.
Let's see how it goes.
Take care.
Les.
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