27 January 06 - 18:05Dance Dance Revolution in Schools

The state of West Virginia is to install Dance Dance Revolution games in the classrooms of public schools (note: in Britain a "public school" is actually a private/fee-paying school). This sounds like the answer to child obesity - give the kids a game they like to play and at the same time they get exercise, almost by stealth.

It seems like a good idea, but it's important to bear in mind that a lack of exercise is only a small factor in someone's weight. Weight and fitness are related, but they are actually different things. It is possible to be skinny and horribly unfit if you don't exercise but eat little and at the same time it's possible to be fit enough to run a reasonable time in a half-marathon and still be considered fat (BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles has never lost much weight, but through daily training runs in a park, managed to run the Great North Run sucessfully).

If kids are overweight it is mostly a combination of what they eat and how much of it they eat. It's all too easy to blame the sedentry modern lifestyle for obesity and while I think there are many life-changing benefits to hard aerobic exercise, it doesn't in and of itself make you lose weight. Besides, this guy obvsiouly spent plenty of time on DDR and he's still pretty heavy :).

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26 January 06 - 15:30Useful, but strangely named Blog: Lifehacker

Here's a quick link to a useful blog I found: Lifehacker. "Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live."

The site contains a ton of useful tips but why isn't it called Lifetips or something like that - why Lifehacker? I think this all goes back to an O'Reilly book on modifying TiVo's called TiVo Hacks. The book did well and launched a whole series of books called Something Hacks even though in the case of most of the books that followed, they weren't hacks, they were just tips or shortcuts. The term hack has now morphed in internet culture to mean tip or shortcut. I find it a bit hackneyed personally.

UPDATE: They did just post an item about a site StopBadWare.org - "Viruses and worms are no longer the biggest threat to computer users – now it’s badware. Badware is a term we use to encompass the broad range of malicious software that is sneaking onto people’s computers, including spyware and deceptive adware." There is a term for this already but I guess someone already registered StopMalware.org.

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26 January 06 - 13:48Crappy part-work offer

Do they have the part-works in other countries or is it just a British marketing phenomenon? A part-work is where you buy part of some larger item each week, usually in the form of a magazine with the part attached, from a newsagents or supermarket. Offers range from small model cars and figurines of all kinds to components to make a radio controlled car. One of the most common schemes is to sell a popular television series one DVD at a time. Oh, they add a little value by providing a magazine all about the episodes and characters on that week/months DVD, but it usually only runs to 10 to 20 pages.

Another characteristic of all part-work offers is that the first issue will be heavily advertised and sold at a large discount to the normal price in the hope that lots of people will buy the first issue with the assumption that a good percentage will buy following issues. The advertising standards authority clamped down on this practice a few years ago and now insists that adverts also indicate the regular price of each issue. Another hazard of part-works is that if they don't sell well enough they can be 'suspended'. If you're part way through building a collection of Napoleonic Cavalry figures, or worse, part way through making a radio controlled car, you're basically stuffed. Sometimes they'll let you buy the rest of the kit for a set fee if they had it made up in advance, but that's not always the case - sometimes the product doesn't even exist to buy.

One part-work being heavily advertised at the moment is The X-Files - The Complete Collection On DVD. Each DVD features 4 'classic' episodes (I guess they're all classic since it's no longer made). The first issue is £2.99. Lets call it 3 quid. After that it's 8 quid an issue (once every two weeks). There are 49 issues in total, so the total cost I make £387. Currently you can buy the entire run of The X-Files from Amazon.co.uk for £139.99. That's quite a saving!

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26 January 06 - 08:51The Liberal Democrates really are liberal

I wrote the other day about Mark Oaten's breif candidacy for the Liberal Democrat leadership. Now it turns out the party grandee SImon Hughes has admitted having both gay and straight relationships in the past. Not that that is a problem in itself, for me anyway, but he's in hot water now for initially denying it. Of course there are also some more conservative (with a small 'c') party members who are now wondering if the party leadership is a bit too liberal. Just give the party leadship to Menzies Campbell already!

Technorati Tags (experimental): UK Politics, Liberal Democrats, Simon Hughes, Mark Oaten

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23 January 06 - 16:08My old school, bottom again

My old secondary school never had a good reputation. In Kent we still have selective secondary eduation with the highest graded juniors going to what used to be called grammar schools. I didn't work hard enough at junior school so while my brother went to Chatham Grammar School for Boys, I went to Upbury Manor High School (for dimwits and future car thieves ;)

I left there in 1990 and not long after the schools inspectors, Ofsted, named it as a "failing school". A new headmaster was brought in and it improved just enough to avoid being closed. Later in the '90s it joined the trendy government program to become a 'specialist' school and gain some extra funding for it's chosen area of speciality. They chose arts (presumably because it's easier to bump the grades a little than it is for maths or english) and the school was renamed Upbury Arts College to make it sound more impressive. Another Gillingham school (Woodlands road) was closed with pupils transferring to Upbury. Then the government came up with another scheme to try and improve failing schools by attracting more funding through gimmicks and the Academy schools program was born. Upbury joined up and the school was renamed again to New Brompton College (Brompton is an area of Gillingham near the school).

Today New Brompton College was in the news because it was the lowest ranked Academy school in the country. A table from the BBC website shows that of the schools in the local area it is ranked last with an astoundingly low figure of only 9% of pupils achieveing the basic standard of 5 GCSE passes at grade C or above - a standard that is really, really easy to gain. The most amazing part of the story is this quote from the Reuters story on Academy schools:-

Headteacher Judy Rider said she recognised that the results were "extremely poor", but Medway Council said it had every confidence in her and her management team.

Well, the council would say that as they appointed the management.

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22 January 06 - 14:54How do politicians think?

Britain's third (and largely pointless) third political party, the Liberal Democrats, has been leaderless since Charles Kennedy was forced to resign after admitting that he was receiving treatment for alcoholism. That sounds a bit harsh, but I think it had more to do with the fact that he'd been an alcoholic for a couple of years at least and had done everything possible to conceal this from the party and the country at large. People don't like it when politicians conceal things.

In the race to suceed Kennedy, the first to declare an interest in the leadership was Sir Menzies Campbell, the party's elder statesman. Another was the young-gun, home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten. He was looking quite competent on camera and with the Conservative's recently electing a younger leader, many thought he might be in with a chance against Campbell.

That was until a newspaper revealed that Oaten, married with two children, was having an affair with a 23 year old man with allegations that the man was a 'rentboy'. Now leaving aside all arguments over morality etc., you have to wonder what was going through Mark Oaten's mind when he decided to run for the party leadership. Didn't he think for even one second that this would come out in the press? It never ceases to amaze me how that when people get on a roll in public life and are popular, they can't resist reaching for the next level regardless of whether it's actually a good idea or not.

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21 January 06 - 14:54Review of Napster Subscription Service

My PC recently suffered yet another harddrive crash (I'm never buying another Maxtor drive) resulting in the loss of about half of my mp3 collection. Although I could rip my own CDs again, I have to admit there was a large number of files there that I, erm, don't have on CD. Since I was also temporarily down on HD space I thought I'd give a music subscription service a go. Napster is only £10 a month (and yet somehow it is also US$10 a month - how does that work?). They also have a free one-week trial.

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20 January 06 - 19:53NBC Nightly News thinks we are backwards

I sometimes catch NBC Nightly News as CNBC Europe show it each week night at 11:30pm after Late Night with Conan O'Brien. It's interesting to see things from a US perspective and although the broadcast is not really in-depth (with all the ad breaks there's probably only about 20 minutes of actual news), it is usually a decent enough show. Today though they amazed me with a piece on marathon runner Paul Tergat's role with the UN's food program in Kenya. I don't know how well known he is in the USA, but due to the coverage the BBC gives athletics (because it's the only sport they can afford to show), Tergat is no stranger to UK viewers. What amazed me though wasn't that he was on a major news show as part of their "making a difference" feature, but that they decided it was necessary to subtitle him! He speaks perfect English and maybe his accent sounds more familiar to me because of the number of African football players in England, but still, I'd be amazed if anyone actually needed subtitles to understand what he was saying.

In the same broadcast they managed to insult us English a little more by claiming the only thing anyone was talking about over here was that Whale that swam up the Thames. Brian Williams actually said "A whale in London, but how did it get there?" - IT SWAM UP THE THAMES! Duh. Actually the news here was more concerned with the issue of sex offenders working in schools and the event in Iraq and Iran. OK, Sky News did spend most of the day showing live footage of the Whale, but then they showed hours and hours of live footage of a man standing on a window ledge at Buckingham Palace as a protest last year. That's what 24 hour 'news' channels do. It's up to scheduled news programming like NBC Nightly News to raise the bar and cover stories that actually matter.

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