Perfidious Facebook

Sorry - I have not been using blogger for some time while I have been on a mission to explore and understand every aspect of Facebook.

The way in which Facebook flatly refuses to engage in a discussion about any of its kangaroo court judgements means that it is impossible to regard it as a viable commercial partner.

"Restrictions such as a page being unpublished, reduced distribution and more." 

Wow. WOW... these folks make no attempt to conceal the arrogance with which they wield absolute power… this is also a confession of the granularity of their content "control" systems. They are The New Mafia.. ...a good title for my book...

The threats it makes when imposing one of its arbitrary notices reminds us that it can control every aspect of any Facebook presence to a degree which is beyond just dangerous. At the very least it is a threat to any society that is now infected by it.

I doubt if I will get much political support for this campaign in the run-up to an election, where the political parties are fully well aware of the pernicious and subversive value in using Facebook as an advertising platform. And Facebook almost certainly knows this.

After the upcoming UK election, hopefully, one party will emerge with a big enough majority to have the balls to conduct a root and branch review of all media, as it has evolved in the past 20 years with its unprecedented access to personal information to which it has become addicted. This will inevitably mean it is necessary to take Facebook apart and either ban it from this country or require it to operate in a much more transparent and responsive manner.

After a 12-month experiment in which I have immersed myself in the workings of Facebook, my NewsScape hobby project is reaching around 200,000 a week, which is nothing in the context of Facebook, but a reasonable circulation as far as specialist Media in the UK. The best post ended up reaching 12 million, and I'm embarrassed to admit it was very much along the lines of "duck on skateboard", rather than any sort of crucial cerebral commentary on a news story.

All part of the process of gathering evidence...

A messy desk is the sign of a sophisticated mind

I unashamedly borrow the core of this piece from an article in The Economist, written some twenty years ago before we all really understood how computers would completely change the way we interact with information. It's been in a notice pinned on my office wall for most of those twenty years, and It's time I shared the secret with anyone who has a sense of guilt about living in a mess.

A messy desk is not necessarily a bad thing. For one, it provides context that aids memory in locating a missing document or scrap of paper. An ergonomist has gone a step further by devising a computerised database to work out a filing system for messy desks.

Most people can be divided Into the obsessively tidy and the madly messy. Likewise. some rooms will be paragons of neatness — desks cleared, papers filed, books shelved — whereas others look as though their contents have been spewed out in a massive eruption.

Albert was famously untidy

The tidy-minded (anal) often accuse the slovenly (creative) of being disorganised in spirit as well as appearance. They are wrong. Though a messy desk is not ideal, it has features which can make it a cheap, flexible and relatively efficient filing system — features which, until now. have been remarkably resistant to computerisation.

Dr [Now Professor] Mark Lansdale, an ergonomist at Loughborough University. aims to change that. Using the way that people think and remember things, rather than the ways that efficiency experts believe they ought to: he is devising a computerised database which will deliver the advantages of the messy desk, without the mess.

The question always asked by people with messy desks is, when you tidy up. where do you put everything so that you can find them again? It Is a good question. Manual filing is a rigid process. A piece of paper can go in under only a single heading. Fine if only one heading is appropriate, but if there Is ambiguity, forget It. Which is just what people do.

In some cases, four out of five such categorisations are forgotten overnight. And If the information is burled invisibly in a computer database, rather than being a piece of paper which can be found by a physical search, the situation is still worse.

This is because most people remember things not by mentally pigeonholing them, but reconstructing circumstances around them until they gradually track them down. This is where the messy desk comes in.

Messy desks give the sort of context that aids memory. The papers are visible (or, at least, partly so), so that things about them can be recognised. Their position bears some relation to when they arrived, or were last referred to. And it is likely that the normal process of working will have caused papers that relate to each other to have ended up together.

These clues enable the owner of the desk to work out where the target is, even if this Is unknown to start with. Lansdale refers to this as the "volcano" model of filing: a more or less clear area in the middle of the desk — the bit where the work is done— is a crater in a vaguely conical heap of paperwork.

The farther a paper is from the crater, the less immediately relevant It is. Eventually, the most useless papers will fall to the floor and be swept away by the cleaners.

His computerised replacement is called MEMOIRS It can handle both' electronic "documents" and real ones — the latter are recorded by a video camera so that they can be displayed on screen. The arrival of a document is an "event".

So is any subsequent handling of it. Just as they would be to a perfect human memory, all of these events can be recalled. In combination, they will define not only a document, but a particular stage of its passage through the electronic office — for, unlike a conventional database, MEMOIRS does not delete or rewrite the past.

Sadly it seems Memoirs was never actually created as a product, and in the 20 years since the original work, much has changed about the way we interact with computers and database and now information clouds. But the general principle that those blessed with sophisticated minds tend to live in a more dishevelled circumstances suits me just fine.

Lemonade the price of champagne??

Recession, what recession?

Sometimes I marvel at the sheer brass neck and amazing gullibility of the human race.

There is not a lot to add. The Tesco own brand lemonade is cheaper than mineral water and the Schweppes mini can is £6 for 2lts worth.

Now then, a very decent Cava can be had for about the same from Robin Greatorex if you are lucky enough to live in his catchment area.

So I want to set up a spy camera at the local Tesco and see who buys the 44p/150ml can, follow them home, and sell them Tower Bridge.

Can we really smell that bad?

I once tried to work out the biggest non-intuitive product selection in the Tesco online shopping catalogue. It was air fresheners. It was at that moment that I realised that UK society was probably finished. The present list has 208 entries.

OK, something like "beer" has some 400 entries, but that covers all the variants of packaging and pack sizes, which is hardly surprising. Despite suspicions that the market had gone potty, there are remarkably few variants of mineral water listed - fewer than 30.

A classy nose clip for £6

But air fresheners are a pointless contrivance of marketing if ever there was. They are a remarkably costly solution that has been invented to address a problem that can fixed by opening the window or washing your socks more than once a month.

If you really can't handle the environment in which you exist, then the simpler answer is to get a nose clip. If a 10p clothes peg is too downmarket, then Mikes Diving will sell you the state of the art device alongside, designed in an air tunnel, for £6 

And then I looked at the goggle image search for nose clips and.there are pages and pages of pages... what the ....

Never mind UK society, this must surely herald the end of civilisation as we know it.

Please someone, tell there is something more significant with which to measure the human condition than air fresheners and nose clips?