Bad advertising

Picture the advert: a girl is sitting on the sofa next to her dad. He's eating a bowl Nestle "Oats and More" of cereal and in order to stop her from eating any, lies to her that the cereal is flammable. The tag line is it's too good to share, and other adverts for this product promote similar deception and greed.

Living on a smart planet – is it the technology that counts?

For many years now we have been developing technologies that can help us to detect events (and their pre-cursors). These technologies, put to good use, can help us to provide faster, better, more effective protection and response, whether it is on a global scale (tsunami warning systems), or personal (body state monitors), and whether it is significant (using GPS to help rescue work in Haiti) or trivial (having your fridge send you a text to say that you need more milk). But are they smart? Does this mean we live on a technologically smart planet?
According to the WordNet lexical database of English, the word smart has several possible meanings:

Noun: a kind of pain such as that caused by a wound or a burn or a sore.
Verb: be the source of pain.
Adjective:
(i) showing mental alertness and calculation and resourcefulness;
(ii) elegant and stylish;
(iii) characterized by quickness and ease in learning;
(iv) fresh, impertinent, impudent, overbold, saucy;
(v) painfully severe ("he gave the dog a smart blow");
(vi) quick and brisk ("we walked at a smart pace");
(v) capable of independent and apparently intelligent action ("smart weapons").

That’s a lot of meanings for one word, but basically they boil down to three sets of meaning – one around painfulness, one around elegance, and one around intelligence – and it’s the last of those that is applicable here: when we talk about “smart technology” or creating a “smart planet”, we mean something that is intelligent and resourceful.

Social media brings out the best of us... and the worst

Like it or not, the world of social media is here to stay. Even if you don’t own a PC (or other Internet connected device) at home, the chances are you’ll still come across it at work or amongst your friends and family. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Gmail, Spotify, Skype, Flickr ... the list seems endless.

Why vote?

Just look at the mess the world is in. Economic disaster following the “greed meltdown” of the banks and financial institutions; squabbles amongst the world’s richest nations about how little they can get away with (at the Copenhagen Summit) in helping the disadvantaged to cope with a climate change disaster they (the rich countries) have created; tawdry money grabbing tactics by expenses-manipulating UK politicians (as if a salary of £65,000 wasn’t enough – and Cabinet ministers / committee chairs get more); and so on.

Record keeping in the public sector: has it gone too far?

The recent Times article by Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent (Bureaucracy stops us helping children, say social workers) raises some important issues, but side-steps them in flavour of political mud-slinging.  As the Times and its readers are basically Tory, it's hardly surprising that the article and most of the comments are political and anti-Labour. Which is a shame because herein lies an important issue that transcends politics.

Are mobile phones good for the classroom?

Liz Lightfoot, writing for the Observer (11 October 2009) reports Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, saying that schools should drop their bans on mobile phones in the classroom. He cites one example of a positive use of the mobile (a child photographing the homework written up on the classroom whiteboard) and uses the general view that “technology is good” to support his thesis.

Can we ever agree about our different perspectives?

When you watch, read or listen to the news, everything is presented in very black and white terms: people are right or wrong. And when something goes wrong, someone must be to blame, so let's find out who that is and... blame them!

It's not how loud you speak, it's who is saying it and why that matters

You have to wonder, sometimes, about people’s sense of proportion. The trouble with the Internet, and especially social media, is that messages can spread so quickly and widely, and people can confuse volume with importance. Just because x-thousand messages appear on Twitter or Facebook about something, doesn’t mean to say that it issue is truly important.

Mapping the customer journey

Why don’t large organisations treat their customers like real people? You know what I mean: here are some examples:

You walk into a major fast food chain. The two staff who are serving happen to be in conversation together. They neither acknowledge you nor break off their conversation to serve. Eventually one of them does serve you, but with obvious ill grace...

You ring your local council with a query about waste recycling. The person who answers is polite but distant. You can tell they don’t really want to answer the question. They suggest you look it up on their web site. You explain that you don’t have web access. With an audible sign, they look up the information and reel it off too fast for you to write down the main details, so you have to ask them to repeat it...

On the Internet nobody knows who you are - or do they?

I have just returned from a holiday in Venice. Amongst other sites, I visited the original Jewish ghetto - the Venetians created the concept centuries before the Nazis (in 1516). For Venetian Jews the ghetto was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was bad because of course it created segregation between Jews and the rest of the (mainly Catholic) population.