The Fresh Ball 2006

The guys behind the entertaining May Day Bingo Ball announced today The Fresh Ball 2006, which is an ‘unofficial freshers ball for everyone‘.

The May Day Ball was certainly good fun and the old bingo hall on Magdalen/Cowley Road proved to be an unusual location with lots of original charm that was well-suited to a ball focused on a small number of acts.

Hopefully they will learn from experience and rethink the entertainment slightly: no matter how good/cheap acts are, if they are to engage the 99% of attendees that are in the main hall, then they need to encompass broader tastes. The fact that The Brothers’ 80s electro funk/rock act that night and OU’s salsa team were usurped by the Brookes DJ playing the Baywatch theme should indicate things going slightly awry.

UK GRAD Careers Advice

My mind has been turning again to The World of Work and I came across some excellent archives of online advice given by UK GRAD experts.

• Week 2: CVs and applications
• Week 2: Interviews and assessment centres

Dr Sara Shinton also provides four articles [Word docs] on CVs, Application Forms, Interviews and Assessment Centres.

In addition to these, UK GRAD provide a nice list of possible interview questions.

Elsewhere, UCL have a nice section on ‘key skills’, inc. a Key Skills Grid.

What can a Physicist bring?

David Potter in this month’s Physics World offers hope for us physicists [19 (8) p42] :

Back in the 19th century, studying classics was seen as good preparation for positions of leadership, but in the modern world I think physics is a wonderful training of the mind. It teaches you to apply rigour to modelling simple, even banal, problems like how an apple falls. That approach is extremely useful in business — in analysing and understanding how markets behave. Business gurus and consultants talk the fashion of the moment, which is often claptrap, so applying greater vigour is valuable. Theoretical physicists known well that out of every 10 ideas they have, nine are nonsense, even if they seem beautiful.

I hope to collect some more titbits like that over the next few weeks.

English Irregular Verbs

On John Prescott’s continuing troubles:

• I participated in an exchange.
• You took part in a discussion.
• They are just a puppet for CCO.

Impressions of Entrepreneurship

I was reminded on the Enviro-Entrepreneurship Summer School that I recently attended of Wilde’s Impressions of America where he claims:

“The exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.”

Remarkably, this is not the only insight of his that could arguably be truer today as in 1882:

“There is a good deal of beauty to be seen in them now and then, but only where the American has not attempted to create it.”

“One is impressed in America, but not favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its impressive bigness.”

Sadly, some things have changed:

“In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation.”

To Keele and Back

I have just returned from the Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School run by QED Consulting (with help from various kind sponsors) at the University of Keele.

A great time, I think, was had by 30 or so attendees, and we explored the mysterious realms of business planning, intellectual property, environmental regulation, finance, networking, and marketing. We also heard from some established firms in the environmental sector, as described on ecoaesthete.

I attended the course to gain help developing my environmental product business that is based around my ecoaesthete brand. Everyone on the Summer School had fascinating business concepts and ideas, ranging from trained artists looking to develop their work as a business to already established businesses.

Confidentiality limits what I can really say, but some things are publically available:

• Nicola @ Bog (http://www.bogblog.com – UPDATE: she mentioned this address, but doesn’t seem to be the registrant)
• Amy @ PrincessAlmighty (http://www.princessalmighty.com – which sadly doesn’t do her justice)
• + loads of others but I’m afraid until I get the contact list I’ve forgotten their website details…

Getting to Keele on Wednesday was a bit of a struggle: I left College at midnight only to learn three hours later that my National Express coach had been cancelled due to an accident on the M40. Fortunately, I was sent off to Birmingham in a taxi and managed to connect with a coach to Stoke, from where I got a bus to Keele’s campus. Rather rudely a few people were hours late for the start of the School, all blaming public transport; but they clearly hadn’t made the effort to ensure they were there on time, something I found disrespectful. This was repeated at the end of the School when others left hours early, saying that they had to go home early. I was still sat in Birmingham at 3am waiting for my coach home because I stayed until the end thereby missing the coach at 7pm. I was left wondering whether I was mad showing such committment, but I hope the experience of the School and the interesting people I met will pay great dividends in the future.

Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School

I’ve been selected to attend the Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School, run by QED Consulting (supported by BusinessLink and mustard.uk.com), at Keele University at the end of this month.

Hopefully it will be an excellent opportunity to further develop a wide range of range business skills and meet all kinds of interesting, motivated people.

Windows Live Local

Microsoft have added better satellite imagery to their Windows Live Local mapping service, thanks to signing up Getmapping.

This means that, as opposed to Google Maps, Oxford is now covered at high resolution: the punts in Wolfson's harbor can easily be counted. The images are a couple of years old, however, since construction on Wolfson's new M-block has not even started.

External Links?

I was wondering what websites do with their external links and how they can be hijacked.

One can generate links from the Daily Telegraph: James Doig

Some random sites found in Google:

• James Doig
• Me and someone called James Doig

Or even the US government: James Doig

And Google itself: James Doig 

Wikipedia: Democracy in Action?

Wikipedia’s contribution to democracy receives a lot of hype. But it is not the articles themselves that are democratic, there the views of the last person to edit the piece stand, but the deletion review debates. These are fascinating to watch: the debate never really evolves, but everyone weighs in with their opinions, and a true consesus is rarely reached.

Real World’s Graduate of the Year, Kirill Makharinsky, has been keeping the Wikipedia masses busy. Someone — one of the family, I think it was disclosed — has been hitting Wikipedia with articles about St. John’s finest. The deletion debate received some strange comments from new users, but the (meritocratic) ‘consensus’ was thankfully in favour of deletion (now twice).

But this story highlights another part of the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia: to be fair to Mr M, it seems to have been an assassination job: as 84.70.175.84 pointed out, Kittybrewster (aka Mr/s Arbuthnot) may have edited the article PoV and then put it up for deletion. The article has gone now anyway (only the edited version is in Google Cache) and it’s nice to see group’s take wise collective decisions: Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, yes, a comprehensive one, but one that doesn’t follow ephemeral solar flares of notoriety, nomatter what Oxonian “sychophants” (to quote the assassin) think.

So, where does Mr M stand? Well, as one user said on Wikipedia, “Notability. There’s plenty of time“.

A quick overview of his companies:

• amiworthit.com, “The largest social networking club for students online” [own quote from someone actually on Facebook].
• ClickUni. (Coming soon! the site claims.)
• CanAnyone (COMING SOON, the site claims. Something — The Sphere Network — can be found in a subdomain.)
• Thinkplane, a consultancy with no online presence.
  (I hope I haven’t missed any here.)