[chippie for pm] hazel's campaign launch

Leader of the pack. See Chris Paul's photo below.

For the benefit of American readers, Chippie will probably be the next Prime Ministerette of England, after Britain is broken into little pieces and Gordo 'Man of Iron' Brown is shown the door. This is her campaign launch, following Iain Dale's multitudinous posts on the dear lady..

My goodness there are some scurrilous things said about Chippie, for example:

Cabinet Minister Hazel Blears was yesterday accused of hypocrisy after joining protests against the closure of the maternity unit of a hospital in her constituency.

She never did. She was filled with compassion for her constituents, that was all. UK Daily Pundit exposes another virulent lie about the delightfully vertically challenged Chippie:

Rather cruelly I thought, Talk Sport's George Galloway referred to Hazel Blears on his Saturday evening phone-in show as "a four foot pile of nothing". He's quite wrong. She's four foot six.

Besides, UKDP, Napoleon was only 9 inches taller [so they say]. Anyway, Chippie appears to have made the wrong move for once. Unusual for her, as she's usually politically smart and unerring:

In August 2005 Blears, while standing in for Home Secretary Charles Clarke (who was on holiday), suggested the 'rebranding' of ethnic minorities in favour of adopting US-style hyphenated titles such as Asian-British-Canadian. That idea was soon firmly squashed by the Clarkean Python foot .

Yes, in throwing her hat into the deputy leadership ring, she's ignoring the call for her to take on the nation's highest elected office. She was allegedly reported as having said: "I have absolutely no aspirations in that direction."

So she's decided on the deputyship instead but Political Opinions are not so sure:

Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser. How preposterous would it be of me to suggest that she is misusing party resources for her own election? Almost as ridiculous as some of the claims that have been flying around at disreputable venues that Peter Hain has been running a dodgy campaign, I suppose. Don't believe any of it for a second.

So let's look at Chippy, the person. Find articles reports that:

The most enthusiastic of the Prime Minister's loyalists, she has been called "Tony Blair's little ray of sunshine" not only for her sunny manner, but because she is brimming with "bold ideas" for Labour's third term.

An example of her constancy, fortitude and staunch loyalty to Tony Blair was reported in the Mirror, the serious newspaper for the thinking workingclass:

Launching her bid to be Gordon Brown's number two, Hazel Blears says that, unlike John Prescott, she would not wallow in the trappings of power like a big fat pig with its greedy snout in the trough.

Not so fast, I hear you say. Surely she was in some sort of portfolio? Well … not exactly. Surely she has policies? Yes, she has some, according to Jim Jay:

Hazel Blears is strongly for ID cards, top up fees, foundation hospitals, war and anti-terror laws.

That's our girl. So jump on the Chippie bandwagon, as I've done here - you'll never regret it.

By the way, if you need any Chippie merchandise, Iain Dale has kindly provided the link.

So see you soon on the campaign trail, all right?

Chippie for PM!

[clandestine cookies] is sitemeter spying on you

Doctor Vee draws our attention to a very worrying matter:

A few months back, StatCounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…

We refused on the spot.

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Oh, a familiar story. The blog post written by StatCounter did not name the provider involved, but this was clearly what I had been experiencing recently. But I couldn’t find confirmation. Although I had an inkling that they were talking about Sitemeter, I couldn’t be certain.

Almost everyone I know uses Sitemeter and more than a few have had troubles with them. I'd never dreamed in a million years they'd be doing this sort of thing. Of course, we don't know and are not actually alleging anything. Is there any way we can find out for sure?

[switzerland] women now control the country

Wonderful news from Switzerland, of all places:

Geneva has become the first city in Switzerland to have a parliament where women are in the majority. The result has been hailed as a major breakthrough for women in the world of Swiss politics – traditionally a male preserve. Women only got the vote nationwide in 1971.

"This event is of symbolic importance. That's to say it's the first time the 50 per cent threshold has been broken and parity has been achieved," Thanh-Huyen Ballmer-Cao, a political scientist at Geneva University, told swissinfo.

But whether the shock result in Geneva marks a sea change in the male-dominated world of Swiss politics waits to be seen. A study published earlier this year showed that despite the increase in the number of women being elected to political posts, women are less interested in politics than men.

Is this the female battle cry: "We can do anything you can, even better but we'd prefer to be clever and let you do it"? Is it better for women to dominate politics whilst men dominate business?

Can the Toynbees of the world join the Chipmunks and Becketts of the world and bring about a jolly palatable PC matriarchy? Would love to hear the female view on this. Men, it seems we are on the way out, as a species.

[powerpoint presentations] could it be the end

This is a summarized version of the text posted today at the Age:

John Sweller, from the University of NSW, has led a team of Australian researchers who have found that is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time.

The report shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time. The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.

Sweller calls it the "cognitive load theory". The working memory is only effective in juggling two or three tasks at the same time, retaining them for a few seconds. When too many mental tasks are taken on some things were forgotten.

The team has also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own.

The theory has implications for Power Point presentations. "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

The findings also suggest that instead of asking students to solve problems on their own, teachers helped students more if they presented already solved problems.

"Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it," Professor Sweller said.

Naturally, educators would need to wait to see if other researchers support this idea but if it's so, it wouldn't take too much adjustment to alternate reading and listening periods.

I always found that if one spoke in point form, with each point clear and no more than one sentence long, people retained up to five points.

If a clear chart of the points was on the board, it would be better to have it covered whilst speaking, with some form of graphic for general effect, then uncover the list for summary purposes.

Just my theory, mind.

[silence] do you always have the right

First the BBC story recapped:

There were violent protests in San Francisco against a G-8 summit held in Scotland and a reporter, Joshua Wolf, 24, filmed it. Federal authorities wanted the videotape of the protesters but Wolf refused to release it.

Result - 226 days in jail. On Tuesday, Wolf posted video footage after repeatedly offering to allow a judge to view the unpublished footage but according to him, this was refused.

Although Californian laws protect journalists from revealing material, prosecutors successfully argued federal money helped pay for the police car, thus making it a federal case and so he was incarcerated.

1] Did the US have the right to incarcerate someone for keeping silence? What about Woodstein?

2] Is withholding a videotape the same as keeping silence?

3] Should journalists be protected from revealing information to authorities, as priests supposedly are?

4] Should the Feds use the new FEMA powers to torture suspects to get it out of Wolf?

[mid week thoughts] on slavery and freedom

At this time of abject apology for past slavery, isn't it more appropriate to look first to the present?

In any consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. [Ivan Illich, 1973]

It behoves us to break the shackles of both and take the first faltering step towards freedom and happiness. [James Higham, 2007]