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  • Chronicle exclusive: the vanishing station

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.

    Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.

    Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.

    Bath Spa railway station
    Bath Spa railway station. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.

    photo caption on Chronicle piece reads Bath Spa railway statio Trains to London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads delayed or cancelled
    The site of Bath Spa railway station according to the Bath Chronicle

    For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉

  • Spot the hypocrisy

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    The right-wing Daily Mail national newspaper group – consisting of the Daily Mail and its sister publication, the Mail on Sunday – is not known for its love of foreigners.

    The Mail group has been a consistent campaigner against Britain’s membership of the European Union, whilst in recent years it has consistently whipped up hysteria against migrants coming to Britain and/or the EU and foreigners in general.

    As regards migrants, the Daily Mail was heavily criticised at the end of last year when a carton by Stanley McMurtry (“Mac”) linked the European migrant crisis (with a focus on Syria in particular) to terrorist attacks and criticised EU immigration laws for allowing Islamist radicals to gain easy access into the United Kingdom.

    The New York Times compared the offending – and offensive – cartoon to Nazi propaganda, whilst Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International stated the following to The Independent:

    The Daily Mail’s cartoon is precisely the sort of reckless xenophobia that fuels the self-same fear and hate loved by those responsible for atrocities in Paris, Beirut, Ankara and elsewhere. Now more than ever is the time to stand together in defiance of the perpetrators of violence with all of their victims and reject this disturbing lack of compassion.

    Another frequent target for the Mail group’s bile has been Britain’s overseas development aid programme, currently accounting for £12.2 bn. of the government’s budget, about which it has been moaning (although the Mail would call it campaigning. Ed.) for nearly as long as Europe.

    According to figures from the government, the UK’s overseas development aid budget accounted for under 0.7% of gross national income in 2015. Today’s Independent reveals that foreign aid accounts for just 1.1% of the UK government’s expenditure.

    However, such largesse is anathema to the Mail and Mail on Sunday and the latter has put its latest outpouring of bile against foreign aid on today’s front page, as shown below.

    today's Mail on Sunday front page
    The Mail on Sunday – free xenophobic bigotry for every reader

    Was the editor asleep when the front page was put together? Or is editor Georgie Greig blind to the irony of splashing a banner announcing the giving away of a “Free Giant Glossy Wall Map” above an attack on foreign aid. The map giveaway also proudly announces the reverse of the map shows “every flag”. This is presumably so Mail on Sunday readers will be able to identify both the countries and their flags to which foreign aid will no longer be going if it gets its narrow-minded, isolationist way.

  • Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.

    The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.

    The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.

    relevant sentence reads There has been a 40 per cent reduction in football in just five years across all of HSBC's branches

    Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.

    To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.

    As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?

    * = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.

  • Tidy BS5 in the Post

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    At the weekend, Cllr. Marg Hickman, the cabinet councillor for neighbourhoods and a great supporter of the Tidy BS campaign, shot the video below at the junction of Perry Street and Stapleton Road – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot which your correspondent has been reporting to Bristol City Council for the best part of two and a half years.

    However, Marg also sent the video to the Bristol Post, which used it as the basis for a piece in yesterday’s online edition.

    The Post’s report states that Marg also sent the footage and photos to the city council in the hope Bristol Waste, which manages street cleansing and waste collections, will finally begin to get to grips with the problem.

    According to the Post a council spokesperson said:

    The refuse team emptied the bins this morning, and Bristol Waste Company have two men on Stapleton Road every week day, so they will clear up following attendance from the refuse crew.

    One of the street cleansing supervisors has been sent to check the area to make sure everything is clean and tidy.

    The council may have sent out a street cleansing supervisor yesterday to check, but one needs to be at that location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your correspondent reported another load of fly-tipping had mysteriously appeared in the same spot overnight.

    Although progress on the ground may be slow, the Tidy BS5 campaign seems to be making better headway in the corridors of power since Marg’s intervention prompted Marvin Rees, Bristol’s elected mayor and past resident of Easton, to tweet on the filthy state of Stapleton Road, voicing his commitment to get our streets tidy.

    tweet from Bristol Mayor stating clean streets are a top priority

    However, Marvin and Marg have a big problem on their hands, as dumping litter and rubbish seem to be endemic throughout the city, not just in deprived BS5. Bristol’s annual Harbour Festival ended on Sunday evening and the Post noted in a separate report that the clean-up from the event is still continuing today, Tuesday.

  • Blunders at the speed of light

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    There was good news this week for Bristol businesses with a yearning for high speed internet connectivity.

    The Bristol Post reported on the deployment of ultra-fast 1 Gbps internet in the city.

    While journalists at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth are quite competent at their main task of churnalism, such as copying and pasting the words of wisdom given in press releases by men in suits – as in the article in question – standards slip dramatically and the absence of sub-editors and the associated lack of quality control are patently obvious when Post staff try simplifying complicated technical concepts, as shown by the following sentence.

    sentence reads These glass cables deliver an internet connection at the speed of light which is highly reliable and efficient

    Shall we just examine the above sentence in detail? There’s plenty wrong with it both technically and grammatically, which schoolchildren sitting their SATs examinations at ages 10 or 11 years would be embarrassed to get wrong.

    Firstly, those glass cables. The proper designation is “optical fibre cable“; and as is well known the correct use of terminology is important. An optical fibre cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibres that are used to carry light, whilst an optical fibre itself is a flexible, transparent fibre made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. So an optical fibre cable can be made of either glass or plastic, i.e. not solely glass.

    Data from an internet connection is transmitted as light down an optical fibre cable. Light travels at the speed of light. However, it is the method for providing the internet connection which is “highly reliable and efficient, not the speed of light. The subordinate clause, i.e. “which is highly reliable and efficient is misplaced and should at any rate have been preceded by a comma.

    Finally, there’s that speed of light; it’s so reliable and efficient that its precise value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s). It is commonly denoted as c, as in Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence formula. Furthermore, c is the maximum speed at which all matter – and hence information – in the universe can travel.

    In the slightly better old days when the Post still employed proper sub-editors, any decent holder of that position would have taken that sentence to bits and re-written it roughly as follows:-

    “These fibre optic cables deliver an internet connection reliably and efficiently at the speed of light.”

    Or alternatively:

    “These fibre optic cables deliver a reliable, efficient internet connection at the speed of light.”

    Unfortunately, local newspapers and their online analogues nowadays seem to have forgotten that quality matters and with quality comes a reputation and with the latter, authority.

  • Latest version of Snoopers’ Charter before Parliament this week

    Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Tech

    This week the House of Commons is due to debate the Investigatory Powers Bill, the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim), that will allow the United Kingdom’s police and services to regard the entire UK population as potential organised criminals, suspected terrorists and other assorted ne’er-do-wells and enable those same services to monitor the UK residents’ internet traffic and telecommunications.

    In advance of the parliamentary debate and to publicise the illiberal nature of Home Secretary Theresa May’s bill, the Open Rights Group installed a public toilet on a busy Friday afternoon in Brick Lane in east London. However, the public toilet was not all that it seemed; it was a toilet with a difference.

    The Open Rights Group has also provided a helpful, fact-packed page for MPs on the Snoopers’ Charter to brief them ahead of the debate.

    Originally posted by the author on Bristol Wireless.

  • Tidy BS5 – more evidence that Bristol is 2 cities

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    I’m indebted to Twitter user @StapletonRd for the following photograph of communal bins in the prosperous Clifton area of Bristol.

    Communal bins screened by Bristol City Council to protect the delicate eyes of Clifton residents
    Communal bins screened by Bristol City Council to protect the delicate eyes of Clifton residents.

    As you can see, no effort – or expense – has been spared to make communal bins acceptable to the area’s rich residents, who have sharp elbows and loud voices, not to mention the ear of the council.

    Now let’s contrast this with Milsom Street in Easton, where communal bins were imposed on residents in 2012 after a botched council consultation (with the emphasis on the first syllable of consultation. Ed.).

    communal bin in Milsom Street buried under a pile of fly-tipped furniture
    Somewhere under that pile of furniture is a communal bin.

    Somewhere under that pile of fly-tipped furniture (reported to Bristol City Council this morning. Ed.).

    In Easton the communal bins were introduced by the council as a remedy to tackle an endemic local fly-tipping problem. One can see how well it’s worked.

    One can also see that no effort has been made to make the communal bins more attractive to Easton residents: no off-street siting of bins; no wooden fencing to screen them from delicate eyes and so on.

    Many years ago, east Bristol residents campaigning to retain public access to Packer’s Field, 7 acres of much-used green space for informal public recreation, were told by council officers that they “were not the kind of people the council listened to“.

    By the unequal treatment of Clifton and Easton residents in respect of communal bins, that attitude is still alive, well and kicking very, very hard indeed down at the Counts Louse (or City Hall as some now call it. Ed.).

    One can only hope that after the mayoral and council elections on Thursday, those newly elected will finally start to break down the discrimination and unequal treatment of different areas that has blighted Bristol City Council’s administration of the city for generations.

  • Red card for Auntie

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Social Media

    With the notable exception of Test Match Special‘s cricket commentary on long wave, BBC sports commentators seem to be employed more for their ability to shout than proficiency in the English language, judging from the rare bits of sports commentary that get broadcast as part of Radio 4’s news bulletins.

    This opinion received further support yesterday when the BBC Sport Twitter account sought the views of Aston Villa FC fans on news that the club at the bottom of the Premier League (that’s the English First Division in old money. Ed. 🙂 ) table would be playing in the Championship (the old Second Division. Ed.) next year, as per the following tweet, which has since been deleted:

    tweet reads Lescott says being relegated is a wait off the shoulders. What do you want to hear #AVFC fans?

    Wait off the shoulders, Auntie? This blog is giving you a red card and you should now proceed from the field of play for an early bath and thence to your reserved place in Heterograph Corner! 🙂

    Hat tip: OwlofMinera.

  • LibreOffice 5.1.2 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation (TDF), the German foundation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, has today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family.

    LibreOffice 5.1.2.2 in use
    LibreOffice 5.1.2.2 in use

    LibreOffice 5.1.2 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users and for enterprise deployments, TDF recommends use of the “still” version: LibreOffice 5.0.5. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified people, of whom a list is available.

    Technical details of the release can be seen in the change logs, i.e. bugs fixed in RC1 and bugs fixed in RC2.

    Download LibreOffice

    LibreOffice 5.1.2 is available for immediate download via the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

    In addition, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are encouraged to support TDF with a donation.

    User comment

    Your correspondent has been using LibreOffice 5.1.2 since the first pre-release version was made available. It has proved itself to be nimble, reliable and I would recommend it as a replacement for your current office suite, particularly if you wish to escape vendor lock-in and support free and open source software too.

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