Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2009

There’s been an ongoing debate for a number of years now as to whether or not bloggers are the same as journalists some of the time, all of the time, or never but thanks to moves from an unexpected quarter that debate is starting to become a moot point.

In fact, myself and particularly Wendy have been legally declared as being the equivalent of journalists by none other than the Old Bailey in London when they issued a missive to us in connection with a contempt of court action regarding a reporting restriction on a current court case. I’m not naming the case in question here because it isn’t relevant to the current discussion and would merely detract from this discussion.

It is interesting though that prior to that particular missive it would not have been possible for us to obtain details of any court reporting restrictions because we did not qualify as journalists and therefore couldn’t obtain these from the courts as our colleagues over at journalism.co.uk discovered when they tried getting similar information themselves last December. Thus there was the ludricuous situation where we could be held in contempt because of a ruling that we were unable to discover (and, no, they aren’t on the court website).

As it’s the weekend, we can’t try out our new categorisation but hope to give it a spin in the coming week.

One consequence of this change in categorisation is that we felt it necessary to begin publishing our blogs in America and thereby gain some protection of our right to free speech. This isn’t because we felt that we should be able to continue “publishing” the information that was felt to be in contempt of court because now that we are aware that there is a “reporting restriction” and that it applies to us, we’re content to leave that information off the blog until it is legally acceptable to publish it. However, we were sadly disappointed in the attitude of our former UK ISP who took down ALL of our sites when only one comment on one post on one blog apparently triggered the contempt action; our American based registrar supported our freedom of speech. So, as we would like to retain the freedom to express our opinions we have moved the blogs outside the jurisdiction of the English authorities.

Incidently, I have delibrately omitted any links from outside articles from this post to avoid legal issues that were raised by a specific case but are really not relevant to the discussion here. Regretably, it would appear that all of the references which I can dig up on this one refer to that particular case.

As you may know we’ve been gradually ramping up our weight loss programme over the last couple of months and are just about to step it up another gear.

What we’ve been doing so far is to reduce our sugar and salt intake by changing our diet onto sugar free and low salt alternatives. That turned out to be much easier to do than you might expect although reading the little diet information panel on the food packets has turned up a few surprises: would you believe that a salad would run to almost 900 calories?

In tandem with that we’ve been going on brisk walks when it’s relatively nice weather which in practice means just about every day. That won’t necessarily get the weight down but should reduce the amount of fat in us and increase the amount of muscle (muscle is denser than fat so you can gain weight if you exercise).

Just a week or so back we added Bladderwrack into the equation. That’s a natural diet pill which basically increases your metabolism. We didn’t do any real research on this ahead of time and chose it simply because it’s the cheapest diet pill on the shelf in Tesco (about £1/week). Having said that, it does appear to be working with something like 5 pounds or so of weight-loss marked down to it over the last week when we started using it properly (ie after every meal rather than sometimes).

Finally, we’re upping the ante with the exercise as of tomorrow and have joined Fitness First. Why them? Well, surprisingly perhaps they are by far the cheapest option around at the moment. The local pay as you go gyms sound cheap at £3 or so per session but even three sessions a week adds up to £40 a month. One really good option seemed to be the council gym which advertises a pay as you go option for £22 a month or rather it appears to because it’s £22 a month on a 12 month contract and classes are £4 a go on top of that thus our total would be around £60 a month. Esporta is an all-inclusive option but at £50 or so per month is getting on for triple the equivalent option at Fitness First.

Payment options with Firness First are seemingly at the discretion of the membership person who signs you up but ours are working out at £29 for student rate, £34 for normal on a pay as you go basis but will drop to around £20 when we go for the 12 month contract version.

Well, not us directly but the government’s £175 billion borrowing equates to for each family in the UK thanks to the incredibly optimistic UK budget announced today. Actually, it’s worse than that as the borrowing is planned to continue for around a decade and amounts to something like £30k per family over that period.

Naturally, there were the usual increases in taxes on luxury cum non-essential items and, breaking a Labour campaign promise, on higher earners too. Well, tax increases for the higher earners were announced but, as usual, they’re unlikely to be as effective as the government hope for them to be as every tax increase on higher earners results in increased thinking by accountants on ways to avoid paying it thus the claimed £7 billion to be raised won’t be.

One notable piece of generosity is the £2,000 to be paid for those scrapping a car over 10 years old and buying a new one. Unfortunately, it’s going generosity towards other countries as the UK has virtually no British owned car manufacturers. Unless, of course, the likes of Morgan have behind the scenes plans to radically raise the number of cars that they produce.

As always the growth predictions coming out of HM Treasury are something of a finger in the air job but that’s particularly the case this year with a 3.5% decline for 2009 being replaced by 1.25% growth the next year and 3.5% the year after that. Thus there’ll be a swing of 6.75% in the fortunes of the country in under two years. Somehow, I don’t think so.

Still, it could be worse. We could be in Ireland.

With summer approaching fast I thought I’d give my new theme a whirl and use any feedback to tidy it up a little before releasing it on an unsuspecting world.

This is the theme I was working on off and on throughout last year. It’s got oodles of options on it so I’ll likely be playing around with some of them in the coming weeks but, so far, seems pretty workable with the current settings (I’ve been using it on some other blogs for several months now).

Big pluses are that it’s fully widget enabled so no more hunting around for missing things that always seems to happen when you change a theme. Also, it’s very easy to change from a full splash background to a plain and simple one.

Now, all I need to do is talk Wendy into using it on her blogs too to simplify looking after them all…

One of the common comments that I hear about all of the level 2 psychology courses is that there’s way too much content for the level and number of points of the courses.

They’re not wrong either if my experience so far is anything to go by. The level 2 60 point Child Development course feels much more like a 90 point course at times and some of the work required from assignments seems to fall into the definition of requirements for level 3 rather than those for level 2.

Usually the Open University are pretty good at setting the level and amount of content in their courses so how come they appear to have this one so wrong?

One big difference that this sequence of course has is that it’s very much targeted at creating professional psychologists rather than having a more general aim of producing degree level education as other courses usually do. Thus, even though level is the lowest level of psychology course that they offer, the content and requirements of us seems to be almost a postgraduate level eg the “big” assignment that’s coming up soon seems to require original research.

The snag is that if they did make it a 90 point course they’d put a lot of people off what’s a very popular course and if they make it level 3 then they’d have to go and produce a new level 2 introductory course to fill in a gap (it takes a very crazy person to start a new subject at level 3!).