I knew having children was expensive, but never realised cots – those small-sized beds for babies – could cost so much until I read this article in today’s Bristol Post about an expensive night out which sadly ended up in that local Palais de Justice also known as Bristol Crown Court.
Bristol Crown Court
Apparently, the night out resulted in a huge bill for bedding, according to the relevant sentence in the article.
The court was told Collins had to stump up £8,500 towards legal cots.
Today the Bristol Post has been occupied with faggots. It all started when Facebook, that bastion of free speech, banned the use of the word faggot as offensive. Apparently they’ve never heard of this traditional item of English cuisine over the pond, where faggot is a term of abuse for homosexuals.
As a result, Mr Brain’s – a producer of culinary products resembling faggots that started life in the Bristol area – has started a campaign to fight against Facebook’s ban, which is duly being reported by the Post.
In addition, the Post also informed its readers what faggots are. Any similarity between the Post’s article and the introduction to Wikipedia’s faggots article is presumably purely coincidental.
However, the Post hasn’t finished with faggots yet; it also tells its by now slavering readers how to make faggots. After having stated that faggots are made from pork, the Post drops a real clanger on this report, illustrating it with a photograph of a butcher (so far, so good. Ed.) posing with a joint of beef (D’oh! Ed.), as evidenced by the screenshot below.
The fifth day of November is remembered in history for more than one thing. Not only was it the day in 1605 one Yorkshireman called Guido Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of Parliament with lots of black powder, it was also the day in 1993 when Parliament passed the Railways Act.
The Act provided for the restructuring of the British Railways Board (BRB), the public corporation that then owned and operated the national railway system. A few residual responsibilities of the BRB remained with BRB (Residuary) Ltd., which was itself abolished in 2011.
The legislation enabled the Secretary of State for Transport John MacGregor to transfer separated parts of the railway to the private sector. Passenger rail services were franchised to private companies including Virgin, FirstGroup and the coach companies Stagecoach and National Express. In addition, the national railway track and signalling company Railtrack was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996. British Rail’s track maintenance and renewal operations were sold to private companies, with contracts to provide infrastructure services to Railtrack. The three rolling stock leasing companies or ROSCOs, owners of the passenger rolling stock, were sold to management buy-out teams.
Returning to the Act itself, it was a shambolic excuse for an act of parliament. Such was the level of tinkering involved, it became the second most amended piece of legislation in history. The Act has also been amended several times since then, most significantly by the Transport Act 2000, the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003 and the Railways Act 2005.
However, that’s not all: it set Britain’s railway back by more than two generations.
We’re now in a situation where there’s no joined up thinking on the railway. Train operating companies have regional monopolies and if your journey involves the services of more than one operator, it’s unlikely your connecting service will be held for you to catch should your preceding train be running late.
The railways were nationalised in 1948 because the ‘Big Four’ national regional railway companies – Great Western Railway, London and North Eastern Railway, London, Midland and Scottish Railway and the Southern Railway – plus 55 other railway undertakings were making such a dreadful mess of running the rail system.
The way things were: British Railways logotype from 1956
We’re back in that state once again. We were in that state before the 1997 general election, in the run-up to which the Labour Party frequently promised to renationalise the railways, a promise upon which it then reneged once elected.
On this 20th anniversary of rail privatisation it’s appropriate to draw attention to the work of Bring Back British Rail. Founded in 2009, Bring Back British Rail strives to popularise the common-sense idea of renationalising the ludicrously over-priced and over-complicated railway system, which the people of Britain have been left with as the result of the Major government’s privatisation. Its aim is to unite disgruntled rail passengers and disheartened rail employees all over the country, to demand a re-unified national rail network run for people instead of profit.
News broke yesterday that supermarket giant Tesco is set to install hi-tech screens that scan customers’ faces in petrol stations so that they can be fed targeted advertising. The screens will be provided by Amscreen, whose chief executive seems to think that implementing a system like “something out of Minority Report“, the dystopian science fiction film, is something of which to be proud. ( Here’s a hint for Alan Sugar’s son: that’s like recommending Nineteen Eighty-Four as a blueprint for running the United Kingdom. Ed.)
It isn’t. What is being proposed is a gross intrusion of privacy and an affront to dignity.
Naturally, this has caused a storm of outrage on social media.
Every little helps?
However, it’s not just Tesco that’s planning this. Some parts of the UK’s healthcare sector are also planning to implement it.
Fortunately, someone with some gumption and a great regard for their own and others’ privacy has set up a petition on the government’s e-petition website. The petition reads as follows:
Face recognition software is about to be used to see what adverts you are looking at. It recognises your gender, age and will be used in GP surgeries, hospitals, dentists whilst you wait for your appointment and other public areas. This is a complete invasion of privacy.
If Capita Translation & Interpreting still has a 98% performance target for filling all requests for language services for courts and tribunals, then the fact it is only filled 92% of requests in the quarter under review – as stated by the report – means they are still failing to fulfil the terms of their contract with the MoJ.
Furthermore, the report gives figures for “off-contract” language service bookings for the first time.
“Off contract” bookings are requests for translation and interpretation [sic] services made outside the Capita TI contract. Bookings for the service are made directly by the courts and tribunals – that is, not through the language service booking portal.
In Q2 2013 – the first quarter for which data is held centrally – a total of 2,929 off contract bookings were made by criminal courts, civil & family courts and tribunals. This accounted for just under 7% of all bookings made for languages services in that period.
Just over half (51%) of these bookings were made by tribunals, with a further 48% made by criminal courts.
This blog will be keeping a close eye on the figures for “off contract” bookings in future. Any increase over subsequent quarters will mean that Capita T&I are living up to their parent company’s well-deserved nickname: Crapita.
The Document Foundation (TDF) blog announced earlier today that LibreOffice 4.1.3 has been released for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features for proprietary and legacy file formats.
According to TDF, the new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. Nevertheless, for enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests the use of LibreOffice 4.0.6, which is supported by certified professionals.
The release of LibreOffice 4.1.3 is taking place just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany, where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced LibreOffice developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.
Earlier this year I blogged about the Home Office’s so-called racist van (posts passim). Yesterday along with most of the national media the BBC reported that the Home Office had admitted that just 11 illegal immigrants had left the UK as a result of its ill-advised campaign.
Although the Home Office’s efforts were ill-advised and less than successful, its use of mobile billboards has inspired their use by others like the Tripe Marketing Board, as the picture below – allegedly from Lancashire – shows.
There are annual events that pepper the year providing easy copy for the media. One of these is Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night on 5th November.
As 5th November is less than a week away, most media outlets are publicising local fireworks events. Here’s today’s offering of that ilk from the Bristol Post.
As usual a screenshot has been taken, just in case authors Rachel Gardner and Alex Cawthron realise they’ve posted a half-finished article. Additional black marks to Rachel and Alex too for a lower case start to the headline.
The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.
The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.
Rufus Pollock, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CEO said: “Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.”
However, even open data leaders such as the UK and USA have room for improvement: for example, the USA does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, whilst the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.
Furthermore, there is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons, including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.
Under half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to use, reuse and redistribute data legally and technically. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.
This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.
After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.
GNU Health provides the following functionality:
Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
The fifth day of November is remembered in history for more than one thing. Not only was it the day in 1605 one Yorkshireman called 
In the week of a 
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt