One of the parts of the Bristol Post whose work is largely unseen is its Invisible Pictures Department, which spends its working day making sure photographs and other images are omitted from articles published in the paper, particularly its online version.
Update: Photographs were finally added to the post at lunchtime, i.e. some 4 hours after it was originally posted, which is no doubt indicative of how much the Post values its online readers.
The British Library has released over one million scanned images into the public domain. A post on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog reveals that the public domain – i.e. freely usable – images which have been made available via the British Library’s Flickr page, originate from 17th, 18th and 19th century books. They were digitised by Microsoft from 65,000 books.
“The Coming of Father Christmas” by Eliza F. Manning
Microsoft and the British Library started collaborating eight years ago. The contents of 100,000 books should be searchable in the near future via Microsoft’s book search project.
All the images are provided with details of their origin and year of publication. The British Library is planning a crowdsourcing project as the next stage for automatically classifying the content of the images. The images’ data has been made available on github by the British Library. The code is being made available under an open licence.
Despite the bluster of senior civil servants and ministers at the Ministry of Justice, the courts and tribunals interpreting contract with Capita is still causing delays and extra expense to the public purse (posts passim).
The case against a Lithuanian national had to be adjourned because there was no translator [sic] available in court.
Algirdas Gerbenis, of Railway Terrace, Grantham, is accused of drink driving on St Catherine’s Road in the town and failing to stop after an accident on October 10.
The case was adjourned to December 16.
Mr Gerbenis was granted unconditional bail.
As the Grantham Chronicle is apparently having some difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart, I suggest the paper makes my illustrated guide to translators and interpreters compulsory reading for its journalists. 🙂
The mandatory screenshot is included above as the occupants of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth may have realised or been alerted to their mistake (I’m sure they wait use your daily review of the paper’s contents as a proofreading tool. Ed.) by the time you read this.
The National Library of Norway has announced it is digitising its entire collection. The Norwegian Legal Deposit Act requires that all published content in all media – i.e. paper, microforms, photographs, combined documents, electronic documents and the radio and television recordings from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation – be deposited with the National Library of Norway.
The Library’s collection is also being expanded through purchases and gifts. The digital collection contains material dating from the Middle Ages up to the current day.
Digital deposit
In parallel with digitising analogue material, the National Library of Norway is working to expand the scope of publications covered by legal digital deposit legislation. The Library wishes to receive the digital source of the publication and thus the collection’s digital content.
The digitising programme started in 2006 and it is estimated that it will take 20–30 years for the Library’s entire collection to be digitised.
A Dickens engraving being digitised. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Furthermore, The Atlantic reports that people accessing the Library’s digital collection from a Norwegian IP address will be able to access all 20th-century works – even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works of any age will be available for download.
It would appear that since publication of the original article, journalists at the Chronicle have learned the actual meaning of the word ‘cartel’.
Oldham is the home town of Gavin Wheeldon, the founder of Advanced Language Solutions (ALS) which was subsequently sold to Capita and renamed Capita Translation & Interpreting. The latter is currently presiding over the fiasco commonly known as the Ministry of Justice framework agreement for courts and tribunals interpreting (posts passim).
Describing it as “the shoddy foreign language interpreter service provided by Crapita“, The Eye’s piece notes there’s a greater than one in ten chance of trouble when a court makes a booking for an interpreter via the MoJ’s contract with Capita, with the piece reaching the conclusion why bother with the contract at all?
Castlemead was completed in 1981. The building has a roof height of 80 metres (262 feet) and consists of 18 floors. Written by an unidentified journalist, the Bristol Post article confidently describes it in its first paragraph as “Bristol’s tallest building”.
But is it?
No.
Most definitely not.
Bristol’s actual tallest buildingAs this blog has pointed out before (posts passim), that accolade is held by a much older building – St Mary Redcliffe, parts of which date to the 12th century.
The spire of St Mary Redcliffe, is 89 metres (292 feet) high. Its height makes it the third tallest English church spire in England. The spire itself was struck by lightning in 1446 and truncated (something which can be clearly seen in the illustration of the church on Millerd’s 17th century plan of Bristol. Ed.), in which condition it remained for some 400 years before being rebuilt to its present height in 1872.
So, Bristol Post hacks, think carefully – and do the all-important background research and fact checking – before in future describing any modern edifice as Bristol’s tallest. 🙂
Horses and cattle are both ungulates, i.e. both use the tips of their toes to support their whole body weight whilst moving. Both cows and horses have hooves.
A horse is an odd-toed ungulate with a long hairy mane and tale, whilst a cow is an even-toed ungulate. They’re easy to identify, unless you’re a city-based employee of the Bristol Post.
Yesterday the Post published a tragic story of more than 100 horses having to be put down after being rescued from appalling conditions in Bridgend in the Vale of Glamorgan.
However, the picture used to illustrate the report features animals that look more bovine than equine, as revealed by the screenshot below.
Frisians or Dobbins?
Just because both beef and horsemeat taste equally good on the plate doesn’t means they are interchangeable in the field, Bristol Post. Try saddling up a cow and entering a steeplechase! 🙂
