Surely with reality television hitting these new lows we are going straight to hell…

A reality TV contest planned over who should get a kidney, not telling an Australian Big Brother contestant that her father had died, and a reminder of several other more or less appalling reality TV concepts.

Update: At least the kidney show was a hoax.

I just read about the Freeplay Devo radio and was quite excited. OK it is £90 which is a little steep for a radio but I’m geeky enough to want to supplement my podcast listening with a little digital radio. So a wind-up one seemed just the thing… until I looked at the fine print. The Devo weighs 1.2Kg and while 60 seconds of winding gives you an hour of FM listening, it provides just 3-5 minutes of digital radio listening! Inevitably this ‘green’ radio would mostly stay plugged into the mains or run off its 6hr battery. Guess I’ll have to wait another few years. Which is probably just as well since I also just read that the Freeplay radio and others may become obsolete anyway.

Just for a change neither of them have to do with terrorism. Eszter brought to my attention a feature in Popular Photography (US) about parents whose innocent (to them) pictures of their children were treated as suspicious by photo developers and resulted in their being criminally prosecuted. You can read the self-published story of a grandmother who fell foul of this culture of suspicion here.

The other story I heard on the radio this morning (listen to it here). Because (it seems) of arrest targets UK police have, a 13 year old child who shoplifted a single roll of candy worth around 40p was taken to the police station, cautioned, fingerprinted and had his DNA taken and stored.

I am not too worried about building up a DNA database per se but I am a little concerned that the fact that someone’s DNA turns up in the database could be taken by future employers or others as evidence of criminality itself, if one day it were to become public.

A friend just alerted me to this book: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home which it seems has shot right onto the New York Times’ bestseller list. I wrote a similar, if more ‘business-y’ book – Dealing with Email (see also at right) four years ago but alas it signally failed to make an impact on the zeitgeist. Oh well, let’s hope a rising tide lifts all boats and that I have more success with the books on blogging I hope one day to write.

P.S. I just discovered that my book has been added to Amazon’s “search within the book” programme so you can leaf through a few pages online if you like to get a feel for it (not possible with “Send”). And you might want to check out the companion website I produced for the book with more tips (as well as looking through the “email discoveries” category on this blog).

Over at Media @ LSE I just posted about my experiences with Librivox – a free project to read public domain texts aloud turning them into audiobooks. I hate to criticize a bunch of people just trying to help spread the availability of classic works but… well… check out my posting…

Epicenter started as a look at those who found themselves contaminated by the radioactivity from early nuclear tests but as this trailer demonstrates his curiosity and journalistic zeal soon encouraged him to broaden his investigation and, from the looks of things, turn up all kinds of interesting stuff about the history of nuclear weapons development. Danny has sent me a DVD so once I get it I’ll tell you more…

The advertising editorial divide in action!

Originally uploaded by D & D.

Photography – the lazy man’s blog entry 😉 This juxtaposition is so delicious it’s hard to believe it wasn’t a joke by someone in the paper…

Yes it turns out Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, did some early promotion material (nearly 20 years ago!) selling Macs to students.

OK I admit my teaching may not have been at my best today. I’ve been suffering from the flu since Friday and am still hardly at my best. There was a moment in the tube on the way to my workshop that I thought I might throw up, but it passed. I may also have been a little distracted by guilt – you see in order to come today I had to leave my (exhausted) wife at home with our (still sick) baby child.

But there wouldn’t have been time to find someone to replace me and I know you are paying more than £10,000/$20,000 to learn at the LSE (plus a great deal more for living expenses in London) so I felt I had to do my best to attend – I can’t remember a lecture or seminar ever being cancelled because of ill-health when I was being taught (though I may have forgotten a time or two).

To be honest though this was an advanced workshop session on Internet methods – a subject I enjoy talking and thinking about, and I was being a little selfish – I actually really like teaching, and a workshop full of graduate students who are (on the basis of marks and financial commitment at least) some of the ‘best and the brightest’. So I was really looking forward to my workshop…

Until I noticed early on that your attention was elsewhere. To be more precise you were using the Internet access I (foolishly) arranged in case it would be needed for teaching in order to surf some kind of funny images site. Which was bad enough. But then you started to smirk and show them off to the woman beside you. Then would have been the time to call you out on it I suppose, but I didn’t really expect you to carry on in the same way for the entire one-hour session. But that doesn’t mean what you did was fine. Here are a couple of tips.

1) You don’t get marked for attendance at the LSE – you get marked for results. If you know in advance you don’t have any interest in the subject don’t turn up – I assure you you won’t be missed.
2) If you do want to surf recreationally, sitting under the speaker’s nose is the wrong place to do it.
3) Distracting another potential learner – even one you hope to impress – puts you pretty close to the bottom tier of my personal student hell.

If you do come across this weblog posting in your idle surfing consider this a warning – if you start anything like that again in next week’s workshop, I will waste a precious minute or two of teaching time giving you a piece of my mind. It may not cure my flu but it would certainly make me feel better about teaching for a little while…

365 Ways to Change the World – stocked by the cash register of my local bookstore – includes “Fight child slavery with fairtrade chocolate” alongside, “Influence the world’s media: become a blogger”. Unless you happen to live in a country or situation that is both inaccessible and newsworthy or you have specialist expertise and connections to the mainstream media you are unlikely to make much of an impact on the mainstream media, and in any case there are many reasons to blog and a desire to influence the world’s media is one of the least common.