Tom Roper's Weblog

Burns night

The sight of a piper in full fig on Lewes station platform as I returned from the University of Sussex winter graduation ceremony reminded me that it is Burns night; that's Robert Burns not the evil capitalist in the Simpsons.
Burns was as revolutionary a poet as any, and to prove this point, rather than the address to the haggis, I shall intone A Man's A Man For A' That while drinking a glass of Bruichladdich.

Technorati Tags: Bruichladdich, burns

Food at Sussex

Two Sussex students have made a film about food on campus, Food for UoS.(Google video link; I believe it's also up in YouTube and Facebook)
'Food for US is a student made investigative documentary, addressing food at Sussex University and asking how it could be improved ... nutritionally, ethically and environmentally.'
Good for them. I don't agree with everything they say, but when I arrived at the university in 2003 I was surprised to find the food served for the most part indistinguishable from that offered at university when I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s.
The university has just carried out a catering review, but it was merely an exercise in cost-cutting.

The Eve of St Agnes

Apparently if maidens do not look behind them when going to bed tonight, they will dream of their future husband. I discovered that tomorrow is St Agnes' day, and that today is therefore the eve of that feast, while looking for excuses to serve cake at work tomorrow.

 

Victor Chandler Chase day at Ascot

With Haydock abandoned, I go with the favourite in the big chase at Ascot.
110: Hoh Viss
145: Twist Magic
220: Mahogany Blaze
2555: Refinement

Plain English vs. HR-speak

I asked for feedback from a recent job application. I was not short-listed and wanted to know why. They gave me three reasons. Numbers one and three were, in the main, not unreasonable. Number two read as follows:
'The panel felt that...you did not show evidence of....securing, managing and implementing significant and effective change processes to ensure the delivery of effective policies and plans to achieve demonstrable continuous improvement'.
Where to start? The meaningless vogue modifiers, such as 'significant' or 'effective', the latter used twice? What subtle differences are there between securing, managing and implementing change processes? In any case. what's the difference between change and change processes? What fantasy world do they live in, where improvement is always continuous?  The possibility of  demonstrable continuous improvement suggests that there could also be continuous improvement that is not demonstrable.  Why would you deliver a policy? What monster of a candidate did they find who could produce evidence of this stuff?

Base Patrimoine

One of the things I enjoy most about my current job is when I discover resources such as this, which I spotted from a post to the French Studies Libraries Group e-mail list by Teresa Vernon of the French Collections at the British Library. She describes the Catalogue Collectif de France, the CCF, (not the Combined Cadet Force of my schooldays) in particular the Base Patrimoine, 2.5 million entries for pre-1914 items, from 63 regional bibliothèques municipale and specialised library catalogues. 
From the CCF home page, in the left-hand column  click each of the following in turn: Localisation >    Rech. spécialisées >  Base Patrimoine
I wonder why we haven't managed to build anything like this in Britain

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

The report I referred to yesterday, and which was the subject of a Guardian article, Intellectual literacy hour,  is now out, though not on the British Library website, as I was told, but on JISC's:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

PS It has now (4.55 pm) found its way onto the British Library website too: http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20080116.html

Intellectual literacy

Today's Guardian, in the Higher Education section, carries a tantalising article headed Intellectual literacy hour, which discusses a report, not yet published, on the 'Google generation's' information-seeking behaviour, but without bothering to give a citation.
A little detective work suggests that they mean the Google generation project. As well as that uninformative JISC page, there's a project page at http://www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk/behaviour.html. Expect more tomorrow, which according to the Guardian is the publication date for the project report.

There's also an account of a presentation Ian Rowlands gave last month  on the project at Online on Dawn Holland's blog.

Update: Ian kindly let me know that the report will be published tomorrow on the British Library's website. I'll post the precise URL when I know it. Ferreting around, I also found out that he's doing some work on citeulike.

Kempton and Warwick

I'm straying into PG's territory here, but the interesting racing this afternoon, on heavy going, is at Warwick and Kempton. I see I agree with him about the big race, the totesport.com Classic Chase , in which we have both gone for High Chimes. There's a lot of noise about Arnold Layne this morning, but I still think High Chimes will love the ground and the pace. We also agree on Nycteos, Paul Nicholl's entry in the Lanzarote Hurdle at Kempton. Of course serious students of the turf set no store by horses names, but Nycteos must have been named by a clssicist: the name appears in Propertius

Warwick 230: High Chimes
Warwick 300: Souffleur
Kempton 315: Nycteos
Warwrick 330: Arafan

And another thing....

...the same issue of the Financial Times that carried the knee-jerk piece had a distinctly Sussex feel, with an article in the news section on government attempts to suppress  Mass Observation during the war, only now released by the National Archives. The Mass Observation  archives are part of the University of Sussex library's special collections. There was also an interview in the Arts section with Anne Olivier Bell, widow of Virginia Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell, the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. Anne edited Virgina Woolf's diaries.