Archives: August, 2006

How’s this for a disingenuous bit of reporting?

Bristol University have done a study on the hours fathers work. The BBC lead off their article like so:

“Modern men are unwilling to break with tradition when it comes to combining the twin roles of work and fatherhood, according to researchers.”

They then go on to quote Dr Esther Dermott, who led the research, as saying:

“What professional men value most about their jobs is their ability to control their working hours so that they can leave early to go to school functions or parents’ meetings - and this flexibility was also what other men most wanted.”

Any guesses which famous world leader this is?

Source: Amey Fearon Mathews

I guessed Boris Yeltsin, on the assumption that Big John Prescott didn’t really count as a famous world leader. And I guessed wrong. The child in the picture grew up to be Tony Blair.

Amey Fearon Matthews has taken childhood photos of current world leaders and brushed them up with some of her artistic magic in her series Before: Portraits of Current World Leaders. [Thanks to 3QuarksDaily for the link]

Amey explains what she’s aiming for:

The BBC is reporting that cows have regional accents.

Dr Jeanine Treffers-Daller, a reader in linguistics at UWE in Bristol says:

“When we are learning to speak, we adopt a local variety of language spoken by our parents, so the same could be said about the variation in the West Country cow moo.”

And that seems to be backed up by farmers. Lloyd Green, a farmer from Glastonbury, comments that:

I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

Just came across the Recycle For London site. If you’re wondering how you can do your bit, when your collection times are and the like - and you live in the Big Smoke - you might want to have a look.

Couldn’t see any details on nappy recycling though - maybe they’ll be coming soon.

This would make a great toy, if MIT decided to use this amazing bit of kit in a trivial, “more fun than you can shake a paintbrush at” sort of way. [thanks Cecilia for the link]

This makes for stark reading. [Thanks to Antonia for the link]

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have conducted some research on child poverty in the UK. They’ve broken it down by ward and uses having one or more parent on workless benefits as a proxy for poverty.

Now, there are always going to be anomalies with this sort of approach. But I would guess that as a whole, this proxy, if anything, will underestimate the situation. (It is perfectly possible to be working and still poor.)

Just a quick note: if, like us, you’re a fan of Emily Turner’s blog, she’s changed URLs. The new address is:

http://www.doingitallagain.com

Thanks for the letting us know, Emily

[The previous post is here]

What we have at the moment is a finished draft. It’s finished, because we’ve developed everything we initially set out to develop. But it’s still a draft. We’ll be watching how people use the site and listening carefully to any feedback and feature requests. What we’re hoping is that, through chatting with them - however remotely - other parents and people with kids will help us co-design the next version. And the next.

Vicky’s written about some of the problems she faced as a mother of young children, and I thought I’d explain some of the thinking behind why we’ve designed Little Legends they way we have.

The main aim is to make good places for kids easier to find. Broadly speaking, there were two possible approaches to this. The first is to make a big online directory, where everything is neatly categorised - a little like a Michelin food guide, but for places for parents rather than for restaurants. And there are a number of sites out there that try to do just that.

What can I say? This is genius! Zip set herself a challenge, then baked and posted her recipe for a chocolate dalek cake. Thankyou, Zip, for single-handedly turned an old childhood hide-behind-the-sofa terror of mine into something that looks good enough to eat