Tom Roper's Weblog

Cheltenham

It would be wonderful to be there today and see the sun shining on Cleeve Hill, but the television will have to do.
130: Black Jack Ketchum (why on earth is this race not televised on Channel 4)
240: Ross River
315: Hardy Eustace (I agree with PG's Tips)
345: Massini's Maguire

Technorati Tags: cheltenham

CILIP Sussex sub-branch Christmas quiz

I am sorry to have to record that my team came an ignominious second-to-last in the CILIP Sussex sub-branch Christmas quiz, held in the Grand Central in Brighton under quiz mistress Jil Fairclough. Among other errors, in the picture rounds we mistook Portsmouth for Istanbul, Shoreham for Venice and Throbbing Gristle for Blondie. A University of Brighton Information Services team came first, for the second year running.

Technorati Tags: cilip, sussex

Gardner Centre to close

This is a great shame, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/USIS/news/index.php?output=html&refer=6669&id=16050; apart from the loss of an arts venue, it was the only decent place to eat on the University of Sussex campus. It seems Brighton and Hove Council and the South East Arts council withdrew funding.

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A transparent mould

I asked, after three years of writing this blog, why I do it, a question I have never answered to my satisfaction. I am reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. and came across this statement:

'What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself...into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life."

I doubt I could ever achieve such a transparent mould, but it is worth trying, though up until now I have excluded the personal. I may reconsider that exclusion.

Technorati Tags: virginiawoolf

CILIP: New Business Model and Governance Review

CILIP council yesterday approved both the report of the Governance Review Task Force and that of the New Business Model Working Group. Both reports are to appear on the CILIP website, but they're not there yet. Update: the Governance Review Task Forcepaper is now up here (pdf). The New Business Model paper "may take a few days".
Update: the New Business Model paper was uploaded on 18 December and is at http://www.cilip.org.uk/aboutcilip/newbusinessmodel/

Technorati Tags: governancereviewtaskforce, newbusinessmodelworkinggroup

The Observer's campaign against blogs

One Jasper Gerard writes in last Sunday's Observer of the awfulness of blogs: "...to the noughties [he means the present decade-TR] what graffiti was to the Seventies: mindless scrawls reading 'I woz 'ere.' It says: 'I'm a moron, but worship me anyway.'...We are bogged down in blogland."
The rest of his page discusses, in tabloid-ese, full of irritating jingle phrases, 'bloggers are the codgers," the following important issues:
A reporter who intercepted royal voicemail and appeared in court with his flies undone
Two men charged with cruelty for overfeeding a dog
Prince William's girlfriend who has started a job

I think Mr Gerard should look for the beam in his own eye. Many blogs are trivial and silly; so are many newspapers, including some who should know better. Turning to the Review section, where one might expect something more worthwhile, the front page offers the following:
What a Colleen: how Wayne Rooney's girlfriend became an icon for the shopping generation
The tone of high seriousness is reinforced by the television reviews, which lead with "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here"", and an A-Z of Christmas presents.

Technorati Tags: newspapers

Three years before the mast

It is three years to the day since I started this blog. When I started it, interested in the medium because of the use I was making of it to run a current awareness service for medical educators, it was hosted on my site at http://www.roper.org.uk, and I used iBlog. In April 2004 I moved over to TypePad, where it has resided ever since.
Some statistics:
Average page views per day: 51.10
Total page views since April 2004: 48,899
Posts: 853
Comments: 188
Trackbacks: 6
Technorati ranking: 126, 268 with 51 links from 27 blogs
There is also the running blog, not started till December 2004
Average page views per day; 15.72
Total page views since 28 December 2004: 11096
Posts: 410
Comments: 36
TrackBacks: 1
Technorati ranking: 850,618 with 7 links from 4 blogs
My first ever posts were on the sad death of Alan Davidson and on Reed Elsevier's share price.
I use TypePad's own statistical tools to analyse traffic, but have supplemented these with Google Analytics
Future plans: I should like to integrate it more with http://www.roper.org.uk, which is not much used, to do which I need to enable domain mapping
It would be nice to increase traffic though it grows, but slowly. The more I comment on events I've been to, the more people seem to com here. I should probably make more use of it for projects I'm involved in
Why are trackbacks so low? It seems to me a useful way of linking conversations.
These statistics are a way of avoiding the more important question, why the hell do I do it and why does anyone bother to read it? To those questions I have no cogent answers.

J D Bernal and scientific communication: "to improve the knowledge of naturall things*"

The germ of an idea: J D Bernal, the physicist, had a great deal to say about scientific communication at the 1948 Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information. According to Bernal, "it was evident that the communication system of science was entirely inefficient and wasteful, and it was only kept going by means of devices that actually made it worse, such as the founding of new journals, the introduction and circulation of reports and letters, and, finally, the mere interchange of private letters....The realisation must come, and the sooner the better, that scientists today must be prepared, to their own advantage, to spend some of their time in the service of arranging and disseminating information, and they must be enabled to do so by a financial support which might be up to 20 per cent of the cost of the research'. He described the conference as "a serious attempt to provide world science with a comprehensive and up-to-date information service". How much progress we have made towards Bernal's aim?
When the founder members of the Royal Society established their journal in 1665, Philosophical Transactions (there's free access to the archive but only until the end of December), they did so at the same time as capitalism consolidated itself in the wake of revolution and restoration. Capitalist publishing now acts as a brake on scientific communication, hence the publishers' antagonism towards open access and institutional repositories so evident at the recent RIN workshop.

*From Hooke's draft of the preamble to the statutes of the Royal Society, "to improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practices, Engynes and Inventions by Experiment – (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logicks)"

Technorati Tags: jdbernal, royalsociety

Tingle Creek Day

There's a lot of short-priced favourites today. I can't see Kauto Star being beaten; I hope I'm not swayed by hyperbole.
205 Sandown: New Little Bric
235 Sandown: Kauto Star
250 Chepstow: Michael Muck
255 Wetherby: Royal Rosa
310 Sandown: Verasi
340 Sandown: Iris Bleu