General News Archives - Page 4 of 6

Disconnecting from work email

December 23, 2024April 11, 2014 by Neil Turner

When I first got my iPhone in 2010, I very quickly set up my three most-used email accounts on it – my personal account at this domain, my Gmail account, and my work email account. Soon, every time I got an email on any of those accounts, no matter what time of day it was, my phone would duly ping me.

At weekends, when going through the unified inbox overview of all three, I’d duly delete the ‘calls for papers’ that various conferences send me (because they assume that anyone who works at a university is an academic) and carefully flagged up the emails that needed action for when I got back in the office on Monday. I thought I was being more productive this way, but actually, all I was doing was spreading what would be a five minute task at work throughout my weekend, when I should be relaxing.

More to the point, it was making it harder to switch off from work, and making checking my personal accounts more difficult as I had to wade through work emails to get to them.

It took until the start of 2012 before I finally decided that this was a silly way to do things. I was off work for two weeks – I’m lucky enough to work for an employer that gives everyone time off between Christmas and New Year, and I had some annual leave in early January. I was getting notifications of work emails, but it would be more than a week until I would be back in the office in order to actually do anything about them. So, I deleted my work email account off my phone.

In the time since, I have kind-of added it back. I use the now abandoned Sparrow client to access my work email on a purely ad-hoc basis, if required, but it’s kept separate from my personal email accounts (in the stock Mail app on my iPhone) and I don’t get notifications for it. So it’s there if I do need to access it – usually if I’m at work but away from the office – but I can’t be disturbed by work emails when I’m not at work.

I’m therefore pleased that, in France, there’s a new labour agreement to stop employees looking at work email after 6pm. France already has a mandatory 35 hour working week, meaning that French employees work shorter hours to improve their work-life balance. This goes further, and helps to prevent employees from doing work-related activities outside work hours.

If you are regularly checking work email when you’re not at work, I would recommend you to stop. It’ll help you disconnect from work and enjoy your free time more. And it often doesn’t save you much time at work either.

Marriage

December 23, 2024March 31, 2014 by Neil Turner

On Saturday, Christine and I went to the wedding of a couple of friends we’ve known for a few years. Co-incidentally, Saturday was the first day that same-sex couples could legally marry in England and Wales.

A bill to change the law was passed last year, and on the 13th of this month, same-sex couples who had married overseas had their marriages automatically recognised as such here. At the same time unmarried couples were able to give notice and the first same-sex marriages happened just after midnight on the 29th March.

The wedding we went to was a mixed-sex marriage, but a marriage all the same. The only thing that was slightly different was that the registrar stated that a marriage was between ‘two people’ and not ‘a man and a woman’, as it was before and when Christine and I got married last year.

I’m really pleased that any two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives with each other can now marry, regardless of their sexual orientation or genitalia. Though Britain has had a compromise of ‘civil partnerships’ since 2005 – offering the same legal status as marriage – it’s good to see that every couple can now be treated equally.

Well, mostly. Whilst same-sex couples should have no problems obtaining a civil marriage, religious marriages are only offered to same-sex couples by a small handful of religious groups – namely the Quakers and the Unitarians. Same-sex marriages are not yet available in Scotland, although the relevant legislation has been passed so it is only a matter of time before this changes. Northern Ireland, however, refuses to allow or recognise same-sex marriages. There are some other issues too.

And there are still changes to happen in wider society. Though a majority of people in the UK support same-sex marriages, around 20% of people would turn down an invitation to a same-sex wedding. But the tide of opinion is going in the right direction and, on the whole, I feel that British society is more accepting of LGBT people now than it has been for any time in history.

Dave Jennings – 1960-2014

March 7, 2024March 25, 2014 by Neil Turner

A photo of Dave Jennings at our wedding, holding a Mr Flibble penguin puppet

Last week I heard the very sad news that Dave Jennings, a very good friend of mine, had passed away from a heart attack outside his flat in Bradford.

I’ve known Dave for several years, initially through friends who were in the musicals society but since 2009 we have been on a regular pub quiz team together at the university.

Though originally from the Bradford area, Dave’s early career was in London, working as a music journalist for Melody Maker magazine. It was there that he reviewed a song by the band ‘Darlin’, which he described as a ‘daft, punky thrash’. Two of the former members of Darlin’, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, went on to form Daft Punk, and the rest is history.

Melody Maker closed in 2000 and Dave returned north, eventually enrolling as a mature student on a course at the University of Bradford where I work. He graduated with a first class honours degree in 2006.

During his time at the university he was involved in both the theatre group and later the musicals society. Indeed, he was due to play the role of Orin Scrivello, the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, but sadly he passed away before the last dress rehearsal. Thankfully, another member of the society stepped up and the show was performed as planned.

Outside of the university he has been a regular extra in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale, often in the background of the Woolpack having a drink. His acting showreel from 2009 is here to watch. And recently he had made a return to music journalism, doing some freelance articles for The Girls Are, and has learnt to play the banjolele, as evidenced in this video.

Dave was also a big geek, like me, particularly when it came to Doctor Who. In fact he shared a birthday with John Barrowman (Captain Jack) and Alex Kingston (River Song). For our wedding, where the photo was taken, he had a Mr Flibble hand puppet commissioned for us, which I’ve been using as my Twitter avatar for some time.

There have been few times over the past six days when I have not been reminded of Dave and the things that he did. Whether it was constantly beating me on Words with Friends with his superior vocabulary, talking about music or the latest Doctor Who episode, or our mutual enjoyment of the Steampunk subculture. Dave will be very much missed by both myself and his large group of friends. He was such a lovely and friendly person and a real shame that his passing has come so soon.

His funeral will take place this Friday, at Nab Wood Cemetery near Bingley, at 3:20pm.

Bradford’s Westfield shopping centre is finally happening

November 15, 2025January 30, 2014 by Neil Turner

Work resumes on the Westfield Bradford development in January 2014

I expect the people of Bradford breathed a sigh of relief when workmen finally returned to the site of Westfield Bradford earlier this month. This will see a new Westfield shopping centre being built, which will be the only one in the north of England (we’ll place Derby in the Midlands).

The shopping centre is due to open in time for Christmas 2015, by which point it will have been almost 12 years in the making. Demolition of the existing buildings on the site started in 2004, and was done by 2006. There followed many months where the remaining rubble was piled up and no activity, but around 2007 preparatory works began to dig a large hole for the foundations.

But after the foundations were constructed, nothing. The credit crunch, and then the recession, put paid to any further progress. The whole project was effectively mothballed. The situation was so bad that in 2010, the local council, with a financial contribution from Westfield, turned part of the park into a ‘temporary urban garden’ as there was no prospect of work starting any time soon.

All this time, the rest of Bradford’s city centre suffered. The recession didn’t help, taking with it a number of shops, but the range and quality of shops in Bradford has declined over the past 10 years. There are a large number of vacant units, and many of those that are occupied are by pop-up shops on short-term lets. There’s also been an explosion of pawnbrokers, payday loan shops and betting shops.

Last year, Trinity Leeds opened in Leeds. Though it too was mothballed for some time during its construction, it’s now open and successful, and has no doubt made Leeds an even more compelling retail destination than Bradford.

Whilst I really hope the opening of Westfield Bradford will be a turning point, and help Bradford get back on its feet, I can’t help but feel that it’s perhaps too late. What if the decline of Bradford’s city centre is actually terminal?

I’m also concerned that Westfield will kill off other parts of the city. Bradford’s existing shopping centre, the Kirkgate Centre, has generally coped well over the years, but has lost a couple of major tenants as some of the larger chain stores went under. Now it too has more than its fair share of poorer quality stores, including a recently extended Poundland. It’s also home to River Island and WHSmith, two confirmed tenants of the new Westfield centre. Marks and Spencer is opposite the Kirkgate Centre and will be an ‘anchor’ tenant in Westfield.

Still, overall I hope that Westdfield is a success. It’s a shame that a once prosperous city like Bradford has fallen so far. Not only has it dropped behind Leeds, but the smaller nearby towns of Halifax and Huddersfield, both of which have (in my opinion) a better range of shops.

The Sowerby Bridge Geese

September 28, 2024September 13, 2013 by Neil Turner

Pictured above are some of the geese that make up a gaggle in my home town of Sowerby Bridge. They nominally live on the River Ryburn, the smaller of Sowerby Bridge’s two rivers which joins the River Calder in the town. Usually they are found on the river outside the swimming pool, but occasionally they waddle a little further afield.

They never stray very far. I’ve never seen any of them fly – they will occasionally flap their wings but they don’t seem to be capable of using them. They just waddle or swim, and the furthest they get is a couple of streets away.

There are probably around 20 of them, and they tend to move together as one big gaggle. This helps when trying to cross the busy A58 road that runs through the town, which they often do, as this video shows. And frequently it’s at rush hour.

Their presence in the town is, unsurprisingly, controversial. Letters from concerned nearby residents have been sent to the local paper and local councillors. The local council have asked that the public do not feed them, and a sign stating this has appeared at one of their regular haunts. However it’s fair to say this sign is regularly ignored as I’ve often seen people throwing bread into the river for them.

I have to admit I’m mostly on the side of the geese (even if their honking occasionally wakes me up on weekend mornings). Whilst they can be a bit threatening to small children and have a habit of defecating a lot, I don’t think there are many humane ways of getting rid of them. And I think they add character to the town, especially in the spring when the newborn goslings hatch. There’s even a Facebook fan page with over 800 ‘likes’. They’ve been here longer than anyone can remember, and I don’t think the town would be the same without them.

Save the National Media Museum

December 23, 2024June 7, 2013 by Neil Turner

It’s not often that I ask you, dear readers of this blog, to sign a petition. But please can you take a few seconds of your time to sign a petition to Save the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The museum, along with the National Railway Museum in York, and the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, are threatened with closure. Their parent company, Science Museum Group, cannot afford to run all three in addition to the Science Museum in London, due to cuts in funding from central government. It is therefore said that one of these will have to go.

I really, really hope that none of them close. As a child, I loved going to visit them and have also been recently as an adult, and enjoyed them all. Putting the museums against each other in a fight for survival is therefore not helpful.

But, I’m particularly keen for the National Media Museum to stay open. It’s the one big visitor attraction in Bradford city centre, with a strong reputation. Closing it would be an absolute disaster for a city which has fallen on hard times over recent years. Racial tension fuelled riots in the summer of 2001. In 2003, demolition work started on a new shopping centre, to be built by Westfield, but ten years on and there’s just a big hole in the ground. Meanwhile the recession has caused many of Bradford’s other shops to close, leaving even bigger gaps in the city centre.

Last year’s opening of the City Park, with its excellent mirror pool and fountains (a magnet for kids on hot sunny afternoons), was a big step in the right direction and shows that the city does have positive momentum. And, hopefully, work will start on our long-awaited shopping centre this year. But all the good work could be undone if the National Media Museum closes. Because people will stop coming to Bradford, and then more local shops and business will go under. It’s a horrible thing to even contemplate.

So please, sign the petition. And if you’re free tomorrow (Saturday), why not visit the museum? There’ll be a mass ‘visit’ of the museum at around 12pm. It’s free to get in, and it’ll show the powers that be that this museum is important, not just to Bradford but for the country as a whole. It is, after all, part of our national collection.

HMV’s fall into administration

July 9, 2024January 15, 2013 by Neil Turner

Last night, it was announced that HMV was to appoint administrators to run the business as it was no longer viable on its own, putting the jobs of over 4000 people who work there at risk. HMV is the last remaining music store in the UK, as over the years Tower Records, Track Records, MVC, Borders and, most recently, Zavvi and Woolworths (to name a few) have all met a similar fate.

Thinking back, the last time I went into HMV was over two years ago, ironically enough to buy some headphones for my iPod, so I could listen to all of the music that I’d bought online. Which is one of the major challenges that HMV faces – many people are now buying music downloads rather than physical CDs, and music downloads in the UK are dominated by Amazon and Apple’s iTunes.

Sure, HMV does sell music downloads and owns 50% of online retailer 7digital, although it’s not as popular as its rivals and tends to be more expensive. But then HMV actually does pay its fair share of taxes in the UK, unlike some other businesses, and its prices are probably higher as a result. Supermarket competition is also a big factor, as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda all sell music and DVDs in their larger stores.

But people still buy CDs. It’s hard to give an MP3 to someone as a gift – especially at Christmas – and there will always be those who prefer to own physical objects. Downloads are great until you realise your in-car CD player doesn’t have an iPod adaptor, or your computer’s hard drive gets corrupted and you lose all of your music files.

How much of HMV will exist in future remains to be seen. It has around 35% of the UK’s CD market and quite a lot of its stores are profitable; hopefully once the failing stores are closed then the business will be able to continue trading, as happened to GAME recently. GAME is an interesting example; in Bradford, through its mergers with Gamestation and EB Games, it ended up with 3 shops within five minutes walk of each other. And this was a pattern repeated across many other towns and cities. Now it generally just has one store and seems to be doing okay. It’s sad news for the staff laid off from the stores that closed, of course, but at least it didn’t disappear forever.

But other recent high street failures haven’t had such a happy ending. Last week, camera retailer Jessops went into administration and within two days had closed all of shops for good. Unfortunately Jessops were in a hard market; few people buy compact cameras any more, as more and more people have smartphones which can take almost-as-good photos, and have the ability to share them on Facebook and Instagram straight-away, rather than waiting until you get home and empty your memory card. And independent camera shops seem to be holding up the top end of the market, especially with second-hand lenses and cameras. Jessops seems to have disappeared into the widening gap between the two.

Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, is quite philosophical about HMV’s collapse; in essence, it’s a sign that banks are letting almost-dead businesses fail, to free up money to lend to those that are doing well and growing. That’s not good news for the people working for these ‘zombie’ companies but a sign that, in time, things will get better.

Whilst changing shopping habits, with a move to digital downloads, are one of the reasons for HMV’s problems, another big problem for all retailers is that many people just don’t have much disposable income nowadays. We’re only just out of a double-dip recession, but last year our economy was bolstered by the Olympics and so it’s possible that Britain will be back in recession for a third time since the credit crunch later this year. Public sector pay is increasing at a measly 1% – less than the rate of inflation – and MPs voted to do the same to benefits. Unemployment isn’t as high as it could be but the fall of Jessops, and Comet just before Christmas, has resulted in thousands losing their jobs just recently. So to me, the economy is also to blame, and by extension those in charge of this country’s economic policy as well.

I’m near the end of this post, but before that I’ll come back to the topic of Bradford. In Bradford, HMV is on Broadway, a street that should, by now, lead into the new Westfield Shopping Centre, had it been built (construction will hopefully start later this year). It’s one of the few shops left there; GAME closed, as mentioned earlier, and children’s clothing retailer Adams closed down a couple of years ago. Jessops was around the corner until last weekend. What was once one of Bradford’s main shopping streets barely has anything left on it, as more and more struggling high street chain stores fall by the wayside.

I really hope that at least some of HMV’s stores stay open. It would be a shame to lose such a big name, especially as it’s the last of its kind.

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Aaron Swartz 1986-2013

December 23, 2024January 13, 2013 by Neil Turner

Yesterday I read of the passing of Aaron Swartz, who took his own life on Friday at just 26 years old. This is a real shame as Aaron has contributed much in his very short life:

He was a co-author of version 1.0 of RSS (the RDF variant)
He was a major contributor to the MusicBrainz project
His blog was one of the first, and was still going as recently as November last year
He has previously worked for campaigning organisations Change.org and Avaaz
He founded Demand Progress which helped to lead the campaign against the SOPA and PIPA bills in America
He was one of the co-founders of the predecessor to Reddit
He worked alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, who offered this brief eulogy on Twitter
Some of the Python code he developed for Reddit was released into the public domain as web.py which is used by a number of other web sites
He worked with Larry Lessig to help to set up Creative Commons
He collaborated with John Gruber on Markdown, which formatted plain text as HTML

And that’s not a complete list.

Unfortunately Aaron has been in trouble with the law of late and faced criminal charges. He also suffered from depression, which is mentioned in this obituary by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow who was one of his friends.

Aaron Swartz was younger than me when he died and yet achieved so much. May he rest in peace, and may his legacy live on.

This post was edited several times before posting as I kept coming across more and more things that Aaron did.

Britain’s best high streets

September 28, 2024November 30, 2012 by Neil Turner

It’s not a paper that I would choose to read, but in the Daily Express last week was an article entitled ‘Britain’s best high streets‘, and, pleasingly, it mentioned Wharf Street in my adopted home town of Sowerby Bridge – pictured above during the Rushbearing festival.

Now, since it only features three towns, it’s not exactly an authoritative article and I’m sure there are many better high streets out there. But Wharf Street is pretty good as high streets go – we have an independent bakery, grocer, butchers, a post office, two banks and a wide range of specialist and boutique shops. There’s also a number of restaurants, including two good curry houses, and a bistro which is listed in the Good Food Guide. And there’s a market which is open most days of the week.

Sowerby Bridge’s high street has held up against two supermarkets. Lidl is just up the hill, and there’s a reasonably-sized Tesco at the western end of the town. It’s probably because the independent shops here tend to offer services that are better than, or different to, what the supermarkets can provide.

It’s not perfect though. Three of the pubs on Wharf Street are currently shut – two have closed recently and one has been shut for some time. And with it being the main road between Halifax and Rochdale it is very busy with traffic, making it a rather noisy place to be with rather narrow pavements. However, the variety and quality of shops is one of the things that drew us to the town and, two years after moving here, we’re still generally in love with the place.

Schools deny girls cervical cancer jabs on religious grounds

March 27, 2026July 18, 2012 by Neil Turner

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

It’s been almost three years (!) since I’ve written a Guest Post for SEB, but a recent news story here in the UK prompted me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write something.

Over here in the UK, some religious schools have opted out of offering free HPV vaccines to their students. HPV – the Human Papillomavirus – is linked to as many as 70% of cases of cervical cancer and is therefore offered, free of charge, to girls aged 12 and 13. Around 1000 women die from cervical cancer each year, so this vaccine has the potential to save hundreds of lives. And normally, it is up to individual parents’ to opt their children out, but these schools have made the decision to opt out of the vaccine for all of their students.

The HPV vaccine is controversial – not because of any side effects, but because HPV is a sexually-transmitted infection. Consequently, some parents opt their children out as they do not want to encourage sexual promiscuity, or feel that because their religion forbids sexual intercourse before marriage that this is incompatible with their faith.

The key problem is that a number of these schools have not informed local doctors that they have chosen to opt out. Consequently, should a child’s parent actually want their child to have the vaccine, it is not subsequently being offered by their doctor and so some children may miss out.

What is laughable are some of the reasons given by the schools for opting out, such as:

“pupils follow strict Christian principles, marry within their own community and do not practise sex outside marriage”

Because we know how likely that is. Regular SEB readers will know that abstinence-only sex education is not effective and actually results in a higher rate of unprotected sex – and consequently puts both men and women at risk of contracting the virus. Although the vaccination programme only targets girls, men can carry the virus and it while it frequently results in no adverse symptoms, carriers are at a heightened risk of other cancers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has some handy information if you want to read more.

Should schools be allowed to put the health of their students at risk in this way, in the course of religious observance? And if so, should such schools be forced to make the effort to provide parents with the information they need to seek alternative sources of the vaccine?