Brian Clegg's Blog, page 55

PR's Corner - issue #1

I was always a fan of Pseud's Corner in Private Eye. These days, the most purple prose I receive is often in the form of press releases for books being offered for review. I will provide an irregular series of these, both for your entertainment and, I hope, as pointers of what not to do with the press releases for your own books. Names will be omitted to protect the innocent and guilty alike.



BOOK TITLE:  Searing Book of Poetry & Prose Empowers Reader to Tackle Society’s Downfalls
Masterfully constructed by renowned poet, author and playwright, X Y, ‘Book Title’ cuts right to the core of humanity and the human condition; a clarion call to readers that urges them to stand up and fight for what’s right. Both heartfelt and raw, Y’s words speak directly to the heart of his readers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEUnited Kingdom – X Y is more than just a writer, he’s a fearless warrior who passionately calls out to society. Not one to let humanity’s problems slip by unnoticed, Y calls his readers into action through bold poetry and short stories that force the redefinition of every shred of their existence.
His new book, ‘Book Title’, is no different. Prepare for something bold and profound; intense messages of truth and hope that will inspire even the most apathetic to band together for the world’s greater good.
Synopsis:
Indulge yourself in a rendezvous with notable poet, author, and playwright X Y as he shares with us a compilation of his best works, ranging in nature from poetry to short-stories, as well as his reflections on the human condition. Allow him to share his thoughts with you, listen to what he has to say, and let your heart respond to his words.
A moment of patience in a moment of anger can save a thousand moments of regrets, so accept your past with no regrets, embrace your present with confidence and face your future with no fear.
We must open up our ears and hearts and listen to the cries of our society, we must come together and think what can we do to bring a change and how can we be the solution to our society's problems, we must listen in order to respond.
[...]
With the volume’s popularity expected to increase, interested readers are urged to secure their copies without delay.

The proof is not in the pudding

One of the most hated activities in all of writing is proofreading. It takes a special kind of focus to sit down with a manuscript and go through, word for word, looking for the slightest slip. And even though books from respectable publishers will usually have undergone this process with at least three separate pairs of eyes, I have hardly ever read a published book where I didn't spot an error or two - which means that there were probably several more, as once I get into a book, I tend to read so quickly that I don't spot much at all.

This being the case, there was a huge temptation when I got a spam email from a proof reading service. What are the chances, I thought, that their email would have a mistake in it? Wouldn't that be deliciously ironic? I have reproduced it here for your delectation. I could only spot one punctuation error, but who know what might be lurking within. (And I do wonder about the journal publication service.) Meanwhile, back at the pudding*...

PROFESSIONAL PROOFREADING AND EDITING 


X Proofreading company is one of the world’s leading editing and  
proofreading companies. Our company’s primary objective is to provide  
clients with prompt, professional, and affordable editing and  
proofreading services. Our careful proofreading and editing services  
provide clear, error-free materials that let you present a  
professional image. 

At X Proofreading company, we offer the following services: 

1. Proofreading and editing 
2. Translation from other languages to English 
3. Manuscript write-up 
4. Manuscript critiques 
5. Publication of manuscript in a relevant journal 

Send your documents for proofreading and editing to; 

email address 1, 

email address 2

* I should note that, as it often misrepresented as 'the proof is in the pudding', the phrase is 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating,' just as the proof of the writing is in the reading. I deduce that if the activity involving writing is proofreading, the activity involving pudding should be proofeating.

End to End review

I very rarely review self-published books, but I love humorous travel books, particularly those set in the UK from the likes of Bill Bryson and Stuart Maconie. So, when I was offered the chance to read a book described by the author as 'a travelogue adventure in a similar style to Bill Bryson' featuring a bicycle trip from Lands End to John O'Groats I plunged in, and I don't regret it.

Alistair McGuinness tells the story of a three-man trip over the 800+ mile trail that would sometimes test the individuals involved to the limit, but that also brought romance to one and a nightmare experience in a youth hostel to all. (The dog mentioned on the cover, incidentally, doesn't come into the story at all - it's just a postscript that somehow got into the subtitle.) The book is solidly written, and has been well edited. I never got bored or felt I wanted to give up on reading it. If I had to sum it up in one word I would say 'Pleasant.' Two words? 'Mildly pleasant.'

Unfortunately, it didn't really live up to the promise of being similar to Bryson's style. The key to good humorous travel writing is to skip the mundane and highlight (dare we even say exaggerate in some cases?) the unusual and extraordinary, injecting a sense of the absurd and delightful. There is too much writing in End to End  along the lines of this extract: 'Breakfast was a quiet affair, broken by requests for water, juice, and more tea. Our cooked breakfast was served by a teenage waitress, who didn't hover at the table too long, except to collect orders for additional toast.' And I care about this because? It's a factual account, but it lacks any bite.

There is one well-flagged incident in the youth hostel visit, which had plenty of potential for humour, lacked pizzazz. We have a nice set-up with one of three cyclists saying he doesn't want to stay in a Youth Hostel, particularly with dormitories and organic muesli as breakfast. With a certain inevitability a hotel booking is missed, it's too late to book a family room in the hostel, and all the worst possibilities come together in a dormitory with plenty of comic opportunity in the problems of getting back into a dark dormitory when returning from a night out. But although the opportunities for hilarity are there, the telling lacks the sophistication it needs, falling a little flat. A comic narration like this needs to build relentlessly, and for whatever reason this never happens.

So, at risk of damning End to End with faint praise, it is fine as a simple description of a biking holiday that really stretched those involved. But it has no real narrative thrust, none of the comedy genius that is present even in Bill Bryson's lesser works. I am glad I read this book. I hope others will too. But think of it as a simple travel account, not travel humour.

End to End will be available on Amazon soon...

Why I might vote 'out' in the referendum

Here's the thing. I have done my best to assess the actual information, rather than scaremongering, from both sides and at the moment, neither has swayed me. Here's my logic for therefore voting out:

My vote won't decide what happens. *If I vote 'in' I seem to be saying 'things are fine with the EU,' but they aren'tIf I vote 'out', then I'm adding weight to the argument the government needs to do more to distance us from the less palatable aspects of the EU. The usual objection to this kind of voting to make a point is 'But if everyone voted like that, we would be in a mess.'
I'm sure I don't need to point out to you the logical error in that argument. But just in case I do, we are talking about unconnected events. The way I vote will not have any influence on how other people behave. The 'What if everyone...' argument has no merit because my action is independent. 
* OK, strictly speaking, it could be totally balanced with my vote being the decider, but that is ridiculously unlikely. 

CleanSpace review

The tag. It's neatly styled, but does get rather grubby.I have recently had the opportunity to review the CleanSpace app and tag for Good Housekeeping - but there's only limited space there, so I'm going into more detail here about this personal air pollution monitor/clean travel app.

The CleanSpace tag is a slim plastic device about the size of mobile phone, which monitors levels of carbon monoxide. Powered by wi-fi, so it never needs a charge, the tag connects to a smartphone by Bluetooth, passing on information to the CleanSpace app. The idea is both to encourage the user to travel in a green fashion and to be able to keep an eye on the air pollution on your route, choosing a healthier alternative if necessary.

The tag only measures carbon monoxide levels, which seems a touch dubious when one of the main concerns in city air pollution is the levels of particulates, notably from diesel exhausts. However, I was reassured by Ben Barrett from King's College, London, who told me:

Carbon monoxide (CO) is a good tracer for combustion sources in general – vehicle exhaust, gas cooking, cigarettes, biomass burning etc – all of which are also sources of particulate matter. Therefore it is true to say that carbon monoxide is a good measure of combustion-related particulates. CO also has the advantage of being relatively stable, so more straightforward to measure with a miniature low-cost electrochemical sensor. CO is not related to non-combustion sources of particulate matter, such as construction dust or transboundary ‘secondary’ PM (nitrates, sulphates and ammonia). However, as the CleanSpace sensor is principally designed to allow users to monitor relative exposure to vehicle exhaust as they travel (thus linked to their CleanSpace low carbon miles), this is a intricacy that is unlikely to affect the vast majority of users.

The app. The control panel is a little
confusing to begin with - there's a lot
going on.So far, so good, then. The CleanSpace app is available free from the App store and has a dual function, which can make it a trifle confusing. It both keeps track of the output of your tag and notes your miles travelled and how many of them it assumes to be green - i.e. travelling by foot or by bike, rather than by car, bus or train.You can use the app without a tag, just to keep track of your mileage, although you then miss out on the personal air pollution details.

As you hit certain targets for clean miles, you are awarded little rewards, from a free coffee for your first mile to the rather more dubious benefits of free yoga sessions. In a particularly unnerving fashion, the app also tells you how many clean miles you have travelled in comparison to the average user of the app. The trouble with this is that if, like me, you are a walker, your typical mileage will be dwarfed by cyclists. (See the image. I recorded 1.44 miles last week (I did more, but I didn't have tracking on all week), but the average user did 25.69 miles.) It would be sensible if you could tell the app which you were, and it compared like with like. Similarly, it seems too broad brush that it treats all motorised transport the same - so I don't get any brownie points for travelling on a train rather than car, or an electric car rather than a diesel taxi.

Fun though the app is on its own, it has the potential to be far more interesting when linked to the tag. Setting this up proved a little fiddly. It took several attempts to get the tag to link to my phone by Bluetooth, and when it had, I didn't realise for a while that it expected to me go onto the website and validate my first data there, rather than being able to do so on the phone app. Inevitably also, when the tag is active, the app uses battery on the phone even faster than the distinctly noticable noticable drain from the app when it is monitoring travel.

I managed some medium quality air by walking
near a dual carriageway in SwindonThe travel monitor in the app mostly works fine - it just occasionally missed a bit of a journey - I found the tag rather less reliable. Sometimes the phone didn't think it was linked to the tag. Other times I made a journey with the tag active and it registered no pollutants - yet I had been walking alongside dual carriageways through the middle of Bristol. The problem seems to be either the tag's power system, or its Bluetooth link. (The other possibility is that found it hard to meter the air in packed pocket, but I also tried it in a loose top shirt pocket, and it still registered nothing.) Either way, the tag was more intermittent than I liked and only managed to monitor about half my walked journeys - though if you regularly take the same route, that's plenty to build up a picture.

You can take a look at your air quality exposure as a graph showing peaks, or as a map, which seems to combine the data from any tag it can lay its hands on to give the best picture it can of its surroundings.

There's no doubt this is a great idea, and though in this relatively early phase it seems a little over complex, it lacks the ability to tailor to your travel means, and it can be inconsistent, it does, nonetheless, provide a useful overview of how you are travelling and what the air quality is like.

The app is downloadable from app stores, while the tag is available direct from CleanSpace or from Amazon.co.uk.

Nightmare scenario

I don't often have nightmares, but when I do, of late, they have had two themes. Some involve sitting my Natural Sciences finals exams, only I haven't revised since 1976. (For some reason it's never my Masters exams from the year after.) And the others put me back with my previous employer, British Airways. What used to be a great place to work has become a seen of hatred between workers and management.

I suspect I know why both of these are occurring. As an RLF Literary Fellow I am currently helping science students at Bristol University with their writing skills - and for third years it is that terrifying time of year. As for the BA nightmares, I'm afraid, while exaggerated, it reflects the way the airline is shooting itself in the foot.

When I was at BA, the IT department (then known as IM for Information Management), was central to the airline's success. The IM director, for example, was a full board member. And this was because sensible airlines knew just how important their ICT systems were to survival. Our biggest American rival used to say that it was a booking system company that happened to fly planes.

There are two big factors behind this importance attributed to ICT. One was, indeed, the booking system. Written a language rarely used outside airlines and banks, designed for ultra-fast high levels of transactions, it needed a small army of programmers trained in this very specialist language. The second was scheduling and yield management. Airlines have complex schedules, which have to change at a moment's notice, and airlines led the field in the business of changing the price of seats over time to maximise revenue. There were plenty of other reasons too, from the way that the newest technology was often employed in the airline business to managing a huge and complex engineering business, where safety was paramount.

It was always possible that some of the ICT business could sensibly be outsourced. But the core aspects were the company's crown jewels. Yet, now, much of that business is being sent offshore, and many of the key workers are leaving or being transferred to an external company. It clearly is a nightmare for those who work there. But I also think there is the distinct danger that it could become a nightmare for the company, which used to be a world leader in this field. And that would be a shame indeed.

Bone by Bone review

It's great when you get a chance to meet an author, in part because it makes you more likely to buy a book you wouldn't otherwise. After a talk by Sanjida Kay (aka Sanjida O'Connell when writing non-fiction and historical fiction), I picked up a copy of her psychological thriller Bone by Bone - and I'm glad I did.
I think there's two reasons I wouldn't normally have bought this - partly because I prefer traditional crime fiction to thrillers, and partly because the publisher has come up with a cover that seemed to hint as it being women's fiction, a category that there is absolutely no reason to straight-jacket this book with.
The difficulty with this kind of story is that it's difficult to say too much without engaging in spoilers, but it features a single mother and her nine-year-old daughter. They have recently moved from London to Bristol, and the daughter begins to be bullied at school. As Laura, the mother, attempts to sort out the bullying she first makes things worse and then plunges herself and her daughter into a spiral of increasingly out-of-control situations.
It's very well written - an excellent balance of good description and taut writing, which pulls the reader on relentlessly. By doing away with numbered chapters and using relatively short sections, Kay strongly pushes the 'I'll just read a bit more' button, and I found that I got through it extremely quickly, particularly as the tension builds towards the end. The sections are either from the point of view of mother Laura or daughter Autumn. I'm usually find child POV writing a touch excruciating, but Kay does not overdo the childlike thinking, giving an inner narration that could be an adult's, but from a child's viewpoint, which mostly works well.
The only slight complaint I'd have is about the topping and tailing prologue and epilogue. I absolutely see the point of the flash forward in the prologue as a way to ratchet up the tension straight away, but the specific occurrence left me feeling a little cheated when we got to it in the 'real time' part of the book. And the epilogue feels a tad over-neat in the way it wraps things. But neither of these spoiled the book for me.
If you fancy a book that combines a page-turner of a story with a situation that anyone with children could identify with (even though reality would thankfully be unlikely to be so extreme), it's one to go for. The Bristol setting makes a pleasant change from other city locations and there's enough depth here to absorb more than caricature sketches of characters, without ever getting the feeling the author has forgotten the importance of plot.
See more about the book at Amazon.co.uk an Amazon.com.

Trade deals and misdirection

As I may have said already (bear with me - only two more months to go) I am fed up with the misdirection that is being used by both sides in the EU exit debate. A couple of days ago, Teresa May made an odd speech, supposedly about staying in the EU, but in practice almost entirely about the European Court of Human Rights. (Guess what. She doesn't like it.) Say after me, Teresa: 'The European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU.' And she knows that perfectly well.

However, the specific topic that has aroused my ire is the response to President Obama's comment at the weekend that it could take 10 years to negotiate a trade deal with the US if we leave the EU, a response that suggests that this means that transatlantic trade will collapse. This echoes similar dire warnings that leaving the EU will mean we can no longer trade with EU countries. Let's be clear here. This is balderdash.

We don't have a proper trade deal with the US at the moment. But guess what? We buy US goods and services - and they buy ours - all the time. We aren't talking about things getting worse with the US, simply sticking with the status quo for longer than if we stayed in the EU. If we do stay in the European Union we are likely to became part of the EU/US trade deal. And what is that trade deal? The horrendous and secretively negotiated TTIP, which threatens to open our markets to a flood of US products and services that don't meet our standards on, for instance, use of hormones in raising cattle, and makes it pretty well impossible to prevent US companies taking over some aspects of the NHS.

I don't doubt there will be some bumps in the road if we leave the EU - and it might not be the best idea. But the way the trade situation has been portrayed as going from wondrous perfection to vastly reduced trade really doesn't provide any reflection on the nature of reality.

Clever clickbait or disappointingly dumb?

Every now and then something turns up on Facebook that has been shared by 100 bazillion people, with a heading like '99% of people will get this wrong.' Some of these posts are just tedious (like the ones that depend on the order in which you apply mathematical operations), but the one illustrated here apparently has some merit - it looks like a straightforward reverse logic problem. But in reality it seems specifically designed to cause confusion. The problem here is that the sequence does not have a single solution. At the very least you can make an argument for 40 or 96, and stretching things a little, 32 gets a look in.
For me, 96 was the most obvious solution - the process to get the right hand value is multiply the two items on the left and add the first of the original numbers. As for 32, it comes from totally ignoring the items on the left and making the sequence of solutions progress regularly - in this case, the first two are separated by 7, the second two by 9, so it seems reasonable to separate the third pair by 11. And, yes, 40 also makes sense, by adding the solution of the previous line to the left hand side of the next line. (I don't know how someone made it 35.)
But why is it designed to cause confusion? Because the people who put it together know we will disagree, and that increases the number of comments. The problem is, as I've mentioned previously, when thinking about logic problems, we are conditioned to expect one correct answer. But like most real world problems, this is a problem that does not have a single correct answer. Each of 32, 40 and 96 is a perfectly respectable value. And no doubt there are others as well. Which is to be welcomed - it's a shame we feel the urge to put forward one particular answer as 'correct', for which we can probably blame the limitations of our education. The designers of this post know that we have been programmed to search for THE right answer, and so exploit us accordingly.

The downside of adultised superheroes

I know there's no such word as 'adultised' - but it matches what I have in mind. When I was a kid, I read DC comics (for some reason, Marvel didn't seem to arrive in Rochdale til after I grew out of them). I enjoyed Superman, but Batman was far better. This was because an important part of reading these comics was role play. It was hard to emulate Superman without, for instance, being able to fly. But, trained though he was, Batman was just human, and so far easier to feature in pretend play. And most important of all, he had his utility belt.

Oh, that utility belt. (I was spurred into writing this, by the way, after passing a police officer as I came out of Temple Meads station, thinking that her gadget-bedecked high vis jacket looked like a utility belt.) How I wanted a utility belt. And, inevitably I made one of sorts, though it didn't carry quite as impressive a collection of items as did Batman's own.

I know the move of comic books to shades of grey in the spread of 'graphic novels' (they really aren't novels, guys, I'm sorry) has made superheroes more attractive to an adult audience. And though I share Stephen Fry's doubts about the genre having such a hold on the box office, I do enjoy some of the modern reboots. But what a loss. There is no way that the modern Batman is a sensible role play option for children. The utility belt now seems far too tame for Batman writers. So while I have nothing against 'graphic novels' per se (apart from the name), I am very sad at the way they have deprived today's young people of an exciting part of their innocence.