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Computer Efficiency but No Understanding
Sometimes you just can’t get through to them; sometimes you just can’t make yourself understood. Whatever you say, however you express it, you don’t get an acceptable response. It can be very annoying and exasperating. If the computer says no then no it will stay. Computers do not respond to reasonableness, appeal or charm. They…
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Managing Society by Television
We know the power and influence of television, that it can create celebrities, initiate and drive fashions; it can establish what is important in the news and set the agenda of debate. Having a presence in most people’s homes it has a direct channel into our lives. Unsurprisingly, this has been recognised and television is…
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Children’s Parties at Home – Top Tips
As soon as children start school they hit the birthday party circuit. Suddenly, they seem to have a party to go to each weekend. Sometimes there’s more than one party. They can even have two parties in a day. It’s a social life that we parents can only envy. Yet the parties do become rather…
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Valuing the Cliché
Watch out for banality. It sneaks up on you. It is the encroachment of the cliché. You might not even know you are saying them. They are sly, devious and manipulative. They are linguistic weeds that need to be extracted at the roots to ensure that they have no basis for returning. And yet they…
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Heart Ablation Opens the Mind
I have just had an unexpected but incredible insight into the alternate possibilities that my brain might be capable of or that others might naturally possess. I recently had to have a heart ablation. This procedure is undertaken in order to correct an irregular heartbeat. It involves the burning or freezing of some of the…
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The Slow, the O-So Slow Rise of Vegetarianism
As a dietary choice vegetarianism has been around for years. I actually became veggie in the mid 1980’s. At that time vegetarians weren’t that common. It would have been considered a strange and unusual practice to adopt. In fact, vegetarians were probably considered a little bit odd. In those days there was no vegetarian options…
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Stand Out Beauty Attracts Attention
Most of the time, you hardly notice other people. You will just walk past them in the street. Even for the dedicated people-watcher, the vast majority of those surveyed are quickly overlooked and soon forgotten. Plain, ordinary and common makes them uninteresting and unremarkable. But every so often you will see someone who captures your…
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Healthy Eating – How do you Measure the Goodness?
We may well be familiar with the expression that you can’t compare apples with oranges, but can you compare bananas with bananas? Certainly apples are very different from oranges, making any comparison difficult. But bananas are – seemingly – very similar to one another, so can you compare them in terms of their health benefits,…
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Taxation by Stealth – How to Hide the Burden?
Governments are often criticised for raising taxes by stealth – perhaps by not adjusting thresholds in line with inflation or by hiding tax changes in the small print of a budget – but the problem is much more fundamental than that. The whole system by which the government seeks to raise revenues is actually built…
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The Essence of Teaching Good Behaviour
All good parents and teachers will know that it is easier to train someone to do something than it is to train them not to do something. This is because it is much simpler to encourage and incentivise positive behaviour than it is to discourage unwanted behaviour. Getting desirable behaviour is readily achievable through positive…
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What’s in a Job Title?
Over the last few years there has been a trend to give people fancier job titles. The job role will not have changed, merely the title of the job. Sales people have become Sales Executives. Cleaners have become Cleaning Operatives. Receptionists have become Front Desk Executives. Sandwich makers have become Sandwich Artists. The reasoning behind…
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Stress – It’s Our Greatest Danger
Until very recently it was thought that smoking, alcohol, obesity and poor lifestyle were the main causes for people to develop a heart condition. It turns out that they are merely contributory factors. The main trigger for heart attacks, strokes and death it seems is stress. In the last few years it has been shown…
Thoughtful Thoughts
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