blog.sparetomato.com

Thank goodness we have the UK Government! In their latest attempt to spend the country out of recession, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) have produced a 26 page guide on how to look after our pets.

With 26 pages of advice on diet and providing somewhere suitable to go to the toilet, you could be forgiven that the Department for Stating the Blindingly Obvious (DeSBO) were also involved.

In all seriousness though, it is a shocking state of affairs when people need to be told about the responsibilities of looking after a pet. But while we are accusing the government of setting up a ‘Nanny State’, the 137,245 cases of animal cruelty recorded by the RSPCA in 2007 show that some people really do need to be told how to look after an animal.

We should really ask why DEFRA are getting in on this, as the code of practice will not hold any real weight, and owners could not be fined for not following the guidelines. DEFRA are really only pointing out pet owner’s responsibilities under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. Having been a dog owner for over 3 years, I was not even aware of such an act. However, surely promoting awareness of this act is the responsibility of organisations such as the RSPCA and the Police, not the UK Government.

So, Britain has it’s first Formula One World Drivers Champion since Damon Hill in 1996. In a thrilling, unpredictable race Lewis Hamilton drove conservatively, seemingly content in the fact that he only needed to finish 5th.

Ultimately, that conservatism almost cost him the title as two laps from the end he was passed by the very impressive Sebastian Vettel in a Toro Rosso and it all seemed over.

As Ferrari and Brazil were celebrating their first World Drivers Champion since Ayrton Senna, no-one was watching the pace of the two Toyota cars who had elected not to switch to the intermediate wet tyres. Both Toyotas had gone through the second, twisty section of the racetrack 10 seconds slower than the rest of the field. At the start of the previous lap, Timo Glock, running in 4th position was only 12-14 seconds ahead of Hamilton and Vettel.

As Felipe Massa crossed the line, the Toyota, Toro Rosso and McLaren had only just passed through the second split timing beam, and Massa was effectively World Drivers Champion 2008.

(continue reading…)

It never ceases to amaze me that in these ‘Hard’ times of ‘Credit Crunch’ that the rich find ever more ludicrous ways to squander their money, and other people get richer.

The very fact that con artist Damien Hirst has made over £110,000,000 from the sale of pickled sharks is mindboggling.

Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate art - even some of the more obscure pieces, but do people not have better or more worthy things to spend money on than buying overhyped tat?

My wife would go mad if I came home having spent £150 on a Nintendo Wii, What would the wife of the person who bought the pickled shark say? At least with the Wii you can wave your remote control around like a lightsaber.

The only saving grace to this story is the disappointment felt that the zebra in formaldehyde above only sold for half it’s expected price, but at over £1M, that wasn’t exactly a snip.

I think this line from Del Amitri’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ sums up the hypocrisy of the situation:

While American businessmen snap up Van Goghs
For the price of a hospital wing

So, it’s been a long time since I updated - a cardinal sin in the blogosphere - is it still called that? the term seems dated these days.

I was going to post last week, about the farce that is Formula One, but after re-reading my bile-filled rant, I thought it was best to put that aside and let the rest of the world say it. I really have little more to add on the subject.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have joined Flickr since having my new camera and I am having a lot of fun with it, much to the exasperation of my wife. However, looking at my statistics page, only one of the photos taken with my new camera make it into my top 10 views of all time.

The most popular image is this:

taken at Goodwood in 2005, it shows Damon Hill driving one of the cars his father’s team built before his tragic death in 1975 in the air crash that not only killed him, but the man who was to drive this car in the 1976 Formula One World Championship.

In many ways, the photo is very poignant, which is possibly why it has so many hits. It is also a rare picture, as to my knowledge Damon Hill has never driven the car before, or since.

The second most popular photo is this:

Personally, I find this to be a more intriguing shot - ephasising the poverty in which this community live. But what is slightly concerning is the search term that was entered into Google Images that led someone to this image: ‘Latino Prostitutes’. I know we live in a sick world, and there are some very sick people out there, but nowhere in my image, description or tags have I mentioned those two search terms.

I’ll grant that Google has been ‘intelligent’ to work out that the Dominican Republic could be classed as Latin America (although I would class it as Carribean), however - where did ‘prostitute’ come from?

Perhaps I should consider changing the title of the image, but again ‘Little Girl’ does not evoke anything sexual to me - am I a little naiive?

Of course, given the fact that I have now mentioned this in a blog post, it is now going to be indexed by Google and the chances are that the image will be even more associated with the search terms.

Can we trust machines to truly understand the subtle semantics of text? I wouldn’t expect them to understand sarcasm or irony, but could Google one day ‘understand’ the semantics of this post and reduce the association of the image with the search terms if a blog post or article is describing what an image is not?

Then there is the added complications of a post like this, where I am reinforcing the association of one image - Damon Hill, Graham Hill, the GH2 and to a lesser extent Tony Brise, but I am also reducing the association between the ‘world’s oldest profession’ and the image of the girl.

Flickr and other such sites allow you to ‘tag’ your images to reinforce themes, but as far as I am aware, they do not yet provide this facility.

Flickr does provide the following advice if you are concerned about the sites/search terms that you see in your stats:

Search engines
If your photos turn up in a search for terms you’d rather not be associated with, you need to remove those terms from the content in your account, like photo titles and descriptions, tags, your screen name, or your Flickr profile page. If you decide that you’d prefer not to be part of search results on other services, you can set a preference on Flickr to prevent external searches from adding your Flickr account to their index. Search engines do not update their (huge) indexes in real-time, so if you decide to change that setting on your Flickr account, search engine indexes can take a few weeks (or sometimes more) to reflect your preference. 

This is all well and good - but the title is ‘Little Girl’, the description is ‘Dominican girl outside of school’ and the tags are ‘Dominican’ and ‘Republic’.

I do not wish to remove my images from the search engines, but should we really have to simply accept that occasionally our content might tagged inappropriately by a machine simply because it has made assumptions about other words?

Tomorrow sees the opening of the 29th Summer Olympiad in China. It also sees Flickr attempt another social experiment, encouraging users to take a snapshot of life on 8-8-08.

Despite having some sympathies to the commericalism of Flickr, I still have a pro account and will be taking part (even though it is open to free accounts too).

No doubt Flickr and Yahoo will be hoping for many photos from China, and the rules for Flickr 888 basically give them the right to sell your photos for profit if they want to. Tomorrow my life won’t be as interesting but I’ve been spending the past week trying to spot potential photographs, and while I know one shot I’m intending to take, I have no inspiration for the rest of them. I’m going to have the camera with me all day, so I’ll see what comes out.