Podcast appearances and mentions of Simon Rogers

For some who had been following The Fall since 'Live At The Witch Trials' and 'Dragnet', 1988's 'The Frenz Experiment' with its more polished and slightly commercial sound might have seemed to be a bit of a sellout. Not so for this week's guest, Manchester record shop co-owner and bass player (The Suncharms) Richard Farnell. Catching them live at a record shop in-store appearance while playing hooky during a school trip into London may have sealed the deal for him, but he contends there's more to this era of The Fall than the unlikely chart success of their covers of 'Victoria' and 'There's A Ghost In My House' might attest. Songs discussed in this episode: There's A Ghost In My House - The Fall;  Time Will Tell - The Suncharms; Mr Pharmacist, Totally Wired, Rebellious Jukebox, Fol De Rol, Frenz, Carry Bag Man, Get A Hotel - The Fall; Victoria - The Kinks; All Day and All of the Night - The Stranglers; Victoria - The Fall; Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight - Spinal Tap; Athlete Cured, In These Times, The Steak Place, Bremen Nacht, Guest Informant, Oswald Defence Lawyer - The Fall; Distant Lights - The Suncharms

In preparation for my upcoming project Constable Ambisonic (more on that soon), I was in Manningtree Station car park for 5am to meet my friend photographer Simon Rogers. It was damp but mild and we walked the paths of the Stour Valley as far as Flatford and back, simply to get back in to the swing of being up early, in the field, listening and recording. In this, the third recording of the morning, one can hear two Great Spotted Woodpeckers working on different trees, Chiffchaff, Robin, Wren, Moorhen, Coal Tit, Pheasant, Wood Pigeon and Dunnock, as well as a flock of Graylag and Canada Geese in the distance. A wheezing pug and her owner also put in an appearance.

Google Data Journalist and Data Editor Simon Rogers is in the house. We talk about the complexity of data, how searches reveal what people are REALLY thinking, and so much more.Check him out on simonrogers.net or tune into The Data Journalism podcast with friend of the show Alberto Cairo.

Depending on who you ask, this is my Got Back 2024 gig review with either Simon Rogers or Roger Simons. Don't ask why. All you need to know is that this episode covers the last two gigs of the entire Got Back Tour (including a soundcheck)!!! Please enjoy. Peace and love, Sam   If you want to support the show, check out our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/mccartneypodcast To get in contact with the show, drop us an email at paulmccartneypod@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter for all Macca updates by searching @mccartneypod.  Check out our YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXcuhC1jm1wqhUTWhVS-r6A  If you haven't seen the blog, check it out at www.paulmccartneypod.wordpress.com where you can see loads of episodes start out life as a random blog post, before being resculpted into the quality content you are here for today!  Hosted by Sam Whiles.

Bite-sized insights from Reuters Institute's fellowship seminars: the evolving field of data visualisation in journalism. Featuring: Alberto Cairo & Simon Rogers – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C_8xXRizqY&list=PLMctYaT2KOgtahBzm5SUSJqiX_nTLpGtU&index=2 Script and editing: Caithlin Mercer Music by Patiño Full transcript here: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fellowship-takeaways-podcast-series"

Highways Voices returns after its summer break with an interview recorded at the JCT Traffic Signals Symposium in Nottingham.Andrew Caleya Chetty is our guest, CEO and Founder of Starling Technologies, talking about its innovative approach to pedestrian safety using computer vision and machine learning.He explains how Starling's system, which can handle saturated pavements and different user types, has received positive feedback from UK and international authorities. The company's technology, which can platoon pedestrians to improve efficiency, also captures detailed behavioural data.He's joined by Simon Rogers, Starling's sales lead, who discusses the business cases for their product, including financial, carbon, and safety benefits. You'll also hear how Starling aims to expand globally, with installations in various countries and plans to showcase their solutions at the ITS World Congress in Dubai.

Simon Rogers is a former member of Warwickshire Police. He commenced his career at Rugby and walked the beat for 3 years. He went on to join the traffic department. Simon decided that he wanted to be a firearms officer and commenced the application. However, he was unsuccessful at is first attempt but the following year he went on to pass his firearms course and become a firearms officer.Having served for a period of time Simon was a safety training officer and was identified as a candidate to become a firearms instructor this process is particularly arduous and following an extensive training course Simon qualified. We discuss the scrutiny that officers go through when a firearms deployment results in the discharge of a weapon. During his time at Warwickshire 4 officers were shot during the training within the range.Due to the strategic location of Warwickshire Simon and had significant links with West Midlands and would work closely with other forces in the region.We discuss the responsibilities of police firearms officers and how they administer support to individuals who have been caught in the “Hot Zone”. Simon also explains the response following an incident where a weapon is discharged and the scrutiny officers face by the authority. We discuss officers handing in their firearms permits under the current climate.Simon believes that the federation should take a greater lead in the welfare of firearms officers, and this should not be left to the PFOA.Simon is a member of the Security Institute and has flourished as a business. His company Turret Training provides specialist training courses that support “strategic threat and risk assessment and harmonise emergency planning allied to UK national JESIP protocols to security professionals. Turret Training was shortlisted for the Outstanding Security Performance Awards and Security and Fire Excellence Awards and was the first company to be awarded the first-ever Approved Training Provider certificate from the prestigious Security Institute”.There is a significant skills gap within the security industry. Many SIA members do not have the skill set to deal with significant trauma and this is frustrating to Simon.Sir John Saunders recommended that security staff be trained do deal with trauma incidents specific to their deployment. The SIA have been directed to devise a plan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we talk about the growth of data use in the media and the potential impact of misinformation on the public's trust in official statistics.   Navigating podcast host Miles Fletcher through this minefield is Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge; Ed Humpherson, Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation; and award-winning data journalist Simon Rogers.    Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics, I'm Miles Fletcher. Now we've talked many times before in these podcasts about the rise of data and its impact on our everyday lives. It's all around us of course, and not least in the media we consume every day. But ‘what' or ‘who' to trust: mainstream media, public figures and national institutions like the ONS, or those random strangers bearing gifts of facts and figures in our social media feeds?  To help us step carefully through the minefields of misinformation and on, we hope, to the terra firma of reliable statistical communication, we have three interesting and distinguished voices, each with a different perspective. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a well-known voice to UK listeners. He's chair of the Winton Centre for Risk Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and was a very prominent voice on the interpretation of public health data here during the COVID pandemic. Also, we have Ed Humpherson, Director General of regulation and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the official stats watchdog if you like, and later in this podcast, I'll be joined by award winning data journalist and writer Simon Rogers, who now works as data editor at Google.  Professor, you've been one of the most prominent voices these last few years – a fascinating few years, obviously, for statistics in which we were told quite frankly, this was a golden age for statistics and data. I mean, reflecting on your personal experience as a prominent public voice in that debate, when it comes to statistics and data, to be very general, how well informed are we now as a public, or indeed, how ill-informed on statistics?     DAVID SPIEGELHALTER  I think things have improved after COVID. You know, for a couple of years we saw nothing but numbers and graphs on the news and in the newspapers and everywhere, and that went down very well. People didn't object to that. In fact, they wanted more. And I think that has led to an increased profile for data journalism, and there's some brilliant ones out there. I'm just thinking of John Burn-Murdoch on the FT but lots of others as well, who do really good work. Of course, in the mainstream media there is still the problem of non-specialists getting hold of data and getting it wrong, and dreadful clickbait headlines. It is the sub editors that wreck it all just by sticking some headline on what might be a decent story to get the attention and which is quite often misleading. So that's a standard problem. In social media, yeah, during COVID and afterwards, there are people I follow who you might consider as - I wouldn't say amateurs at all, but they're not professional pundits or media people - who just do brilliant stuff, and who I've learned so much from. There are also some terrible people out there, widespread misinformation claims which are based on data and sound convincing because they have got numbers in them. And that, I mean, it's not a new problem, but now it is widespread, and it's really tricky to counter and deal with, but very important indeed.     MF  So the issue aside from - those of us who deal with the media have heard this a hundred times - “I don't write the headlines”, reporters will tell you when you challenge that misleading kind of headline. But would you say it's the mainstream media then, because they can be called out on what they report, who broadly get things right? And that the challenge is everything else - it's out there in the Wild West of social media?     DS  Yeah, mainstream media is not too bad, partly because, you know, we've got the BBC in this country, we've got regulations, and so it's not too bad. And social media, it's the Wild West. You know, there are people who really revel in using numbers and data to make inappropriate and misleading claims.     MF  Is there anything that can be done? Is it the government, or even those of us like the ONS who produce statistics, who should we be wading in more than we do? Should we be getting out there onto the social media platforms and putting people right?     DS  It's difficult I mean, I don't believe in sort of censorship. I don't think you can stop this at source at all. But just because people can say this, it doesn't give them a right for it to be broadcast wide, in a way and to be dumped into people's feeds. And so my main problem is with the recommendation algorithms of social media, where people will see things because it's getting clicks, and the right algorithm thinks persona will like it. And so we just get fed all this stuff. That is my real problem and the obscurity and the lack of accountability of recommendation algorithms right across social media is I think, a really shocking state of affairs. Of course, you know, we come on to this later, but we should be doing something about education, and actually sort of pre-empting some of the misunderstandings is something I feel very strongly about with my colleagues. You've got to get in there quick, and rather than being on the backfoot and just reacting to false claims that have been made, you've got to sort of realise how to take the initiative and to realise what misunderstandings, misinterpretations can be made, and get in there quickly to try to pre-empt them. But that of course comes down to the whole business of how ONS and others communicate their data.     MF  Because when you ask the public whether they trust them - and the UK statistics authority does this every two years - you ask the public if they trust ONS statistics, and a large proportion of them say they do. But of course, if they're not being presented with those statistics, then they're still going to end up being misled.     DS  Yeah, I mean, it's nice to get those responses back. But, you know...that's in terms of respondents and just asking a simple question, do you trust something or not? I think it's good to hear but we can't be complacent about that at all. I'm massively influenced by the approach of the philosopher, Baroness Onora O'Neill, who really makes a sharp distinction between organisations wanting to be trusted and revelling in being trusted, and she says that shouldn't be your objective to be trusted. Your objective should be to be trustworthy, to deserve trust, and then it might be offered up to you. And so the crucial thing is trustworthiness of the statistics system and in the communications, and that's what I love talking about, because I think it's absolutely important and it puts the responsibility really firmly back to the communicator to demonstrate trustworthiness.     MF  So doing more as stats producers to actually actively promote data and get people to come perhaps away from the social platforms, and to have their own websites that present data in an accessible way, in an understandable way, where people can get it for nothing without requiring an expensive subscription or something, as some of the best of the media outlets would require.     DS  The other thing I'd say is there's no point of being trustworthy if you're dull, as no one's going to look at it or take any notice, and other media aren't going to use it. So I think it's really worthwhile to invest, make a lot of effort to make what you're putting out there as attractive, as vivid and as grabbing as possible. The problem is that in trying to do that, I mean, that's what a lot of communicators and media people want to do, because of course they want people to read their stuff. But what that tends to do largely is make their stuff kind of opinionated and have a very strong line, essentially to persuade you to either do something or think something or buy something or vote something. So much communication has to do with persuading that I think it's just completely inappropriate. In this context, what we should be doing is informing people.    In a way we want to persuade them to take notice, so that's why you want to have really good quality communications, vivid, get good people out there. But in the end, they're just trying to inform people, and that's why I love working with ONS. I just think this is a really decent organisation whose job is just trying to raise the...to obviously provide official statistics...but in their communications, it's to try to raise the level of awareness raise the level of discussion, and by being part of a non -ministerial department, they're not there, the comms department, to make the minister look good, or to make anyone look good. It's just there to tell people how it is.    MF  Exactly. To put that data into context. Is this a big number or is this is a small number, right? Adjectives can sometimes be very unhelpful, but often the numbers don't speak for themselves, do they.    DS   Numbers never speak for themselves, we imbue them with meaning, which is a great quote as well from Nate Silver.    MF  And in doing that, of course, you have to walk the same line that the media do, in making them relevant and putting them into context, but not at the same time distorting them. There's been a big debate going on recently, of course, about revisions. And if you've listened to this podcast, which we'd always advise and consume other articles that the ONS has published, we've said a lot about the whole process of revising GDP, and the uncertainty that's built into those initial estimates, which although helpful, are going to be pretty broad. And then of course, when the picture changes dramatically, people are kind of entitled to say, oh hang on, you told us this was something different and the narrative has changed. The story has changed because of that uncertainty with the numbers, shouldn't you have done more to tell us about that uncertainty. That message can sometimes get lost, can't it?     DS  Yeah, it's terribly important. You've got to be upfront. We develop these five points on trustworthy communication and the first one was inform, not persuade. And the second is to be balanced and not to have a one-sided message to tell both sides of the story, winners and losers, positives and negatives. And then to admit uncertainty, to just say what you don't know. And in particular, in this case, “provisionality”, the fact that things may change in the future, is incredibly important to emphasise, and I think not part of a lot of discussion. Politicians find it kind of impossible to say I think, that things are provisional and to talk about quality of the evidence and limitations in the evidence, which you know, if you're only basing GDP on a limited returns to start with, on the monthly figures, then you need to be clear about that. And the other one is to pre-empt the misunderstandings, and again, that means sort of getting in there first to tell you this point, this may change. This is a provisional judgement, and you know, I think that that could be emphasised yet more times, yet more.     MF  And yet there's a risk in that though, of course the message gets lost and diluted and the...    DS  Oh no, it always gets trotted out - oh, we can't admit uncertainty. We can't tell both sides of story. We have to tell a message that is simple because people are too stupid to understand it otherwise, it's so insulting to the audience. I really feel a lot of media people do not respect their audience. They treat them as children - oh we've got to keep it simple, we mustn't give the nuances or the complexity. All right, if you're going to be boring and just put long paragraphs of caveats on everything, no one is going to read that or take any notice of them. But there are ways to communicate balance and uncertainty and limitations without being dull. And that's what actually media people should focus on. Instead of saying, oh, we can't do that. You should be able to do it. Good media, good storytelling should be able to have that nuance in. You know, that's the skill.     MF  You're absolutely right, you can't disagree with any of that, and yet, in communicating with the public, even as a statistics producer, you are limited somewhat by the public's ability to get used to certain content. I mean, for example, the Met Office recently, a couple of years back, started putting in ‘percentage of chance of rainfall', which is something that it hadn't done before. And some work on that revealed just how few people actually understood what they were saying in that, and what the chances were actually going to be of it raining when they went out for the afternoon's work.     DS  Absolute nonsense. That sorry, that's completely I mean, I completely rely on those percentages. My 90-year-old father used to understand those percentages. Because it's a novelty if you are going to ask people what they understand, they might say something wrong, such as, oh, that's the percentage of the area that it's going to rain in or something like that. No, it's the percentage of times it makes that claim that it's right. And those percentages have been used in America for years, they're completely part of routine forecast and I wouldn't say the American public is enormously better educated than the British public. So this is just reluctance and conservatism. It's like saying oh well people don't understand graphs. We can't put up line graphs on the news, people don't understand that. This is contempt for the public. And it just shows I think, a reluctance to make an effort to explain things. And people get used to stuff, once they've learned what a graph looks like, when they see it again, then they'll understand it. So you need to educate the public and not, you know, in a patronising way, it's just that, you know, otherwise you're just being misleading. If you just say, oh, you know, it'll rain or not rain you're just misleading them. If you just say it might rain, that's misleading. What does that mean? It can mean different things. I want a percentage and people do understand them, when they've got some experience of them.     MF  And what about certainty in estimates? Here is a reaction we add to the migration figures that ONS published earlier in the summer. Somebody tweeted back to say, well estimates, that's all very good but I want the actual figures. I want to know how many people have migrated.    DS  Yeah, I think actually, it's quite a reasonable question. Because, you know, you kind of think well can't you count them, we actually know who comes in and out of the country. In that case it's really quite a reasonable question to ask. I want to know why you can't count them. And in fact, of course ONS is moving towards counting them. It's moving away from the survey towards using administrative data to count them. So I think in that case, that's quite a good question to ask. Now in other situations, it's a stupid question. If you want to know if someone says, oh, I don't want an estimate of how many people you know, go and vote one way or do something or other, I want to know how many, well then you think don't be daft. We can't go and ask everybody this all the time. So that's a stupid question. So the point is that in certain contexts, asking whether something is an estimate or not, is reasonable. Sometimes it's not and that can be explained, I think, quite reasonably to people.     MF  And yet, we will still want to be entertained. We also want to have numbers to confirm our own prejudices.     DS  Yeah, people will always do that. But that's not what the ONS is for, to confirm people's prejudices. People are hopeless at estimating. How many, you know, migrants there are, how many people, what size ethnic minorities and things, we know if you ask people these numbers, they're pretty bad at it. But people are bad at estimating all numbers. So no, it's ONS's job to try to explain things and in a vivid way that people will be interested in, particularly when there's an argument about a topic going on, to present the evidence, not one side or the other, but that each side can use, and that's why I really feel that the ONS's migration team, you know, I have a lot of respect for them, when they're changing their format or consulting on it, they go to organization's on both sides. They go to Migration Watch and the Migration Observatory and talk to them about you know, can they understand what's going on, is this data helping them in their deliberations.     MF  Now, you mentioned earlier in the conversation, education, do we have a younger generation coming up who are more stats literate or does an awful lot more need to be done?     DS  A lot more needs to be done in terms of data education in schools. I'm actually part of a group at the Royal Society that is proposing a whole new programme called mathematics and data education, for that to be put together within a single framework, because a lot of this isn't particularly maths, and maths is not the right way or place to teach it. But it still should be an essential part of education, understanding numbers, understanding data, their limitations and their strengths and it uses some numeracy, uses some math but it's not part of maths. The problem has always been where does that fit in the syllabus because it doesn't, particularly at the moment. So that's something that every country is struggling with. We're not unique in that and, and I think it's actually essential that that happens. And when you know, the Prime Minister, I think quite reasonably says people should study mathematics until 18. I mean, I hope he doesn't mean mathematics in the sense of the algebra and the geometry that kids do, get forced to do essentially, for GCSE, and some of whom absolutely loathe it. And so, but that's not really the sort of mathematics that everyone needs. Everyone needs data literacy. Everyone needs that.    MF  Lies, damned lies and statistics is an old cliche, it's still robustly wheeled out in the media every time, offering some perceived reason to doubt what the statisticians have said. I mean looking ahead, how optimistic are you, do you think that one day we might finally see the end of all that?     DS  Well my eyes always go to heaven, and I just say for goodness sake. So I like it when it's used, because I say, do you really believe that? You know, do you really believe that, because if you do you're just rejecting evidence out of hand. And this is utter stupidity. And nobody could live like that. And it emphasises this idea somehow, among the more non-data-literate, it encourages them to think that numbers they hear either have to be sort of accepted as God given truths or rejected out of hand. And this is a terrible state to be in, the point is we should interpret any number we hear, any claim based on data, same as we'd interpret any other claim made by anybody about anything. We've got to judge it on its merits at the time and that includes do we trust the source? Do I understand how this is being explained to me? What am I not being told? And so why is this person telling me this? So all of that comes into interpreting numbers as well. We hear this all the time on programmes like More or Less, and so on. So I like it as a phrase because it is so utterly stupid, then so utterly, easily demolished, that it encourages, you know, a healthy debate.    MF  We're certainly not talking about good statistics, we're certainly not talking about quality statistics, properly used. And that, of course, is the role of the statistics watchdog as we're obliged to call him, or certainly as the media always call him, and that's our other guest, Ed Humpherson.     Ed, having listened to what the professor had to say there, from your perspective, how much misuse of statistics is there out there? What does your organisation, your office, do to try and combat that?      ED HUMPHERSON     Well, Miles the first thing to say is I wish I could give you a really juicy point of disagreement with David to set off some kind of sparky dialogue. Unfortunately, almost everything, if not everything that David said, I completely agree with - he said it more fluently and more directly than I would, but I think we are two fellow travellers on all of these issues.      In terms of the way we look at things at the Office for Statistics Regulation that I head up, we are a statistics watchdog. That's how we are reported. Most of our work is, so to speak, below the visible waterline: we do lots and lots of work assessing reviewing the production of statistics across the UK public sector. We require organisations like the ONS, but also many other government departments, to be demonstrating their trustworthiness; to explain their quality; and to deliver value. And a lot of that work just goes on, week in week out, year in year out to support and drive-up evidence base that's available to the British public. I think what you're referring to is that if we care about the value and the worth of statistics in public life, we can't just sort of sit behind the scenes and make sure there's a steady flow. We actually have to step up and defend statistics when they are being misused because it's very toxic, I think, to the public. Their confidence in statistics if they're subjected to rampant misuse or mis explanation of statistics, it's all very well having good statistics but if they go out into the world and they get garbled or misquoted, that I think is very destructive. So what we do is we either have members of the public raise cases with us when they see something and they're not they're not sure about it, or indeed we spot things ourselves and we will get in contact with the relevant department and want to understand why this thing has been said, whether it really is consistent with the underlying evidence, often it isn't, and then we make an intervention to correct the situation. And we are busy, right, there's a lot there's a lot of there's a lot of demand for work.     MF  Are instances of statistical misuse on the rise?     EH  We recently published our annual summary of what we call casework - that's handling the individual situations where people are concerned. And we revealed in that that we had our highest ever number of cases, 372, which might imply that, you know, things are getting worse. I'd really strongly caution against that interpretation. I think what that increase is telling you is two other things. One is, as we as the Office for Statistics Regulation, do our work, we are gradually growing our profile and more people are aware that they can come to us, that's the first thing this is telling you; and the second thing is that people care a lot more about statistics and data now, exactly as Sir David was saying that this raised profile during the pandemic. I don't think it's a sign that there's more misuse per se. I do think perhaps, the thing I would be willing to accept is, there's just a generally greater tendency for communication to be datafied. In other words, for communication to want to use data: it sounds authoritative, it sounds convincing. And I think that may be driving more instances of people saying well, a number has been used there, I want to really understand what that number is. So I would be slightly cautious about saying there is more misuse, but I would be confident in saying there's probably a greater desire to use data and therefore a greater awareness both of the opportunity to complain to us and of its importance.      MF  Underlying all of your work is compliance with the UK code of practice for statistics, a very important document, and one that we haven't actually mentioned in this podcast so far…      EH  Shame on you, Miles, shame on you.      MF  We're here to put that right, immediately. Tell us about what the code of practice is. What is it for? what does it do?      EH  So the Code of Practice is a statutory code and its purpose is to ensure that statistics serve the public good. And it does that through a very simple structure. It says that in any situation where an individual or an organisation is providing information to an audience, there are three things going on. There's the trustworthiness of the speaker, and the Code sets out lots of requirements on organisations as to how they can demonstrate they're trustworthiness. And it's exactly in line with what David was saying earlier and exactly in line with the thinking of Onora O'Neill – a set of commitments which demonstrate trustworthiness. Like a really simple commitment is to say, we will pre-announce at least four weeks in advance when the statistics are going to be released, and we will release them at the time that we say, so there is no risk that there's any political interference in when the news comes out. It comes out at the time that has been pre-announced. Very clear commitment, very tangible, evidence-based thing. It's a binary thing, right? You either do that or you do not. And if you do not: You're not being trustworthy. The second thing in any situation where people are exchanging information is the information itself. What's its quality? Where's this data from? How's it been compiled? What are its strengths and limitations? And the code has requirements on all of those areas. That is clarity of what the numbers are, what they mean, what they don't mean. And then thirdly, in that exchange of information, is the information of any use to the audience? It could be high, high quality, it could be very trustworthy, but it could, to use David's excellent phrase, it could just be “dull”. It could be irrelevant, it could not be important. And the value pillar is all about that. It's all about the user having relevant, insightful information on a question that they care about. That's, Miles, what the Code of Practice is: it's trustworthiness, it's quality and it's value. And those things we think are kind of pretty universal actually, which is why they don't just apply now to official statistics. We take them out and we apply them to all sorts of situations where Ministers and Departments are using numbers, we always want to ask those three questions. Is it trustworthy? Is it quality, is it value? That's the Code.      MF  And when they've satisfied your stringent requirements and been certified as good quality, there is of course a badge to tell the users that they have been.      EH  There's a badge - the badge means that we have accredited them as complying with that Code of Practice. It's called the National Statistics badge. The term is less important and what it means what it means is we have independently assessed that they comply in full with that Code.      MF  Most people would have heard, if they have heard of the OSR's work, they'll have seen it perhaps in the media. They'll have seen you as the so-called data watchdog, the statistics watchdog. It's never gently explained as it it's usually ‘slammed', ‘criticised', despite the extremely measured and calm language you use, but you're seen as being the body that takes politicians to task. Is that really what you do? It seems more often that you're sort of gently helping people to be right.      EH  That's exactly right. I mean, it's not unhelpful, frankly, that there's a degree of respect for the role and that when we do make statements, they are taken seriously and they're seen as significant, but we are not, absolutely not, trying to generate those headlines. We are absolutely not trying to intimidate or scare or, you know, browbeat people. Our role is very simple. Something has been said, which is not consistent with the underlying evidence. We want to make that clear publicly. And a lot of time what our intervention does actually is it strengthens the hand of the analysts in government departments so that their advice is taken more seriously at the point when things are being communicated. Now, as I say, it's not unwelcome sometimes that our interventions do get reported on. But I always try and make these interventions in a very constructive and measured way. Because the goal is not column inches. Absolutely not. The goal is the change in the information that's available to the public.      MF  You're in the business of correcting the record and not giving people a public shaming.      EH  Exactly, exactly. And even correcting the record actually, there's some quite interesting stuff about whether parliamentarians correct the record. And in some ways, it'd be great if parliamentarians corrected the record when they have been shown to have misstated with statistics. But actually, you could end up in a world where people correct the record and in a sort of tokenistic way, it's sort of, you know, buried in the depths of the Hansard parliamentary report. What we want is for people not to be misled, for people to not think that, for example, the number of people in employment is different from what it actually is. So actually, it's the outcome that really matters most; not so much the correction as are people left understanding what the numbers actually say.      MF  Surveys show - I should be careful using that phrase, you know - nonetheless, but including the UKSA survey, show that the public were much less inclined to trust in the words of the survey. Politicians use of statistics and indeed, Chris Bryant the Labour MP said that politicians who have been who've been found to have erred statistically should be forced to apologise to Parliament. Did you take that on board? Is there much in that?     EH  When he said that, he was actually directly quoting instances we've been involved with and he talks about our role very directly in that sense. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We support that. It will be really, really good. I think the point about the correction, Miles, is that it shows it's a manifestation of a culture that takes fidelity to the evidence, truthfulness to the evidence, faithfulness to the evidence, it takes that seriously, as I say, what I don't want to get into is a world where you know, corrections are sort of tokenistic and buried. I think the key thing is that it's part of an environment in which all actors in public debate realise it's in everybody's interests or evidence; data and statistics to be used fairly and appropriately and part of that is that if they've misspoken, they correct the record. From our experience, by and large, when we deal with these issues, the politicians concerned want to get it right. What they want to do is, they want to communicate their policy vision, their idea of the policy or what the, you know, the state of the country is. They want to communicate that, sure, that's their job as politicians, but they don't want to do so in a way that is demonstrably not consistent with the underlying evidence. And in almost all cases, they are… I wouldn't say they're grateful, but they're respectful of the need to get it right and respect the intervention. And very often the things that we encounter are a result of more of a cockup than a conspiracy really - something wasn't signed off by the right person in the right place and a particular number gets blown out of proportion, it gets ripped from its context, it becomes sort of weaponized; it's not really as a deliberate attempt to mislead. Now, there are probably some exceptions to that generally positive picture I'm giving. but overall it's not really in their interests for the story to be about how they misuse the numbers. That's not really a very good look for them. They'd much rather the stories be about what they're trying to persuade the public of, and staying on the right side of all of the principles we set out helps that to happen.      MF  Your remit runs across the relatively controlled world sort of government, Parliament and so forth. And I think the UK is quite unusual in having a body that does this in an independent sort of way. Do you think the public expects you to be active in other areas, we mentioned earlier, you know, the wilder shores of social media where it's not cockup theories you're going to be hearing there, it's conspiracy theories based on misuse of data. Is there any role that a statistics regulator could possibly take on in that arena?      EH  Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier that the way we often get triggered into this environment is when members of the public raised things with us. And I always think that's quite a solemn sort of responsibility. You know, you have a member of the public who's concerned about something and they care about it enough to contact us - use the “raise a concern” part of our website - so I always try and take it seriously. And sometimes they're complaining about something which isn't actually an official statistic. And in those circumstances, even if we say to them, “well, this isn't really an official statistic”, we will say, “but, applying our principles, this would be our judgement”. Because I think we owe it to those people who who've taken the time to care about a statistical usage, we owe it to take them seriously. And we have stepped in. Only recently we're looking at some claims about the impact of gambling, which are not from a government department, but from parts of the gambling industry. We also look at things from local government, who are not part of central government. So we do we do look at those things, Miles. It's a relatively small part of our work, but, as I say, our principles are universal and you've got to take seriously a situation in which a member of the public is concerned about a piece of evidence.     MF  Professor Spiegelhalter, what do you make of this regulatory function that the OSR pursues, are we unusual in the UK in having something along those lines?     DS  Ed probably knows better than I do, but I haven't heard of anybody else and I get asked about it when I'm travelling and talking to other people. I have no conflict of interest. I'm Non-Executive Director for the UK Stats Authority, and I sit on the regulation committee that oversees the way it works. So of course, I'm a huge supporter of what they do. And as described, it's a subtle role because it's not to do with performing, you know, and making a big song and dance and going grabbing all that attention but working away just to try to improve the standard of stats in this country. I think we're incredibly fortunate to have such a body and in fact, we know things are never perfect and there's always room for improvement of course, but I think we're very lucky to have our statistical system.     MF  A final thought from you...we're at a moment in time now where people are anticipating the widespread implementation of AI, artificial intelligence, large language models and all that sort of thing. Threat or opportunity for statistics, or both?    DS  Oh, my goodness me, it is very difficult to predict. I use GPT a lot in my work, you know, both for sort of research and making inquiries about stuff and also to help me do codings I'm not very good at. I haven't yet explored GPT-4's capacity for doing automated data analysis, but I want to, and actually, I'd welcome it. if it's good, if you can put some data in and it does stuff - that's great. However, I would love to see what guardrails are being put into it, to prevent it doing stupid misleading things. I hope that that does become an issue in the future, that if AI is automatically interpreting data for example, that it's actually got some idea of what it's doing. And I don't see that that's impossible. I mean, there were already a lot of guardrails in about sexist statements, racist statements, violent statements and so on. There's all sorts of protection already in there. Well, can't we have protection against grossly misleading statistical analysis?     MF  A future over the statistics watchdog perhaps?    DF  Quite possibly.    EH  Miles, I never turn down suggestions for doing new work.   MF  So we've heard how statistics are regulated in the UK, and covered the role of the media in communicating data accurately, and now to give some insight into what that might all look like from a journalist's perspective, it's time to introduce our next guest, all the way from California, award-winning journalist and data editor at Google, Simon Rogers. Simon, welcome to Statistically Speaking. Now, before you took up the role at Google you were actually at the forefront of something of a data journalism movement here in the UK. Responsible for launching and editing The Guardian's data blog, looking at where we are now and how things have come on since that period, to what extent do you reckon journalists can offer some kind of solution to online misinterpretation of information?    Simon Rogers   At a time when misinformation is pretty rampant, then you need people there who can make sense of the world and help you make sense of the world through data and facts and things that are true, as opposed to things that we feel might be right. And it's kind of like there is a battle between the heart and the head out there in the world right now. And there are the things that people feel might be right, but are completely wrong. And where, I think, Data Journalists can be the solution to solving that. Now, having said that, there are people as we know who will never believe something, and it doesn't matter. There are people for whom it literally doesn't matter, you can do all the fact checks that you want, and I think that is a bit of a shock for people, this realisation that sometimes it's just not enough, but I think honestly, the fact that there are more Data Journalists now than before...There was an EJC survey, the European Journalism Centre did a survey earlier this year about the state of data journalism. There are way more data journalists now than there were the last time they did the survey. It's becoming much more...it's just a part of being a reporter now. You don't have to necessarily be identified as a separate data journalist to work with data. So we're definitely living in a world where there are more people doing this really important work, but the need, I would say it has never been greater.     MF  How do you think data journalists then tend to see their role? Is it simply a mission to explain, or do some of them see it as their role to actually prove some theories and vindicate a viewpoint, or is it a mixture, are there different types of data journalists?     SR  I would say there were as many types of data journalists as there are types of journalists. And that's the thing about the field, there's no standard form of data journalism, which is one of the things that I love about it. That your output at the end of the day can be anything, it can be a podcast or it can be an article or a number or something on social media. And because of the kind of variety, and the fact I think, that unlike almost any other role in the newsroom, there really isn't like a standard pattern to becoming a data journalist. As a result of that, I think what you get are very different kind of motivations among very different kinds of people. I mean, for me, personally, the thing that interested me when I started working in the field was the idea of understanding and explaining. That is my childhood, with Richard Scarry books and Dorling Kindersley. You know, like trying to understand the world a little bit better. I do think sometimes people have theories. Sometimes people come in from very sophisticated statistical backgrounds. I mean, my background certainly wasn't that and I would say a lot of the work, the stats and the way that we use data isn't necessarily that complicated. It's often things like, you know, is this thing bigger than that thing? Has this thing grown? You know, where in the world is this thing, the biggest and so on. But you can tell amazing stories that way. And I think this motivation to use a skill, but there are still those people who get inured by maths in the same way that I did when I was at school, you know, but I think the motivation to try and make it clear with people that definitely seems to me to be a kind of a common thread among most of the data journalists that I've met.    MF  Do you think that journalists therefore, people going into journalism, and mentioning no names, as an occupation...used to be seen as a bit less numerous, perhaps whose skills tended to be in the verbal domain. Do you think therefore these days you've got to have at least a feel for data and statistics to be able to be credible as a journalist?     SR  I think it is becoming a basic skill for lots of journalists who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves data journalists. We always said eventually it is just journalism. And the reason is because the amount of sources now that are out there, I don't think you can tell a full story unless you take account of those. COVID's a great example of that, you know, here's a story that data journalists, I think, performed incredibly well. Someone like John Burn-Murdoch on the Financial Times say, where they've got a mission to explain what's going on and make it clear to people at a time when nothing was clear, we didn't really know what was going on down the road, never mind globally. So I think that is becoming a really important part being a journalist. I mean, I remember one of my first big data stories at the Guardian was around the release of the coins database – a big spending database from the government - and we had it on the list as a “data story” and people would chuckle, snigger a little bit of the idea that there'll be a story on the front page of the paper about data, which they felt to be weird, and I don't think people would be snickering or chuckling now about that. It's just normal. So my feeling is that if you're a reporter now, not being afraid of data and understanding the tools that are there to help you, I think that's a basic part of the role and it's being reflected in the way that journalism schools are working. I teach here one semester a year at the San Francisco Campus of Medill. There's an introduction to data journalism course and we get people coming in there from all kinds of backgrounds. Often half the class are just, they put their hands up if they're worried about math or scared of data, but somehow at the end of the course they are all making visualisations and telling data stories, so you know, those concerns can always be overcome.     MF  I suppose it's not that radical a development really if you think back, particularly from where we're sitting in the ONS. Of course, many of the biggest news stories outside of COVID have been data driven. think only of inflation for example, the cost of living has been a big running story in this country, and internationally of course, over the last couple of years. Ultimately, that's a data driven story. People are relying on the statisticians to tell them what the rate of inflation is, confirming of course what they're seeing every day in the shops and when they're spending money.     SR  Yeah, no, I agree. Absolutely. And half of the stories that are probably about data, people don't realise they're writing about data. However, I think there is a tendency, or there has been in the past, a tendency to just believe all data without questioning it, in the way that as a reporter, you would question a human source and make sure you understood what they were saying. If we gave one thing and that thing is that reporters would then come back to you guys and say ask an informed question about this data and dive into a little bit more, then I think we've gained a lot.     MF  So this is perhaps what good data journalists are bringing to the table, perhaps and ability to actually sort out the good data from the bad data, and actually, to use it appropriately to understand uncertainty and understand how the number on the page might not be providing the full picture.    SR   Absolutely. I think it's that combination of traditional journalistic skills and data that to me always make the strongest storytelling. When you see somebody, you know, who knows a story inside out like a health correspondent, who knows everything there is to know about health policy, and then they're telling a human story perhaps about somebody in that condition, and then they've got data to back it up - it's like the near and the far. This idea of the near view and the far view, and journalism being the thing that brings those two together. So there's the view from 30,000 feet that the data gives you and then the individual view that the more kind of qualitative interview that you get with somebody who is in a situation gives you. The two things together - that's incredibly powerful.    MF  And when choosing the data you use for a story I guess it's about making sound judgements – you know, basic questions like “is this a big number?”, “is this an important number?”     SR  Yeah, a billion pounds sounds like a lot of money, but they need to know how much is a billion pounds, is it more about a rounding error for the government.    MF  Yes, and you still see as well, outside of data journalism I stress, you still see news organisations making much of percentage increases or what looks like a significant increase in something that's pretty rare to start with.     SR  Yeah, it's all relative. Understanding what something means relatively, without having to give them a math lesson, I think is important.     MF  So this talk about supply, the availability of data journalism, where do people go to find good data journalism, perhaps without having to subscribe? You know, some of the publications that do it best are after all behind paywalls, where do we find the good stuff that's freely available?    SR  If I was looking from scratch for the best data journalism, I think there are lots of places you can find it without having to subscribe to every service. Obviously, you have now the traditional big organisations like the Guardian, and New York Times, and De Spiegel in Germany, there is a tonne of data journalism now happening in other countries around the world that I work on supporting the Sigma Data Journalism Awards. And over half of those entries come from small one or two people units, you know, practising their data journalism in countries in the world where it's a lot more difficult than it is to do it in the UK. For example, Texty in Ukraine, which is a Ukrainian data journalism site, really, and they're in the middle of a war zone right now and they're producing data journalism. In fact, Anatoly Barranco, their data editor, is literally in the army and on the frontline, but he's also producing data journalism and they produce incredible visualisations. They've used AI in interesting ways to analyse propaganda and social media posts and stuff. And the stuff happening everywhere is not just limited to those big partners behind paywalls. And what you do find also, often around big stories like what's happened with COVID, people will put their work outside of the paywall. But um, yeah, data is like an attraction. I think visualisation is an attraction for readers. I'm not surprised people try and monetize that, but there is enough going on out there in the world.    MF  And all that acknowledged, could the producers of statistics like the ONS, and system bodies around the world, could we be doing more to make sure that people using this data in this way have it in forms have it available to be interpreted? Is there more than we can do?     SR  I mean, there was the JC survey that I mentioned earlier, it's definitely worth checking out because one thing it shows is that 57% of data journalists say that getting access to data is still their biggest challenge. And then followed by kind of like lack of resources, time pressure, things like that. PDFs are still an issue out there in the world. There's two things to this for me, on one side it's like, how do I use the data, help me understand what I'm looking at. On the other side is that access, so you know, having more kind of API's and easy downloads, things that are not formatted to look pretty but formatted for use. Those kinds of things are still really important. I would say the ONS has made tremendous strides, certainly since I was working in the UK, on accessibility to data and that's a notable way, and I've seen the same thing with gov.us here in the States.    MF  Well it's good to hear the way the ONS has been moving in the right direction. Certainly I think we've been tough on PDFs.   SR Yes and to me it's noticeable. It's noticeable and you've obviously made a deliberate decision to do that, which is great. That makes the data more useful, right, and makes it more and more helpful for people.     MF  Yes, and at the other end of the chain, what about storing publishers and web platforms, particularly well you're at Google currently, but generally, what can these big platforms do to promote good data journalism and combat misinformation? I mean, big question there.    SR  Obviously, I work with Google Trends data, which is probably the world's biggest publicly available data set. I think a big company like Google has a responsibility to make this data public, and the fact that it is, you can download reusable datasets, is incredibly powerful. I'm very proud to work on that. I think that all companies have a responsibility to be transparent, especially when you have a unique data set. That didn't exist 20 years earlier, and it's there now and it can tell you something about how the world works. I mean, for instance, when we look at something like I mean, I've mentioned COVID before, but it's such a big event in our recent history. How people were searching around COVID is incredibly fascinating and it was important information to get out there. Especially at a time when the official data is always going to be behind what's actually happening out there. And is there a way you can use that data to predict stuff, predict where cases are going to come up... We work with this data every day and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible with it.    MF   And when it comes to combating misinformation we stand, so we're told, on the threshold of another revolution from artificial intelligence, large language models, and so forth. How do you see that future? Is AI friend, foe, or both?     SR  I work for a company that is a significant player in the AI area, so I give you that background. But I think in the field of data, we've seen a lot of data users use AI to really help produce incredible work, where instead of having to read through a million documents, they can get the system to do it for them and pull out stories. Yeah, like any other tool, it can be anything but the potential to help journalists do their jobs better, and for good, I think is pretty high. I'm going to be optimistic and hope that that's the way things go.    MF  Looking optimistically to the future then, thank you very much Simon for joining us. And thanks also to my other guests, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Ed Humpherson. Taking their advice on board then, when we hear or read about data through the news or experience it on social media, perhaps we should first always ask ourselves – do we trust the source? Good advice indeed.     You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also get more information, or ask us a question, by following the @ONSFocus on X, or Twitter, take your pick. I'm Miles Fletcher, from myself and our producer Steve Milne, thanks for listening.   ENDS 

Esta edição foi publicada originalmente em 15 de abril 2015. Se você não ouviu esta edição em 2015, esta é a sua chance de conhecer o  o Adult Net, um projeto paralelo de alguns integrantes do The Fall (Brix Smith, Simon Rogers, Craigh Scanlon e Karl Burns) com outros músicos famosos, como o Craig Gannon, o Andy Rourke e o Mike Joyce, dos Smiths, o Clem Burke (do Blondie) e o James Eller do The The. De resto, não repare nos famosos. Era uma outra fase do 80 WATTS. Mês que vem eu volto com outro relançamento dentro do projeto Sobe de Novo Shi , que visa disponibilizar todas as edições anteriores do podcast que estavam em outro servidor.  Boa (re)audição e até a próxima. SHI Tracklist The Necessaries - Driving And Talking At The Same Time Swimming Pool Q's - The A-Bomb Woke Me Up Love Tractor - J.E.B. Pharoahs Devo - Gates of Steel Rational Youth - Saturdays in Silesia Experimental Products - S.O.S Minny Pops - A Feeling Style Council – My Ever Changing Moods Aztec Camera - Jump Adult Net - Honey Tangle The Motorcycle Boy - Room at the Top Garotos da Rua - Gurizada Medonha 80 WATTS outro theme by Fernando Werneck         Muito obrigado aos produtores virtuais que acreditam e apoiam esta iniciativa: Fabiano F. M. Cordeiro (Fab 97,4 FM) Ricardo Bunnyman (AutoRadio Podcast) Marcos Coluci Marcelo Machado (Podcast de Garagem) Danilo de Almeida (Doublecast, Já Ouviu Esse Disco) William Floyd (Fermata podcast) Seja também um apoiador do 80 WATTS em uma das plataformas abaixo.      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Background vector created by freepik - www.freepik.com  

Nonprofits are the glue to making the world a better place. Often they focus on issues like sustainability, health and wellness, and activism. But they need key resources to stay afloat. Enter, the Unless Project.It aims to help four local nonprofit organizations implement modern digital marketing strategies. Simon Rogers is the founder and CEO of A Little Better Company that's piloting the program. He talks about how to apply, what the program will look like and the importance of innovative marketing. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A welcomed return to one of our favourite guests... As we discuss most things about self... Self-awareness, humility, internal experiences and enjoying being you... To find out more about today's guest and more on the topics discussed, you can do so by using the links below; Website: https://www.enjoybeingyou.co.uk/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonrogers-unboxingyourpotential/

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Matt KersnerPeter Murphy “Cuts you Up" from the 1990 album "Deep" released on Beggars Banquet. Written by Peter Murphy and Paul Statham and produced by Simon Rogers.Personel:Peter Murphy - vocals, samplesThe Hundred MenTerl Bryant - drums, percussionEddie Branch - bassPaul Statham - guitar, keyboardsPeter Bonas - guitarCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Matt KersnerPeter Murphy “Cuts you Up" from the 1990 album "Deep" released on Beggars Banquet. Written by Peter Murphy and Paul Statham and produced by Simon Rogers.Personel:Peter Murphy - vocals, samplesThe Hundred MenTerl Bryant - drums, percussionEddie Branch - bassPaul Statham - guitar, keyboardsPeter Bonas - guitarCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Kate BushMissy ElliotGeorge MichaelSheryl CrowRage Against the MachineThe SpinnersWillie NelsonAl KooperChaka KhanLink WrayDJ Kool HercBernie TaupinDon CorneliusElton JohnKris Kristoferson “Help Me Make It Through the Night”Norah JonesWoody HarrelsonHelen MirrenChelsea HandlerKeith RichardsThe Avett BrothersBeckDave MatthewsFor the Kings “Turn It Off”Neil Young “Heart of Gold”AerosmithU2MetallicaGuns n Roses “Paradise City”REMDavid BowieAlice in ChainsPearl Jam “Evenflow”Blind MelonINXS “Never Tear Us Apart”Karate Kid 2The CureModern English“I Melt With You”Simple Minds “Don't You (Forget About Me)”The BeatlesPink FloydThe Rolling StonesBauhausThe FallThe Lightning SeedsLynyrd Skynyrd “Tuesday's Gone”NirvanaSlashDidoKylie MinogueKim Carnes “Bette Davis Eyes”SoundgardenCreedStaindPuddle of MuddThe NationalMatt BerningerTwin ShadowsSoft CellFilter “Take My Picture”Crash Test Dummies ‘Hmm Hmm Hmm Hmm”BrainhaloNeon CovenEndless Winter

Ever wondered what you full potential is... Have you given thought on how you could tap into this... Or even how you can realise your true and fullest potential... Simon Rogers is here to guide you through this...

In our latest episode, we spoke about the importance of archiving data journalism. Bahareh Heravi from The University of Surrey and Simon Rogers from Google discuss the challenges and the solutions to address this growing problem of lost content.

As we grapple with increasing living costs, do you know our homes lose around 10% heat through windows? I chat with Simon Rogers, Director, Sussex County Windows about how homeowners and Landlords can improve the thermal efficiency of homes and property. Simon also reveals how double and triple glazing has improved since the early days. Heather Hilder-Darling October 2022

Google Data Editor, Simon Rogers, examines what Beatles fans across the globe are searching for. The latest trends, the most searched songs and albums, the most-asked questions - and much more.

Data Journalism is a hot topic in the news business. Reporters working in diverse media and diverse markets are increasingly being asked to work with data. What exactly makes for good data journalism and what does a reporter need to understand to use data well. Those are a few of the questions discussed on The Data Journalism Podcast and that is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers. Alberto Cairo is a journalist and designer, and the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He is also the director of the visualization program at UM's Center for Computational Science. He has been head of information graphics at media publications in Spain and Brazil. He is the author of several books including his upcoming, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information, Cairo currently consults with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office, and has provided visualization training to the European Union, Eurostat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Army National Guard, and many others. Simon Rogers is an award-winning data journalist, writer and speaker. Author of ‘Facts are Sacred‘, published by Faber & Faber in the UK, China and South Korea. He has also written a range of infographics for children books from Candlewick. Data editor on the News Lab team at Google, based in San Francisco, he is director of the Data Journalism Awards and teaches Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco and has taught at U Cal Berkeley Journalism school.

Get my FREE report on “First Gear Fallen Flags” here: http://bit.ly/Fallen-Flags BUY Diecast Promotions trucks at http://www.farmtoysandmore.com Shop online here: https://www.advantagediecast.com Connect with me on social media! Facebook: http://bit.ly/FBP-ADC Instagram: http://bit.ly/IG-ADC Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/FBG-64th-Gear-Jammers YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/Toy-Talk-on-YouTube YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/haLfhue12Dw Send me your letters, snacks, or other things to: Toy Talk with Logan Skeele P.O. Box 508 Georgetown, KY 40324 Boom! What's going on everyone I'm Logan the 64th Gear Jammer Skeele Opening the warehouse doors on another episode of Toy Talk. Vintage trucks are the latest craze in the 64th scale truck market. Models of trucks from the 50s through the 90s are the rage and DCP by First Gear has released many of them in their fallen flags series. Grab a copy of the entire fallen flags series with the link in the description below. Also be sure to subscribe as I really appreciate each and every one of my YouTube family. To go along with the DCP by First Gear Fallen Flags series, Tuff Trucks of Australia, that's Simon Rogers's company has produced several runs by DCP of vintage Australia company trucks. The latest release is a Kenworth for TNT Express Refrigerated Services. While TNT is still operating, the old divisions have been either consolidated or sold off today, but back in the 70s and 80s TNT operated multiple divisions. One of which was TNT Express Refrigerated Services… #KenworthK100 #TNTExpressRefrigeratedServices #TNTExpress #ExpressRefrigeratedServices #AustralianTruck #AustralianKenworth #COE #CabOverEngine #TuffTrucks #SimonRogers #TuffTrucksScaleModels #Dcpbyfirstgear #dcp #diecastpromotions #firstgear #diecast #ProductReview #64thScale #64thscaletruck #AdvantageDiecast #LoganSkeele #ToyTalk --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/logan-skeele/message

No swim warnings are closer to becoming a thing of the past for Aucklanders - as a $1 billion WaterCare project moves to the next step. With construction on the Central Interceptor now well underway - our reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers went behind the scenes

Sharing the load could come with a healthy boost to the economy. A Westpac / Deloitte survey has found just seven percent of heterosexual couples, who both work full time, share the domestic chores at home. It suggests a change to that dynamic could mean women do more paid work - something that could help close the pay gap. Our reporter Louise Ternouth and cameraman Simon Rogers hit the streets to find out who's doing what, at home.

The 'no paywave' sign may soon become a thing of the past - as new legislation to regulate transaction charges is announced. Caps will be set on the amount banks can charge retailers for credit and debit payments. Lowering these fees is expected to save businesses $74 million a year - with the hopes the savings will be passed on to consumers. Video journalist Simon Rogers and reporter Amy Williams filed this report.

New: welcome to The Data Journalism Podcast, the first podcast devoted to doing journalism with numbers. Hosts Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers will explore the latest in data journalism. You will meet the world's top data journalists - and you will find out how they do what they do. Subscribe to see how data is changing the world of journalism forever.

A Sydney GP says Australian vaccination clinics have faced transparency and supply issues in their bid to help protect the country against Covid-19. The Commonwealth-funded, GP-led vaccination clinics are part of Australia's vaccine rollout. So far, more than 1.6 million doses of the vaccine have been delivered across Australia. That's a far cry from that government's initial target of vaccinating four million people by the end of March. As New Zealand's Ministry of Health works through the details of how GP clinics will be used in our own vaccine rollout, reporter Tess Brunton and videographer Simon Rogers visited a GP-led vaccination clinic in Sydney to find out how it's working there.

Sydney tourism operators are over the moon to be welcoming back New Zealanders taking advantage of the quarantine-free travel arrangement. Our tourism reporter Tess Brunton and videographer Simon Rogers are in Sydney and filed this report.

Excitement, relief and joy - that's how passengers described the feeling of boarding the first trans Tasman flight out of Auckland to Sydney under the new quarantine free bubble. While the flight wasn't packed, those onboard were buzzing as they neared Australian shores. Tourism reporter Tess Brunton and videographer Simon Rogers spoke to passengers before they boarded the flight and then hopped onboard themselves.

RNZ tourism reporter Tess Brunton and videographer Simon Rogers were on board one of the first flights from New Zealand to Australia under the new trans-Tasman travel bubble today. Tess joins Lisa Owen from Sydney to describe the significant day.  

A new Covid-19 vaccination clinic in Ōtara could be vaccinating five times the number of people booked in. South Seas vaccination clinic been open two days and is working through people in group 1 and 2 due to get their jab. But as Checkpoint reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers found out, the clinic isn't operating at full capacity. 

Auckland's Cornwall Park is facing criticism for a plan to export live cattle overseas. The park's facing public backlash after announcing some cows currently grazing in its fields will be shipped to Mongolia. The government has reviewing the live exports, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says she has significant concerns about the practice. Meanwhile, an Auckland councillor says she'll be seeking a please explain from the trust overseeing Cornwall Park. Our reporter Nick Truebridge and cameraman Simon Rogers have this report.

The country's first hydrogen-fuelled bus has been unveiled today as Auckland Transport moves towards an emission-free fleet by 2040. The $1.1 million bus will run from Botany to Britomart for a trial, running over the next two years. Reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers went to check it out.

Despite closed borders and far less international travel, illegal items made from protected animals and plants are still making it into the country in suitcases and mailed packages. Alligator handbags, Chinese Covid-19 traditional medicines along with items like canned whale-meat continue to slip through our border cracks. Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers went for a look.

It was sold as a blue sky opportunity, but businesses at Auckland's Commercial Bay say they're floundering. The $1 billion development with more than 120 shops opened just as Covid-19 restrictions first eased last year. But stores say they're struggling without international tourists and fear for the worst as the America's Cup dies down. Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers went to find out how the downtown Auckland mall is faring.

Auckland's been given the green light and has joined the rest of the country at alert level one today. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the decision late on Friday morning - it was met with delight from businesses around the city - some of whom then had to scurry into action. Reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers hit the streets as level one came into force.

Some people in south Auckland will be prioritised for the vaccine, but not everyone. Papatoetoe was the centre of the latest outbreak, so Checkpoint reporter Ella Stewart and cameraman Simon Rogers headed there to gauge reaction to the rollout plan. They found some supported Countdown's view over prioritising their public facing staff.

So as the Black Caps seek priority for their players, we went searching for a citizens' 2nd XI. That is, 11 people who would happily let the team leapfrog them in the Covid-19 queue. We sent reporter Nick Truebridge and cameraman Simon Rogers to see if they could find a team. [embed] https://players.brightcove.net/6093072280001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6238113662001

On the other side of the city.. businesses were making the now familiar snap back into lockdown operations. Bars, restaurants and shops have been forced to reverting back to level 3 operations - or close their doors. And as Checkpoint reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers discovered another change in alert levels has been met with huge frustration.

Hundreds of Auckland workers are being forced to stay home after being identified as casual plus contacts of a Kmart worker who tested positive for Covid-19. The good news is there are no new community cases today, but there have been queues of people making the familiar pilgrimage to testing centres across the city. That's because the three new cases yesterday - all linked to Papatoetoe High School - come with new locations of interest. Everyone at the school is being retested, as well as staff and shoppers at a Kmart and a vape shop. Reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers have this report.

The Covid-19 rollercoaster continues in Auckland after a new community case of Covid-19 was identified this morning. The Ministry of Health says the 'casual plus' contact, also a student at Papatoetoe High School, tested positive yesterday 13 days after the original index case was last at school on February 10. And that means all 1500 students plus teachers and some household contacts will all need to be tested again. This from our reporter Ella Stewart and camera operator Simon Rogers.

Auckland businesses are fearing the worst, just one day into Auckland's third lockdown. Bars, restaurants and shops were forced to shut up shop at 11.59 on Sunday night, reverting once again to social distancing, click and collect and takeaways. And as Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers discovered, some business owners fear this lockdown will be their last.

Auckland Zoo's orangutans have a new playground that allows them to move around at great heights.  The high canopy habitat was officially opened today as part of the Zoo's ongoing South East Asia Jungle Track development.  Three lucky orangutans were the first to test it out.  Checkpoint reporter Louise Ternouth and cameraman Simon Rogers filed this report.

The City Rail Link project's latest worker has arrived in Auckland: a multi-million dollar boring machine that can gnaw through 32 metres of ground every day. Named after Māori rights champion Dame Whina Cooper, the towering tunnel-maker was unveiled in Mt Eden this morning. Our reporter Katie Todd and visual journalist Simon Rogers were there.

The last two elephants in New Zealand are being moved overseas, after multiple attempts to expand the herd failed. Auckland Zoo's female Asian Elephants, Anjalee and Burma, will be transported by plane to join a new family herd at a yet to be determined location. Checkpoint reporter Nick Truebridge and cameraman Simon Rogers dropped into the Auckland Zoo this afternoon. Nick started by asking Zoo director Kevin Buley what challenges staff faced in trying to breed a family of elephants.

A South Auckland councillor is calling for more youth workers in the area after a series of shootings during the weekend. There were six gang-related incidents in Otara on Friday and Saturday - five of which involved gunshots. No one was injured, but police officers were temporarily armed until this morning as they waited for the dust to settle. Reporter Jean Bell and visual journalist, Simon Rogers, went out to Otara today and filed this report.

"We have a responsibility to find ourselves. Only you can explore who you are and what fulfils you."  - Simon RIn this episode of Eternal Paradigm, I am joined by Simon Rogers who has dedicated his energies to understanding the human body and mind. He has turned his fascination into a successful wellness coaching and osteopathic treatment practice that is committed to helping people feel well and live better. Since releasing episode 1 where I share a snap shot of my mental health journey, I have been contacted by so many people who really connect with the experiences and emotions that I describe. As a result of this, I wanted to share some steps that I have taken in my journey and Simon has been a significant part of that process. This episode reflects slightly on my journey and touches on some of the tools that Simon uses with his clients. There are changes that we can all make when we decide to move into the unknown, Simon also highlights how the healthcare system is not designed to help us to experience a holistic approach in connecting with ourselves and solving physical problems.  Ultimately this episode explores how the approach that Simon works on with his clients is just one option that can change the way we live as individuals and as a society. Cheekily this episode is also a chance for me to ask Simon some questions that I wouldn't usually ask him. Guest: Simon Rogers Host and Interviewer: Urmi Raval Sound Editor: Maja Pronko Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/eternalparadigm)

A fleet of electric buses have been rolled out on Waiheke Island, making it the first suburb in Auckland to go electric. The new buses will reduce carbon emissions by over 500 tonnes a year. That's equivalent to the amount of electricity used to power 718 homes. Six new buses were unveiled today, with two more on the way next month. Reporter Louise Ternouth and camera operator Simon Rogers filed this report.

Former Auckland Blues player Matt Johnson had his career cut drastically short after he nearly died from the complications of rheumatic fever. Now he's fighting to stop others from getting disease that usually starts in childhood but can lead to heart damage and devastating life long consequences. He's working with the heatlh charity Cure Kids as it put a big chunk of funding into fighting the disease. Health correspondent Rowan Quinn and videographer Simon Rogers filed this report.

Auckland is nearly one week into its shift down to level one but central city businesses say they are still hurting. Checkpoint has spoken to a number of businesses calling for their fellow CBD workers to return to the office to help central Auckland's economy. Those calls have been repeated by Heart of the City, which says spending in the central city is down $100 million on this time last year. Checkpoint reporter Nick Truebridge and camera operator Simon Rogers filed this report.

Auckland's suburban shopping strips appear to be getting a welcome boost from locals working from home. However, spending data shows the pandemic's business armageddon is far from even with a 40 percent drop in the central city compared with 15 percent across the region. At least one urban design expert thinks people gravitating to stay local could be an opportunity to create a suburban utopia. Video journalist Simon Rogers and Amy Williams filed this report.

The people that first raised the alarm - and the firefighters that raced to their rescue - have opened up about how the Lake Ōhau fire took hold. About 40 houses in the small community were destroyed or badly damaged - with some residents allowed through fire cordons to collect belongings today. The fire comes a month after a blaze at nearby Lake Pukaki - and firefighters say the region's not of the woods yet, as fire season gets away. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Tess Brunton are in Twizel.

An Auckland school which is bursting at the seams has had to transform its board room, staff room, prinicpal's office and now corridoors into classooms to make space for its skyrocketing roll. Ormiston Primary School - in the city's southeast - is only five years old and is right in the heart of one of the fastest growth areas in Auckland. In fact, it's growing so fast that by the end of the year they expect to have 1000 students in a school made for just over 700. Pleas to the Minitry for Education for more classrooms have been largely unsucessful - and staff say things are getting desperate. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen filed this report.

It's just under one hectare in size, captures the sun to produce electricity and floats on water. New Zealand's largest and only floating solar array has officially opened in Auckland's Northshore Rosedale Waste Water treatment plant. It will save $4.5 million in power a year as it is sourced from the sun, and reduce carbon emissions by 145 tonnes a year. Checkpoint reporter Louise Ternouth and cameraman Simon Rogers were there for its opening.

With their vision "Create a new connected age of people, things, and information with efficient, compact and precision technologies", Epson is truly the pioneer brand in regards to Audio Visual technology. Join Pete Tecman Coman and Mark The Bearded Tech Skehan as they dive deeper into what Epson offers us in the coming years! In this episode, we have the General Manager of Sales at Epson Australia Simon Rogers! Tune-In now!

During the pandemic we've been more hungry for information than ever before. So how different are the questions you're asking to the rest of the country? Are your google searches weirder than everyone else's? Are you responding differently to this moment than most people? What is the most googled question in this pandemic?   On today's episode we take a look at the most googled search terms over the last six months, and find out what they say about us. We've gone straight to Google and asked what are the top ten questions of the last six months in Australia? Google's Data editor Simon Rogers counts them down with us.   In today's headlines: Victoria's roadmap revealed: Melbourne to be in the world's longest lockdown Free Covid-19 vaccines available from next year if trials prove successful More than half of mortgage-holders still deferring payments as deadline looms   Follow The Briefing Instagram: @thebriefingpodcast  Facebook: TheBriefingNewsAU Twitter: @TheBriefingAU  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealanders will sit tight at the current Alert Level settings for at least another 12 days. It means still no gatherings of more than 10 people in Auckland, at level 2.5, and no more than 100 for the rest of the country, at level two. Video journalist Simon Rogers and reporter Katie Todd went for a stroll in central Auckland to find out who supports the decision and who isn't so thrilled.

Some beneficiaries are about to lose more than $60 from their weekly pay, despite demand for food banks and emergency assistance being at record levels. The government doubled the Winter Energy Payment this year to soften Covid-19's economic hit - but it will run out on October 1. Beneficiaries and welfare advocates say the costs and stresses of Covid-19 aren't going anywhere in just a month's time and are urging the government not to cut the extra payment. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen filed this report.

The Education Minister has issued a plea for all Auckland parents to send their children back to school, after thousands opted to stay away from classrooms today. Around 250,000 children were expected to return this morning, under Auckland's new level 2.5, but some principals reported only a third of students showing up. But for those who did turn up, many opted to wear face coverings beyond the ride to the school gate. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen have the story.

While many businesses around the country are taking a battering because of Covid-19, a real estate agent in the Coromandel Peninsula is enjoying his best August in five years. The Coromandel is benefitting from people being forced give up on the idea of an overseas holiday, and take their break closer to home. While Auckland's lockdown has been a hiccup for some businesses relying on the passing cars - for others it has provided an unexpected bonus. Checkpoint reporter Nita Blake-Persen and cameraman Simon Rogers hit the road to see how they're all getting on.

The move to make masks part of our daily routine is being embraced in South Auckland, an area hard hit by the latest covid cluster. Face coverings are becoming the norm in Manurewa - from bandanas to flags, single use masks or home made set ups. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen spoke to locals about the change.

The midnight deadline to have all those thousands of ports staff tested has been abandoned as health authorities struggle to get through everyone. Around 12,000 people are expected to be screened at Auckland and Tauranga ports. Our video journalist Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen filed this report.

The Islamic Women's Council says the last year's mosque attacks may never have happened if the Government listened to its concerns about rising hostility towards Muslims. The council has publicly released part of their submissions to the Royal Comission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks -- a move it says sets a standard of transparency for the inquiry. The Commission due to hand its report to the Governer General at the end of the month. Our reporter Anneke Smith and cameraman Simon Rogers filed this report.

All Blacks first-five Beauden Barrett is preparing for a pair of significant firsts when the Blues and Hurricanes meet in the opening round of Super Rugby Aotearoa this weekend. As well as being his debut for the Auckland-based Blues, Sunday's match at Eden Park will be his first against his former club. Far from daunted, Barrett can't wait to go up against his old team-mates - especially now he's got a former All Blacks star at his side. Clay Wilson and video journalist Simon Rogers joined them at training.

"I've been looking for you" - those were the first words of New Zealand Defence Force medic Jase Denharder as he reached trampers Dion Reynolds and Jessica O'Connor. Amid emotional scenes the pair was rescued yesterday from dense bush in difficult terrain in the remote Kahurangi National Park. Air force personnel involved in today's retrieval of rescue crew who remained overnight, were on their way back to Ohakea this afternoon, when they diverted to Nelson to talk to media. Here's RNZ Nelson reporter Tracy Neal and videographer Simon Rogers with the story.

Our borders may be closed but some international backpackers are still making the most of their New Zealand travel dreams. There are estimated to be up to 150,000 overseas visitors still in the country and despite various repatriation flights, many have decided to stay on. Checkpoint cameraman Simon Rogers and reporter Nita Blake-Persen spoke to some of them.

Late on Wednesday afternoon Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller emailed his caucus colleagues signalling his intent to challenge for the National Party leadership. It came after current leader Simon Bridges called the party's MPs back to Parliament for an emergency caucus meeting on Friday. It's understood Todd Muller will run with Nikki Kaye as his deputy. In his email he said the country faces 'the most enormous challenge since the end of the Second World War'. He said Labour has failed to deliver on every measure it has set for itself in government, and that will not change.  Also in the email Muller said the consequences of Labour being re-elected would be catastrophic for two generations. Muller said he shares the view of a majority of colleagues that National winning the election is not possible under the current leadership. He said based on that, he is best placed to earn the trust of New Zealanders on September 19. It comes after a Newshub-Reid Research Poll on Monday night put National at just 30.6 percent and Simon Bridges on 4.6 percent as preferred Prime Minister. Checkpoint reporter Nita Blake-Persen and cameraman Simon Rogers went to Tauranga to see if they could track Mr Muller down.

"Take two."Simon Rogers is an award-winning production designer for film and television (and special effects on Puttenham bonfire), with a list of credits as long as your key grip. He talks about creativity, budgets and thinking big.There's also hedgehog news from Kit (and Danny) and more proper jokes from gagmeister Lennon.

Simon Rogers, a data journalist with the Google News Initiative, joins It's All Journalism producer Michael O'Connell this week to discuss the ways in which data journalism can help reporters find new ways to cover coronavirus with information gleaned from search engine trends in their communities. Keep up with the latest news about the It's All Journalism podcast, sign up for our weekly email newsletter.

Simon Rogers is a leading voice in the world of data journalism. As the data editor at Google News Lab, we spoke with him about the 2020 Sigma Awards, machine learning in the newsroom, and why collaboration is the future of data journalism.

Simon Rogers is an award-winning data journalist, writer and speaker. Author of ‘Facts are Sacred‘, published by Faber & Faber in the UK, China and South Korea. He has also written a range of infographics for children books from Candlewick. Data editor on the News Lab team at Google, based in San Francisco, he is director of the Data Journalism Awards and teaches Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco and has taught at U Cal Berkeley Journalism school.

Simon Rogers is an award-winning data journalist, writer and speaker. Author of ‘Facts are Sacred‘, published by Faber & Faber in the UK, China and South Korea. He has also written a range of infographics for children books from Candlewick. Data editor on the News Lab team at Google, based in San Francisco, he is director of the Data Journalism Awards and teaches Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco and has taught at U Cal Berkeley Journalism school.

A blend of slow radio, gardening advice and conversation, and readings from the best garden and wildlife writing.   These notes may contain affiliate links.        Garden soundtrack   Soggy October.   Knowing a place, season to season.   The idea of UNKNOWN GROUND (Terra Incognita)     Reading 04:48   from Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane https://amzn.to/2WgmH5N   Read by Rachel Coldbreath.       Interview with Grant Simon Rogers 06:46   07:14 "Keep sharing the beauty”   10:46 An introduction to Grant’s work   13:16 The importance of walking through the landscape – immersion or escape?    15:14 The process of taking (or making) a photograph   17:00 A cinematic quality   17:44 The representation of the human element    18:19 The reaction of the public during photography   19:14 London: Brockwell Park – Daphne and the Bad Wildlife   20:00 Learning trees   20:39 Favourite plants to photograph – individuals, or types?   22:14 Berlin: Tempelhof – grasses and birds of prey in the city   23:26 Documenting the wildlife, or passing through?   24:24 ‘Terra Incognita’ – always new ground? How well do we know the ground under our feet?   The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the younger.  https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-ambassadors/bQEWbLB26MG1LA?hl=en-GB   27:19 A subtle approach to storytelling        I’m so grateful to Grant for making time to talk to us about how he works in and sees the landscape around him. You can find out more about Grant and see examples of his photographs on the following links:    Online   flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/grantsrogers/ instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grantsimonrogers/     Exhibitions   The Last Supper,  42 Webb’s Road, SW11 6SF, London, +44 (0)742 763 6306 or +44 (0)207 223 8900 http://the-lastsupper.com/item/october-2018/   La Camera Chiara, Pestalozzistraße 13 / Berlin / 10625 https://www.lacamerachiara.de/ausstellungen/terra-incognita-02-11-07-12-2019/       With thanks to all my listeners for your continued support and reviews, I really do appreciate them. You can support the podcast by buying its producer a virtual cup of coffee for three quid, at https://ko-fi.com/andrewtimothyOB. Proceeds will go towards equipment, software and the monthly podcast hosting fees.    I'm grateful, once again, to Rachel for helping me out with the reading. You can find Rachel here: twitter.com/agildedeye.      One-to-one online garden coaching I’m very excited about my new venture – it’s a way for me to work with more people than I can physically get around to, helping them to make the very best of their gardens in a way that suits the life they lead. If you’d like to find out more, please leave me your email address on the following link. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as soon as this launches! https://www.gardensweedsandwords.com/garden-coaching-prelaunch       website: gardensweedsandwords.com email: gardensweedsandwords@gmail.com Instagram: instagram.com/AndrewTimothyOB Twitter: twitter.com/AndrewTimothyOB       

Google Trends Expert, Simon Rogers speaks about Google’s top 5 searched trends of the week & top viewed YouTube video. You can visit Google.com for all of your search needsYou can like Google on Facebook at: Facebook.com/GoogleFollow Google on Twitter at: Twitter.com/Google Top Trends Google Trends1. Toni Morrison2. Beverly Hills, 902103. Pokémon Sword and Shield4. Antonio Brown5. Sam’s Club https://masonverapaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/15.-Google-Trends-08-09-19.mp3 Top YouTube Video of the Week: Idris Elba Wants to Fight While Eating Spicy Wings | Hot Ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYRS0aXaBC8 Want to hear more of Mason? Check out WGNRadio.com exclusive content & interviews by Mason. Like Mason on Facebook at: Facebook.com/MasonVeraPaine and follow her on Twitter at: Twitter.com/MasonVeraPaine. Interested in being a guest on the show or wish to send pitches contact us at: Contact@Masonverapaine.com

Simon Rogers is a full-stack developer of 15 years currently transitioning from PHP to C# in his latest career jump after working in the former for many years. He has some interesting perspectives on this, and many other things.This includes a curve-ball strategy to make you extra hire-able by adding particular types of open-source packages to your portfolio, why taking criticism (with the right perspective) is actually the best thing for your career, how to effectively combat imposter syndrome and many other things.We hope you can take away a lot from this episode, it was so much fun talking to Simon and let us know via Instagram, Twitter or your usual platforms what moments brought you the most value?

DSPN is proud to present the audio from Pelgrane Press' 2017 Dragonmeet Mysteries in RPGs panel featuring Robin D. Laws, Cat Tobin, Simon Rogers, and Kenneth Hite!

DSPN is proud to present the audio from Pelgrane Press' 2017 Dragonmeet Mysteries in RPGs panel featuring Robin D. Laws, Cat Tobin, Simon Rogers, and Kenneth Hite!

Ian and Jennifer, a happily childfree couple, don’t fit in at work, where family values are ascendant, or at home, where all their friends are having kids. Starring: GERALDINE QUINN as Jennifer and Bec TONY MARTIN as Ian and Tarquin ROZ HAMMOND as Caitlin, Shelley and Claire ANDREW McCLELLAND as Mike Pomfrey and Wayne DAMIAN COWELL as John CRISTINA LARIA as Brittany DJOVAN CARO as Paul and LACHY HULME as Sturgo and Sir Leo With guests: SIMON ROGERS as Ted SARINA ROWELL as Kerry and the Receptionist and SAM PETERSEN as Dion And JAY MUELLER as the Narrator.

Ian and Jennifer become the public face of ‘child-hating’ after an incident with a screaming child at a restaurant propels them onto the front pages.  Starring: GERALDINE QUINN as Jennifer and Bec TONY MARTIN as Ian and Tarquin ROZ HAMMOND as Caitlin, Mandy-Anne and the Angry Mother ANDREW McCLELLAND as Mike Pomfrey and the Waiter DAMIAN COWELL as John CRISTINA LARIA as Brittany DJOVAN CARO as  the Maitre’D and LACHY HULME as Sturgo and Mal Paget With guests: SIMON ROGERS as Roderick and SARINA ROWELL and SAM PETERSEN  as Society Members And JAY MUELLER as the Narrator.

Host Lisa Kiefer talks with Ed Bice, co-founder and CEO of MEEDAN, a San Francisco company building digital tools and programs that promote collaborative verification, annotation and translation for global journalism in the fight against 'fake news.'TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Your listening to method to the madness or weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Keifer. And today I'm interviewing Ed Bice, cofounder and CEO of media, San Francisco Company building digital tools that assist global journalists in the battle against fake news. You're on the front lines of what is kind of a hostile [00:00:30] environment to journalists right now. Yup. Let's talk about what technologies you're enabling to help journalists out there. Speaker 2:Journalism has been embattled for a long, long time. The shift we've seen in the journalism threat model in the last five years is we went from worrying about where revenues are coming from. We solved that issue in part by thinking about new commissioned content models and, and then suddenly we woke [00:01:00] up with a new president, this crazy lunatic in the White House. And we looked inward as journalism and journalism tech community and, and we noticed that, that we had lost trust and we'd lost our ability to assert a set of facts and have those prove more durable and influential than a set of provably not facts. And I think that we went from this deep despair over [00:01:30] not having a really good revenue business model to a more existential threat of really not having the words that were writing and the, the stories that we're publishing have influence and have meaning. Speaker 2:And this is, this is a deeper crisis than, than uh, the business model. Is this when you founded or cofounded meet and, no, we have to go way back. Median has been around since [00:02:00] very early days of social web. It started with the war in Iraq protest and I'm sure many of your listeners where we're at, the protests in the bay area, on the first day that we started dropping bombs, it was a profound global moment. It was the first time I f I felt globally networked even though I'd been on the Internet since it wasn't Internet. There was on that day, this awareness that hundreds of marches were happening around [00:02:30] the world, literally tens of millions of people were taking to the streets to say, this is not what we want. This is not how we should respond. Second Year of the post nine 11 era feels so naive now. Speaker 2:But I remember thinking as I was walking the streets of San Francisco that wow, this is what it looks like when we're able to change influence history. And, and there was really a sense that the power of this many people could do it. I went [00:03:00] with, um, my good friend Rouge Giuseppe, uh, who is, he was a human rights photographer who had worked in El Salvador Rouge and I were kind of separated and there were some people blocking market street and I was standing on the sidewalk and I can still kind of imagine the, uh, bald, very tall, very large policemen, uh, reached out, grabbed me from the sidewalk, pulled me into the street and said, you can't be in the street. I'm arresting you. There are good cops. This was a bad [00:03:30] cop. I was not intending to be arrested that day, but I was arrested along with I think 1300 other people, straps around the risks and put on the bus and hauled over to pier 39. Speaker 2:And I didn't know it at the time. I would've, I would've kissed the guy if I had known how he would have changed my life at the time. I wrote an email from that experience, send it to five friends via, I think it was an AOL online email account. And, uh, [00:04:00] one of those friends who was, uh, an environmental scientist wrote back and his dad had started a tool company. He built it up and he and his wife had inherited some money and he said, ed, I want to publish your, the email that you've sent, you know, in my email, questioned what we're doing post nine 11, you know, with my experience as, as a person who had traveled in the Muslim world and who had had homes open to me and just who had just such a different understanding [00:04:30] of the world. You know, I also had the experience of studying with Paul Wells, stone in college, and, and so I had this latent to activism, right? Speaker 2:And, and I expressed that into this email, you know, just what, what, what the hell are we doing? This is crazy. We're creating generations of, of misery for, for this sculpture. And they Rakhi people. And he wrote back and said, I want to publish this as a full page run in the New York Times so that people can have a different perspective on what's going on. And I know it sounds [00:05:00] crazy, but this feels to me like this incredibly important moment in history. Within 10 minutes I wrote him back, I'll do this, but it's not my, I'm not gonna publish my words in the New York Times. I'm going to go out and find statements from people in Iraq and people in Palestine. I'm going to put those beside statements from Americans and Israelis and we're going to start this peoples opinion project. We will run this as a full page ad in the New York Times and we will go out and source this content [00:05:30] from around the world and it'll get people thinking it'll be provocative. Speaker 2:The idea was that we would do this, we would publish it, people would be so moved that they would send us money and we would do this again. And we'd start placing authentic, translated content from around the world, you know, into the New York Times. And, and, and kind of expand then to other papers and presses and, and, and is this the digital New York Times or was this the pace? This was the ink [00:06:00] and paper New York Times. And so in June of 2003 w we ran a full page ad that said in our efforts to bring democracy to the people of the world, we keep forgetting about the people of the world and then had these translated voices below that. And it was very inspiring and it didn't work. We know that in terms of the amount of money that it takes to produce and place and ad that goes out to 3 million Sunday [00:06:30] Times readers and the amount of revenue res we received back from that project, you know, it was an utter failure. Speaker 2:We had a, a short lived organization called the People's opinion project and did global opinion polling. So, so we showed some of the early trends around global opinion of us post nine 11 and post Iraq invasion. That was pretty profound. We were able to, to show that, you know, our actions had resulted [00:07:00] in this kind of loss of faith or trust in America. You mentioned that you had experienced in the Arab world. Did you live there? What was your I traveled and it wasn't the Arab world actually, although all of our work since then has been, but I traveled through Pakistan, through northern Pakistan and into western China Karakorum Highway. It's incredibly beautiful. The way we were treated there was, it was, um, it was formative. Anyone who's listening to this who hasn't gone [00:07:30] out into the world and traveled, you know, that that was my most important education from that early experience. Speaker 2:The effort in ethos early on was that the media diet, it leads to these really narrow perceptions, which in turn support ill-advised policy decisions. We wanted to broaden that and we saw the internet as a means of doing that. So everything we did in the early days had an online component. [00:08:00] You know, at the time I was, um, I was designing homes designed background, this like, this is a design problem. How do we diversify the media ecosystem? And the thing that we hit on early, early on was that language was such a fundamentally missing piece that the Internet was even in those days and this pre Facebook, but even in those days, the Internet was going to millions and millions and millions of people all around [00:08:30] the world. And it was a bunch of linguistically siloed communities. So no translation, there was no sense. Yeah. Not to speak of. Speaker 2:And any machine translation was so bad back then that fundamentally useless from that initial failed experiment, I started pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, calling people. And we've got the intention of an Israeli and Palestinian engineer at Carnegie Mellon University's language Technologies Institute [00:09:00] and that put in motion the last 12 years, which, which the patent for that, uh, translation, uh, you with, with, uh, a great technologist too who worked in Senator Leahy's office actually, is this when you founded this is, yes. So 2006. Yeah. Fast forward 2006 and there's, there's a hilarious story of which I think I've never told publicly. Shortly after the, uh, idea, Kinda jelled and the, these guys at Carnegie Mellon are like, yes, let's do this. And, and this [00:09:30] serious linguistic scientist is like, yeah, a crowdsourced human plus machine translation with a reputation model behind it. These are great ideas. We should, we should write this up and for what it's worth, we have a patent on this and still needed some money to do this right. Speaker 2:So one of my dearest friends in the world, his stepfather's uncle, really, really successful banker in New York. And I asked for a meeting, pretty nervous, but his family had, [00:10:00] had, um, escaped the Holocaust and I knew that he was pretty motivated to contribute back. So I went into his office overlooking Central Park. I had quit my job. I had done crazy things which were unpopular with my family to try to get this thing off the ground. And so I went into his office with very quite nervous and penniless. Uh, I gave him the pitch and I said, you know, language technology plus this thing called the Internet. [00:10:30] Imagine that must've appealed to him because you're getting at the truth. Yeah. Yeah. He looked at me and he pointed at this picture of his grandfather at the end of the conference table. He said, Mr Bias, my, my grandfather is smiling down on you today in 1904 or something like this. Speaker 2:A Swedish dentist walked into my grandfather's office and dressed in with a vision for language impacting global peace. And I looked at him and I said, Esperanto, [00:11:00] I was going to say that, yes, that came out of the same kind of divisiveness. And he said, precisely, Huh? My grandfather funded Esperanto and I'm going to give you some seed funding to try to put this idea in. Motion. Language is such a fundamental divider. It's not a surprise that many people have said, oh, if only we could talk a common language, you know, the world would be a better place. So that put in motion, meet Dan and MacArthur Foundation was one of those friends. The real break for [00:11:30] us came when IBM put two of their research labs at our disposal. You know, we've had partnerships with IBM and now have a good partnership with Google, Google News Lab, you know, their interest is in seeing more data. And so IBM's interest was in us using this network to bring in more human data on top of the machine processing so that they can improve their models with Google news lab. Now we're looking at how we bring in more credibility, how we can get journalists writing indicators of a, [00:12:00] an article's credibility. Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm interviewing Ed Bice, the cofounder and CEO of me, Dan, a San Francisco Company building digital tools and programs that promote collaborative verification and rotation and translation supporting journalists around the world. [00:12:30] So are you a nonprofit? Yeah, so we [inaudible] Speaker 2:uh, three years ago we were offered a big contract to do software development with one of the large social networks and so we, we did form a for profit. Then and the nonprofit has an equity stake in that. We are a unique hybrid. 98% of our work is with the nonprofit. Now I first heard about, or read about me Dan with the Arab spring, all the protests and you all were pretty instrumental [00:13:00] in translation. Yeah. Yeah. So as soon as we started meeting in, we hired a small team in Cairo and started working on translating Arab media and, and commentary on that media and putting that alongside a US versions of that media or western English language versions of that media and translating the English language into Arabic. So we, we built kind of the Internet's first bilingual side by side news site. We had roots in Cairo. Speaker 2:[00:13:30] Some of our good friends were in the middle of the the revolution and, and still are, um, we still have deep connections with Kairos, still have employees there. We spun off a media project there two years ago that was just blocked by the state of Egypt when we were doing translation work during Arab spring. The stuff that was coming off of Twitter and Youtube and Facebook was incredibly important. We found that having no way to provide [00:14:00] notes about the sources of that content, uh, no way to really do investigations into the, the assertions made in that media. We felt like that was an area that deserved some development. So we went to, um, some of our funders and said, hey, why don't you help us next phase of media and it's going to be about not just translation on top of the social content, but also a verification and annotation, [00:14:30] annotation, building context, helping and you have specific products for that. Speaker 2:I was reading about. Yeah. So, so check is, is that product that came out of bar experiences and, and it's, and it's intended to be really simple. It's a tool that allows for collaborative verification notes. It also performs some machine processes, like makes it easy for a journalist to go out and look at the reverse image search. Uh, [00:15:00] so if, if a piece of social media contains an image, uh, we provide a quick link that says, okay, here's where that image has appeared elsewhere. So if you see that it actually came from 10 years ago in Sudan in is not a picture of a current protest in Egypt. Say you've saved yourself a a an embarrassing moment because we are kind of early to that verification space. Google news lab came to us three years ago when they were starting the first draft initiative. So we are one [00:15:30] of handful of NGOs and media orgs that came together to form the first draft group, which is been doing amazing research trainings, kind of leading a lot of the important work in news verification and fact checking space. Speaker 2:Um, and it's run by a brilliant woman named Claire Wartell who was a before that or the research director at the Tau Center, the Columbia School of journalism and, and first draft is on a, uh, [00:16:00] a steep growth curve. And, and so I think you'll continue to see a lot of really great things coming out of that organization. And I think our contributions to that have been one of the really big success stories out of me. Dan, let's talk about election land, which is an amazing moment in journalism history. The election land project was, um, spun out of that same first draft, Google news lab, me, Dan, but, uh, with the Google trends team and Propublica [00:16:30] in the lead. So propublica really, really loved prep. Yeah. They're amazing. Really great people. So 94 days before the election, I got invited to Washington DC to meet with Scott Klein and from propublica and, uh, Simon Rogers from Google trends and, uh, Clair from first draft and small set of people. Speaker 2:And they're like, well, we want to do nationwide election monitoring, you know, with a thousand journalists [00:17:00] 90 days from now. Uh, yeah. And at this point we were in, in a rewrite of, of our software. And so I said, yes, of course. So it was, it was a mad dash to pull that project together. And it's now collecting all sorts of awards. There's now a case study, uh, we've recreated this, uh, for the French election now with a project called crosscheck and a UK general election project as well with a popup newsroom component that had [00:17:30] a bunch of journalism school students together. So the model is evolving. Election monitoring has historically just been this, you know, big agencies checking boxes and observing things. And so this is really the recognition that the Internet, the social media landscape is this incredibly valuable area to do election monitoring to understand how elections are, are working in real time and try to respond to that. Speaker 2:So, so I think [00:18:00] there's something really important in this. The outcome was that you discovered there was no election fraud. Yeah, yeah. Shortly after the election, Trump was saying there was fraud. Yeah. So has he not seen this data now? He, um, you know, the, the, the irony is that w, you know, 94 days before the election, Trump had not talked about vote rigging. So we're, we're starting this project and we were like, Yep, you know, we're going to be in an amazing [00:18:30] position to look at voter day issues. And then, I don't know, 30 days, 40 days later, Trump says the vote's going to be rigged. And we're like, oh my God, he's just, he's doing our advertising, you know, marketing this project and, and, and making it incredibly important. But there were hundreds of articles that were filed from the findings on election day. Speaker 2:So the, the model that we had was, uh, work with a bunch of journalism school students and 300 local [00:19:00] media partners and source these stories in real time. I mean, it was a, it was a remarkable and remarkably complex operation, but we were signaling out to reporters during election day and the result of those signals was, I want to say between two and 300 stories may be off on that in terms of the comprehensive view from, there wasn't voter fraud. Propublica did a series of stories on that. Okay. So that was major, that was a pivotal moment, [00:19:30] but very costly, right? Yeah. Costly. Costly in terms of we had a hundred people in the CUNY, a journalism school newsroom on election nights. A certainly there's costs getting all those people together, but when you think about the person hours, we had a thousand journalists using the software. We had about 700 in check and about a thousand on the slack. Speaker 2:We use slack as a communication back end for the project. When you think about the person hours [00:20:00] that went into that, that came out of that project was pretty efficient investment. So this will continue. I would be shocked if we didn't do midterms and, and sh I believe election land is a models going forward and I think that first draft and pop up newsroom as global election monitoring efforts and, and the research that comes out of that is gonna. I think we've invented a whole new mode of election monitoring and, and I think it's gonna [00:20:30] be a really powerful and important tool, especially as we see the kind of weaponization, the misinformation campaigns that are now being waged around elections. The Bot armies that are being deployed to just, you know, misinformation. All of this needs to be addressed in, in efforts that identify and call out misinformation, disinformation campaigns in, [00:21:00] in the runup and, and, uh, into election day. Speaker 2:David Remnick New Yorker, he talks about this as the golden age of ignorance. Yeah. We're in, how do we, uh, fight the media moguls who take over, for instance, the guy who owns national enquirers now trying to take Time magazine. And all of those assorted of magazines and that's editorial content that how, how do we get around that kind of gaming? The answer used to be the Internet, you know the Internet, it'll save us [00:21:30] from, from this. Have you guys all talked about that you, you were just at a conference in Italy International Journalism Festival at a certain level, the same consumer appetite that had people clicking onto bula and Outbrain's ads as a means of supporting serious journalism is now supplanting serious journalism with that sort of reporting in there. There are some good signs in subscription models and [00:22:00] what's happening for the post and the Times. Speaker 2:There's a lot of people who are saying, Oh okay, we do need to pay for this. And maybe that's one positive trend out of all of this. But the idea that people who are just dead set to promote agenda driven media are, are going to control influential. You know, Fox News feels, feels very innocent in comparison, [00:22:30] you know, with these efforts. So the idea that you know, that Breitbart would become as influential as foxes is, is David Pecker with the time empire? If that happens, it's terrifying. So that's continuing this silo, like people who believe a certain way, they know which outlets to go to and you and I may go to Propublican read what we know to be the truth. Are we never going to have the mediation between these groups through journalism that [00:23:00] that's the hope. But I mean really the, the deepest hope for journalism is that, um, the truth, uh, has more weight than untruth, you know, if that is thrown out then, then the sorting mechanism, just his, because it all is in, is all about the truth. Speaker 2:It's, it's there. It's supposed to help us. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that we're in some, some really, really dark days and, and that, [00:23:30] these technologies that we thought were, you know, so liberating and so empowering and the wisdom of the crowd that would, that would surface and, and, and the sort of Wikipedia model re across human knowledge that would have affordances for editing and annotating and revising every object knowledge until it came to the point that was like, was better [00:24:00] or more true as we wade into conversations around the truth. One thing is that working in a global context, you're really humble about this truth. You recognize that there are a thousand truths that describe an important piece of every event. It's not just to descend into total relativism, but to acknowledge that context is, is always dependent on a cultural framing, [00:24:30] the reader framing the understanding the source better. Speaker 2:So I feel like I want to offer this disclaimer that as, as I'm saying, you know, we need the truth to mean more that I'm not saying there's not just there, there is one truth in the end and you don't have no, nor should there be one arbiter of the truth. And, and right now the one thing is very concerning for journalism is, is the, is the fact that Google and and Facebook are distributing and Twitter distributing, you know, these, these [00:25:00] are distribution pipelines that are so dominant right now, surely in terms of how the search algorithms and newsfeed are influencing what we're getting on a daily basis in our media diet. Those are the platforms that are very, very serious about saying we don't want to be arbiters of truth, but the algorithms that power newsfeed in power search are arbiters of meaning. And that is, is a pretty close proxy for truth. Speaker 2:You know, I think [00:25:30] we're in some really dark early days of understanding, um, how these systems, uh, were where it a failure point I think there is resolve to try to do better. And that's, that's, that's changed a lot since, uh, early November. They understand the problem and neither one of them is, is saying, oh, we need to build a truth algorithm, which is really good. And our role over the next year is going to be helping think about how signals from journalists [00:26:00] are treated by those platforms. So having a way of looking at how 30 or 40 different journalists from around the world are, are viewing a claim that might be circulating and, and then surfacing that into a Google search result as as a fact check. Would it post an alert to the yes or Google started doing this already. So Google and in some cases if you're on Google news and article contains [00:26:30] a claim that has been fact checked, they're just in this just in the last month starting to surface. Speaker 2:In fact check Facebook has dispute. We can better structure signals into those types of systems. I really respect the technology building you're doing for journalists. I think it's, it's really important. I worry about the flip side of that. There is less curiosity today because of some of the technologies that have been built. Readers become [00:27:00] lazy. They don't do the deep connecting. They put trust where they shouldn't. What do we do about that? That, I mean it's, the technology is partly to blame for that. Before we had to open an unfolded the newspaper. Yeah, it is nanny's garden next to, you know, bombing in Yemen. I think the response to that is, well, two things, decay of society motivates people to realize that sitting [00:27:30] back and allowing the media system to decay has some real bad consequences. But also thinking about tools that allow people to, to feel that they have, um, more agency than just putting up a, uh, a smiley face or a, you know, a, a sobbing face in those go to structural issues with the web. Speaker 2:How do we Wikipedia FY the Internet in a better way [00:28:00] so that even citizens can write signals in a structured way that a journalist who wants to take in those signals or who's looking for them or who's maybe gotten a really credible signal from that person before might look at and say, oh my God, this needs to be written about because it's going to change this story. What's coming up for you in the future? Bridge is our translation project. So we're working to bring that product into open [00:28:30] source and we're also looking to integrate bridge as a translation solution with check, which is verification solution. So a lot of these events that break around the world are reported outside our language community, giving journalists a good way to get firsthand data, get that professionally translated, then do verification work. On top of that, we're working with some, some stellar partners. Speaker 2:So we've got projects in the pipeline now with the Syria of Video Archive, [00:29:00] uh, which is a really important project to archive and mark up videos, uh, that we hope will have evidentiary value. The Digital Verification Corps, which is, uh, Amnesty International and Berkeley Human Rights Center project. Some of those projects are in the pipeline. We are keen to, to c check in more newsrooms in the u s and to repeat the election work that we've, we've, uh, been doing. If somebody wants to get ahold of you or, [00:29:30] or go to your website, if you could share that with me. Yeah, we're at me, Dan. It's m e e d a n.com. And uh, can always send me an email@helloatmedia.com. That email will go to me and my colleague on show, Mina and, and Tom [inaudible]. Anyone who's interested in contributing to open source software development or helping us think through some of these thorny issues that we're working on that we'd love to hear from you right now is this moment in history. [00:30:00] We need technologists, we need journalists. Uh, but we also need philosophers. I think we are dealing with issues of truth and ethics and we, we've created hugely powerful technologies and maybe we've lost our way. Maybe we needed more philosophers and academics involved in thinking through what this would mean. Speaker 1:Thank you so much and yeah, no, it was, it was my pleasure. That was Ed bice, the Co founder and CEO [00:30:30] of me. Dan, you've been listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley, celebrating Bay area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes university. We'll be back again next Friday at noon. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Co-hosts Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos interview Chris Paton (2 weeks before he had a brain tumor removed - see notes below which are published with Chris’s permission). Chris is the founder and Managing Director of Quirk Solutions, a company that specializes in delivering Business Wargaming to many organizations. Chris was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Marines and an advisor to the Cabinet and National Security Council on Afghan strategy, and he leverages the wargaming he learned as a tool to pressure test and evaluate business plans before committing resources into action. Listen in to learn more about how you can lead stress testing in your organization to strengthen your plans and execution.   Emails we received from Chris - this is one tough hombre - and hope this inspires you as much as did us...   Feb 7 - Date show was recorded   Feb 24 - date of Chris’s surgery - his comments below right after surgery:   Hi Jan & Jim. All done. Feeling a bit rubbish and just recovering from anaesthetic now, but thanks to your kind thoughts and prayers have come out the other side of surgery ok.   Won't know more re how cancerous/benign it is for 2-3 weeks but already feeling up for the fight.   Whatever it is; It picked on the wrong dude.....   You know me; not about to let this get in the way of what I want to do.   Really hope I smash the ball out of the park for you.   Looking forward to hearing what you come up with as a title. Will cheer up a few days in hospital!   Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. I'm out of immediate danger and now turning my energy back against my opponent!   March 9 As it happens, we had some amazing news this morning. The results of the biopsy are back and not only did they get all of the tumour out, but it seems it was totally benign and there's no risk of cancer at all.   Big smiles this side of the pond!   God bless,   Key Takeaways [3:21] In the Royal Marines, Chris co-authored an article on planning in fluid situations. That led to talks and consulting, and he realized he had something important to contribute to the corporate world. He left the military to create a business planning consultancy. At each point of a client strategy, Chris would pressure test it to find gaps and weaknesses. He would also pressure test the options he delivered. [6:24] Chris started to have clients create more of the strategy, with more self-reliance; more responsibility for their own planning. Chris ‘blew on the embers,’ with pressure tests, to add the real value to the planning process. [7:56] Military people go into business, aware that the consequences of getting something wrong are so catastrophic, that they don’t want to engage with it. Because of that, they spend a lot of time preparing to get it right for the actual action. Corporations sometimes just give it a whirl, to see what happens. Military will not do that, because the cost of failure is too great. [11:05] Chris runs sessions three ways. The first is a pure pressure test. The second is to train the people to run their own tests. The third is to train the trainer, to do it independently. The pressure test is oriented around a Blue idea team and a Red critical team. The Red are the people who will be affected by the plan. Blue runs the ideas like game plays against Red team. An umpire facilitates the wargame. [17:38] Matthew Syed, in Black Box Thinking, suggests an evolutionary process of trying and testing, failing, trying, and testing. Chris combines that with technical expertise, to start with a good initial plan. All affected parties are needed. Executives arguing against executives will not find all problems. [19:54] One cause of organizational blind spots is always recruiting people to be a good fit. Over time they end up recruiting very similar people, who see things the same way. Another blind spot is wilful blindness, from fear of the awful consequence of failure. Chris insists organizations draw from their own experiences in solving these challenges, for buy-in, using him as a safety net. [24:50] Representatives of every affected group are in the room, and the facilitator urges them to use their voice to discuss all aspects of the plan. It’s about giving people a platform to critique the plans positively, and be a critical friend: “I get where you’re trying to go, but if we did it slightly differently, we’d probably have more success.” [26:17] A leader who is too controlling causes paralysis by fear among employees. By giving people permission to fail, leaders reduce the instances of failure. A leader can humbly say, “I don’t have all the answers; you’re going to have to help me. I will make the decision, but I need you to provide me with the expertise to help me make the right decision, at the right time, and in the right place.” [30:44] Chris hires people who want to contribute and make a difference. To deliver the workshops they must be ex-military, but Chris also requires three years of challenging commercial experience before he will hire them. They need to have engagement, warmth and openness. They are connected, and engaged, and Chris rewards them. [34:55] Chris has a story from his early business days that still makes his toes curl. One of the corporate Blue team members gaver a great presentation of his segment, but when challenged, was unable to defend it, because he didn’t have a good grasp of it. The Red team was recruited to generate ideas, and Chris learned that he needed to pre-qualify all the presenters for competence before pressure testing. [39:50] Chris, 40 when he started, had no previous business experience, but had a mortgage and teenage children. He relies on his wife and family to sustain him in his entrepreneurial journey. Chris also asked clients for testimonial support, which they supplied freely. That was invigorating for him. Chris also finds strength volunteering at CHICKS, a week-long outdoor experience for disadvantaged children.   Books Mentioned in This Episode Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do, by Matthew Syed The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen R. Covey "How the UK's Royal Marines Plan in the Face of Uncertainty," by Arnoud Franken, Chris Paton, and Simon Rogers   Bio In his former career, Chris was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Marines and advisor to the Cabinet and National Security Council on the Afghan strategy. He was responsible for the design of the drawdown of the UK presence in Afghanistan. He saw active service in a wide range of places including Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Georgia and Afghanistan. In 2010, Chris co-authored a HBR article on planning in fluid situations. This then led to his leaving the military to create Quirk Solutions Ltd. Chris has worked with BUPA, Heineken, Standard Life Investments, Shell and a wide range of SME businesses. He uses his leadership, strategy and planning experience to give organisations increased coherency, direction and efficiency. Chris is also one of the UK’s premier exponents of Business Wargaming; stress testing plans to identify risks and opportunities. Bi-lingual in French and with a Masters Degree in International Liaison and Communication, Chris also provides French-speaking performance consultancy to clients. Chris Paton is an extraordinary polymath. His exceptional intellect and leadership skill set is faultless and is combined, in his new career, with an empathy to deliver, which at once inspires as much as it educates. Chris is an avid rugby man, as well as many outdoor sports, trying to surf, and expending vast amounts of futile effort trying to make his garden look presentable. Website: QuirkSolutions.org Twitter: @quirkwargaming LinkedIn: Quirk Solutions Ltd Blog: ChrisPatonWargame.wordpress.com/  

Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! On this week's episode, I'm excited to welcome Simon Rogers to the show. Simon is a data journalist, writer, and speaker and has worked at the Guardian in the UK, Twitter, and is now a... The post Episode #70: Simon Rogers appeared first on PolicyViz.

Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! On this week's episode, I'm excited to welcome Simon Rogers to the show. Simon is a data journalist, writer, and speaker and has worked at the Guardian in the UK, Twitter, and is now a... The post Episode #70: Simon Rogers appeared first on PolicyViz.

Interactive media, data journalism and ethics with Simon Rogers, Data Editor at Google.

[Thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (https://twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode] Hi everyone! After a long while ... we have a real British voice on the show again! In this episode we have the pleasure to host data journalist Simon Rogers. Simon has been leading data journalism initiatives at The Guardian for many years and he recently moved to Twitter (with the official role of Data Editor) where he takes care of creating visual stories out of Twitter data. In the show we talk about his past experience at The Guardian as well as the more recent and exciting developments at Twitter. Links The debate of Gregor & Moritz with Simon on colors (and Simon pissed off by it :)) Creative tools: CartoDB and DataWrapper? Twitter Data Blog (where new projects are announced) Overview page of Twitter visualizations Simon's post: Data Journalism as Punk [very interesting concept!] Simon's infographics kid books: Animal Kingdom and Human Body

From brutal sports to poignant puzzle adventures. This is BitNote! Music by: Intro by Russell Shaw from Theme Park by Bullfrog Productions; Main theme by Nation 12/Simon Rogers (coded by Richard Joseph) from Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe by Bitmap Brothers; Iris (Instrumental) by Tomohito Nishiura (sung by Salyu) from Professor Layton and Pandora's Box by Level-5.

Join us for our first episode recorded in front of a live audience, in the council chambers at Kensington Town Hall as part of Dragonmeet 2012. We welcome special guest Simon Rogers for an uber edition of Ask Ken and Robin, which in turn encompasses a panoply of our trademark huts. In the process as […]