A guest editor makes a post on the blog. If you have any interest in how your DNA profiles may be used and kept by the police even if you were arrested and released, then you should read this:

The National DNA Database® is an effective and useful crime-fighting tool. There are many statistics flying about to tell you this, I won’t bore you with them. You want to hear one? OK – if a DNA samples is left at the scene of a crime it increases the chance of detection 23% to 43%. On vehicle theft it increases the chance from 6% to 54%. That’s enough. Oh, and the database currently contains about 3.5% of our population.. Continue reading →

News that the Site Gallery is closing after Xmas is another blow for any sort of cultural activity happening in Sheffield’s so-called Cultural Industries quarter. Oh there is Spearmint Rhino, the empty National Centre for Popular Music but not much else. I’m not sure converting everything into “business units” is such a good idea. Sometimes making the most money per square metre is not the answer. Photography and Video Editing suites may not make huge amounts of money but they train people up and give them the freedom to express themselves in other ways rather than the balance sheet at the end of the financial year… Continue reading →

I keep waking up at exactly 7:30am. I don’t know why but it’s quite scary. Well today it was good cos we got a couple of inches of snow in Sheffield last night. It fell in about 3 hours and makes the place look quite nice, despite the slipiness of walking to work:

They’re a bit dull cos the sun had only just come up but it was so nice crunching around in proper deep snow!

In other news, I somehow lost 1/2 of my photos from Malaysia/Laos in the Summer. They were on a memory card and I (somehow) never transferred them to another computer. As you can imagine I was pretty gutted…. There’s probably more to say but it’s early and I need to slide to work.