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Theranos: Charisma Over Competence

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Theranos - Charisma over competence.

Whilst it’s making the mainstream headlines right now, the Theranos story has actually been rumbling on for a number of years. Formed way back in 2003, Theranos’ unique selling point (USP) was that it could analyse just a few drops of patients’ blood and produce results. It claimed that, backed by its innovative technology, it … Read more

And Now the AMP Project

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AMP Project - Accelerated Mobile PagesAs if there’s not enough to do, racing around and tweaking your websites’ code to pander to Google’s needs, there’s now the AMP Project from Big G.

Announced yesterday on the official Google blog, AMP is the Accelerated Mobile Pages project. The aim of the AMP project is to improve delivery of content on mobile devices. The basis of the latest crusade is that publishers use open-source AMP-HTML to markup their content and this speeds up delivery, hopefully by instantaneously downloading content to mobile devices. Behind this all appears to be some sort of Content Distribution Network (CDN) that Google say can be used at no cost.

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Clone Wars: Farnborough

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On the 25th January 2012 I attended a meeting of North Camp residents, even though I live in the Fox Lane area of Farnborough (some might argue that it’s Cove, almost Hawley)

The most important aspect of that meeting, hosted by Andrew Lloyd, the Chief Executive of Rushmoor Borough Council, was that he said he did not want Farnborough to be another clone town, or words to that effect. As the CEO of this Borough, I expected that to apply to Aldershot too.

Then, on a trip to Aldershot one day, to visit Spinnadisc Records, which was forced to close due to the extortionately high rents, I saw atop a pole in Union Street a banner boasting of all the big names coming to Aldershot’s new Westgate “leisure” development: Morrisons, Nando’s, Toby Carvery, Harvester, Travelodge, Frankie & Bennie’s, Pizza Express, Subway…

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The Tumbledown Dick – 15 Months On

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This post has been updated on Weds 6th May, Fri 8th May One of our local pubs, The Tumbledown Dick (The Tumble Down Dick), was shut down on 12th February 2008 for “environmental health reasons”. Whilst there’s no argument that the pub was in need of a serious renovation it’s a crying shame that this … Read more

Intelligence

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We’re not talking brain power here but rather the hazy world of clandestine information gathering services. You see, there’s a story in The Telegraph entitled “Israel launches covert war against Iran“. That headline alone is an intelligence failure of the cognitive kind; a reporter in New York, writing for a British newspaper, tells the world (wide … Read more