LittleLegends.biz

How’s this for a disingenuous bit of reporting?

Bristol University have done a study on the hours fathers work. The BBC lead off their article like so:

“Modern men are unwilling to break with tradition when it comes to combining the twin roles of work and fatherhood, according to researchers.”

They then go on to quote Dr Esther Dermott, who led the research, as saying:

“What professional men value most about their jobs is their ability to control their working hours so that they can leave early to go to school functions or parents’ meetings – and this flexibility was also what other men most wanted.”

Huh? Surely then the research shows that modern men are more than willing to break with tradition, and in fact prize the flexibility that allows them to do that.

As Chickenhouse says over at The Welch Family Christmas

“I have no beef with the conclusion that fathers aren’t as hands on with parenting as mothers …, but the implication that we “choose” to work long hours and not see our families is not a long step away from being an insult. I work in a lovely area: there’s a castle looming over the factory … and we’re in beautiful countryside. But I’d still rather be at home with Oliver on my knee or singing The Wheels On The Bus with Lucy, even if she is being a little madam at the moment.”

Perhaps what should be being targeted is not the men who go back to work, but the work that makes it harder for men to go back to their families. What do you think?

Any guesses which famous world leader this is?

Source: Amey Fearon Mathews

I guessed Boris Yeltsin, on the assumption that Big John Prescott didn’t really count as a famous world leader. And I guessed wrong. The child in the picture grew up to be Tony Blair.

Amey Fearon Matthews has taken childhood photos of current world leaders and brushed them up with some of her artistic magic in her series Before: Portraits of Current World Leaders. [Thanks to 3QuarksDaily for the link]

Amey explains what she’s aiming for:

“Traveling around … the world, it is amazing to see how differently the same leaders are regarded. Shown in one community, certain of [their pictures] will elicit glowing admiration and others will elicit hatred and disgust. Meanwhile, in a different community, those very same portraits could evoke the opposite responses.

Each of these leaders was born as a blank slate. As children, their expressions range from joy to confusion, from sadness to wonder. Through a combination of innate qualities, personal choices, and circumstances beyond their control, they have become their present-day selves. These portraits present an opportunity to see the subjects as people again, and to reconsider them as complex individuals with an array of complex influences and motivations.”

Intriguing stuff. And very strange to be looking at these leaders from a “family perspective”.

The BBC is reporting that cows have regional accents.

Dr Jeanine Treffers-Daller, a reader in linguistics at UWE in Bristol says:

“When we are learning to speak, we adopt a local variety of language spoken by our parents, so the same could be said about the variation in the West Country cow moo.”

And that seems to be backed up by farmers. Lloyd Green, a farmer from Glastonbury, comments that:

I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

I’ve got the feeling, though, that – deep down – anyone who’s had to read bedtime stories to children knows that anyway.

For me, trying to read, say, the House at Pooh Corner without regional accents is a little like trying to suck a fruit pastille without chewing.

Just came across the Recycle For London site. If you’re wondering how you can do your bit, when your collection times are and the like – and you live in the Big Smoke – you might want to have a look.

Couldn’t see any details on nappy recycling though – maybe they’ll be coming soon.

This would make a great toy, if MIT decided to use this amazing bit of kit in a trivial, “more fun than you can shake a paintbrush at” sort of way. [thanks Cecilia for the link]

This makes for stark reading. [Thanks to Antonia for the link]

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have conducted some research on child poverty in the UK. They’ve broken it down by ward and uses having one or more parent on workless benefits as a proxy for poverty.

Now, there are always going to be anomalies with this sort of approach. But I would guess that as a whole, this proxy, if anything, will underestimate the situation. (It is perfectly possible to be working and still poor.)

And the general picture the research gives is this: 21% of children in the UK are living in families on benefits. Put another way, about 1 in 5 children are living in poverty.

The research site lets you download the statistics for your area. Mine made for uncomfortable and depressing reading.

London, as I suppose you might expect, is on average twice as bad as the rest of the UK. But that’s no reason for those outside London to feel smug. Skuds has posted about the same issue where he lives in Crawley. And as he says.

“As a whole we should really be scandalised that nearly 1 in 5 children in the town are dependent on benefits and not satisfied just because that is better than the national average. The acceptable level should be zero.”

Totally. But how do we reach that level? As important for me, I think, is mitgating the effect of parental poverty on the child, and making sure that the children aren’t punished for their parents’ bad luck. But again, there’s a big how do we do that.

Update: I’ve put some people who might have more of a clue on the how below.

• Child Poverty Action Group
• Children’s Society
• End Child Poverty Coalition
• End Child Poverty Network Cymru
• Northern Ireland Anti Poverty Network
• Poverty Alliance
• Save the Children

Just a quick note: if, like us, you’re a fan of Emily Turner’s blog, she’s changed URLs. The new address is:

http://www.doingitallagain.com

Thanks for the letting us know, Emily

What can I say? This is genius! Zip set herself a challenge, then baked and posted her recipe for a chocolate dalek cake. Thankyou, Zip, for single-handedly turned an old childhood hide-behind-the-sofa terror of mine into something that looks good enough to eat

It was recently reported in The Telegraph that new research has suggested that ultrasound scans on unborn babies can cause brain damage in male babies.

Swedish Scientists have compared men whose mothers underwent scans when pregnant with those who did not. They were specifically looking for any differences in the levels of men who were right handed and left handed. The outcome was that there was a significantly larger proportion of men whose mothers had undergone ultrasound scans who were left handed than those men in the control group.

There is a connection being made between brain damage and being left handed. To a non-scientist this seems slightly ridiculous. Whilst it is very possible that there are risks involved in having a scan I can’t imagine many mothers who would refuse to have one on the grounds that their child might turn out to be left handed.

Even if there are risks involved with having an ultrasound scan, personally I can’t imagine going through a pregnancy without them. They are very reassuring if all is well, and even if it is not, sometimes problems that are discovered can be treated before birth eg cleft palates.

The Gina Ford vs Mumsnet hoo-haa is bringing up a lot of difficult questions. With the libel laws as they currently are, one big question for me is this: why get involved in any start-up website if there’s a risk of being shut down, and that risk is out of your control?

Emily’s got a great post on the legal side of the Gina Ford case. As a “nosy journo” – her words, not mine – Emily emailed Susan Singleton for her views on the matter. (Susan runs her own firm of solicitors, is editor of IT Law Today and is recognised in the Chambers Law Dictionary as one of the UK’s leading lawyers in the fields of IT, Intellectual Property Rights and Internet Law).

And she got quite a response. Highlights for me were:

“In practice many groups and individuals have used the risk and cost of litigation against small web sites. They have in effect been able to censor any debate, even lawful honest and accurate debate … The practical issue, as with most litigation, is money … It is virtually never worth taking on a rich potential litigant…

Web sites are not advised to check all posts before they are put up on the site as perversely that then makes them liable for the content … Instead, under the EU ecommerce directive and UK regulations implementing The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, the web site owner is unlikely to be liable for the material if they expeditiously remove it when the infringement comes to their attention. In my view if they remove the offending material quickly they will not be liable…

If I were advising the site, just to avoid future trouble, I would take the coward’s way out and bow to the threats/censorship to save trouble and require users not to discuss Ms Ford. That is the simple solution for the future and the web site terms and conditions of use usually allow such rules to be imposed and posters who breach them to be barred…

If Gina Ford is saying ban all discussion of her methods then that is not lawful but a web site might choose to impose that rule just to avoid potential litigation … What lawfully can be stopped is any inaccuracies. For example I am sure she doesn’t say leave babies to cry for hours and I expect that parents on the site are likely to have suggested that is her method. That is the kind of inaccurate comment that she has every right to have corrected and taken down from the site.”

Now my first reaction to this was to sigh heavily and make myself a cup of very weak tea. As Mumsnet have said,

We don’t condone personal attacks … The last thing we want to do is unnecessarily upset anyone – our philosophy specifically states that we are here to help people not the reverse.

And, from what I can make out, they’re doing a great job of helping people. But yet here they are, trying to do the right thing, but tangled up with lawyers because someone made some over-the-top remarks. And not just tangled up, asked to close of the whole site.

The main mistake that Mumsnet have made, it seems, is to be small enough to be bullyable. Jeremy Young made a great point in the comments on Emily’s post:

“she is not getting flattering reviews on Amazon which makes me wonder if she will go after Amazon next.”

And it looks like (the again small) Bad Mothers Club are having similar issues. [thanks to Pewari for the pointer]

“Following recent communication with Gina F***’s advisers BMC has undertaken to remove any posts pertaining to her on our boards.”

So back to the cup of weak tea. As a website provider, you are basically at the mercy, legally speaking, of any wealthier people that the people you’re trying to help talk about. Even sensible sounding lawyers like Susan seem to suggest you turn and run when you hear any litigators knocking. So why – sip – should we bother with trying to do something like Little Legends? More to the point, why does anyone bother with trying to “do good things” online when you get run the risk of being treated like Mumsnet have been?

Well, for me, this isn’t about whether Gina Ford has acted sensibly or not. (I would, though, be interested to have seen what would have happened if she had joined in the discussion on Mumsnet rather than bring in the lawyers.) Nope, for me – with a website provider’s hat on – this is about freedom of speech, and disincentives. And both are linked.

All the hard work any of these website providers put in to making life easier for parents relies heavily on freedom of speech. Allowing parents and people who look after children to connect through message boards and the like, to talk about things that they are concerned about, in ways that they want is, I believe, a “good thing”. I can’t stress enough how important that is to me. A website is never about the site, but about the people who use it. For me, those connections and conversations are what breathe life into a site.

But by trying to nourish this sort of website, one runs the uncontrollable risk of having all that life, all those conversations, and all that hard work shut down for legal reasons, essentially by people who are bigger and wealthier than you.

So why bother? Why – and again, this is purely from the standpoint of a website provider – would those behind Mumsnet even begin to try to let those conversations happen? More personally, why – sigh, sip of tea, sigh – should we try to make Little Legends work? Why does anyone put in all that hard work, to start something from nothing, knowing that they could be shut down, or face punitive damages.

The short answer, I think, is T-shirts.

The longer answer is that the support and kind words that Mumsnet has been getting, from people like Emily and Pewari, is a huge validation of the service that Mumsnet have done, and continue to provide. Even if everything were to go belly up – and touch every piece of wood it doesn’t – it shows how much Mumsnet members value the site. It shows that it’s service that they think is worth holding on to. And it shows, above all, that all the hard work that Justine, Carrie, Rachel and the other members of the Mumsnet team, has helped people and not the reverse.

That’s why small websites should bother, and all credit to Mumsnet for having done so, and doing it so well.