If you are an author, one of the mixed joys and horrors of your life is the royalty statement. The joy part is that this could be a piece of paper telling you that you have earned some money. The horror is two-fold. Sometimes instead, the royalty statement tells you the reverse. Because books are sent out to stores sale or return, it is entirely possible in a six month accounting period to have negative sales when returns outweigh outgoings. This is highly dispiriting the first time it happens. But the other horrific aspect is that royalty statements often suffer from byzantine complexity. And this means it is very easy for the publisher to make mistakes. This is not malicious - it is just that as an author you are one of many and there is only a limited amount of effort they can put into getting it right. Because of this, I recommend that all authors check their royalty statements with a fine tooth comb. If you have an agent you may feel 'It's okay, I don't need to do th...

As someone who is passionate about science communication, I am all in favour of any means that can get information about science out to the general public. Scientists often criticize science journalists for being too simplistic, but I can testify to the ease with which an over-simplified explanation slips out when you are in a radio studio, being interviewed by a jolly breakfast DJ who hasn't a clue about science and, to be honest, hasn't much interest. It is natural to highlight the sexy aspects of the science and inevitably to distort the picture. The same temptation occurs when writing about science, but at least then there is the opportunity to take a step back and think about what it is that you are saying. However there is always a difficult balance to be made between making a subject approachable and capturing the science accurately. There is another sin of science communication, though, which strangely scientists are just as prone to as science writers - and that is...

To celebrate my newest book Extra Sensory 's arrival I am arranging a little giveaway with a 1 in 4 chance of winning. We'd all love to have 'psi' abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and remote viewing. But is there any solid evidence to back up these talents, or are they nothing more than fantasy? That's what Extra Sensory is about. We still only understand a small percentage of the capabilities of the human brain—and we shouldn’t dismiss such potential powers out of hand. Although there is no doubt that many who claim these abilities are frauds, and no one has yet won James Randi’s $1M prize for demonstrating ESP under lab conditions, we still have a Nobel prize winner suggesting a mechanism for telepathy, serious scientists researching the field and university projects that produced potentially explosive results. What’s the verdict? By looking at possible physical mechanisms for ESP and taking in the best scientific evidence, the reader can discover ...

Me as a student being very careful with a vinyl record (this was just before I bought my decent deck & amplifier) When I was a student I took my music reproduction seriously. While I couldn't afford top of the range equipment, I did eventually save up money from my holiday job to buy a nice record deck, and treated my vinyl collection like they were made of, well, vinyl. (You had to if you didn't want clicks, pops and bangs as you played them - remember that, folks.) When CDs came along I heaved a sigh of relief. No more dust removal and clicks and pops. No more delicate handling. Clean, digital sound wherever and whenever I wanted. Now I'm somewhat older and probably wiser I really don't give a monkey's about the quality of my sound system. When I was student I used to sit down and listen to music in a chair carefully positioned to get the best stereo placement. Now, to be honest, I don't sit and listen to music as a sole activity anymore. Ever. I ...

It being a public (bank) holiday here in the UK I am having a lazy day and simply referring you to my piece in yesterday's Observer newspaper on lightning . Enjoy!

PCs and I go back a long way. My second PC at work, for instance, was IBM's AT model, of which I was privileged to have the second one that IBM imported into the UK (at least that's what they told me - they probably said that to all their customers). And it was a huge improvement on my previous XT, doubling the hard disk* space at a stroke to 20 Mb. I tell you this, not so you can snigger at granddad, but to emphasise how things have moved on. In the early 1990s there was a huge business in software that automatically compressed files on your hard disk so you didn't run out of space. It slowed the computer down, but the introduction of music and photos was jamming up disk space terribly. But then something changed. Disks got really big. For my last few computers I've had more disk space that I knew what to do with. Let's take a look at what my computer has on offer and what I've used: ... and that is keeping every email I send, every important one I recei...

One of the joys of being a green heretic (TM) is that you are able to talk about the bits of ecological theory that traditionally aren't talked about. Because in most environmental issues there are topics that are considered off-limits, either because they result in bad publicity or are considered politically incorrect. Yesterday a small one of these reared its head on our local radio show. The excellent host Mark O'Donnell was talking about the recent report showing a major decline in some wild species in the UK. I pointed out that one way to improve things was to get rid of cats, as they kill at least 50 million wild birds a year. I was expecting a deluge of complaint from cat-lovers, but even when Mark expanded this to point out that over 300 million wild birds and mammals killed by cats each year, most of the response was in support of reducing the cat population. But despite his personal support, it was also interesting that Mark treated the cat aspect as a humorous a...

Like most people from the North West of England, I might grumble about the people of the North East, especially those from Yorkshire, but also have a grudging respect for them. However there is one subject that totally divides North East from North West. And that is mints. Each of these great regions has a mint product they are deeply proud of. For us in the North West it is Uncle Joe's Mintballs . For the North East it is Black Bullets . Each comes proudly in a tin. Each is really rather a similar product (though slightly strangely, Black Bullets are more, erm, ball-shaped than Mintballs). They are brown, hard sweets with a strong mint flavour. I've never done a comparative taste test, but my suspicion is that they are very similar. Of course, Uncle Joe's are more sophisticated - they come in wrappers, where the Geordie equivalent is naked - but to be honest the sweet itself is much the same. I have to grudgingly admit that having discovered they can be bought from ...

Although I don't write business books much these days, I am still passionate about creativity and customer service in business, and I thought it would be useful to occasionally throw in something from my customer service book, Capturing Customers' Hearts . I've called this 'top twelve tips' but really it's more the twelve aspects of customer service you need to focus on if you want your business to have charisma - to actually appeal to customers, rather than be somewhere they go because there's no other choice. 1. Going the extra light year In a way, this first component pulls all the others together. It’s an attractive trait if someone goes out of their way to help you. Equally it’s attractive if a company goes that extra mile. But for true charisma, to stand out like a beacon, you have to do more – to go the extra light year, the first component of capturing customers' hearts. 2. If it’s broke, fix it We all get it wrong sometimes....

This is one for the Mac users amongst you (or those with secret Mac cravings) - I have fallen in love with a little app called L iquid . One of the biggest surprise when you come into the Mac world from the outside is how obsessed the heavy-duty Maccers are with doing things with keyboard shortcuts. Given that the Mac popularised the mouse, it's rather amusing that Macfans just love to do as much as possible without ever taking their hands off the keyboard. Now this works quite well for me - in Windows, I always used to cut and paste using keystrokes, for instance. But when it comes to the Mac much more seems frequently done this way, and there are plenty of helper apps like Alfred to extend the possibilities. Liquid is a productivity tool for people who often look things up - ideal for a writer. Let's say I'm writing about Jupiter and wanted to check a fact in Wikipedia (yes, it is possible to do this - the science coverage is usually very good). I've just typed Ju...

If you have a Kindle (or a device you can read a Kindle book on like an iPad, or Android tablet, or smartphone or PC or Mac... you get the picture) today is a momentous day as between now and 21 May, to celebrate the Cromer and Sheringham Crab and Lobster Fest (I kid you not), my friend Henry Gee 's dark and gothic crime mystery By the Sea is free! (Check it out at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com .) It's worth writing this post just to tell you this. I mean, it has a creepy museum with a preserved mermaid! However I did have a larger point. I will be rushing to download a copy to my iPad... and yet I have already bought the real, paper version. Why would I do this? I think it represents a fundamental shift. My life is getting cloudy. It's not that I'm abandoning paper books, but if I can have a book available in e-format as well, I will - because then if I want to look at it and I'm not at home I can do it, just like that. My library is heading cloudward. The s...

History is not unlike science, an observation made by Richard Carrier, the author of Proving History - and when you think about it, this idea makes a lot of sense. They both involve weighing up evidence, testing hypotheses and drawing up conclusions. In fact arguably cosmology is, in effect history rather than science, as it involves looking into the past and it is rarely possible to subject it to experiment or repeat it to see what happens. That being the case, to do history properly, historians really ought to be using some of the tools available to scientists, but that they tend to ignore, in part because history has been around longer, but primarily, I suspect, because most historians have neither the training nor the inclination to dip their toes into mathematics. But the message of Proving History, written by a historian, is 'Come on in, guys, the water is lovely!' Carrier doesn't mention it, but there is a precedent here. Until recently biologists were basically n...

There's nothing easier than attacking the media for misusing statistics - but I am puzzled at the moment by a major story in which the news media are avoiding statistics altogether. This may be an even worse reality, because the misuse of statistics is usually accidental, where this suppression may be deliberate. Yesterday's news was full of the outcome of the Oxford trial where seven men were found guilty of grooming and abusing young girls in a terrible fashion. It is notable that the BBC report says nothing about whether the culture of the seven might have influenced this behaviour, not even in a piece headlined ' Who were the abusers ?' Last night, though, Channel 4 News bit the bullet that most are dancing around and asked if race, religion or culture could have had an influence. Here Jon Snow asks the Deputy Children's Commissioner the straight question (and this is why I love Channel 4 News ) 'Is it race?' Here's the interview: She responds...

The world is traditionally divided into those who see a glass half full and those who think it's half empty. The optimists and the pessimists. Those who see opportunities and those who see problems. You get the picture. And I think nothing brings this out more than the widely talked about Google Glass product, in development at the moment. In case you have just emerged from a year in a cave, this is a wearable computer interface that is like (and can be incorporated into) a pair of glasses and features a display, camera, speaker and microphone. The Glass half full picture is that this is the sensible and wonderful extension of what you can do with a mobile phone. At the moment, when I'm walking about I will quite often ask Siri something on my phone (say to look something up, add something to my diary or reminders, or send a text), or will use maps on the phone to guide myself while walking. Similarly if I want to snap a photo or take some video I just whip out my phone an...

I saw the new Star Trek movie at the weekend. I really like the new version of the franchise - as a fan of both the original series and STTNG, I think they have really done well in capturing the feel of Star Trek. And, boy, did they load in the references in this one, from a tribble to the lovingly crafted inversion of Star Trek II. However, most Star Trek movies have had fatal plot flaws. One of the STTNG movies, for instance, had the saucer section crash landing on a planet - no power, yet somehow a) it stayed in one piece and b) the crew weren't killed. They were however, as usual, thrown all over the bridge - so nice to see in the new movie the deployment of seat belts. Clunk, click, Spock! In Into Darkness there was unfortunately also a significant plot point that just didn't make sense. [SPOILER ALERT, but I won't give too much away] Towards the end, our heroes are desperate to get hold of Benedict Cumberbatch's character (a great, surprise reveal, by the w...

Over the years there have been a number of those irritating photo messages that get repeatedly shared on Facebook showing just how different the hamburgers McDonalds shows in its advertising look from the actual burger bought in a store. In the comparison photos the one in the advert is plump with all sorts of good things visible - the real one is saggy and usually just displays a bit of meat and an ooze of cheese. Generally speaking, the McDonalds response to this has been to ignore it - the usual corporate approach to bad publicity, but some while ago the Canadian branch of McD's decided to address the matter face on. I think this was a bold and actually very sensible thing to do from a PR standpoint. Once you get over the fact that the burger in the photo is not made in a restaurant, but in a studio (using the standard ingredients) the difference in appearance does make a kind of sense. Yes, the bits and pieces are carefully arranged to stick out of the bun, which is plumper t...

Last week I gave a talk at the University of Bath and afterwards was invited to supper. I don't know about you, but generally speaking, I don't do supper. The word is not part of my everyday vocabulary. Of course, being a northerner*, when I was young we used to have dinner as a midday meal and tea in the early evening - but these days it's more likely to be either lunch and tea or lunch and dinner. (The distinction between tea and dinner being primarily timing and/or where you have it. Tea is earlier than dinner, and you have tea in a tea room/the Ritz, but if you go out to a restaurant it is dinner.) So what is this 'supper' thing? I think the origins were when some households had a quite substantial afternoon tea - 'high tea' - sandwiches and cakes, for instance - and then topped up in the evening with a light meal, perhaps a bowl of soup. But then we come across something like Colley's Supper Rooms, where 'Supper' appears to be a seven co...

In my book Capturing Customers' Hearts   I emphasize how important recovery is. It's not good enough to give excellent day-to-day customer service, when things go wrong (and sometimes they will) you have to be able to recover from the problem in a way that leaves the customer thinking you are brilliant. And it's entirely possible to do so if you go about it the right way. I've just had a great example of how not to do it at Asda. Asda (the UK Walmart) is generally on top of its day-to-day service standards. Its staff are amongst the most helpful in any UK supermarket. However they clearly haven't been trained to cope with things going wrong and to make the most of the situation. This became clear when at approximately 13.22 yesterday their EPOS system went down in our local superstore. Every single till, human-operated and automatic, stopped working. First failing: it took too long to get announcements out about what was happening. And they ought to have got a...

I have just finished watching the new Netflix originated series, Hemlock Grove . As I had really enjoyed their previous (and first) attempt at a home-grown series, House of Cards , I was looking forward to HG . Admittedly it is a horror show, and I am rather averse to gross horror (though clever, funny horror makes Buffy my favourite TV show ever), but I was willing to make allowances. By about half way through the 13 episodes I thought that watching was a good move. The show was genuinely mystifying, very atmospheric and though leisurely in the extreme, there was enough complexity in the plot to keep the viewer interested - plus some genuinely intriguing characters. Ok, some aspects (Shelley's appearance, particularly) were trying too hard to be weird, but that was forgivable. But then I watched the last two episodes and it all fell apart. Entirely. [ALERT - Spoilers coming.] There was a lot left hanging for the next season. Well you expect that from a US series - they lov...

This won't replace an iPad The whole history of computing is littered with people making wildly inaccurate predictions. Famously Thomas J. Watson, Mr Big in the early days of IBM, believed that there was only a worldwide market for about five electronic computers. If we ignore things like washing machines, but include smartphones, games consoles and PVRs, we must have around three times that in our house alone. Even so, you would think by now that some computing bigwigs would learn their lesson. But no. The head honcho of struggling mobile manufacturer BlackBerry, Thorsten Heins has announced that tablet computers - iPads and Kindle Fires and all those other Android equivalents - will be dead within five years. A flash in the pan. A short term craze that will go the way of hula hoops (the toy, not the crisp) and clackers. Apparently Thorsten said 'In five years, I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore... Maybe a big screen in your workplace,...

There was a time when any rich landowner worth his salt would build himself a folly, a bit of architectural madness designed to improve the view from his house or garden. Some of them are absolutely stunning - a fake castle built on the hills above or a bizarre three-sided tower looming at the edge of the grounds. The are all about appearance. They don't do anything apart from sit there and look wonderful. But this doesn't detract from their value. I would say that a book I've been sent for review recently is the literary equivalent of one of those follies. It is magnificent, if practically hollow. The Resurrectionist is the first book by E. B. Hudspeth. It is a book of two parts. The first is the fictional biography of a late Victorian medical man, who starts as someone with a brilliant reputation as a surgeon helping to repair deformities. But over time he comes to believe that birth defects hark back to earlier forms of life now lost, forms that we retain in folk mem...

Science festivals are great. A brilliant opportunity to hear about exciting science with similar minded people - which is another way of saying fellow geeks. (Don't worry about this, by the way. Ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer it has been okay to be a geek. Embrace your inner geek.) The only thing is they tend to be rather pompous, formal affairs in venues that would otherwise be used for events like weddings (think marquees and town halls) or for dull university lectures. However there's a shiny new festivalette that is putting the science in possibly the best conceivable place - the pub. It's called 'Pint of Science' and the organizers proudly say 'We are bringing science out of labs, seminars, lecture halls or classrooms to a place where everyone feels comfortable voicing their opinion over a pint.' Another innovation is that it is on in three venues simultaneously: London, Cambridge and Oxford and in total there are 75 speakers and 15 pubs inv...