It will be especially interesting watching how fans and opponents attempt to ‘frame’ the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, and indeed each other. My Indy piece a few weeks ago looked at the dynamics of framing in the UK election context: A classic framing ploy is the Dead Cat Denial. You […]
Here is a good example (video plus text) of how to deliver a speech using consecutive interpreting: short, sharp sentences. This rather diminishes the sense of the flow of the argument, but it (crucially) keeps up the sense of conversation with the audience. See Speechwriting for Leaders where I explain this […]
Here is a brisk piece by Tim Harford on Causation and Cigarettes, where he looks at how Big Data help (helps?) us see patterns that were not obvious before or confirm our previously unproved hypotheses: We cannot rely on correlation alone, then. But insisting on absolute proof of causation is […]
Some people have concluded that my thoughts on the Sturgeon Memo as previously posted were amiss – see the Comments. Am I accusing key people of lying? No. This first: “It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish […]
Shock! Conspiracy! An official British memo has leaked to the Daily Telegraph giving the uncontroversial opinion that ‘Ed Miliband is not PM material’. The author of this memo is not yet a matter of public record, although no doubt the FOI requests are flooding in, and will be answered after […]
Back in 2010 when I was young and optimistic and had more time than nowadays, I poured out work for a website called Business and Politics. That site has vanished, as sites do. So my work is no longer accessible. But some of the pieces are still a jolly romp […]
I have emerged from my various Public Speaking sessions with different United Nations colleagues, Only to be plunged into a new venture: an online course on Diplomatic Protocol and Etiquette. Today’s principles of diplomatic protocol including the idea of diplomatic immunity itself trace back over 2000 years. The core principle […]
This afternoon I finished my first online course for the United Nations on the general theme of drafting talking-points and speechwriting. Running any course through successive webinars poses interesting new challenges. Above all, how to get the participants to do something useful between sessions and during the sessions. In this […]
After all the tomfoolery getting this iMac 5K Retina delivered, it did finally arrive. And what a device it is. Talk about minimalism. The computing power is built into the screen. Yet the screen at the edge is about the thickness of the pencil. You lift it from its box. You plug […]
So, in the past two weeks I have spent a week in chilly Kazakhstan (Astana) where the road-signs are rather difficult to fathom. Does this mean that public drinking while ten-pin bowling and carrying a primitive smartphone is banned? If it isn’t, it should be. In Astana I gave two […]
