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Meet the dyslexic journalist; ‘If I write 1,000 words, 990 of them will be spelt wrongly, and when a spell-check gives me four likely options I’ve no idea which is the correct one’. web site online spell check

The Evening Standard (London, England) May 1, 2002 | Roberts, Alison Byline: ALISON ROBERTS His acerbic columns have made him a household name. Here, AA Gill talks for the first time about how he can barely read what he writes AA Gill chooses The Ivy for lunch.

Well he would, wouldn’t he?

London’s most acerbic restaurant critic has written a book about The Ivy, loves the food and the people, and knows the menu backwards – which may, indeed, be how it appears to him when he reads it.

Backwards, or upside down, or a swirl of random letters spelling Caesar salad in Swahili.

For a serious dyslexic, choosing to become a writer is surely an act of profound masochism, like a claustrophobic deciding he wants to be a lift attendant in a tiny Parisian hotel. Adrian Gill is what he calls “word blind” – a problem discovered when he was nine or 10, and the reason for near-total academic failure as a child. The obstacles to a successful writing career are almost comically legion: Gill spends an age reading a newspaper – a novel can take three weeks – and can’t remotely spell. He doesn’t recognise words like non-dyslexics do, with a beginning and an end, but muddles up the letters, inverting them and confusing their shape and sense. Even the vaguest concept of grammar defeats him.

“I couldn’t tell you what an adjective is,” he says startlingly, over steak tartare.

“Is it a doing word, or a describing word, or a naming word? People tell me over and over again, but it just refuses to go in.” Sometimes he finds it impossible to reread even his own word-processed copy – certainly, no one else can – and there’s no point using a spellchecker because “if I write 1,000 words, 990 of them will be spelt wrongly, and when a spell-check gives me four likely options I’ve no idea which is the correct one”.

Of all the grazers and guzzlers who flock nightly to London’s newest watering holes, Gill is by far the most exotic – today dressed in black shades, crisp, white shirt and more gold jewellery than Ali G. He goes out with The Blonde, aka former model Nicola Formby.

As well as those digressive restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times, he writes novels (two so far, both trashed by the critics to his apparent indifference), and lengthy travel pieces, 25 of which have been collected into a new book called “A A Gill is away”, the line that follows his column in the paper when he’s off on a foreign story.

“Please don’t call me a travel writer,” he asks sheepishly. “I hate travel writing.” What then? “Rather pathetically, I call myself a writer who travels.” The book’s dustjacket declares that Gill “interviews places”, which isn’t quite as pretentious as it sounds (though it’s a close-run thing), since his style relies heavily upon listening and observing and goes easy on the pre-travel research. He deals in highly subjective impressions, he says, rather than cold, hard facts and the less he knows about a place before he visits, the better the piece he’ll write.

“I try to go with no preconceptions at all, otherwise you lose the impact of foreignness. If I stopped feeling lost, I’d start to rub the story out.” THE fundamental question remains, though: how on earth does he actually write the stuff? His modus operandi is distinctly unconventional – Gill writes in his own sort of patois, as an “aide memoire”, without paragraph breaks, capital letters or any structural niceties at all. Then he reads his articles over the phone to copytakers or an editor – he tapes his novels for a typist – and treats this as the final editing process, realising as he reads that a sentence is too long or clumsy or generally verbose. “The closer you can make writing to speech the better, I think, so that it sounds like someone talking to you, telling you a story or an anecdote.” The copytakers or his editor will insert all the punctuation. “It’s like the worst sort of e e cummings. A bit more than stream-ofconsciousness stuff, but that sort of thing.” Gill’s parents were both arty, hippie-ish types – dad worked for the BBC, mum was an actress – who, upon identifying his dyslexia, sent little Adrian to the radical-hippie St Christopher’s in Hertfordshire, then an experiment in handing autonomy to kids and one of the few schools that recognised dyslexia as a genuine syndrome. “I still don’t know what it is they thought they did at that school, though, except call me stupid,” he says. “I was constantly told I was stupid, so there was this fantastic sapping of self-confidence.

IN the end I just checked out, and St Christopher’s was a good place for that. I got drunk a lot and took a lot of drugs.

I was a member of the awkward squad, always arguing, what my grandfather would call a barrack-room lawyer.” You don’t have to read quickly, or write legibly, to be an artist and art was a family tradition, so Adrian went to St Martins after St Christopher’s, and then to the Slade. This was the Seventies, punk was happening and art wasn’t – at least not for Gill. He spent his days instead acquiring a truly monumental drink and drugs habit, while his terrified parents looked on helplessly. go to web site online spell check

“But you can’t write and drink, or not write seriously in any case,” he says now, and despite the alcoholic heroes of his youth – Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Carver – wisely decided to ditch his addictions before permanent damage was done.

He cleaned himself up when he was 30. He is now nearing 50 and, because he rarely writes anything down and works Of all the grazers and guzzlers, he is the most exotic: AA Gill with The Blonde, Nicola Formby unburdened by notebooks, Gill lives in his head to a much greater degree than the average writer or journalist.

“I trust my memory more than most writers, which is probably to do with the dyslexia. I rely on it to do the editing process for me on a story, to clear away the non-important stuff.” So how does he read menus?

“Slowly. I read hugely, just very slowly. Having said that, my comprehension is very good. Because I read so slowly, I tend to get it all.” After lunch, Gill receives a coffee-course visitation from his statuesque literary agent Ed Victor, who happens to be dining at The Ivy too.

Now there’s a delicious conundrum: the writer who can’t write meets the agent who sells his novels in the restaurant about which he’s written a book.

Just don’t ask him to spell the word “ironic”.

Roberts, Alison

Questel*Orbit Launches PlusPat.(Brief Article)

Information Today November 1, 2000 Questel*Orbit Inc. has announced the introduction of PlusPat, a new product covering more than 30 million worldwide patent documents. PlusPat is available through both Questel*Orbit’s online and Internet services.

According to the announcement, PlusPat combines the European Patent Office’s (EPO) worldwide collection with U.S. and Japanese patent information, resulting in the only service to offer merged European and U.S. classification systems to worldwide patents as far back as the 1920s.

PlusPat also offers the following: go to web site new family search

* More than 30 million patent documents from 68 worldwide patenting authorities * More than 9 million English-language abstracts summarizing the inventions * The ability to perform detailed and extensive patent-family searches * The latest legal-status information * Classification indexing for patent retrieval of documents going back to the early 20th century “The well-known USPTO [United States Patent and Trademark Office], EPO, and International Patent classification systems are all provided in this file. In particular, the EPO classification allows users to conduct very accurate and comprehensive worldwide prior-art subject searches,” said David Dickens, director of patents business at Questel*Orbit and manager of the PlusPat project. “Along with more than 9 million English abstracts, the subject-searching capabilities in this file are absolutely unique. These features provide great value to technology researchers and to intellectual-property professionals.” PlusPat records combine all the publication stages for a patent/publication, from unexamined application to the examined application and the granted patent, including the publication stage descriptions. PlusPat also has formats that display a summary of the patent/publication, giving users a concise way to look at the information.

Another PlusPat feature is the availability of ECLA (European patent CLAssification) coding. The ECLA codes are based on the IPC (International Patent Classification) codes but are more specific, with over 80,000 additional subdivisions, and are updated monthly and retrospectively applied. in our site new family search

PlusPat’s patent-family search capability, including the legal status information and the family-equivalents data, allows a family command to be performed against a set of records. In addition to the existing family-results display, PlusPat merges all of the related family equivalents into one record. The new, family search and display command MFAM (Merged Family) is currently under development and will be available later this year.

All existing Questel*Orbit searching capabilities and display features are also available within PlusPat, including the following:

* Comprehensive data ranging * Standardized patent data * Family searching * Statistical analysis tools * Cross-file searching * Patent grouping and de-duplication * Legal and full-text display features

Co-employee had ‘supervisor’ status in creating hostile work environment. (Court Report).

HRMagazine July 1, 2003 | Peikes, Lawrence Mack v. Otis Elevator Co., 2d Cir., No. 02-7056. April 11. 2003.

Employers are legally liable for the harassment of employees by their supervisors, but who is considered a supervisor under Title VII? The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently said the answer doesn’t depend on an individual’s authority to take “tangible employment actions” but on whether the individual’s authority enables him to create a hostile work environment for subordinates. (For more on tangible employment actions, see “Constructive Discharge Is ‘Tangible Employment Action’ “on page 105.) The recent case involved Yasharay Mack, who worked as an elevator mechanic for Otis Elevator Co. and who filed a Title VII lawsuit claiming that the elevator “mechanic-in-charge” at her worksite subjected her to a hostile work environment.

Although the mechanic-in-charge was covered by the applicable collective bargaining agreement, he had the right to–and did-assign and schedule work, direct the workforce, ensure the quality and efficiency of assignments and enforce safety practices and procedures. go to web site hostile work environment site hostile work environment

But the trial court ruled that the elevator “mechanic-in-charge” was not a supervisor for the purposes of Title VII, so the company was not liable for his actions.

The 2nd Circuit reversed, ruling that the test used by the trial court to determine supervisory status was too restrictive. That test focused on whether the employee was empowered to take “tangible employment actions” with respect to subordinates.

A better test, the 2nd Circuit determined, is whether “the authority given by the employer to the employee enabled or materially augmented the ability of the employee to create a hostile work environment for his subordinates.” Applying that test, the court found the mechanic-in-charge to be the plaintiff’s supervisor for purposes of Title VII. Because he directed the particulars of Mack’s workdays, including her work assignments, and was the senior employee on the work site, he possessed a special dominance over on-site employees–especially since the workers’ location was remote and no one else nearby had authority to exercise power on Otis’s behalf.

RELATED ARTICLE: Professional Pointer This ruling provides yet another reason to train all employees regarding appropriate workplace behavior, including lead employees (especially those at remote locations) that you might not consider “supervisors” in the traditional sense.

LAWRENCE PEIKES IS AN ATTORNEY WITH THE LAW FIRM OF WIGGIN & DANA IN NEW HAVEN, CONN.

Peikes, Lawrence

I’m searching for changes from Google.(Features)

Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland) March 24, 2009 Byline: John McKie IT’S hard to remember how we ever managed to check facts before Google. So hard that I just logged on to Google to find out what we did. go to site google iphone app

Apparently, we used books.

Google is as much a part of modern life as over-the-top collective displays of grief, celebrity worship and speed cameras.

But it’s a lot more useful.

So now we have Google, Google Images, Google Video (especially once they bought YouTube) and Google Maps.

Google Maps is clearly an invaluable resource. Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, for instance, was last seen typing “opposition goal” into his laptop. (Computer says no.) Sadly, however, the folk behind Google have become drunk on power.

It has unveiled a Google Street View with addresses all over the UK in 25 British cities, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen.

This was OK when the site was showing panoramic views of the Sydney Opera House and the Coliseum in Rome.

But not when it’s showing discarded Twix wrappers outside my house.

Not when it shows blokes caught short in public, exiting Soho sex shops or smoking a fag outside “No Smoking” signs.

Not at a time when a UK Government with its ID card plans, stealth taxes and hidden cameras has close to zero regard for our civil liberties.

Good to see Google is blocking some of the views after public complaints. Tough to figure who benefits from this new Street View system other than Google.

iPhone owners too drunk to recall what their front doors look like that is, perhaps.

Or stalkers.

Any other browsers – not just Old Firm players whose houses have just been attacked – should be concerned about the power companies like Google and Facebook currently have. Google was started by two student dropouts in a Californian garage, and has gone a long way from that underground vibe. website google iphone app

Google Street View leaves a sour taste, as do the tiny YouTube royalty fees for musicians.

Next time your favourite band charges pounds 30, or even pounds 100, for a concert ticket, or you complain that record companies only sign groups made on telly talent shows, remember this may be part of the reason.

Over at Facebook, things aren’t much better after the worst makeover since Madonna bought her pink leotard.

Web giants, such as Google and Facebook, have to start listening to their customers.

That’s if they don’t want to end up as crazes in history which you look up on another search engine.