Through a mixture of lectures, live demonstrations and hands-on activities the students get taught and shown wide ranging areas of science; from the fundamentals of electricity and light in weeks one and two, to debates on climate change and health issues with mobile phone use.

For more information, you can check out the Protons for Breakfast section on the NPL site, or read the official Protons for Breakfast blog.

See some of the goings on from the past couple of weeks below;

Electrification with a Van de Graaff generator during Week 1

Week 2 saw the students exploring the wonders of light

Listening to a talk on optical illusions and light from week 2.

Events selling photographer tickets do seem very, very rare – but something which I’ve thought about for quite some time; why some events don’t sell tickets for photographers (even at a premium if they must) is beyond me – after all, the organisers normally always are in favour of us and love the free publicity we photographers provide – maybe they can learn a thing or too from the London Fashion Weekend event!

So, without further a do, below are are a few highlights of the shots I took while I was there of the models showcasing outfits from a whole range of designers, including Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran and more.

As always you can also see more in the photography section.

Outfit by Betty Jackson

From the Swallows & Amazons range

Mecia Simson, winner of Britain’s Next Top Model 2009, showing off another outfit from Betty Jackon’s collection

From the Candy Rock range

Click here to view more

However, even with the luck with the weather, there was just too many people and too few things going on for the day to be a great success, nevertheless however, below are a few photos and a video of the fireworks which ended the day.

All weekend, visitors to the event had the chance to phone in and vote for their favourite, however, there could only be one winner; who was Georgia Graham pictured below shortly after being crowned Babe of the Year 2010;

When asked what it would mean to win; Georgia, 20, from Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland said; “I was bullied as school for being ugly, so I want to prove the bullies wrong by winning”. See the rest of the post for more photos of the winner and runners-up.

Georgia Graham

Runner-up Emma Watts from Leicestershire

Georgia Graham on a bike after being crowned Babe of the Year 2010

Runners-up Emma Watts from Leicestershire, and Hayley Sams from Bedforshire

Winner; Georgia Graham

With so much of our time and lives spent online these days using sites such as Facebook, Twitter & Flickr for example, you do sometimes wonder what would ever happen to all your data if one of these services suddenly dropped off the face of the earth? Granted, its highly unlikely that they would, or that they would lose all your data – but for that one in a billion chance there is a solution!

Backupify (www.backupify.com) is a service which I came across about a month ago which offers to backup all of your online data from a whole variety of online services with little to no effort from us. After setting up the initial options and account settings, it will happily do it’s thing every day while you sit back and forget about it. I’m currently using the service to backup my Twitter, Flickr and this very Wordpress blog – I could setup more, but just havn’t yet.

And what’s more, if you sign up by February 15th 2010 – you can take advantage of their current offer and get a premium account for free, so it’s worth joining even simply to check it out and decide if its the right thing for you, especially as it’s currently free!

Taken in Hampton Court Palace Gardens – View Large
1/200 sec at f4.5, ISO 100

Annotations

Perhaps the biggest update I’ve noticed; you can now annotate graphs in Google Analytics so you can note anything which may have happened at that time, such as website downtime which could have affected your stats – so in 6 months time when you go back to look at your stats, you can be reminded of why there is a blip the graph.

Simply click on a date on the graph, and a pop-up box appears where you can now Create a new annotation. Couldn’t  be simpler!

This could be very useful for people who often analyise old statistics, and what’s even better – you can make the annotations private, or if you are on a shared account (for example for work purposes), you can share the annotation with everyone else who has an account so all your collegues can also see the information.

Asynchronous Tracking

A new method of tracking stats on your site has also been released which optimises how your browser loads the Google ga.js file, minimising any negative impact on user experience and allowing you to have the tracking code higher on your webpage.

More info can be found over at Google about this one and how to implement it here

Mobile Visitors

Secondly, under ‘Visitors’, Google have now seperated out the stats of visitors who use mobile devices. Quite handy if you want to analyise mobile visitors on their own without other browsers affecting the results.

Network Location

Last but not least, a very minor tweak but deserves a mention – a couple weeks ago the ‘Network Location’ section (which I seem to alway use!) was renamed ‘Service Providers’ – nothing more than just a name change!

The other day I recieved Dane Sander’s book “Fast Track Photographer” for free through the post after winning it in a twitter contest where he was giving away 500 copies. Who is Dane Sanders I here you ask? Well he’s a professional wedding photographer living in Southern California who is also a regular speaker for Adobe and Pictage as well as having been featured in many professional photography magazines.

The excerpt for the book states;

“Fast Track Photographer gives you powerful tools for discovering your core strengths and a foolproof plan for maximizing them in the flat new world we live in. If you want to build a recession-proof, competition proof photo business in the 21st Century, you need to throw out the old rule book. You need to get on the Fast Track.”

Even though I am not a wedding photographer, and have never taken any photos at one, I still look forward to reading the book as I can hopefully apply what it discusses to other situations.

If you want to find out more about Dane Sanders you can visit his site, or follow him on twitter here.

Check out some of the photos which I took below;

What’s a KTN I hear you say? Well, they are government funded networks (there’s quite a few of them!), where groups of industry professionals can get together to discuss and share knowledge and keep up to date on what everyone’s doing, and what’s happening within their profession.

Anyway!, to put a stop to there being no single repository of their Twitter activities I’ve set up a Twitter list to do bring them all together - now you can find and follow to all the KTN’s at once by heading over to my Twitter list here: http://twitter.com/lloydengland/ktns

If you know of any other KTN’s which arn’t on my list, please do let me know.

*Note – This is not an official list by any means, and was solely created by me to benefit others with no involvement from any official party.