Archive for January, 2014
A new addition to my collection of motivational stories
January 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I like to collect little stories that make you think. I’ve put them all on a page of my web site which is one of the most popular of the whole site. I’ve just added the 58th. It’s titled “The last ride” and you can read it here.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
My interview in “Utility Week” on my role in the water sector
January 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Last month, I did a blog posting about the report I had drafted for the water regulator Ofwat on the business plan for 2015-2020 of the regional water company South East Water . This work was done in my capacity as the independent chair of the Customer Challenge Group of South East Water. The magazine for the energy and […]
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
The varying use of first and family names in different countries and cultures
January 20th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
What first started as simply an exchange of e-mails between a close Chinese friend and me has become an extensive essay on my web site exploring how the naming of children around the world is so varied. You can check it out here. Most of the essay is about first names, but I also have […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
The world’s 85 richest are worth as much as the 3.5 billion poorest
January 20th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population, worldwide development organisation Oxfam warns in a report published today. “Working For the Few”, published ahead of this week’s World Economic […]
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A review of the stunning film “12 Years A Slave”
January 19th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
You can read my assessment of the movie here.
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Do you really want to be happy? (3)
January 19th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Earlier this week, I attended a packed-out seminar at the London School of Economics” entitled “Measuring Happiness?” which was addressed by four experts on this subject. The third speaker was Paul Dolan who is a professor of behavioural science at the LSE. He told the story of a friend who criticised so many specific aspects of her […]
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Do you really want to be happy? (2)
January 18th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Earlier this week, I attended a packed-out seminar at the London School of Economics” entitled “Measuring Happiness?” which was addressed by four experts on this subject. The second speaker was Anthony Oswald who is professor of economics at Warwick University. In a fascinating 10 minutes with lots of slides, some of the points he made were: Simon […]
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Do you really want to be happy? (1)
January 17th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have always been interested in happiness. I think it is ‘a good thing’ – and I would like to see more of it, at both the individual and the societal level. A few years ago, I read a fascinating book on the subject, called simply “Happiness” [see my review here], and one of the […]
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The real battle is within Islam rather than between Islam and other faiths
January 16th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I recently had dinner with a friend who had just returned from a holiday in Tunisia and we were debating the role of islam in the modern world. My friend felt that Islam is a forcefully proselytising religion and that its fundamentalist adherents want not just an Islamic caliphate but an Islamic world. He feared that, […]
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A review of the film “Righteous Kill”
January 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have only been in the same film on three occasions. “Righteous Kill” was the third one and is reviewed here.
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