Deconstructing and Advert

This full page advert for Standard Life SIPP Pensions appeared in the Sunday Times 1st Feb 09.

The text in the advertisement reads

"PEOPLE DON'T GROW OLD LIKE THEY USED TO"
"why should your money"

"Whether you dedicate your life to adventure, or just pack as much as possible into every single day, ............."

I have to confess that although I assumed the person in the advert was probably famous I did not recognise them immediately. They are obviously an outdoor type, with lean rugged features, stubbly beard, light coloured piercing eyes, wearing an anorak, age, from the look of the eyebrows (grey and wiry), about 55 to 60, probably the age group of the target customer. I later realised the subject was Ranaulph Fiennes.

The advert is one of three in the campaign. This one appeared on successive right hand pages with an almost identical advert which included an image (which I again did not recognise immediately) of Mariella Fostrop. The only difference between the adverts was a variation in the wording of the first sentence in the boiler plate copy:-

"Whether you dedicate your life to art and culture, or just make the most of every waking moment, ............."

The third personality is Marco Pierre White.

Analysis

To me the message in this advert is confused. The strap line poses a statement which is ambiguous.

Will the message be diminished if you don't recognise the person in the advert? Will it be enhanced if you do?

Why don't they name the celebrity?

Is the male character intended to appeal to males or females and vica versa?

Will investing your money with Standard Life be an adventure? In the current economic climate, probably!

Why choose three celebrities? Why choose these particular celebrities?

The Standard Life website suggests the target audience is over 44! The age of the celebrities are; Fiennes 65, Foster 50. White 50!

Not sure why this image is duplicated!

Critical Studies Essay December 08 - Reflections

Critical Studies Essay December 08
A belated reflection on the essay. At the time of writing I have not had my marks for the essay. I will have to reflect further on this post when I have.

The essay proved to be a marathon. Mainly due to my lack of initial planning. I quickly realised that in my panic to grab as much reference material as possible I became overloaded with information. Much of which I did not reference sufficiently well that I could go back to the source. Result was I lost focus, could not see the wood for the trees. I pulled myself together by reaffirming that although this was a research based essay, it was essentially a technical exercise and it was probably more important at this stage to get the structure and presentation right as come up with an earth shattering academic work. I am sure that is what Steve said!

I made the notes that in future I should stay more focussed, produce my thesis statement at an early stage, make sure my notes were clear and well referenced, make sure reading is relevant. Avoid being side tracked. Start the bibliography and reference collection from day one. I discovered a brilliant Word plug-in for collating citations, called Zotero.

As for the essay, I think my technical structure is OK but I am not so sure about the actual essay structure. I feel my conclusion may prove to be a major weakness, too short! Time will tell.

Just need to wait and see if my thoughts prove to be correct. Grade ? C+?????



Jackson Pollock at work - the main focus of my essay

13 photographs that changed the world

"Omaha Beach, Normandy, France" Robert Capa, 1944

This post may be a little late for some. I would assume that many of these images could have been the subject of the last essay assignment, for the photographers anyway.

The photographs are aggregated and commented on on Neatorama's blog.

Possibly the most interesting part of the post are the comments suggesting other images which could have been included.

How many more could you add to the list?

Zotero - Citation Organisation

Being of a lazy disposition I have been looking for ways to organise my growing list of references and bibliographies. I currently run Word XP, inevitably Microsoft do not have a means of organising citations in this ancient version. I believe there is an option in Word 2007, although it can not cope with Harvard (Author:Date) citations. I tried a third party option Documentit. Downloaded the Trial version and typed in some 20 bibliography citations. Only to discover that the trial version of Documentit will only allow you to download the first 3 citations in your list, bummer! Having just spent 30 mins typing all that in and not to be able to extract the info again is not amusing. Nowhere in the information regarding the trial version is this limitation mentioned. A cheap trick to make me cough up £14.99 for the full version, I think not, why can they not be upfront about the limitations?

Not to be thwarted, I discovered that I could auto transfer the first 3 citations in my the list into my Word document. Then deleted them from DocumentS*it and transferred again. Yes, it worked the next three citations were transferred and adinfinitum until I had copied over all my bibliography citations into a Word document for future use. Not a completely wasted effort but not quite what I was expecting.

What next, well another session with Google dug up an interesting extension for Firefox, Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] claims that it can "help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources" Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps to gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. Interestingly Zotero seems to be in dispute with the owners of Endnote a proprietary citation manager.

The easiest way to collect your bibliography is to find the book in question in Amazon click the Zotera icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window and Bingo the full citation is added to your library. I have since found a more useful location for Zotero friendly citations at Worldcat an aggregation site for over 10,000 libraries worldwide. The beauty of this site is you can find the details of out of print books.

Zotero integrates with Microsoft Word or Open Office via a plugin. This places icons in the Word toolbar. To add a citation to a document or essay, place the cursor at the point in the document where you want to add the citation, click add citation icon in the toolbar, the first time you will be asked for the format, choose Harvard, select your citation from the list and click add. The citation will be added thus - (Anfam 1998). at the same time Zotero adds the full citation at the end of the document as an alphabetical list. It has worked for me and saved loads of tedious typing.

Modernism - Greenberg - Discuss

The major obstacles to tackling this essay are the impenetrable prose and unnecessarily complex vocabulary. The armoury of the educated to defend their assumed intellectual superiority.

From my lowly standpoint it would appear to me that Greenberg is suggesting or rather stating that to legitimise or justify art we must criticise it but before we can do that we must understand what it is and what it is endeavouring to achieve.

He implies that the only medium capable of representing modernism is painting as painting is the only medium that can divorce itself from representation and what has gone before by virtue of its flatness; the essence of Modernism.

References:-
http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html (Accessed 20.10.08)
http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/mp_sum.html (Accessed 20.10.08)

Developing the Right Language

One of my grandmothers homilies was that she did not know she was poor because no one had told her! Critical Thinking is a bit the same for me. As a practical scientist, I have spent most of my life Critical Thinking but I did not know that because we called it analysis!

As I search and develop the right side of my brain through the pursuit of art the exposure to abstruse aspects of the subject are quite enlightening. One of the pleasures and frustrations of the endeavour is the discovery of a new language and of course the words that go with it. My inadequacies in this area are evident as I struggle with the lexicon of the subject. This inadequacy was brought home to me as I listened to a commentary by Sasha Cradock on one of the works (Flowing 2 by Marta Marcé) at the current John Moores exhibition, but I shall leave Sasha to another occasion.

One of the first reoccurring words to catch my eye was "epistemology". At first glance I read it as "episiotomy", must be something to do with my daughter just having given birth. As you may imagine the sentence did not make much sense until I reread it and realised my mistake.

After a lifetime immersed in the scientific language of microbiology, biochemistry, haematology and a load more ologies getting to grips with the language of art is not far off learning Norwegian and I have been trying to do that for 14 years with little success. So you can see I may be struggling with Critical Studies!

Definitions:-
Epistemology (from Greek - episteme, "knowledge") or theory of knowledge is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. The term was introduced into English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864).

Episiotomy is a surgical incision through the perineum made to enlarge the vagina and assist childbirth.