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I’m writing on behalf of the RSPCA, raising awareness of its urgent campaign to protect the welfare of UK meat chickens.

Right now, the government is considering new EU legislation that may increase the number of chickens allowed in rearing sheds. Even at current minimum standards, each bird is given less space than a sheet of A4. It’s hard to walk or even flap their wings. But this legislation would allow yet more birds to be squashed in, cutting that space by almost a quarter.

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sourced by bethgranter

The RSPCA are asking people to petition Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for Animal welfare, to make the right choice for UK chickens and quash the squash, by sending an email via the Quash the Squash website. Mr Fitzpatrick’s decision is imminent and we want 15,000 letters to be sent before he makes his decision.

The RSPCA have also created a short film called Irritating Chicken to highlight the plight of broiler (meat) chickens’ if EU legislation on living conditions is brought into force in the UK. The purpose of the stunt was to invade people’s personal space to make them feel what is like being squashed into a chicken shed.

If anyone wonders what people in their 60s do online, here’s my folk’s online activity:

Last week my Dad joined Facebook. My Mum has been on Facebook for around a year. Now when you’re new to Facebook, you get a progress bar to encourage you to come back and do more:

• Dad does social bookmarking, once Furl now Diigo, as well as being an active member of MyLibraryThing. I tried to get him to use del.icio.us but I think he’s sticking to Diigo.
• My mum uses MSN but my Dad doesn’t. If I don’t respond immediately she thinks I’m ignoring her.
• My Dad is a Flickr Pro but my Mum isn’t. I bought him his first Flickr pro account because he was getting into photography and I was sick of getting huge images filling up my inbox all the time! Dad uploads photos that Mum takes too.
• My Mum started a blog recently, about living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an Aspergic husband, and politics.
• My Dad prefers to microblog on Twitter, is on Last.FM and uses Spotify.

There must be something to the fact that each of them has favoured such different social channels through which to connect. Not sure how much is to do with gender and how much to do with their individual personalities, but Mum’s seem much more to do with communication (Facebook, blogging and MSN) whereas Dad’s seem more hobby specific and functional (Flickr, Diigo, MyLibraryThing, Last.FM).

When I was doing my MA dissertation on curating new media art, I saw some videos of projects like this, where people remotely control an actor and watch them perform whatever instructions are given via video link. The organiser of this upcoming interactive physical space / digital / mobile art project is looking for people to get involved – see the post below (from Rhizome). If I had more time I’d certainly be interested in having a go at this, probably more as the person playing the game (like playing God) rather than being the actor!

TEST RABBIT WANTED!
Some fun for a volunteer helping to run public tests of FLIRTMAN in U.K. this summer

CONCEPT:
A free game for mobile phones, which turns people into social viruses with unpredictable behavior. The computer game taken out of the box and placed back into the reality. A hired actor equipped with a hidden mobile phone is walking around and anybody can control him by mobile phone using it as remote control. People can control his movement and send him simple commands, like kneel down, hug, kiss etc… When the actor hears these commands, he has to do them, but still act natural. You can imagine how it affects social games…

It similar to these works
Project website (in progress)

WHAT IS REQUIRED:
A volunteer actor – to be controlled remotely (kind of “live avatar”), approximately 2 hours. A “hidden theatre” experience.
Needed skills: brave heart, a bit social behavior.

REWARD:
30 per session (approximately 2 hours) (I assume that’s £ pounds)

WHEN:
Glasgow: 15.8. / afternoon and/or evening
Edinburgh: 16.8, 17.8. / afternoon and/or evening
London: 19.8., 20.8., 21.8., / afternoon and/or evening
Manchester: 22.8. / afternoon

CONTACT:
Test rabbits can contact Petr Svarovsky via email: petrsvar@khio.no or SMS: +47 928 13 858

[vimeo 1618417]

I was going to describe the new text based MMORPG, ‘Spymaster‘ which has just hit Twitter, but then I realised this article said pretty much all I was going to say. Except… people have already started hating it (e.g. The Guardian’s Technology correspondent Charles Arthur – that got a few RT (re-tweets). Because the default settings make it so that everything you do on the game sends out a tweet to your stream, your stream is gonna get clogged with #spymaster tweets and nothing else, annoy all your followers etc., pretty quickly unless you change them to be minimal/non-existent.  However, right now, lots of people are pretty excited about what appears to be a standard, traditional text based game – mainly because of its clever integration with the Twitter API.  I predict there will be a big hoo-ha over the next few days, some people will be loving spymaster, some will be hating it, it is going to be big, it is incredibly viral, and I think it will end up being quickly shunned by the Twitter community.

But in the meantime… I’m gonna be playing it. On Team Russia of course!

Whose side are you on?

p.s. if you want a spymaster invite, you don’t actually need one, you can just sign in with your Twitter username and password. I did and it worked. Also, it’s weird, when you send an invite to someone, they get a DM with the spymaster website address, but no invite code or anything, so it’s not even doing anything that clever in that instance.