Oxford restaurant Porters, which features in chef Raymond Blanc’s new reality TV show ‘The Restaurant’, has closed.

The show sees nine couples take an empty restaurant and try to turn it into a successful business. The winners will be able to run their own restaurant financed and supported by Blanc.

Porters was already ailing in April, when the BBC took over for a week’s filming. A subsequent refurbishment failed to keep the business afloat long enough to benefit from any publicity off the back of the show.

Owners Jonathan Flint and Sara Reevell blamed soaring rents and the increasing presence of big chains. University College, the landlords, refused to confirm an extension of the lease.

Speaking to the Oxford Mail, Flint said: “When all that the landlords are interested in is how much they can get out of a property, then the only players will be the chain groups.”

Flint went on to suggest Oxford is “losing its character.” “Look at Cowley Road – the local shops can't afford it,” he said.

The Restaurant starts this Wednesday, 8pm on BBC2.

A motorist has admitted to travelling at 172mph on a road in Oxfordshire – the fastest speeding incident of its kind recorded in Britain. 

Timothy Brady, of Harrow, North West London, achieved the speed in a Porsche 911 Turbo as he travelled along the A420 near Abingdon in January this year.

Caught by a routine police speed check, Brady admitted in Oxford Crown Court to one count of dangerous driving. He pleaded not guilty to one count of aggravated vehicle taking.

Brady’s is not the only recent driving incident to attract attention. Earlier this month, the Marquess of Blandford, whose ancestral home is Blenheim Palace, appeared in Oxford Crown Court on a string of motoring charges.

In one incident, the Marquess tailgated drivers at high speed, before blocking traffic and directing a ‘tirade of abuse’ at an innocent driver. 

The Marquess pleaded guilty to criminal damage and dangerous and careless driving on two occasions, and a separate charge of dangerous driving.

Both defendants are due to be sentenced next month.

Jenny Lewis performs one of her poems for Cherwell24 at the Oxford Literary Festival 2007.

Oxford has beaten Cambridge to the top spot in the Times Good University Guide for the sixth year running, reports The Times Online.Cambridge came in second place, but the gap between the two universities is the smallest it has been since 1993. According to John O'Leary, editor of the guide, Oxford were able to edge ahead because of bigger budgets for library and computing facilities, and a greater number of students graduating with at least a 2:1 degree.
There was good news across the town as well as Oxford Brookes University broke into the top 50, ranking 49th. For graduate employment rates, it ranks 26th overall, placing it ahead of many top university competitors such as Exeter, Manchester, Reading and York.The annually published Times Good University Guide was released today, giving prospective students the opportunity to see where their universities strengths and weaknesses lie.

Hello! Over the past few days, you might have noticed that the site has been offline. This is because we are currently moving the archived articles from our old-style website to our new C24 site. We're not finished yet; this will be an ongoing process which will continue for the next few weeks, but before term begins again, you will find a comprehensive Cherwell website up and running. For the moment, we apologise for the interruption to the normal order of things. We'll keep you up to date with our progress. Throughout the summer, Cherwell24 hasn't stopped. We've been continuing to bring you all of the latest updates on what's going on in Oxford, covering major stories from the facebook scandal to the floods. Over the coming months we will continue to feed you information on what's happening, you will see more bloggers appear, more features, more pictures, more videos and more updates.For any prospective freshers taking a look at the Cherwell24 site, good luck with the A-Level results you'll be receiving later on today and we hope you receive the news you want.On the run up to term, we'll be posting more details on how to get involved in Cherwell this next term. Cherwell24 – the online version of the newspaper – will be looking for writers, contributors, photographers and film team to name a few, so keep checking back. We'll be at the freshers' fair and will be organising some events of our own, but if you are thinking ahead and want to get in contact, we'd love to hear from you. To ask any questions, sign up to the website and leave a comment below, or alternatively send an e-mail to [email protected] with "C24 Michaelmas Term" as the subject and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.All the best,Fiona and LeahC24 Editors

Cappuccino is back in business with my sincere apologies for the long hiatus. As you can see, I’ve been busy posting elsewhere in cyberland, and sometimes even tabbed browser windows aren’t enough to help me keep track of multiple online personae. One day, according to Aili McConnon at BusinessWeek, my online lives will link into one another and I can manage them all at once. That day could not come soon enough.  

That said, other parts of Web 2.0 progress have moved so fast while this blog’s been off duty that I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps with a news update:  

1. Oxford University took a real killing in the press for using Facebook to go after student parties. I took a dig at them myself in BusinessWeek.
2. Facebook has been hauled in for a potential killing in court. Some other Harvard alums say Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from a network they were thinking of launching. The case looks pretty shoddy, but that’s mostly because there aren’t very strict copywright laws for this web stuff anyway.
3. The U.S. Republican Presidential candidates took some dips in the polls because they’ve said they don’t want to do a debate on YouTube! like the Democrats did earlier this summer. Apparently being web savvy and appealing to young voters can actually move the needle in politics today.
4. The piece de resistence: one of the candidates, Rudy Giuliani, faced the heavy embarrassment of having the world discover that his own daughter actually backs a candidate from the other party. How did word get out? Some fellow student saw it on her Facebook page and leaked it to the press.

Together, all this seems to suggest that these websites are getting to be more “established” and more concerned with rules, an idea we’ve discussed here before.   

On the other hand, the politicians and authority figures have to participate and have to worry about what’s on Facebook, or it might cost them votes or just make an arse of them. Which confirms my longstanding suspicion that the mainstream and the exceptional are less distinct categories today.  

But more importantly, it suggests to me that our whole generation is pretty engaged with the wheels of society—we’re driving the politicians to take up our formats, they’re coming to our online playgrounds to deal with us and the rules and structures that govern culture (the law, for example) are having to figure out how to accommodate those playgrounds into their reasoning.   

So how come everyone keeps saying we’re so apathetic? This week, the New York Times collected essays for a contest they are running for college students in the U.S. They had people write a response to this article by Rick Perlstein about how disconnected and disengaged young people are from the big ideas of society and politics. It’s all about America, but the article describes a bunch of students in ways that any young person anywhere in the world can react to. Read the piece here, and then please tell me what you think. Does this sound like the students you know? Are we this materialistic and politically useless?  

Or does all the legal and political rumbling around Facebook and YouTube! suggest we’re driving change in ways Rick Perlstein is missing?

Cherwell24 is not responsible for the content of external links.

1) Sinister left-handed gene found. Scientists working in Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Genetics believe carrying the gene may slightly raise the risk of developing psychotic mental illness such as schizophrenia…but may improve sporting ability. A fair exchange?  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6923577.stm  

2) Deep brain stimulation brings man back from coma. Previously doomed to a vegetative existence for the rest of his life, DBS has allowed this patient to feed himself, talk, express emotion, and recognise visitors. DBS is a relatively new technique which have already yielded some miraculous results in treating CNS disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article2182621.ece  

3) A Virgin Birth in Korea – shamed Korean scientist made groundbreaking discovery – without realising it. Analysis of data has revealed he may have created stem cells from unfertilised human eggs – a human ‘virgin birth’ – which will have profound implications for stem cell research worldwide. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6929203.stm 
4) Mission to Mars: NASA launches a 9 month mission to Mars to search for life beneath the surface. Read a blog by one of the team members here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6914836.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6926880.stm  
5) Groove on down to the sounds of the Big Bang. Jodrell bank is celebrating its 50^th birthday and is planning to turn the sounds of the Big Bang into a backing track for the physics party of the century. Get your glad rags and white coats on.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195682.ece
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Hardworking Mertonians across the country will be feeling smug today thanks to news that their college has topped the 2007 Norrington table for the second year running.

Magdalen College is runner-up in the league of undergraduate degree results, with a score of 74.81 – just under two points behind Merton's 76.63%. Harris Manchester comes bottom for the third year running, kept company by Oriel, another college all too familiar with the bottom five.

The table has been a regular feature of college rivalry since the 60s, when it was invented by Sir Arthur Norrington as a way of comparing the finals results of Oxford's colleges. A score is compiled by awarding five points for every 1st class degree obtained, three for a 2:1, two for a 2:2 and one point for a 3rd. The total is then expressed as a percentage of the highest possible score that the college could have achieved that year.

Until recently the table was compiled unofficially from publicly posted pass lists, but the fact that students can ask for their names to be withheld from these lists led to complaints that the system was unfair. In 2005 the University decided to publish its own, official version of the league.

Some critics remain, including those who feel the table gives an unfair advantage to colleges with higher numbers of science students, as subjects such as Mathematics and Chemistry usually produce a higher number of first class degrees compared to the arts.

You can view the official Norrington table here.

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On Friday night, I went to a baseball game where my hometown Yankees were ingloriously destroyed by the Tampa Bay Devils. My long hiatus from this blog can be explained by the consequent mourning period, combined with my Harry Potter reading.
 
I was at the game with two friends and each of us knew people in New York. So after the game, we wanted to get in touch with all our different contacts and figure out where to meet for drinks and food. As we stood in the stadium, each of us on our cellphones for 15, 20 minutes but not speaking to each other, I laughed to myself. How strangely antisocial the technology was making us.
 
Then we decided to call a fourth friend whose number no one had in their phones. His number, we knew, was posted on his Facebook page, but of course, none of us was by a computer. But my mother happens to be very high tech and she is not only on Facebook, but friends with my friends. [Mothers on Facebook is a topic for its own article].
 
I proceeded to call her and ask her to sign online and text message the number to me. It gets better, because my mother's phone was losing service, so she dictated the number to me quickly over the phone. I read it aloud to one of the friends at the game with me, who typed it into his phone and texted it back to me. At this point, it was taking three cell phones and a computer to connect me and the one friend I wanted to meet up with.
 
Our solitary phone calling at first made me think that technology cuts people off from each other, which you sometimes here the cynics say. We'll all sit at home and shop over Amazon and Second Life and never go out. TIn my house, my mother, sister and I sometimes sit in the same room on our respective laptops without speaking to each other.
 
The ridiculous hoops we were jumping through seem to support the other cynical view that technology makes human interaction more complicated. But the knowledge that we might never have met up with the fourth friend without three phones and a laptop makes me wonder if technology facilitates real world connections.
 
Does technology make the world bigger and lonelier as we surf an ever expanding web and listen to our iPods but stop noticing people in the streets? Or does technology make the world smaller and more social, linking us to people we might never meet otherwise? Silly as my Friday night adventures may seem, this is the million dollar/pound question of the moment. Anybody want to venture an answer?
 
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1)       One small move of a counter – one giant leap for computer-kind. Scientists in Canada claim to have written a program which can win or draw any possible game of draughts – ever. 500 billion billion possible combinations of movements have been analysed over 2 decades to give the winning (or drawing) formula. What happened to losing gracefully?  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6907018.stm
2)       What's green and sticky? No, it's not an unfortunate joke. A powerful glue inspired by geckos and mussels may be gluing together space shuttles – or your suture wounds – in the near future: it joins a long list of biological glues, including ones derived from frogs, based on polymers and the strength-in-numbers-power of van der Waals’ forces.    
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6904175.stm
3)       This does sound like a bad joke – vibrating rings designed to guide women around foreign cities safely. A ring on either hand guides you in the right direction. Words fail me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6905286.stm
4)       Size Doesn't Matter – the case of a man with almost a 75% reduction in brain volume has been published in the Lancet. Married with two children and a stable career – living proof of the brain's astonishing plasticity. He came into the surgery with a slight weakness in one leg and left with a picture of a hole in his brain. Astonishing pictures. 
 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html
5)       Another moon has been discovered in orbit around Saturn, bringing the total number up to 60.  Saturn's moons have also been described as the location with the ‘best chance of finding life’ in our solar system. Some planets get all the attention. Spare a thought for poor Pluto with only one moon, and now not even a planet any more. Life as an orbiting body just ain't fair.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6908190.stm
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