Torrential downpours hit Oxfordshire yesterday causing severe flooding and transport delays.
Many train routes in and around Oxford have been cancelled or rerouted, leaving passengers stranded at stations, with National Rail advising people to avoid travelling where possible. Last night, many passengers stranded in Oxford and Banbury were forced to spend the night in a local school after some routes were deemed impassable. The disruption is forecast to continue until Sunday, with no alternative transport available.
On the roads, drivers found many routes blocked due to poor weather conditions. Some of the major roads around Oxford continue to be affected today, including the A329, the A420, the B4450 and the B4495.
The impact of the heavy rain has caused many events in Oxfordshire to be cancelled or rescheduled, including the annual Truck Festival in Steventon, and forecasters are predicting there is more rain yet to come.

Way back in 2005, I wrote a few columns about generation gaps and aging. You see, in a Web 2.0 world, where things can happen quickly, ideas and people get old faster. My grandmother sometimes refers to her four grandchildren (aged 21, 15, 10 and 3) as "the young generation." A generation, she says, is about 20 years and we're all in the same group.

I beg to differ.

My sister, who's only 5 years younger than I, is already a different generation. Lumping me with my younger cousins is completely out of the question. Think about it—my sister cannot remember large 5 inch computer disks, MS DOS-based games or life before the Internet. She and her friends had cell phones when they were 9 years old; I remember when cell phones were new technology. She aspires to own a Blackberry; I can still remember thePalm Pilot. In so many ways, she has grown up on technology that I can have grown up with. Even though I'm tuned in to the technologies, they aren't part of my mental makeup the way they are for her.
What that means, is that her world still moves at a faster, higher-tech clip than mine. My favorite "contemporary" bands are those I got to know in the late 1990's; in her world, contemporary is the last few months. With generations now about 5 years long, few trends can hang on longer than a season. We used to be able to identify trends by decade—the hair metal '80s, the punk rock '90s. We're only ¾ through this decade and I can already think of at least 5 musical movements that have come, dominated, and gone. And even when trends dominate, they dominate among smaller groups—groups of the new, shortened, generations; groups of the specific niche who happen to be at the right social network at the right time. Smart people are making a lot of money off these niches, creating boutique social sites, and niche brands. You can do a lot better getting a few people to be intensely loyal to you than you can getting everybody to be lukewarm about you. As I've highlighted in my columns, it's virtually impossible to be mainstream today. 

Every individual is trying to be their own niche, their own brand, their own kind of alternative. If nothing else, Facebook and MySpace pages are a chance for teens, tweens and twentysomethings to brand themselves and rebrand themselves with each profile update. Indeed, I rebrand myself about once a day when I post on a wall or upload a new picture.
My professional life is likely to take about as much rebranding. My father points out how worried he is about our generation's careers—we're all going to have 5 or 6 jobs in the time he's spent in one company. We'll switch between fields, go back for more degrees and be forced to pack up and move cities. Web 2.0 and the real world that goes with it, is all about change and fragmentation.
Can anybody—from a company to a pop star—have staying power in a world like this? Sure, the people who can best cope with reinvention. The older world had some of those too. Think of Madonna: her many identities, her long and never boring career. In the 1980s and '90s her shape shifting was a cause for derision and surprise. Today, hers is the kind of identity stunt we'll all have to pull just to stay on par.
Strike a pose, Gen Y.
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Your Physicists Need You! An Oxford team of astrophysicists is enlisting the public's help in classifying newly discovered galaxies at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ The name is whimsically inspired by the huge (and stunningly beautiful) variety of galaxies – one million never before seen by human eyes – milling against the darkness of the universe, a zoo of the new and unknown. 

Newly discovered galaxies need to be sorted into types – elliptical and spiral – and since the launch of the website a week ago, 40,000 have already signed up. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking these images in an attempt to help scientists understand better how galaxies are born, evolve, and die. Volunteers have been recruited from around the world – Japan, New Zealand, and Russia are just a few – and Dr Lintott, a member of the Oxford team, claims the interest has appeal even further afield: "I'm convinced that somewhere out there there is an alien at a computer spending two seconds looking at an image of the Milky Way, saying that's just another spiral."

But why people (or aliens, for that matter)? Why not use a computer? Because you, yes you, are better than any super-computer can ever be at recognising patterns, shapes and resemblances (try sticking that on your CV for your next interview). The website explains:

"Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you."

While some unfortunates may argue that facebook too is a collection of the unusual, the weird and the wonderful, if you're looking for something a little different, the GalaxyZoo awaits. Try your hand at identifying galaxies at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Tutorial.aspx. Deep space is just a click away.
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Oxford's Proctors have resorted to Facebook in their latest campaign against post-exam celebrations.  
Senior members of Univeristy staff are using the social networking tool to track down photographs of students participating in trashing, using them as evidence upon which to base disciplinary action.
OUSU President Martin McCluskey has leapt to students' defence, sending out emails advising them to alter privacy settings on Facebook "to prohibit members of staff and faculty from viewing your profile and photographs.”
The student union stressed that while it does not condone antisocial behaviour it is determined to stand for the privacy of its members and that "disciplinary procedures at all levels within the University should be fair and transparent."
It has drawn up a document offering advice to students who have been summoned by the Proctors, explaining disciplinary procedures and possible outcomes.  

Oxford student Will Jaggs has pleaded guilty to killing a 25 year-old woman in a frenzied sexually-motivated attack.

Police were called to the crime scene after being alerted by neighbours and they arrived to find Jaggs naked and screaming before he began stabbing himself in the chest. Miss Braham lay naked in front of him in a pool of blood.
Last week the Oxford student pleaded not guilty to murder but yesterday  admitted manslaughter on the grounds of dimished responsibility.

He has been sent to Broadmoor Hosptial, a high-security psychiatric unit in Berkshire, where he will remain indefinitely.

My mother says the scariest thing about Facebook is that there are no rules. How can I distinguish love interests from professional contacts when everyone is just a ‘friend,’ she worries.   

How wrong she is.  

Last week, five friends and I discussed Facebook etiquette. Without much effort, we agreed on several key patterns in our online behavior, an unwritten rulebook:  

Friendly hellos and plans to meet for coffee merit a wall post, which can be seen by anyone. Date invites or secret gossip go by Facebook message (like a private email, but sent over Facebook’s server). Aimless chatter occurs over AOL Instant Messenger. For job interviews or chats with Mom, there is Skype’s online phone service. Email is for sending resumes and contacting professors.  

The hierarchy is strict. Mixing up the categories—asking someone out on their wall, for example, or Skype-ing just to make lunch plans—is social suicide.  

My younger sister, a high-school sophomore, has an equally strong online code. Ever since my mother got a Facebook profile, my sister has busily mocked her blundering misuse of the site. ‘You can’t call me by baby names on my wall, ALL my friends will see that!’  

But my sister’s Facebook etiquette is not the same as mine. For my sister, regulation is about hiding more formal contact (with family, adults and teachers) from her casual friends, so they don’t see her as un-cool. For my friends and I, regulation is about concealing casual content, relationships and college life from potential employers or professors. Some of my friends, for example, have taken to editing their Facebook pages during internship-application-season in case employers are online.  

Every media revolution—from the first papers to radio and telegraph to TV—has seen old rulebooks thrown out. Skeptics, like my mother, inevitably panic, but eventually, new rules develop. Wikipedia has already established its own system of authority, freezing pages when content becomes unreliable or hostile.  

With Facebook now open to everyone, the rules will continue to change. The question is how. As they join social networks, will an older generation of CEO’s and parents adopt social manners from the young?  Or, as the first group of users grows up, will Facebook itself grow more formal?

Earlier this week saw former OUSU President Alan Strickland vying to take over Tony Blair’s position as MP for Sedgefield. 

After more than 50 applications were received for the position, Strickland became one of the 11 longlisted candidates who faced interviews with the National Executive Committee in London. 

Having impressed the panel at this stage he made it into the shortlist, which included former ministers and councillors, but lost out to seasoned politician Phil Wilson, who won by a comfortable majority.  

The primary reasons for Strickland’s loss were put down to age and inexperience. Had he succeeded, the role would have seen him fighting in the by-election later this month.

We've been getting a lot of questions about site archiving. Please rest assured we have not forgotten you or your previous work! We'll be working on it throughout the month and will have everything up and accessible as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you've written for Cherwell in the past, or plan to do so in the future, please be sure to register with the site so that we can give you authorial credit for your work. All the best to everyone – enjoy your holiday!
Leah

There's a weird paradox in the way Gen Y lives and works. Everywhere I am reading about how the Millennials are super-driven, hyper-informed, search engine wizards. We chug lattes. We get to work early. We leave late. We want to be promoted. We expect to make millions by age 30. If all of this is new to you, read Lindsey Gerdes's work on young professionals at BusinessWeek.
 
A friend told me she was at her book club meeting in New York when a young writer started crying. She's turning 30 and she hasn't sold a book yet. Her career is over, she believes.
 
Some would say this makes perfect sense. We've got the technology to do everything faster, and get more information, more mileage, for every minute of each day. Why shouldn't we want to maximize that potential and feel inadequate when it takes too long?
 
But isn't it also true that everyone lives longer now? A 30-year old today is less than a third through her life–she's more like a 22 year old in the last generation's reckoning. That calculation has had a slowing effect on most other life choices–people get married and have kids later now because they know they've got more than enough time for family.
 
Why is our professional life speeding up when life's getting longer? Why am I sprinting for a finish line that's further and further away?
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In Sarajevo, as the wife of a BBC war correspondent, Rosie Whitehouse and her five children “heard the firing of the shots that started a war”. Heather Ryan asks what else she had to juggle in the raising of a most unusual family.  

“Family travel with bullets” is not a synopsis that could be applied to many books. But “Are We There Yet” is no ordinary travel memoir. Author Rosie Whitehouse and her war reporter husband, Tim Judah, brought up their children in Bucharest, Belgrade, Croatia and Bosnia during their most unstable years rather than separate their family. Her book not only describes the struggles of a wife and mother trying to create a stable home environment in the midst of war and social upheaval, but also examines the (positive) effect that a childhood spent following Daddy across Europe has had on her children’s identity and development. 

Whitehouse is a journalist herself; indeed, she and Judah met while working on the student newspaper at the London School of Economics. She was News Editor, and he was Arts Editor; he caught her eye when he delivered his article to her office, and she managed to get him to ask her out by setting up an arts magazine, inviting him to contribute, and hoping he would take her on dates with the free tickets to cultural events that he received. Needless to say, it worked. Studying International History at undergraduate level, and then Russian government and politics at Master’s, Whitehouse’s university career was good preparation for her career in the BBC World Service. 

It was as an ambitious editor of Newshour that Whitehouse “woke up one morning and felt sick”; she had fallen pregnant with her eldest son, Ben. In 1980s Britain, she tells me, “women were expected to look as poised and elegant as Princess Di, and hold down a full-time job as well – to have it all”. In spreading themselves so thinly, Whitehouse counters, women “ended up with nothing”. Finding it increasingly hard to go out to work and leave her son with a babysitter, she decided to become a full-time mum, a move which precipitated her husband – a freelance reporter – to approach the Times and ask for work. He was dispatched to cover Bucharest, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall – revolution had swept over Romania and thousands of people were dying in street-fights. Despite the daunting political situation, Whitehouse was “delighted” with her husband’s assignation and there was no question that she and Ben would be accompanying him.  

Did Rosie ever wonder whether she was doing the right thing? Of course, but although she concedes “perhaps I’m slightly crazy”, Whitehouse insists that her family’s experiences have enabled her children to “meet history head-on”. She is confident that their unusual upbringing has given her children an appreciation of history, politics and culture that conventional education can’t provide, and this is perhaps borne out by the fact that her firstborn Ben is now studying Modern History and Politics here at Oxford. Whitehouse had a somewhat unconventional childhood herself. Her father was a doctor – a “workaholic” who took his daughter along on his ward rounds on Christmas Day – and his work took him to Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein, and Poland in the grip of Communism. Family holidays consisted of accompanying her father on business trips abroad. However, she is adamant that her identity, as a child who travelled often but from a settled base in Britain, differs fundamentally from that of her children, two of whom had never lived in the UK before the family recently re-settled here. She uses the Troubles as an illustration. With an Irish Catholic mother, Whitehouse says that she “grew up with an Irish identity that fed my interest in politics”. In contrast, when she visited Ireland with her children, they “identified with the ethnic strife on the streets of Belfast” but do not self-define as Irish, taking instead “a worldwide approach”. 

I am interested in the conflict between motherhood and career to which Whitehouse alludes in her discussion of the book. “When you have a child,” she tells me, “you mutate – your child becomes the focus of your life. You’re torn in two.” As a foreign correspondent, finding a satisfactory work-life balance was particularly difficult. But when she was a full-time mum bringing up her children in the Balkans, she gained a new perspective on the things that people work in order to buy: “We don’t need half the rubbish people buy in the UK. Do you really need designer baby clothes?” However, she’s not advocating that women should forego career in favour of motherhood, and feels that the workplace battles her generation fought have prepared the ground for our generation to have a better work-life balance. 

Whitehouse is a vocal critic of newsrooms, which she says “neglect” the families of the foreign correspondents they dispatch to dangerous situations. In 17 years of her husband’s career, only once has somebody from a newspaper – the Times – contacted her to check everything was all right. How could this be remedied? Firstly, she says, a journalist calling with news of her husband should “think before they open their mouth” – because ringing late at night, and leaving terse messages such as “Your husband isn’t dead”, are common occurrences that raise more concerns than they alleviate. She illustrates her assertion that journalists are often thoughtless by describing a recent visit to Warminster in Wiltshire, site of an army barracks. “Reporters were asking the Army wives how they’d feel if their husbands were killed!” Secondly, she suggests an Internet forum could be established for war reporters and their families. “Men need an outlet where they can talk about trauma,” Whitehouse says, “and there could be a closed forum where people could ask advice, and post bits of information and messages of support.” 

Whitehouse hopes that, in the absence of such a forum, her book can offer some support to families in a similar position to her own. “No parenting guide I’ve ever seen tells you how to explain to your five-year-old why war has broken out, or what to say when your child asks if Daddy loves Iraqis more than he loves them.” In more ways than one, “Are We There Yet” is a first.
Rosie Whitehouse will be speaking at QI on Tuesday, June 26^th, at 7:30. Tickets will be £3 on the door. “Are We There Yet” can be bought from www.reportagepress.com – it costs £8.99 and part of the proceeds go to the Rory Peck Trust, which helps the families of freelance newsgatherers who are killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned. 

Rosie Whitehouse has a blog, which contains excerpts from her book: www.travelswithmyfrontlinefamily.blogspot.com
By Heather Ryan
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