Kate Griffin freelance journalism and editing

Tomorrow evening sees the return of the Oxford Girl Geek Dinners and I’m pleased to be one of the speakers. It’s being held at the White October offices in East Oxford.

Alexa Raisbeck remembers shop assistants laughing at her because she couldn’t work out the correct change. It took her five years of searching to find out that her problems had a name: dyscalculia. Now she’s a successful artist.

Her current exhibition, Hidden, runs for three days next week in London and explores what it’s like to have an undetected non-verbal learning disability (NvLD).

Attempts to harmonize easily strand when considering population environmental banks to harmonize with disease-oriented/clinical banks.

Make sense? Thought not. But that sentence was taken from a medical journal with subscription costs of nearly €900 a year, a journal covering important developments in European medical research.

The spending cuts we’re facing today will not only be the largest since World War II, but perhaps also the most heavily spun. Finding out the real impact of the cuts means going beyond the press releases and searching for the small print in lengthy documents.

Health reporter John Lister has spent the past 26 years doing just that. He has become a familiar face on television as one of the few experts who can provide informed comment on NHS funding.

What’s happening to local news? This Thursday’s meeting at Oxford Town Hall will be an attempt to answer that question. Both print and broadcast media in Oxfordshire are undergoing cutbacks that seriously undermine our access to the news, so the NUJ Oxford & District Branch have organised a public meeting to discuss the crisis. 

Tonight is the tenth Oxford Geek Night. (All the cool kids are calling it OGNX, or so I hear.)

Chief geek-herder J-P Stacey has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slot on Radio Oxford today at 12:30pm.

We’ll be munching on mince pies tonight at the NUJ branch meeting. The meeting, at Oxford Town Hall, will be held at the new earlier time of 6:30pm and there will be sandwiches (as well as mince pies) to make things easier for people coming straight from work.

There’s a lot to discuss tonight, not least the worsening situation at Newsquest. The company, part of American group Gannett, is using the current economic climate as an excuse to impose pay freezes and job cuts, despite the fact that profits are still very high.

The ninth Oxford Geek Night is happening tomorrow evening at the Jericho Tavern. Both keynote speeches should be interesting for anyone involved in online publishing. I'm definitely going, if only to find out what "digital fiction" actually means.

The first ever Regional Magazines Summit takes place in London on October 3rd. It has been organised by the PPA as part of a new strategy of looking at regional glossies as a sector in their own right.