Dear branch member,

In this issue: details about our Christmas meeting on Thursday this week and early information about our January meeting. We do hope you'll be able to come along.

Note: this talk, preceded by Christmas mulled wine and mince pies, will be held at Rewley House, Oxford OX1 2JA rather than our usual location.

Our Christmas Lecture, subtitled "The End of Privacy as We Know It", is based on this engaging and thought-provoking new book about the implications of privacy in today's increasingly web-based world, jointly written by our speaker, Kieron O'Hara, and BCS past president Nigel Shadbolt.

We hope to have a copy of the book to give away to a lucky attendee.

Feel free to print out the poster and use it to invite your colleagues.

According to a survey by the BCS, only 7% of British adults have looked at their MP's website and only 46% know the name of their MP. This contrasts sharply with the level of public interaction generated through social networking sites and the internet in the recent US presidential race.

To encourage MPs to better understand the importance of reaching their constituents through effective websites, the BCS created the MP website awards, now in their second year. The 2008 winners were announced on 19 November at the House of Commons.

ICT Departments are coming under increasing pressure to fix problems quickly and fix them for good. Our speaker will show how method-based problem diagnosis can find the Root Cause of a problem consistently faster than any other approach.

The annual free Turing lecture will be given this year by Professor Sir Michael Brady, who will explore the question "What is Information Engineering?", drawing on the experience of his 20 years work at Oxford University.

Summarising his knowledge in the areas of mobile robotics, computer vision, signal processing, medical image analysis and artificial intelligence, he will then examine what information engineering really means and the possibilities for the future of this field.

Registrations are coming in steadily for our 2009 BCS Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition.

If you have have connections with a school in Oxfordshire, as a parent, teacher, governor or in some other capacity, do ask them to check out the details at www.oxon.bcs.org/webcomp and fill in the no-obligation signup form for a copy of the information pack.

Our full meeting programme for 2008/9 is on the branch website.

As usual, in late August 2008 we posted details to BCS members of the branch who live in the UK or mainland Europe. If you missed it, there's a pointer to a downloadable copy on our branch downloads page.

Did you know that BCS members can join up to five BCS Specialist Groups online?

Just sign on to the Members' secure area, and click on "Specialist Groups" in the box headed "Manage your membership". You should then be able to join several Specialist Groups.

The tenth Oxford Geek Night is on 21 January 2009.

BCS members can manage all their BCS email subscriptions online by logging on at https://wam.bcs.org/wam/lsm.aspx.

Want to know more about this newsletter? There's an article on the branch wiki.

You can now subscribe to the text-only version of this newsletter. The BCS online interface doesn't support this option - see below for how to request it.