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You have to give some thought to how you ask for help, whom and when.

What follows is just a reminder of what everyone knows ... however, I think reminders can sometimes be useful.

Many people will be happily give (a little) help to anyone who's done what they can to answer their own questions and now just needs some specific advice to take the next step forward. They won't help if they can't work out what you're asking, suspect there's a hidden agenda or feel you're expecting too much support as a "freebie".

People like to be thanked for their efforts - those who remember this often get the bonus of receiving additional help!

They also prefer to help those who've established their right to support by being generous helpers themselves.

I will now stop teaching my grandmothers how to suck eggs and get on with the recycling

If I want to learn something (information / new ideas) I read it up. Listening to a talk or viewing an instructional film doesn't help me as much.

If it's important for me to remember the new stuff, I mindmap it (cos you can't mindmap anything unless you understand it - and the effort required to develop a mindmap helps me to put the info into longterm memory).

If it's something techie (I hate techie stuff), I work out what I need to know and rewrite the "instruction manual" accordingly.

If it's skill-based, then I break down the task into sub-elements, practise each one until I know it, then g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y combine all the elements and practise that repeatedly. When learning to drive, for example, I learnt how to do an emergency stop well before I learnt how to start the car - everyone was safer that way!

Hope the above helps you decide what learning style suits you best.

If I want to learn something (information / new ideas) I read it up. Listening to a talk or viewing an instructional film doesn't help me as much.

If it's important for me to remember the new stuff, I mindmap it (cos you can't mindmap anything unless you understand it - and the effort required to develop a mindmap helps me to put the info into longterm memory).

If it's something techie (I hate techie stuff), I work what I need to know and rewrite the "instruction manual" accordingly.

If it's skill-based, then I break down the task into sub-elements, practise each one until I know it, then g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y combine all the elements and practise that repeatedly. When learning to drive, for example, I learnt how to do an emergency stop well before I learnt how to start the car - everyone was safer that way!

Hope the above helps you decide what learning style suits you best.

Hi Business Minds

Getting known and persuading enough comfortably off people it's worth parting with some dosh to get your design help will take more hard work than in most businesses.

Can you do deals with the regional newspapers and upmarket county magazines (you offer free design as a competition prize they run in return for free editorial about you and past design successes and for post-competion displays of the winner enjoying their beautiful new environment)?

I did some free career counselling sessions for journalists of regional papers and they "sold" the process in half-page features complete with photos in the middle of their papers. I also learnt a bit about how to pitch to journalists and how to ensure the deal benefited both sides.

In years to come, I wonder whether historians will describe Iraq, Libya etc as "the West's oil wars"?

In many respects, Cameron is Blair-lite. We now know we were lied to over Iraq and I suspect we're being told untruths about Libya.

You an only afford to do a very short-term job (eg picking fruit where your employment may only last a fortnight) if you're doing it for pocket money, to top up an existing secure income. That type of job is OK for students during the summer vac, retired people and so on.

If you're on benefit, you'd be absolutely stupid to take such work and declare it.

You'd know that the benefits system copes extremely badly with any changes to claimants' circumstances. It's the norm for claimants to be left without any money for several months when they first become unemployed, sick or move. Because they're not paid on time, claimants may lose their accommodation and build up debts they can't pay. God help them if they then make the mistake of going to the loan sharks, as many do.

Quite rightly, those who are on benefits and do undeclared work will find themselves in court.

The clued up claimant should only take a job lasting more than 5 months, unless it's paid far better than most of the permanent jobs he or she could get. Being more "flexible" causes huge amounts of grief.

Could you get an independent person to judge who writes the best review?

The judge might be a "personality" who's also technically respected by computer knowledgeable members of the general public.

If the judge was someone like the technical journalist for one of the computer magazines, part of the remit would be to write a review insightful enough to be worthy of publication in the journal. The person deciding whether entries came up to that standard would be the features editor, not you, and if no entry was good enough you'd not need to fork out on the ipad.

I don't think you'd have any difficulty in attracting entries and knowledgeable entries at that.

There's more evidence by the day that prolonged stress during the developmental stages damages brain development, including the ability to empathise with others. Prolonged stress also damages adults (eg through its impact on mental health, the immune system and so on.

If you want to raise a generation of dangerous thugs, a good way of doing it is to put the kids in environments where they can't feel secure or relaxed (eg in dysfunctional families, sink estates and schools where bullying is rife). The more pressure you put people under (eg poverty, insecure housing, chronic unemployment, etc), the more likely it is they won't cope and you and they will be left with the problems and costs of them not coping.

I feel the rioters are only the extreme tip of the iceberg. Far too many people are fearful, financially over-stretched and tired.

Personally, I'd rather live in a community more at ease with itself and more caring for all its members than in the unhappy, economically and socially polarised society we've got now.

As a newbie to article marketing, I'm still finding the conventions mystifying.

I thought what happened was you sent out an article to just one ezine directory, then any interested site owner customers of that directory published the item on their site(s) and that was it.

What seems to happen quite often in my very limited experience, though, is that the article in the first ezine directory is picked up by another ezine directory ... and so on, ad infinitum. In theory, the article might never reach sites flogging anything other than free articles and never be read by any human being. I wonder how often that happens?

... but the only way [it can go now] is up! Fast forward a few months and you'll be feeling rich again, Steve!