Amazing CCTV clip found over at the Telegraph website:

In the dramatic footage, a train slammed into a flatbed lorry as it was crossing train tracks in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin on Feb 25.

Propelled sideways, the lorry then swept over Cem Tokac, who was standing beside the tracks.

But while the footage, released on Wednesday by Dogan news agency, showed Mr Tokac after the accident, lying motionless on the ground, incredibly the 32-year-old suffered only minor injuries.

“I can’t remember anything about the accident,” Mr Tokac said. “I thought I was asleep. But when I woke up, I was not in my bed. I was on the ground.”

Mr Tokac, who plans to marry in April, said Feb 25 is his new birthday.

“Life is really beautiful,” he said.

CCTV camera statistics are often quoted to illustrate how we are all watched by 300 cameras a day, and how many millions of security cameras there are in the UK.

We’ve commented on these ‘facts’ previously and pointed out that they never seem to increase since we first quoted them over five years ago, and wonderment at how these numbers of installed surveillance cameras were ever established?

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday by Paul Lewis, with many links to research and the original documents that first cited (in some cases made-up) these claims.

David Aaronovitch has been snooping on statistics. His mission: to get to the bottom of the dubious claim, often quoted as fact, that the average Briton is caught on 300 CCTV cameras a day.

The statistic is fiction. Or at least was written as such when it first appeared in 1999 in the book The Maximum Surveillance Society. The author, Sheffield University’s Professor Clive Norris stated clearly in the book that the “contrived account” of a day in the life of a man called Thomas Reams was “a fictional construction” designed to mirror the reality of routine surveillance. That important detail appears to have been lost when the estimate was referenced in a landmark study for the Office of the Information Commissioner.

The original detective work of chasing these stats was carried out by David Aaronovitch in an article in The Times:

The mystery stat was sitting on one of our Times blogs and read “the average Brit is caught on security cameras some 300 times a day” and, God knows why, I just decided to chase the number down and find out where it came from. The colleague responsible for the blog referred me to a couple of news stories, and to a document issued by the office of an important and newsworthy quango.

CCTV job queries seem very popular at the moment, presumably due to the current economic climate?

We’ve added a list of specialist recruitment companies to a new CCTV Jobs thread in our CCTV Forum.

The recruitment companies listed there all specialise in security job vacancies.

Many of them offer career guidance tips too.

Good Luck to any job hunters out there …

The 2012 Olympics CCTV system in London will inevitably be a pretty big deal.

We spotted this article over on the SKY News website.

Number-plate recognition cameras as well as private networks, such as those of a shopping centre or car park, would all be accessible to allow authorities to track suspects throughout the capital.

Advanced computer intelligence systems would assist officers by filtering out all but the most relevant CCTV feeds coming into the control room, reducing time normally spent scrambling from one camera to the next.

Essentially it is what our fellow security experts across the pond call managing situational awareness, and what we would probably term sorting the wheat from the chaff!

We’re not sure why using pre-existing CCTV camera feeds more intelligently should upset Liberty, and wonder how upset they’re going to be when the final additional camera count for the City of London is totted-up?

CCTV and Security training is attracting a lot of interest at the moment.

We’re in a recession, and a lot of folk are losing their jobs.

Those people are looking around for a new career, perhaps in a technology with a future …

They see upcoming major projects such as the 2012 London Olympics creating a great demand for CCTV and other security services.

They are looking to re-train and to pick up new skills, seeking courses to attend which will provide them with the new skills they seek.

Some are in the market for a career change into a new and more interesting field of work associated with developing technologies such as IP CCTV.

Common questions include:

• Where can I attend a CCTV training course?
• How much does it cost?
• What previous experience or qualifications will I need?
• What will employers expect?
• Are there any jobs?
• Where are vacancies advertised?
• How can I start my own CCTV company?

We have a great deal of experience in the UK CCTV market, please feel free to Contact Us and we’ll gladly provide you with some pointers to guide you in the right direction in these difficult and changing times.

Update, due to lots of enquiries on this topic:

From personal experience we are happy to recommend Tavcom for CCTV Training.

Other possibilities include:

CCTV Training & Logistics