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Piccadilly Circus is a famous road junction and public space of London’s West End in the City of Westminster, built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with the major shopping street of Piccadilly. In this context a circus, from the Latin word meaning a circle, is a circular open space at a street junction. The Circus is particularly known for its video display and neon signs mounted on the corner building on the northern side, as well as the Shaftesbury memorial fountain and statue of an archer popularly known as Eros. It is surrounded by several noted buildings, including the London Pavilion and Criterion Theatre. Directly underneath the plaza is Piccadilly Circus London Underground station. Piccadilly Circus is surrounded by several major tourist attractions, including the Shaftesbury Memorial, Criterion Theatre, London Pavilion and several major retail stores. You can see it here live streaming webcams and live video.

Piccadilly Circus used to be surrounded by illuminated advertising hoardings on buildings, starting in the early 1900′s, but only one building now carries them, the one in the north-western corner between Shaftesbury Avenue and Glasshouse Street. As of 2008, the site has six illuminated advertising screens above three large retail units, facing Piccadilly Circus on the north side, occupied by Boots, and GAP and a mix of smaller retail, restaurant and office premises fronting the other streets. A Burger King located under the Samsung advert which had been previously a Wimpy Bar until the late 1980s had closed in early 2008 and has now been converted into a Barclays Bank.

Coca-Cola have had a sign at Piccadilly Circus since 1955. The sign dates from September 2003, when the previous digital projector board and the site formerly occupied by Nescafé was replaced with a state-of-the-art LED video display that curves round with the building. On November 23, 2007 the very first film was broadcast through the board. Paul Atherton’s film “The Ballet of Change”. Piccadilly Circus was allowed five minutes to show the first non-commercial film depicting the history of Piccadilly Circus and the lights. The former Nescafé advert site had also been occupied by a neon advertisement for Fosters until about 1999 and for three months in 2002 between the display of the Nescafé advert and the enlarged Coca Cola advert this part of Piccadilly Circus had featured the quote “Imagine all the people living life in peace” by the late Beatle John Lennon. This was paid for by his wife Yoko Ono who spent an estimated £150,000 to display an advert at this location.

Sanyo’s sign is the oldest out of the six, having been installed in the late 1980′s and remaining unchanged ever since. However, earlier Sanyo signs with older logos have occupied that position since at least 1980.

TDK replaced the space formerly occupied by Kodak in 1990. Their sign has remained almost unchanged since, although in 2001 the color of the background lamps were changed from green to blue, and the words ‘Audio & Video Tape’ and ‘Floppy Disks’ under the logo was removed.

McDonald’s added a sign in the mid-1980s, replacing one for BASF. In 2001 the sign was changed from neon to an animated LED screen, which was further changed to a bigger, brighter LED screen in 2008.

Samsung replaced a sign for Panasonic in November 1994, and the sign was upgraded from neon to LED in 2005.

Piccadilly Lite was added on 3 December 2007, placed under the Samsung and McDonald’s signs. This is an LED screen that allows other companies to advertise for both short and long term leases, increasing the amount of advertising space but using the same screen for multiple brands.

The British mobile telephony company Vodafone used to have a neon sign installed on the roof of Coventry House, which diagonally faces Piccadilly Circus. In addition to the logo of the company, the sign displayed personal messages that could be submitted on a special website and displayed at a certain time and date. As of February 2007, this has been replaced by a new, larger LED video-advertising display for LGE, the British arm of South Korean electronics group LG. The new display also incorporates a scrolling ticker of Sky News headlines.

On special occasions the lights are switched off, such as the deaths of Winston Churchill in 1965 and Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. On 21 June 2007 they were switched off for 1 hour as part of the Lights Out London campaign.

The phrase “it’s like Piccadilly Circus” is commonly used in the UK to refer to a place or situation which is extremely busy with people. It has been said that a person who stays long enough at Piccadilly Circus will eventually bump into everyone they know. Probably because of this connection, during World War II, “Piccadilly Circus” was the code name given to the Allies’ D-Day invasion fleet’s assembly location in the English Channel.

The Dire Straits song “Wild West End” is about the area around Piccadilly. The Morrissey song “Piccadilly Palare” from the album Bona Drag recounts the life of male prostitutes by employing the use of “palare”, argot used by this subculture and by gay men generally. A lost verse -  “Around the centre of town is where I belong am I really doing wrong?” Jethro Tull mention Piccadilly Circus in “Mother Goose” on the album Aqualung: “And a foreign student said to me, was it really true there are elephants and lions in Piccadilly Circus?”

Bob Marley makes mention of Piccadilly Circus in his song “Kinky Reggae” on the album Catch A Fire. The Sundays mention Piccadilly Circus in their song “Hideous Towns” on their 1990 album Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

In the film Austin Powers, Piccadilly Circus is the location of Dr Evil’s lair during “the swinging 60s”. Austin Powers confronts Dr Evil at the “The Electric Pussycat” nightclub which hides a rocketship in the shape of a Big Boy statue on the rooftop of a Piccadilly Circus building.

Piccadilly Circus was the final action scene in John Landis’ 1981 werewolf classic, An American Werewolf in London. David Naughton’s character, David Kessler aka the werewolf, makes his final transformation in an adult theatre in Piccadilly Circus and shortly after, chaos erupts when he escapes the theatre and sets off a chain reaction of car crashes.

Piccadilly Circus is an area in the PC game Hellgate: London.

Piccadilly Circus is a flim location for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I.

The former Zavvi (formerly known as Virgin Megastore) flagship store, previously owned by Tower Records was located at Number 1 Piccadilly before it went into administration. Number 1 Piccadilly is empty, the unit is located on the west side between Regent Street and Piccadilly, directly facing Piccadilly Circus. Before being Tower Records this was the location of the Swan and Edgar department store. Lillywhites is a major retailer of sporting goods located on the south side, next to the Shaftesbury fountain. It moved to its present site in 1925.

Get more information and a live view of Piccadilly Circus here on this multimedia site

On the north-eastern side of Piccadilly Circus, on the corner between Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street, is the London Pavilion. The first building bearing the name was built in 1859, and was a music hall. In 1885, Shaftesbury Avenue was built through the former site of the Pavilion and a new London Pavilion was constructed, which also served as a music hall.

The Phoenix Mars Polar Lander is slated to land on Mars’ north pole on May 25th – very soon now! Phoenix is intended to look for signs of microbial life, and there’s a case that evidence may be found on Mars.

The first piece of evidence is purported microfossils found in an Antarctic meteorite in 1997 – this Shergottic meteorite ALH84001, estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, is still the subject of some controversy. There are some who say that the micro structures are evidence of biotic contamination from its long tenure on Earth, others maintain hope that it’s evidence of a link to life on the Mars.

Martian life has a long held a fascination for astronomers – for one, it’s a bright object in the sky, and for two, after the development of the telescope in the 1600s, it showed the most obvious color changes of any object in the sky. From Schiapiarelli to Lowell to Wells, the prospect of Martian life has held the imagination, even as the scientific evidence mounted that such life would be nothing at all like we’d expect.

The case for life on Mars is reinforced by the exposure of bacteria on Lunar missions – samples went out, and came back, and were able to survive the harsh Solar and Van Allen radiation belts – even some of the plasma and thermal changes of reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere. So life is remarkably hardy and capable of surviving in the vicious environment of space. Achaeobacteria and tube worms living on volcanic vents show that life can survive and thrive wherever there’s a source of energy to exploit, even down in the depths of the ocean where sunlight isn’t even a memory.

However, the question of life on Mars has a few more complications. For one, it’s a cold case -whether there was life in the past, Mars’ surface conditions have changed over the last 5 billion years. There are definite epochs in Martian geology (called areology), where Mars speculation shows Mars having a thicker atmosphere than now, and receding (and advancing) surface water levels. Mars’ current climate cannot support liquid water on the surface – the temperature is too low, and the atmospheric pressure is too low; if you took a tray of ice cubes out on the surface, they’d slowly evaporate by sublimation, the way dry ice does on Earth.

What caused these changes in Martian climate? Plate tectonics, or rather, the lack of them. Earth’s biosphere is driven in large part by plate tectonics, which serve to bury carbon (in the form of limestone) caused by sedimentation. The driving force on plate tectonics is the decay of radioactive elements in the Earth’s core.

Venus also shows evidence of having had plate tectonics in the past; its plate tectonics appear to have stopped due to the lack of water in the subsurface crust – the water in the oceans is far from being the majority of it on the planet; most of the rest is seepage down into the Earth’s mantle, where it acts as a lubricant.

On Mars, due to short range radio surveys by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now show that Mars’ crust isn’t as flexible as Earth’s – it’s not being pressed down as much as it should be by the mass of the Martian polar ice cap. This is indicative that Mars is tectonically dormant.

Why does tectonic dormancy matter for the case for life on Mars? Tectonic activity is the likely driving energy source for any Martian microbes out there, and it’s the only candidate presently known to make long standing seeps of liquid water, which is necessary for life as we know it.

Phoenix will be landing at the Martian north pole to give us some answers – but even if it finds nothing, there’s no reason to give up hope. Mars has a surface area equal to all of Earth’s dry land put together. Phoenix will only be able to sample an area comparable to a ring of soil around an office cubical.

Phoenix’ other mission profile is to give climate data on Martian weather patterns and observational data on the polar winter, and it’s slated to provide data for at least six months, with optional extensions for years. (The Spirit and Opportunity rovers are now approaching the fourth anniversary of the beginning of their 90 day survey…)

Phoenix live commentary from NASA begins at at 3:30 pm USA Pacific time on the 25th as the craft prepares for its decent into the Martian atmosphere, or about 9:30 on the morning of the 26th for Eastern Australia.

One thing many business owners or managers assume when they start their business is that their employees will be as motivated as they are. This is simply not true. Most employees are there for one thing, a paycheck and many will do the bare minimum or just enough to get paid.

So, how do you motivate employees? You have to get to know how they work and you have to start trying different things. Every employee is unique and you may want to get to know them a little better to determine what they like, dislike, what motivates them, and why. Simply ask them.

Don’t try the supreme dictator approach because making employees afraid of you will just make them want to find another job. The trick is to make them look forward to coming to work so they have fun with it and soon, before you know it, you’ll have a group of motivated employees who love their jobs.

Motivate Employees With A Reward System

When researching ways to motivate employees, you will hear a lot about reward systems. Don’t think that this means you have to give them money or buy them things. That’s a good way for you to go broke and for your business to go under. However a simple $50 bonus on a holiday or a birthday is not a bad idea to keep their motivation in check.

Reward based motivations can include anything from a casually dressed Friday or maybe taking people out for happy hour after work. In a sales situation you may want to offer commission on top of a salary to motivate your employees to sell more.

Or, you might even want to try an employee of the month scenario where the winner gets his or her picture hung on the wall or a prized parking space. By incorporating these rewards, your employees will want to work hard so that they can get that coveted reward. Play around with it and learn ways to best motivate your employees as everyone is different.

There is no right or wrong way when it comes to ways to motivate employees. If you’re stumped for ideas, pick up a book on the subject of ways to motivate employees as there are many available. However, the basis of ways to motivate employees changes from business to business. What motivates one group of employees might not motivate another, so try and try again.

You should never give up until you find the right method of motivation because when you do your business will sky-rocket. One way to try to motivate your employees is to put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself, what is it that they need to make them as interested in my business as I am.

They will probably never be quite as interested as you are, but the closer you can get them to that point the better off the company or your business is. A motivated employee will think for the company or business, not themselves.

Motivating employees is what makes a great business owner or manager. Once you have it down and your employees actually like coming to work, you’ll see your productivity increase and your business will be booming.