Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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Are you a Baconian or a Cartesian?
Freeman Dyson quotes Bacon in his NYRB review of a book about the importance of amateur astronomers: All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature,…
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Notes on Work Foundation conference
Diligent attendees at last week’s Work Foundation Social Software conference (part of a larger research project) have published their notes. Very useful. Thank you!
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Distressed information architect
Matt Jones is the subject of a long and quite serious interview about information architecture for news at Online Journalism Review. This is all very interesting but the best thing…
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Problems with Azeem’s BPL idea
Azeem’s BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream: 1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed…
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Redefining ‘Public Service’ at BBCi
Azeem thinks we should try to apply open source thinking to the BBC. He thinks the Beeb’s online content and code should be freely published under the GPL – the…
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W3C Web Services standards
Werbach links to the W3C’s draft web services standards.
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Motorists out of control
Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks “who dares to stand up to the motorists?” The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that…
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Making of the Macintosh
I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase…
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Bioinformatics links
From an overview in last week’s New Scientist:Cytoscape, National Center for Biotechnology Information (US), European Bioinformatics Institute, Gene Ontology Consortium, Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium, The Center for Advancement of Genomics
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Proof for posterity
Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Gutenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It’s got to be worth a few minutes of your day to…
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Grocery heroes
The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they’ve built a home delivery service that doesn’t require you…