I think I’m going to cut the UK Wired out of my diet. They recently got an award, and the mag is usually a handsome book, but it’s not good enough. Typically there’s a bit less than one genuinely interesting piece per issue, which is nowhere near enough to make the cover price worthwhile. The…
Read More a Christmas gift for you: UK Wired editionI approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn’t even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality. Airport documentaries: might have been funny, in 1998. Stelios hasn’t actually been in charge of EasyJet in years, and IIRC he doesn’t own it any more…
Read More a Christmas gift for youThis paper in PLoS One is fascinating (if heavily blogged already). Basically, BT let some researchers from MIT, Cornell, UCL, and their own R&D division have an anonymised slice through their call-detail record (CDR) pile, the database from which phone bills are calculated. The scientists filtered out all the numbers that only made or accepted…
Read More an infallible scheme for redesigning BritainThis is one of the most interesting stories in the Wikileaks cable dump. The Saudis use the existence of the French national imagery satellite capability, and David Ignatius’s column in the Washington Post, to resist efforts by the Americans to stop them using US arms and satellite data provided for use on Al-Qa’ida for other…
Read More a glimpse of imagery diplomacyBérube sez: So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the…
Read More Back to 2006“Richard sent me photos of his private parts before I’d even met him,” says the redhead. “I thought this was very odd for a politician.”
Read More Quoted without commentYahoo! might be going to shut down del.icio.us, the link-sharing and bookmarking website it bought back in 2005 or thereabouts. (They might sell it, too.) This is awful – it’s one of the most useful things on the Web and it’s a key link in the production chain for everything I’ve written in the last…
Read More dis.gustin.ngThis would do as a HOWTO start a war. The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including “critics like the Guardian”. Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: “Our argument should be narrow, and put…
Read More repetition, repetition, repetitionAnyone going?
Read More psaOh yes, so the IBM ManyEyes people fixed their computer. I’ve got much more data now – I still need to do the four (key) departments that release in PDF format, and flush the existing stuff to replace the records with ones with standardised dates, but that should give you an idea. Hit the button…
Read More lobby