I’m not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it’s not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time – here’s their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the “Enough Project” is going to…
Read More tasksIf it’s possible to get Americans to start a string of minor riots in order not to have at least $80bn worth of national healthcare, surely it must be possible to start a good row about whatever it is the Conservatives have in store for us? We stand to lose at least that and more.…
Read More first mover advantageWired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors…
Read More twitbook: book of twitsAn idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it. Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co.Observation 2: Political campaigns of all kinds…
Read More don’t leave me hanging on the telephoneMinor triumph. Hacker News dropped 2,095 hits on this post yesterday, which just shows you what a bit of well-directed whining can achieve; the fleeting attention of one million social-network Skinner-box pigeons. But yes. Anyway, Reggie makes a very good point in comments – why can’t I subscribe to somebody’s contact details and have them…
Read More contacts, againIn the last couple of months, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by XMPP; I said this to a colleague of mine, who reacted roughly as if I’d informed him that I now perceived time as simultaneous. Hey, it’s a tech company but not that techie. Specifically, however, I’ve become convinced that I was barking up the…
Read More Rethinking ORGANISEWhat with things like this, the LibDems’ drive to collect members of the scientific-technical intelligentsia at a secret location in Kazakhstan (surely it must be a….), it’s surely time to shake up my ORGANISE project – a messaging and task scheduling system for organisations of all kinds that implements a Stafford Beer viable system approach.…
Read More ORGANISE: a reappraisalAfter MySociety’s triumph on the MPs’ expenses issue, this looks interesting: the Lib Dems are putting out a call for geeks. This was followed up by a survey being sent out; I’ve filled it in, so I may end up spending the next election twiddling bolts on Chris Rennard’s particle accelerator. Apparently, there’s to be…
Read More our futuristic “mailing list” technology will render your crude oppression meaninglessBruce Sterling quotes a study into state failure which – counter-intuitively – puts Iceland and Canada at the top of the list of stable polities. It’s worse than that, though; they reckon Hungary is superstable , and they’re in the middle of an epic bank-currency-credit-mortgage crisis which has metastatised into a panic call to the…
Read More StabilityBeen writing the models.py for ORGANISE.
Read More reduced blog