From Conor O’Neill:

“Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a fool’s errand. They would spend €100m, take five years and it wouldn’t work when it was finished. However, if they make each department’s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use…

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it.”

Yup. Just been looking for what I’d naively hoped were simple things: an API to help me sort out a GP nearby locator, and an API for OFSTED stuff. Ho hum. Am now fervently hoping the Guardian Free Our Data campaign works. Especially given the conclusion of this (very good) report:

In sum, recognition is slowly emerging in Europe that open access to government information is critical to the information society, the scientific endeavor, and economic growth. However, recent trends towards more “liberal” policies face opposition. This comes from treasuries as well as from entrepreneurial civil servants in charge of “government commercialization” initiatives, who are sometimes tempted to engage in anti-competitive practices. Therefore, these issues require consideration at the highest policy making levels of government.

• russell davies: learning by playing
  hopefully the beginning of something useful
  Tags: learning online kids tools blogs

Great post here (by someone who used to be a real curator):

“real curators don’t just leave a record. They assiduously build their collections, so that each new entry is made in full knowledge of its predecessors and with a deeply thoughtful anticipation for what comes next. These collections vibrate like a spider’s web with each new entry.

Real curators think with their collections. The collections are intelligence, memory, conceptual architecture made manifest. I love the idea that someone would take up this function in the digital world. But that’s not what I see the new “curators” doing. This richer, more authentic, more sincere rendering of the term could accomplish something astonishing. It would help sort and capture contemporary culture with some feeling for context, relative location, relative weight, what goes with what. This is the sort of thing that Pepys accomplished, unwittingly, with his diary. This notion of the curator has yet to find its champion. I don’t think we quite yet have a Pepys of the present day.”

Made me think of The Culture of Collecting again, and the problem with collecting things that aren’t “objects” as such: how do you easily spot what’s missing from your collection of thoughts? In other words, how can you usefully use all these wonderful online tools to avoid thinking kitsch thoughts or blandly repeating yourself?

• The Economist Has No Clothes: Scientific American
  Jevons, Walras, Edgeworth and Pareto developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete . The strategy .. was as simple as it was absurd�they substituted economic variables for physical ones.
  Tags: science history economics creativity

From Scientific American:

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

From the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (p.30):

[n.b. the lift coincides with the introduction of GCSE’s to avoid the O-level/CSE divide. Similar evidence at the BBC]

Aside from standards debates, it does make you wonder a) whether the GCSE syllabuses are more female-friendly, b) whether boys need Lutzesque training in empathy and c) if the choice is one of a two-tier O-level/CSE or a two-tier boy/girl, then which one’s preferable?

[Update]
just found this Pinker vs Spelke conversation on where

The speakers discussed research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of gender bias, discrimination, and innate and acquired differences between the sexes.

• To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson’s “Free!”) - O’Reilly Radar
  Anderson’s taxonomy of “free” contains six models that justify giving the information away. The idea of “free as in freedom” (that is, open source information in the GPL or CCs style) doesn’t enter at all into his article. I think it’s a crucial omission.
  Tags: business web2.0 information intelligent
• Office 2.0 Database - My Office 2.0 Setup
  
  Tags: web2.0 tools office productivity online
• Synching Up with the iKid: Connecting to the Twenty-First-Century Student | Edutopia
  “They like everything being electronic — it’s speaking their language.”
  Tags: technology education ikid
• Fawnt - Top free fonts | Font - Archive | Blog Design and Webdesign
  10.000 + fonts to look at… Maybe you don’t need to buy fonts. [via BBJ]
  Tags: design graphics free fonts
• Greg Laden’s Blog : Oral traditions effectively warn people about tsunamis and reduce mortality
  The stories contained information about how to recognize when a tsunami was about to come, such as falling sea levels, and told how people should take action. That’s the reason why casualties [in 1930] were so low.
  Tags: orality literacy tsunami narrative
• The science of religion | Where angels no longer fear to tread | Economist.com
  �Explaining Religion� is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics.
  Tags: research religion science europe
• 3quarksdaily
  Much has been made about the waggle dance, a fox trot of sorts that foraging honeybees do to tell their hive mates when they have found a good food source. There is only one problem: Many bees seem to ignore the information.
  Tags: nature information bees waggle_dance
• Interactions: I’m O.K., My P.C.’s O.K. - New York Times
  Individuals interact with communications technologies in fundamentally social and natural ways. We know intellectually that the screen before them is not flesh and blood, but our ability to distinguish person and language-using machine remains faulty
  Tags: brains interaction computer social manners
• Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 - FM - Volume 13, Number 3
  Web 2.0 embodies a set of unintended consequences: the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of identity across fractured spaces, powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor …
  Tags: article web2.0 criticism

From Worth1000.com via Matt:

From Black Swans(p.74):

“People tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of ‘national identity’, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors was shown to be a total fiction. (’National traits’ might be great for movies, they might be help a lot war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity…) Empirically, sex, social class and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behaviour than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru, and so on.)

From Cnet (via Alan):

Even if you just checkmated your new friend in India or took your Russian opponent’s rook, new chess Web sites like Chess.com are encouraging niche social networking. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi sat down with the site’s founder to find out what has attracted more than 100,000 members in less than a year.

This is kind of interesting. It equates self-employment with entrepreneurial activity, which I’m not sure is a particularly good indicator - skunkworks and the like are surely entrepreneurial albeit within the confines of an organisation - but good fodder nonetheless for sweeping statements in the pub.

“This paper examines the influence of religion on the decision for people to become an entrepreneur. Based on a large-scale data set of nearly ninety thousand workers in India, this paper finds that religion shapes the entrepreneurial decision. In particular, some religions, such as Islam and Christianity, are found to be conducive to entrepreneurship, while others, such as Hinduism, inhibit entrepreneurship.

In addition, the caste system is found to influence the propensity to become an entrepreneur. Individuals belonging to a backward caste exhibit a lower propensity to become an entrepreneur.

Thus, the empirical evidence suggests that both religion and the tradition of the caste system influence economic behavior, suggesting a link between religion and economics.”

• Are Kids Copying Their Parents When They Lie? — New York Magazine
  Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons�to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there�s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents
  Tags: children brains learning lying
• Addicted to browsing for information - WSJ.com
  coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well…
  Tags: addiction information brains interest research
• Developing Intelligence : 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers
  Research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed important differences between brains and computers. Appreciating these differences may be crucial to understanding the mechanisms of neural information processing and the creation of artificial intelligence.
  Tags: psychology neuroscience intelligence computing brains
• Make your site readable by semantic search engines - Dapper
  
  Tags: code semantic_web search seo

“When anyone asks how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. …… I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story”

- EJ Smith, Captain, RMS Titanic , 1907

Fast forward 5 years to 1912.

Captain Smith seems fabulous material for a story, and a least a discussion. Is there a sweet-spot for mistakes (and learning from them)? Or do we just have to accept that big unpredictable icebergs come along every now and then? (It seems that George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle had very different viewpoints on this at the time). If we do just have to accept it, then it seems that it is at least as important to learn how to cope with the icebergs as to steer the ship.

From The Black Swan:

“It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority by wearing unconventional clothes - what social scientists and economists call ‘cheap signalling’ - and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.”

Struck a chord for a couple of reasons.

1. a lot of cheap signals (e.g. bookmarks in delicious) seem to create value when aggregated
2. one of the things that frustrates me online is reading posts that are “more of the same” - cheap signals I suppose, which I’m as guilty as the next person of sending.

Ho hum.

John mentioned a lovely little quote at dinner last night, from Hermann Abs (apparently one of the great post-war bankers):

Profit is to business as breathing is to life.

Necessary, but not the point.