BASIC CRAFT

Loving Wordle for fun and for research.

It’s by Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM Research, and is a tool for generating ‘word clouds’ from texts.

I made this one out my About page.

Visual-literacy.org is the site of an online course in data visualisation run by Università della Svizzera italiana. They’ve put together a nifty ‘periodic table’ of visulation methods. A very good resource.

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) is one of the new kids on the Whitehall block. The department has been established to steward the Government programmes that foster a dynamic, knowledge-based economy. And with a Minister like John Denham at the helm, the outlook is good.

A while back I picked up on a consultation DIUS was staging on innovation and how it should be sustained in the UK. Originally based on a conventional set of questions and an invitation to send in a response, I spotted that DIUS have now ‘upgraded’ the exercise with a consultation microsite.

The opportunity to get involved in a consultation about the contribution of innovation to the UK’s competitiveness is welcomed. The exercise has a particular focus on science and innovation policies and is open until January 31st 2008. I’m going to respond where I can (science and innovation is not exactly my area of expertise) and would urge others to get involved in order to demonstrate the depth of interest and the breadth of the innovation practitioner community. (more…)

If you’ve never read Straw Dogs by John Gray, you should. It’s an arresting book centred on a critique of humanism and the concept of progress and materialism. At times it really spoke to me, and at others it induced a very furrowed brow. Either way, I’m really glad I read it.

There was one paragraph that really stood out to me in a chapter on free will. Gray discusses the ‘bandwidth of consciousness’. He cites figures from Vincent Deary who has calculated that overall we process some 14 million bits of information per second. But the bandwidth of conscious action and thought, however, is only 18 bits!

If true (unfortunately the name of the calculator is cited but not the paper), then perhaps we should be less concerned with pushing up the speed of our internet connections, and spend some more time on reducing the throttling on our minds.

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Really enjoyed an article by Jonathan Fildes on the BBC website about a Nigerian primary school’s experiences of the $100 laptop.

According to his report, there have been some highs and lows. On the negatives… it seems that ‘games, girls and gambling’ are still high on the agenda for first time internet users :) But let’s concentrate on the highs… the students are really enjoying the laptops and have even started to disassemble and reassemble the hardware to see how it really works.

This last bit reminds me of a school I visited in Recife (Brazil) that was working with the Porto Digital initiative. The students’ first task is to build their own machine. Then, instead of Portuguese, it’s code and copyrighting class; instead of maths, it’s budgets. In art class, they learn photo-editing and Flash. I want to go back to school!