Thursday Dec 27, 2007
The Beatles, Pachelbel, and total availability of the long tail
Listening to the Beatles and Pachelbel make me think about selection and availability from the 'long tail' of data which is now so readily available to us all.
Tuesday Dec 25, 2007
Free software, free understanding: an example from macro-economics.
Please view this talk by Zak Greant. It's an important subject, espcially for simulation, though so far there are some areas - even in government - where open source modelling seems to thrive alongside proprietary code.
Thursday Dec 20, 2007
The practical value of emergency response exercises
A report by "Trust for America's health" reviews pandemic planning and makes some interesting points about exercises.
Tuesday Dec 18, 2007
Cognitive dissonance, Bayes and simulation
Really fascinating discussion on Mind Hacks about cognitive dissonance (actually, it's about reductionism, but the cognitive dissonance is what interests me.) This is the idea that we rationalise our 'choices' based on external events.
Sunday Dec 16, 2007
Surfacing coincidence
An interesting speculation, attributed by Matt Mcalister to Matt Jones, on the way that internet applications (not least blogging) can "surface coincidence" or manufacture serendipity.
'Monopoly' at war
According to the WSJ, MI9 supplied doctored Monopoly sets to British prisoners of war.
Wednesday Dec 5, 2007
The environmental impact of servers: missing the point?
A glitzy report by 'Global Action Plan' claims that servers do as much environmental damge as SUVs. At least they don't take up parking spaces.
Sunday Dec 2, 2007
Metadata and the micro-ecology of data.
In an ICT lesson, my son was shown how to create HTML pages in a text editor, and then in MS Word. The teacher did admit that Word was more verbose. I said the same thing, and then felt obliged to prove it to him. I wrote two simple 'Hello world' pages: one in plain HTML, one using HTML generated by Word. The simple HTML has 50 characters, the Word version has 1392. (26 times as much, though the ratio would be different if the document was longer and more complex.) Serious implications for the ecology of data, a science that the world needs.
Google Streetmaps
A civilian version of the GKB, Google Streetmaps drives through cities photographing us and publishing the results.
The GKB: a database of everything.
The US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently has recently announced that the Worldview 1 spy satellite is operational. When WorldView 2 comes on stream, the two will supply 1 million square km per day of high-resolution earth imagery. The planned GEOINT Knowledge Base (GKB) may soon become the world's most massive database.