I love the idea of microcredit. The idea that you can lend money to a person, or a small group of people who can create or expand a business in certain parts of the world, giving them more stability and freedom, and also creating more economic activity in their country.
With kiva.org, you can do this […]
Via the BBC
Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.
I’ll make my own prediction here: in 20 years time, people will still be predicting that human-level AI is only 20 years away. 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1968, predicting that as well as colonisation of space and […]
From the BBC:-
“Britons currently enjoy eight bank holidays compared with 11 in France, 15 in Germany and 16 in Spain. Slovenia is top in Europe with 18 days.”
No, we don’t “enjoy” eight bank holidays. We are forced into taking days off when we’d rather not. Bank Holidays cost employers and without them, we’d be […]
I’ve been having a few chinwags with Dirk Olbertz who runs the Noserub project, for which he seems to be working on something that what I’m thinking about. He’s starting in a good way - don’t try and produce conceptual diagrams - build something and get people thinking and talking about it.
The approach is not […]
I’ve been starting to mull over whether there is an alternative to social networking than the current set of closed networks that exist in technologies such as Facebook, MySpace and so forth.
One could argue that blogging, RSS and so forth is a start of this. You can see a view of all your friends blogs […]
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/freegovdata/
I’ve set up an e-petition with regards to government data. In essence, I’m petitioning for that data which has already been produced by and for the government to be made freely available. So, where the government currently sells information such as the electoral role, DVLA information and postcodes, the information will be available on an […]
At the recent Oxford Geek Nights event, Simon Willison gave a presentation about OpenID. I think it’s worth a mention on its own, as sites like LifeHacker are picking up on it.
The idea behind OpenID is simple - replace hundreds of "per site" identity systems with a single sign-on system that can be used anywhere.
This […]
As a follow-up to my earlier post, I thought I’d try and explain what I’m thinking in terms of personal search.
The idea is based on Paul Graham’s "A Plan for Spam" which uses Bayesian Logic on emails to determine which mails for you are spam, and which are not. The general principle is that if […]
An Englishman’s Castle asks for choice of someone for New Years honours.
I’m not sure that this isn’t more "Man of the Year" than a New Year’s honour, but I’ll shoot.
My choice is Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. He’s South African, so qualifies. Not only because Ubuntu works great for me, but […]
Who thought up the website "naming and shaming of non-payers" by the new CSA (CMEC)? Actually, I’ll rephrase that - who approved it?
This has to be one of the silliest ideas that I’ve heard for a long time. What are they thinking? That people will go to the CMEC website and spot people they know?
One […]
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