Preoccupations

Links for 2008-10-05 [del.icio.us]

Thomas Jefferson - Wikiquote
"I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give."
How The Guardian reported the 1929 Wall Street Crash (pdf)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/04/useconomy
Observer: The 2008 Crash
2020 Hindsight » What the meltdown looks like
"The thriving business of “trashing out” foreclosed homes. All the stuff, abandoned. So many homes to process that there’s no time to get valuable things to charity. So many and so fast, that all the stuff goes to the landfill."
The party's over for Iceland, the island that tried to buy the world | Observer
"Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country's three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out."
Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations - ReadWriteWeb
Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » technological determinism, open exceptionalism, defensive politicisation
"Those who believe in the positive values of ... an open Internet ... often have diverging ideas about how ... best [these should] be defended. ... The first & earliest ... is technological determinism which ... assumes that the technology just naturally rolls along to maximize the right degree & kinds of freedom. ... A lot of people still hold with this ... If you become disillusioned with it, you often end up ... far more sceptical ... of the Net's benefits ... A modified version ... states that while the Net ... doesn't always provide positive values, it can ... protect its best values ... Call it open exceptionalism ... Then I think you have a Lessig-like pessimism about the inevitability of those positive values. Openness is good, but the Net doesn't always show it, & the preservation of its best attributes requires constant vigilance against vested interests ... the Internet was incredibly lucky to reach the place it did quickly enough before anyone realised it would be a threat"
BBC NEWS | dot.life | A blog about technology from BBC News | CNN, Steve Jobs, and a dodgy rumour
"The border between professional and amateur journalism is getting more blurred. But if a professional news organisation publishes an inaccurate piece by an amateur journalist, whose reputation suffers?" + http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/10/maybe-journalism-is-not-quite.php
BBC NEWS | Robert Peston: Full deposit protection is nigh
"The decision by the German federal government to guarantee all private savings in German banks is momentous. In a globalised banking market, in which money can leak across borders like a sieve, it will be almost impossible for the UK not to follow Germany's lead. I would be immensely surprised if Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, didn't announce a similar commitment within the next 24 hours. ... there's an unfortunate Great Depresssion resonance in the decision of the German administration to stand behind all private savings". But see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/10/german_guarantee_lost_in_trans.html
Karl Kraft » Yet another iPhone Emergency Call Security Bug
"If however the phone is placed in emergency call mode, any incoming SMS messages are previewed instead of presented as the generic messages. ... this is bug 6267416. I don’t have much hope for it being fixed soon, because my security bug 5368148 from July of 2007 is still marked as open, and still unfixed in 10.5.5"
Is the Web still the Web? | Neil McAllister | InfoWorld
First, "Web documents were fundamentally text, embellished with a markup language (HTML) that described how the text should be formatted & how each document was linked to others elsewhere on the Web. ... static HTML document is largely a thing of the past. In its place is a ... range of technologies ... from the flexibility & openness of Web 1.0 ... to a closed, binary-only paradigm ... akin to traditional desktop software. ... Is it still the Web if it's not really hypertext? ... if you can't navigate directly to specific content? ... if the content can't be indexed & searched? ... if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? ... if you can't view source? Equally important ... If application developers feel limited by the constraints of standards-compliant browser technologies, should they really be targeting their applications for the browser? Or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs?"
New dating method sheds light on cave art
"Scientists are revolutionising our understanding of early human societies with a more precise way of dating cave art. Instead of trying to date the paintings & engravings themselves, they are analysing carbonate deposits like stalactites and stalagmites that have formed over them. ... in several caves whose art had previously been assumed to date from the same period, the new dating technique has revealed that the paintings were done in several phases, possibly over 15,000 years (25,000 years ago to just 10,000.) The dating method involves a technique called uranium series dating. It works on any carbonate substance, such as coral or limestone, and involves measuring the balance between a uranium isotope and the form of thorium that it decays into. The technology isn't new - it was first developed in the mid-twentieth century, and is often used in areas like geology and geochemistry. But successfully applying it to date cave art is a big leap in our understanding of human prehistory"

Links for 2008-10-04 [del.icio.us]

The Featured Artists Coalition
"The Featured Artists' Coalition campaigns for the protection of performers' and musicians' rights. We want all artists to have more control of their music and a much fairer share of the profits it generates in the digital age. We speak with one voice to help artists strike a new bargain with record companies, digital distributors and others, and are campaigning for specific changes." See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7652143.stm & http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/04/popandrock.tradeunions
Robert Peston, 'face of the credit crunch': clever, tricky fastidious and serious | The Guardian
"aggressively confident &, once he gets past a certain sing-song throat-clearing, he can hardly talk fast enough to get it all out: Northern Rock (... Royal Television Society award for scoop of the year); Lloyd TSB's plans to take over HBOS - another major scoop; the first post-announcement interview with HBOS's chief executive. ... what Brown, who perhaps has been a "bit naive", is now dealing with is "more than a theoretical possibility" of a full-blown depression, probably "quite a bad recession", & a redrawing of the financial firmament - which, "in many ways, is a very, very good thing. I think there's a sense in which all of us ... were seduced by property prices. A house is somewhere to live in. It's not a source of wealth." ... "The moral authority, that America can lecture the world on the best way to run their economy, has been shot to pieces. ... if the Chinese got their act together, & they wanted to, they could actually, at this moment, buy the entire US banking system""
Flickr: Panda
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/2774092202/
Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Cloud computing
"Google, Zoho and Jooce cost nothing. MobileMe and SugarSync charge, so I suggest taking advantage of their free trial offers. Security? Ah, well, that’s a whole other ball of wax. Are your jewels safer at home or in someone else’s safety deposit box? Questions don’t get mooter." Stallman: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
Derek Walcott — the people who never got the Nobel: Auden, Frost, Naipaul - I mean Nabokov | The Guardian
""I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays ... Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? ... You can't act a myth. ... the poet ... can make his language grandiose, but the interior tone must be human. That's the achievement of Shakespeare: this grandiose poetry is spoken as if somebody could say it""; "Walcott insisted on "the importance of the shape that you make out of a poem. ... Pasternak said: 'Great poets have no time to be original.'" Imitation ... "is not only a form of flattery, but is in a way creation. No two things are going to be alike. Whatever you bring to the craft is going to be individualistic"; ""the totalitarian view of anything, the callous view, the indifference to beauty. If you are indifferent to that, as part of your politics, then everything is permissible. If you can say God is dead, then harmony is dead, melody is dead, music is dead, therefore faith is dead. Therefore it's easy to do what you have to do in the name of necessity""
Data centre energy use jumps 13 per cent | IT PRO
"The amount of energy used by European data centres climbed by more than 13 per cent between 2006 and 2007. More than 16.3TWh were consumed by servers in Western Europe in 2007. The same amount of electricity could power all street lighting and traffic signals in the UK for almost two years, the report claimed. ... “Last year, €1.6 billion (£1.3 billion) was spent on powering servers throughout Western Europe, which translated into €4.4 billion for entire data centres," said Nathaniel Martinez program director, European Enterprise Servers. "Unless a drastic change in products and company practices occurs, things will not get any better in the future.""
Open the Future: Long-Run vs. Long-Lag
"With a long-run problem, a solution can be applied any time between now and when the problem manifests; the "solution window," if you will, is open up to the moment of the problem. While the costs will vary, it's possible for a solution applied at any time to work. ... Global warming is, for me, the canonical example of a long-lag problem, as geophysical systems don't operate on human cause-and-effect time frames. ... With long-lag problems, you simply can't wait until the problem is imminent before you act. You have to act long in advance in order to solve the problem. In other words, the solution window closes long before the problem hits."

Links for 2008-10-03 [del.icio.us]

Henry Jenkins: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked"
1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. 2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression. 3. Children are the primary market for video games. 4. Almost no girls play computer games. 5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them. 6. Video games are not a meaningful form of expression. 7. Video game play is socially isolating. 8. Video game play is desensitizing.
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Video Games Myths Revisited: New Pew Study Tells Us About Games and Youth
"At the most basic level, game playing has become more or less universal. ... The Pew research may also force us to rethink once again the assumption that there is a gender gap in terms of who plays games ... [&] complicates easy generalizations about the place of violent entertainment in the lives of American teens ... [&] further challenges the idea that game playing is a socially isolating activity ... The Pew Research does indicate some areas where parents should be concerned about the gaming lives of their sons and daughters. ... The Pew Research also challenges the prevailing myth that most parents are worried or alarmed about their young people's relations to games."
This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. (pdf)
"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7648042.stm
Official Gmail Blog: Tip: Read your mail without touching your mouse
Kevin Kelly -- The Expansion of Ignorance
"science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge"
Rob van Kranenburg: The Internet of Things (pdf)
See http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/10/the-internet-of.html
Permalinks - jerakeen.org
"We seem to have bi-directional permalinks back again. With none of the advantages - delicious doesn’t tell me when someone bookmarks one of my pages, for instance, I’d have to ask them about every single url on my site - and all the disadvantages, in that I can’t ever change urls now, even if I use redirects."
Schneier on Security: Taleb on the Limitations of Risk Management
""The thing you have to be aware of most obviously is scenario planning, because typically if you talk about scenarios, you'll overestimate the probability of these scenarios. If you examine them at the expense of those you don't examine, sometimes it has left a lot of people worse off, so scenario planning can be bad. I'll just take my track record. Those who did scenario planning have not fared better than those who did not do scenario planning. A lot of people have done some kind of "make-sense" type measures, and that has made them more vulnerable because they give the illusion of having done your job. This is the problem with risk management. I always come back to a classical question. Don't give a fool the illusion of risk management. Don't ask someone to guess the number of dentists in Manhattan after asking him the last four digits of his Social Security number. The numbers will always be correlated.""
navigation watch with little map scrolls, from 1920s britain (strange maps)

Links for 2008-10-02 [del.icio.us]

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library
Harvard Business Interactive Chart: The U.S. Economy Since 1948
Jonathan Jones: Alan Moore knows the score | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
Dourish & Bell: "Resistance is Futile": Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing (pdf)
"the character of technology use is strongly shaped by cultural & institutional arrangements. ... It is not the case that some technological descriptions focus on social context, and some do not; any description of a technology is always already social and cultural. Nor is it the case that social and cultural forces come into play after a technology is deployed, shaping its diffusion and appropriation; rather, social and cultural are already thoroughly implicated in how a technology is imagined and designed. So the distinction we might draw is not between research that involves social and cultural factors and research that does not, but rather between research that acknowledges these factors and research that DRAFT UNDER REVIEW – NOT FOR CITATION 13 suppresses, ignores, or denies them. Ironically, what we achieve through an engagement with science fiction is a series of reminders about scientific fact."
Pew Research Center: The Bad Rap on the Bailout Bill
"There is little indication of overwhelming public rejection of the bailout proposal ... While the public is divided over what to do, no signs of a firestorm of opposition are evident. ... an attentive American public is certainly voicing many widely shared misgivings about the rescue plan ... Yet despite these concerns, most of the public is still not rejecting the proposed legislation simply because there is such a strong desire to see the government take action. The ABC/Washington Post poll on Monday night found 94% saying the current financial situation is a crisis. And 88% of its respondents worried that Congress's rejection of the plan, which resulted in Monday's big stock mark loss, could lead to a more severe economic decline in this country."
Salon Books | "From Hell"
Jack Schofield meets Vint Cerf, the 'father of the internet' | Technology | The Guardian
""I don't believe we will see grow out of the network the kind of intelligence that sounds like a Fred Hoyle science fiction novel, ... even if the internet is not intelligent and aware, it will feel more intelligent than it does today. But it's fair to say that if you want the system to do things you care about, you have to let it know what you care about. You have to give up some information voluntarily"; ""The idea of a virtual private network was not part of the original design," says Cerf, with a grin. "It was actually an oversight. It didn't occur to me that it would be useful until afterwards.""
How Wikipedia Works
Skype sells out to China - Machinist - Salon.com
oh dear, oh dear, oh dear ... See http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/10/02/5564. + Wikipedia?

Links for 2008-10-01 [del.icio.us]

David Simon — The Wire: The Audacity of Despair
russell davies: unproduct
"maximum idea, minimum stuff"
Google 10th Birthday timeline
+ http://www.google.com/search2001.html
Evernote Blog » Evernote Opens Up, Launches API, Hugs Geeks
"Three huge things happened this week: (1) we released our Service API today, (2) we introduced scripting support to our Mac and Windows clients, and (3) we enabled XML import/export of your notes and notebooks from the desktop clients. "
Official Google Blog: Saving electricity one data center at a time
"We now believe that Google-designed data centers are the most efficient in the world. The graph below shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower. As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query."
Google: Commitment to Sustainable Computing
"Our five step plan 1. Minimize electricity used by servers 2. Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves 3. Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead 4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers 5. Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices"
Socialtext 3.0 Launch Coverage
Amazon Web Services Blog: Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows
See http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/09/amazon_ec2_with_microsoft_wind.html
Official Google Blog: Clean energy 2030
"To get there we need to move immediately on three fronts: (1) Reduce demand by doing more with less ... (2) Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal (RE<C) ... (3) Electrify transportation and re-invent our electric grid"
The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc | 43 Folders
"In sum, The Wire pays back the attention you invest in it like few pieces of art created in my lifetime. It’s vicious about telling every letter of the story with muscular precision — even when it chooses to do so at pace many would consider pointlessly deliberate: “dull.” And, because the story rarely stops to explain what’s happening for the folks who just wandered in from the first segment of Family Feud, it demands that you bring the same care and thought to watching the show that its creators brought to making it. Thinking, on both ends of the art. That is engagement. Like great literature, yes, you can return and enjoy this series on many levels and based on whatever you have to bring to it at a given time. It’s not only smarter than anything else that I’ve seen on TV, it’s also smarter than I am. Which I love."
Ben Cerveny: Patterns, Play, Improvisation and Simulation
"There are a couple of other things worth mentioning concerning play. One of the things people are very good at is manipulating a number of variables in real time. ... Play is something that happens as a system of rules, potentially very simple rules that generate potentially very complex results. ... Pattern languages that are formed from ... improvisations will begin to inform the extension of new systems, and you can begin to build up a community of understanding ... varied tropes or typologies that form the bases of a higher-bandwidth ability for humans to interact with information in real time. ... all of these different approaches that I have spoken about - improvisation, play, pattern languages, simulation - all form a pattern language in and of themselves ... the process of iterative innovation ... is something that people in the world will do, once they have access to the tools people can use to transform their environment in real time"

Links for 2008-09-30 [del.icio.us]

Sam Harris on the prospect of President Palin
"how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. ... I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization"
Stainless for OS X Leopard
Kable - Conservatives would scrap ContactPoint database
"A Conservative party spokesperson confirmed a report in The Daily Telegraph that Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, plans to scrap the £224m system if his party forms a government. Gove told the Telegraph that ContactPoint would "increase the risk" of abuse of vulnerable children. "The government has proved that it cannot be trusted to set up large databases and cannot promise that inappropriate people would be able to access the database. It would be irresponsible to implement something that is such a danger to our children," he said. "After all the problems we have with this government losing sensitive data we need to do things differently. We need to invest in people. Strengthening relationships, not building another Big Brother system," Gove added. He said that a Conservative government would instead promote data sharing between professionals looking after children, as well as a small targeted database for children of concern."
russell davies: socialising an idea
"whenever you hear mention of speed, it's worth remembering the eternal Project Triangle"; "going fast will tend to reduce the amount of collaboration you do. Fast strategy is perfectly possible, but it's best done in the head of a single person, or the heads of a really tight team. Not necessarily a bad thing. But not always the right thing ... a slow strategy, a socialised strategy is maybe more likely to yield a rich one"; "doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly"
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Once and for all
"As threatened, in my Guardian column this week, I try to catalogue the yes-but contrariness I hear about the internet’s opportunities–and my responses"; "When you see nothing but junk, create quality. Where quality is hard to find, curate it, adding your own seal of approval with a link. When you read inaccuracies and misunderstandings, add facts, corrections, context and journalism. If people on the internet get things wrong, educate them. When you hear the noise of people talking online, listen. I know I come across as the internet triumphalist. Somebody has to. Somebody needs to be the contrarian’s contrarian."
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
"The Singularity is an illusion that will be constantly retreating -- always "near" but never arriving. We'll wonder why it never came after we got AI. Then one day in the future, we'll realize it already happened. The super AI came, and all the things we thought it would bring instantly -- personal nanotechnology, brain upgrades, immortality -- did not come. Instead other benefits accrued, which we did not anticipate, and took long to appreciate. Since we did not see them coming, we look back and say, yes, that was the Singularity."
Official Google Blog: Your YouTube video: Hot or Not?
"What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again? This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine "hot" and "cold" spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content's gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely."
Pulse Laser: If products are people too, let them have a thousand true fans…
"products and services for ‘generation-c’ can’t afford not to generate, nurture and learn from their ‘fanbase’, as soon the means of creating such products will lie with the fanbase themselves. It’s rich territory for designers and makers working today for sure: creating products and potentialities for products that will garner a fanbase through their lifetime has always been their goal. In the recent past of industrial design and manufacture this was the mass-produced ‘megahit’ of the ‘design classic’: the Aalto stool, the Eames chair, the Ive pods - but the breadth and depth of niches that this post-industrial scenario offers for viable, sustainable, economic exploration is something new I think, and one that post-industrial design firms such as S&W are itching to explore."
Brave new worlds : Nature
"A new series of essays looks back at scientific meetings that had world-changing consequences." See http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/meetings/
Engineering the Earth to avoid global warming | A changing climate of opinion? | The Economist
This Blog Sits at the: Brands Behaving Badly
"I am working on a way to draw together the pieces of this blog. Here are the posts that fall under the theme Brands Behaving Badly"

Links for 2008-09-29 [del.icio.us]

Twitter / Fred Wilson: it's interesting that the ...
"it's interesting that the house said no to the splurge. these assets are toxic politically and financially. a buying oppty for someone"
Twitter / Doc Searls: The market today lost $.3 ...
"The market today lost $.3 trillion more than the bailout would have cost. Nice move."
Tories plan £20bn 180mph rail link instead of Heathrow third runway | Politics | The Guardian
"A third runway at Heathrow airport would be scrapped by a Tory government that would instead build a £20bn TGV-style high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. ... In one of David Cameron's boldest moves on the environment, the party will today unveil plans to cut 66,000 flights a year from Heathrow by tempting passengers on to the first new rail line north of London in more than a century. ... There would also be a high speed line linking St Pancras with Heathrow.London to Birmingham would take 45 minutes instead of 80; London to Manchester 80 minutes instead of 125, London to Leeds 97 minutes instead of 125 and Manchester to Leeds 17 minutes instead of the current 55."
Martin Tytell, a man who loved typewriters | Martin Tytell | The Economist
"Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. ... When his shop closed in 2001, after 65 years of business, it held a stock of 2m pieces of type. ... Each typewriter was, to him, an individual."
The Baikonur Cosmodrome - The Big Picture
"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is an entire Kazakh city, rented and administered by Russia. The Cosmodrome was founded in 1955, making it one of the oldest space launch facilites still in operation. Here are collected some photographs of manned and unmanned launches from Baikonur over the past several years."
Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com
"It's 11 a.m., & a handful of Flickr.com employees have gathered around a messy conference table to discuss, as they have daily for six years, the minutiae of governing humans. ... it's hard not to conclude Flickr's conducting a kind of nation-building. ... A society takes shape around the bizarre intersections where one freedom is pitted against another. When a Web site hosts visual representations of those intersections, weird questions get asked. ... "The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual & the community ... We don't need to be the photo-sharing site for all people. We don't need to take all comers. It's important to me that Flickr was built on certain principles. ... I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own. ... People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract""
…My heart’s in Accra » Mastermundo, and the challenge of breaking rules
"how do we build real, productive connections with people across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries… without putting people on airplanes? Or trains? How do we efficiently manufacture xenophiles? ... I’d been hoping the internet could be a solution ... Shouldn’t this help us connect with people around the world? That’s what I thought ... I helped start a website called Global Voices, which is basically a site designed to help you find citizen media from other countries, especially the developing world. ... If you read the site, you’ll end up getting a much better sense for what the hot topics are in other parts of the world ... But you probably won’t. ... It’s not your fault. Human beings are tribal by nature. ... We’ve got the infrastructure that makes it possible to connect to one another, to tell stories to one another, to share films and family photos and things that make us laugh or cry with people anywhere in the world. And so far, we’re pretty bad at using it."
Department for Children, Schools and Families: Government Launches New UK Council For Child Internet Safety

Bowood House [Flickr]

Preoccupations posted a photo:

Capability Brown's work