Mssv

Putting webcams in classrooms to catch problem pupils - seems like a great idea to me, you wouldn’t believe the number of parents who think their kids can do no wrong. As for privacy concerns, I think maybe some kind of key escrow agency might be a good idea, wherein (say) at least two out [...]

There’s been a bit of a ruckus on MetaFilter recently regarding a journalist, Laurie Garrett, who attended the World Economic Forum and sent an email to her friends filled with her personal thoughts an speculations about the conference. The email was of course not intended for publication, but this being the 21st century and what [...]

Dispatches From Davos - an ongoing report of the Davos World Economic Forum conference by Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson. Fun and interesting stuff.

In the Sunday Times today is a short opinion article by John Humphries; it’s a relatively pedestrian essay about how we shouldn’t make AK-47s any more, etc etc. Not really worthy of note, other than the fact that its title, ‘AK-47s are weapons of mass destruction too’ is quite obviously ripped off from Michigan’s Lake [...]

Take a look at the LambdaMOO constitution (about halfway down the page). It confirms my belief that the most efficient and often best form of governance for an online community is essentially a benevolent dictatorship. LambdaMOO is basically an virtual online world.
In their constitution, the LambdaMOO administrators (’Wizards’) explicitly state that they will sometimes make [...]

An excellent article in the Times today examined the content of Prince Charles’ letters to ministers, and found them sadly lacking in logic and facts. I’m not too concerned about Prince Charles writing to government ministers since this article echoes my thoughts that the letters don’t say anything useful anyway, apart from woolly heartful platitudes.

Nice to see that the British Council is running the Daily Summit weblog, providing continual coverage of the World Summit. It’s impressively teched up, with RSS feeds, and has a load of original content. I’d say that this was very forward-thinking of the British Council, but to be honest they’ve always sponsored cool stuff in [...]

I’ve just become a student member of the British Association of Science so that I can attend upcoming the Festival of Science for free. In the newsletter, I’m told that Science Year has been extended to the end of 2003.
I’ve never been a fan of grand gestures like ‘Science Year’, partly because I’ve never seen [...]

There’s been a story on Metafilter that mirrors a recent thread on the Culture mailing list concerning the rash of media coverage on child kidnappings in the US and UK. If you read the Metafilter discussion, it morphs into an argument about whether it’s insensitive for someone to say, “Well, it’s very sad that these [...]

A new bill entitled the Space Exploration Act of 2002 has been introduced to set forth a strict timetable for NASA to accelerate reuseable space vehicle development and see a Man on Mars by 2022 (and no, it hasn’t been enacted yet).