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How is wealth destroyed and where does wealth come from?: Where did the wealth destroyed on Stock Markets come from? If 20 percent of the value of world stock markets can be wiped out in one week, as has just happened, then where does that wealth actually disappear to? Is it buried in a big hole somewhere, scuttled at sea or sent on a rocket into [...]
What?s odd about this Dartboard? Found in an East London Pub: Do you notice anything odd about this dartboard seen in an East London pub recently? Most darts boards look a bit like this, but different. How on earth would you ever end a game of 301 on such a dart board? addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fdistributedresearch.net%2Fblog%2F2008%2F10%2F02%2Fodd-dartboard-east-london-fives'; addthis_title = 'What%27s+odd+about+this+Dartboard%3F+Found+in+an+East+London+Pub'; addthis_pub [...]
Theatre Breaks: Theatre Breaks not for cutbacks Having avoided traditional summer holidays the past two years, preferring to go abroad in the off seasons, I certainly won’t be cutting back on theatre breaks and other little weekends away or short breaks in the UK. Neither will hoards of other people up and down the country regardless of what [...]
Where does Money come from?: Have you ever been asked, Where does money come from? This might sound like a stupid question - “where does money come from” - but how many people actually know? In recent days European and UK national banks have pumped billions of Euros and pounds into the economies to try and stabilise a volatile market. The US [...]
Sea Eagles in Scotland - problems of reintroducing species: Sea Eagles Release Programme Various attempts have been made over the years, some successful, to reintroduce wildlife species into areas where they have become extinct in the past. The ospreys in England are one well known example, and a similar scheme is currently underway to reintroduce sea eagles into Scotland. This season is the second in a [...]
Untangle This: Sometimes it can seem as if everything has been so interwoven and tangled up that it will never be possible to straighten out any one individual strand. But why would you need to anyway? The main thing from the subjective point of view is not to get washed up on the beach in the first [...]
Loading Up The Lobster Pots: Loading up a small boat with lobster pots ready to put out from Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife. I’ve always been fascinated to watch the comings and going in these little fishing village harbours in Cornwall, France, Spain and now the east of Scotland. “We watch the working boats come in, to see what they have [...]
School Of Everything: Last night at Channel 4 in Horseferry Road, London The School of Everything launched. I’d heard about school of everything from various places over the past year, and gathered the idea is to encourage informal learning about subjects that people wish to learn more about, rather than agendas to promote qualifications and assessment. So [...]
Learning by Doing - interview part 5: Continuing the interview with Cormac Lawler, in which we begin to address the nature of “learning by doing” as it relates to distributed projects, and wiki in particular. Cormac Lawler: About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place [...]
August Rain and The Harvest: With the August bank holiday weekend coming up soon, the end of summer looms large ahead and I for one shall be welcoming it with open arms. Just a few years ago at this time of year I would have been sitting in a tent in a field somewhere like North Wales enjoying the [...]
Cormac interview: Wikiversity and Wikipedia: After a bit of a gap, the two-way interview between Cormac Lawler and myself continues. This post continues the discussion about distributed action research and wikiversity from previous episodes: DARnet-interview-part 1 DARnet interview part two Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity Andy Roberts asked: I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break [...]
Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum: As the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all [...]
London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs: I’m looking forward to the London Bloggers meetup tonight at a new venue near Blackfriars Bridge. Organiser Andy Bargery says there will be “plenty of space and cracking views over the Thames” which sounds good. With it being a larger venue, I noticed on the meetup site that there are still two places left [...]
Greenwich Naval College: The Naval College Buildings at Greenwich Viewed from Island Gardens at the tip of the Isle of Dogs across the river, because the DLR train service to Cutty Sark was suffering from delays on Sunday. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren just as he was limbering up to build an even bigger dome [...]
Eurostar Paris trains from London getting busier: I used to wonder what would happen after the Eurostar Paris trains were diverted from the interim Waterloo International station to the new St Pancras and now we are beginning to see the answer. International commuters in their thousands are switching from short haul flights between the two capitals to the fast St Pancras [...]
Google Suggests a pre-emptive text search: A short video to show how Google Suggest works and to imagine how this might change people’s behaviours if it gets deployed as the default search mode. If I’m right and Google are seriously considering releasing this live then how big a change do you think it will mean and what [...]
Wordpress as a Wiki: Wordpress version 2.6 is now out on release and the video below shows some detail of the new revision control which gives authors some of the functionality of a Wiki on top of the most popular blogging platform. From now on, a history of post versions is retained in the [...]
Can you learn how to write lyrics?: Learn how to write lyrics? The story goes like this: I was reading Friendfeed and came across a link to a site about How to write Lyrics and thought to myself “Well that’s a bit presumptuous isn’t it?” On visiting the site I found advice which seemed to recommend ‘tuning in to the music of the [...]
Questions about Wikiversity: This post continues the discussion about distributed action research and wikiversity from DARnet interview part two and DARnet-interview-part 1 with Cormac Lawler Cormac wrote: About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental [...]
London Bloggers presentations: London Bloggers This month’s London Bloggers evening meetup organised by Andy Bargery returned to the Coach and Horses with a slightly more formal evening than the usual social event, having four presentations for us to consider. Comment Tag Presented by Xavier Damman. After a good roundup of general strategies for encouraging comment on blogs, the Wordpress plugin CommentTag [...]