Category — General

Dyke to open up BBC archive. BBC boss Greg Dyke plans to give the public full free online access to the corporation's archives. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

this is a good thing, first the ibm archives as noted by Matt a while back and now the bbc.

Utopian Architecture. Ever wonder what Utopia might look like? So have 300 years of Russian architects. [MetaFilter]

I remember that a few years ago there was some movement about documenting the 'crisis' architecture movement in the former u.s.s.r. (i don't know if it was called crisis, but it was building things to look like they would collapse, be broken, etc. symbolizing a real break) there wer some nifty designs linked about from a wide variety of places.

New blog: netwoman. It's not often that I come across blogs about gender and technology, but here is a new one: Netwoman by… [GENDER & COMPUTING]

Campus Cutbacks Hit the Classroom. Many public universities have reluctantly begun chopping away at academics, making it harder for students to graduate on time. By Greg Winter. [New York Times: Education]

i will say that i think that there may be much more politics involved in some of these occurances than perhaps should be.

nonetheless my position is: raise taxes and guarantee the success of the future by investing in education. the booms of the 80's-90's are probably much more an effect of the huge investment in education int the 60's-70's than anything else. of course, comparative funding levels now point toward a much less optimistic future, but you see this is a choice voters can make, they can tell their state governments to pay for education.

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully. Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust has begun, the part in which former employees of start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. By Claudia H. Deutsch. [New York Times: Technology]

this article has several levels to consider, but most dishearteningly the core seems to be “don't encourage a culture of taking big chances”.

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i like quizzes that seem to have good characters….

College Rankings!. College Rankings! Seems like everyone's talking about 'em. There's the good ole controversial US News & World Report rankings, but thanks to the the librarians at UIUC, this wonderful site has links to many, many, many different rankings, including ones that let you make your own rankings. There's also rankings of some of the more important non-academic features of colleges, too.

Does college rank really matter? [MetaFilter]

all rankings except the ones you personally construct and refuse to distribute are junk, once you make it for an audience other than yourself, and accept evidence and opinion from others without a proper critical eye based on your own personal perspective and desires, the enumeration of the value becomes worthless and uninterpretatable.

Study: Open source produces best results. I found the following link/article buried in my e-mail. It is a bit old, nevertheless the argument still stands. Study: Open source produces best results “A consulting group that scrutinizes the source code underlying several operating systems has found that a key networking component of Linux is of higher quality in several ways than that of competing closed-source software.”… [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information]

Interesting study, i might be able to put it to some use….

Globalisation and Falling Inequality.

The Economist discusses a lecture by Stanley Fischer (ex-MIT,IMF and now with Citigroup) and summarises that “if you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.” One of the reasons: “Two of the poorest countries in the world÷China and India÷have both (a) enormous populations and (b) rapid growth in incomes per head in the years in question.”

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

but maybe we should account for inflation and money transfer and illicit economies to see where that equality arises.

Nachi, the 'benevolent' worm has so far been responsible for shutting down a railroad and a hospital among other institutions. Please tell me no one is running a nuclear power plant on Windows… What? They are? [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

yes, well, a few nuclear plants, an aircraft carrier or two; in a risk society occasional calamitous disasters are often traded amongst rich and poor, for various other values and uses. Windows is easy and common, who cares if we have a meltdown…. or don't.