Ed Dowding

Tag: information society

Superstruct future forecasting game

I can’t believe I’ve only just heard of this. Superstruct is a forecasting game designed to anticipate new ways of being / doing this human being thing on planet Earth. It was massively multiplayer and played by more than 7000 people from September – November, 2008. The Institute for the Future published the results. Some ...

Gaming for a better world.

It’s all just a game, really, this whole life business. We’re in it for a good time, to be fulfilled, amused, creative, challenged, active, careful, and much more. In games we often perform better if the pressure is off. So too in life. Relaxing into it and knowing that one way or another it’s pretty ...

Round of good things this week

A rather lovely looking place called Old Hall Community which is looking for residents and volunteers, and a sustainability centre based at Llanfyllin Workhouse. A few interesting things in citizen reporting and community action: Help Me Investigate is a place where you can collaborate with other people to investigate things. Who’s Lobbying answers questions for ...

Human Culture through language

A team from Harvard has been studying Google Book’s record of human culture, spanning six centuries and seven languages. It shows vocabularies expanding and grammar evolving. It contains stories about our adoption of technology, our quest for fame, and our battle for equality. And it hides the traces of tragedy, including traces of political suppression, ...

Wikileaks: Website of the knowledge of good and evil

I wonder if this is going to play out as it does in the Bible, wherein power-hungry incumbent with delusions of grandeur (and a penchant for voyeurism) shows true colours, and banishes us from every getting near such founts of knowledge again? Paypal and Amazon have already removed their support for WikiLeaks. God directly forbade ...

I Wish This Was

New Orleans is full of vacant storefronts and people who need things. These stickers are an easy tool to voice what you want where you want it. Fill them out and put them on abandoned buildings and beyond. These stickers are custom vinyl and can be easily removed without damaging property. They’re free and can ...

Vision 2050. From here to there.

Zoom.it – Image foTF.

Contentious post about tuition fees

Are people being denied loans to pay for tuition feed? Is it actually IMPOSSIBLE for people to go to university, or just expensive for them to? When I went to university I found many people who didn’t really want to be there, gained little from the experience, were only really doing it because it was ...

Facebook relationship data

Neat graph. Facebook shows why you might get dumped before Xmas | Technically Incorrect – CNET News.

Stuxnet

A great story, but more importantly a really interesting one.. Stuxnet is a worm (computer virus) which has been designed – by a very good team for about 6 months – to do a very specific job. But what is that job?

Google Transparency Report

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. This map shows the number of requests that we received in six-month blocks Google Transparency Report: Government Requests.

Two great new London Maps

TFL have eventually decided to release their data. (We were trying to get them to do this five years ago…) Already there are a few great examples of what this data can do: Stefan Wehrmeyer (who is looking for a job, if you have one going) has made a few great examples showing CCTV footage ...

Good.is' most popular infographics of 2009

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

Free documentaries

Does what it says on the can: http://freedocumentaries.org/

Web of mistrust

China pays 280,000 commentators to skew online conversations. Their activities were described by Chinese President Hu Jintao as “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance”.

The Postcode Paper – welcome to your neighbourhood

What a great idea, and fantastic use of liberated data: [The Postcode Paper] gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics. It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for ...

Royal Mail strikes – a postie's perspective

Edited highlights from an LRB article: ‘Figures are down,’ we chortle mirthlessly, as we load the third batch of door-to-door catalogues onto our frames, adding yet more weight to our bags, and more minutes of unpaid overtime to our clock. We get paid 1.67 pence per item of unaddressed mail, an amount that hasn’t changed ...

Economist “Did you know?” 2009

YouTube – Economist “Did you know?”.

Biological lego

Thanks to Martin Anazco for linking to this video about creating custom DNA which led me to this: The Registry is a collection of ~3200 genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems. Founded in 2003 at MIT, the Registry is part of the Synthetic Biology community’s efforts ...

I have nothing to fear from a DNA database

It’s tempting to think that DNA databases are OK, because it’s just a way of uniquely identifying someone, just like a long number which no one else has, which is intrinsically linked to you. If you believe that, I can see why you think you may have nothing to worry about. But the problem is ...