Interesting Links for 5-9-2011

[andrewducker]

• Edinburgh Festival closing fireworks. My favourite was number 10 (the curtain)
  (tags: fireworks edinburgh photos pretty)
• Google Gravity - a new search interface. It's a bit fragile, so try not to break it.
  (tags: google search funny)
• Can the United States move beyond the narcissism of 9/11?
  (tags: usa OsamaBinLaden terrorism)
• Tony Blair godfather to Rupert Murdoch's daughter. OhForGoodnessSake
  (tags: tonyblair RupertMurdoch)
• Should the Freedom Of Information Act be expanded to cover private companies?
  (tags: TransparentSociety information business)
• If you lose control of your business' Facebook page then Facebook won't help you.
  (tags: facebook business EpicFail)
• Without Insurance, 24-year-old Dies of Toothache
  (tags: dental EpicFail usa healthcare)
• Behind the scenes of the last fortnight's tram voting fiasco
  (tags: trams democracy edinburgh EpicFail)
• Post-it Note Wars
  (tags: art office)
• When did computing lessons become courses in Microsoft applications?
  (tags: education technology programming uk computing)
• Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas
  (tags: creativity ideas psychology)
• Good interview with Steven Moffat. Nice to know how much he had planned in advance, and how much is made up as he goes along.
  (tags: DrWho StevenMoffat writing tv)
• There is now only one postcode in the UK without a Tesco. And soon they will have one too.
  (tags: tesco uk business shopping)
• English Defence League coach breaks down in one of the highest ethnic minority areas of London. Oops.
  (tags: London england racism EpicFail)
• Art made of money worth less than the money it's made of.
  (tags: art money funny)

Comments

[miss_s_b]

When did computing lessons become courses in Microsoft applications?

My mum took one of those at the local adult education centre before Holly was born. The instructor was genuinely amazed that not everybody has Microsoft Publisher on their machine.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Ah I was meaning to bring the John Naughton article to your attention.

Computer lessons in schools have been courses in MS Office for years -- a good decade or so, going by what I've vaguely gathered about friends' children and friends who are teachers. It really is the most appalling pile of wank, and if the situation is no better when my daughter starts school I will demand she be removed from those classes.

[andrewducker]

To be honest, I don't mind if people get some training in "Using a word processor". But that really shouldn't take very long, and it's not a substitute for a proper computing course.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Launch. Type shit. Print. Save.

People who have *HAD* courses and training and whatnot in MS Office don't know the stuff that is proper word processing such as formatting, using stylesheets and the like. (As in, I know far too many people who space things out with tabs!)

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I discovered LaTeX only this last month, via Lisa

I can't quite express how cheated I feel

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Indeed; longer than that - my secondary-school IT lessons in the mid-90s consisted of learning to use Office. (And in a very specific way. If you knew keyboard shortcuts you were penalised for using them, because you were supposed to click File -> Save or whatever.)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Penalized for using shortcuts? That is just ludicrous -- the whole point of those is that they're more efficient once you know them!

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

at my school we had the option of Acorn BBCs or Macs. This was circa 1995.
I wasn't exposed to Windows until quite recently, and wish I knew then just how blessed I was.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas

Story of the big problem with both the fiction publishing and record industry right there. Constantly after the next big thing; repeatedly signing clones of the last one.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Re Should the Freedom Of Information Act be expanded to cover private companies?

Others have pointed out that privatisation/outsourcing of government functions evades freedom of information, and in those cases there is an even better case for extending it.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> The SNP didn’t think the Haymarket option had a hope of succeeding, so abstained on the key vote to preserve their pristine record of opposition to the project.

Wankers wankers wankers. I mean, WTF? This sort of thing makes me just despise politicians as shifty slippery shits, interested in their appearance rather than their actual beliefs.

Though it's interesting to see it wasn't any grand plan by the SNP to make themselves look like saviours, just an almighty fucking cock-up.

[andrewducker]

I know! Given a proposition, one is generally either in favour of it or against it. If one is a politician then it is one's fucking _job_ to decide which and vote one way or the other. Abstaining is just political game-playing.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Game-playing -- put far better than I did in my outrage! And game-playing with public funds and the future of the city is just wrong.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Have you left in one of those div tags you mentioned? My friends page is going strangely wide after your post.

[andrewducker]

I had.

*hangs head in shame*

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I wasn't going to say... don't you know it's rude to point out someone's overhanging div tag? ;)

[camies.livejournal.com]

Tesco seems less ubiquitous than Sainsbury's here in Birmingham but they are insidious - I thought 'there isn't one in KT1' (where I lived until recently) but there is, it seems, right at the edge towards New Malden.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

What do they mean by 'postcode'? The first half, 'XX00', presumably? (Or /[[:alpha:]]{1,2}\d{1,2}/ to be all fancy.)

[camies.livejournal.com]

From the original story it looks like they mean just that, the first half.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I assume only the first two letters. We live in CW5 and there aren't any Tesco's in this area.

I was quite shocked to discover last year that there is now a Tesco on both Orkney and Shetland. They really are everywhere.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

About six years ago, I had the misfortune to try a web programming course taught by someone who didn't know the difference between Microsoft and computing. ("web programming"===C#)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

There are two parts to creativity: there's the broad, open-ended, outside-the-box brainstorming of ideas, and then there's the filtering of those ideas to see which ones might actually work or make any sense.

Without the first you can't have creativity, but without the second you don't really have creativity either, just annoying randomness. I wonder if the "bias against creativity" is actually just a bias against that?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m interested in the idea of extending Freedom of Information to private organisations. I think there are many merits to the idea.

I think there is a difference between public and private bodies. The information held by public bodies is created and owned by the public and the bodies are doing work for and on behalf of the public. Private organisations are, well, private.

I do wonder how comfortable I would feel if FOI rights were extended to all private organisations including me.

[andrewducker]

Uncomfortable at first, but we might find that it made us all happier in the long run.

I've been fascinated by The Transparent Society for a very long time. Nice article on it here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent_pr.html

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Very interesting article.

I like the emphasis on a conscious choice needing to be made by the citizenry about how to handle an almost total loss of functional privacy.

The extention, I suppose, is that private organisations should expect to have any data they hold hacked or leaked at some point, no matter what counter-measures they put in place. Therefore, their choice is the same as our; how do they deal with total transparency rather how to prevent it.