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Wow - London Transport's new journey planner rocks!

Sometime in the last few weeks, Transport for London’s web-based route planner just got a huge upgrade. It used to be you could only automatically plan your route by tube - if you were thinking of taking a combination of tube, bus, rail or other public transport, you still had to download maps and figure out fares and interconnections yourself.

The new site can estimate your journey practically door to door, if you give it the postcode of your destination (as long as you are in London), integrating estimated walking times, waiting times and giving costs. The only thing it doesn’t do is point out the most efficient way to pay your fare - for example a zone one tube journey is listed as costing £1.60 but if you have bought a “carnet” of ten the tickets will “only” cost £1.15 each.

In fact, the site seems almost to hide away some of the best fares - for full details you have to read a 21 page PDF.

It’s aggravating that Livingstone recently lost his battle to avoid having to use a “public private partnership” to fund tube improvements (not even The Economist thought this was a good idea!) but the £5 charge for bringing cars into the centre of London has just passed its last hurdle, so on the whole things are looking rather good for transport in London….

Empowering the underprivileged using ICT

For less than £500 per person, two thousand people in a high rise tower block in Melbourne, Australia are being provided with computers, training and broadband access to email and community services.

It's too early to tell, but I would hope that with the right community software and appropriate help this could turn out to be a crucial tool to building social capital on the estate and improving both people's skills and their environment.

The scheme is already up for the Stockholm Challenge Award. The award is interesting in itself as it helps to make prominent examples of good practice from around the world.

Showing my age...

I am entertained by the idea of the Ageless Project which lets you tell the world your birthday and check out weblogs by your own age cohort. I am registered there now. It's reminiscent of Thomas Boutell's World Birthday Web (now seemingly deceased due to excessive spamming, though it is still linked to from his homepage).

Salon offers paid-for links for bloggers

In a further (and quite clever) attempt to find revenues, Salon is promoting Userland’s Radio weblog software by hosting user’s weblogs themselves and pledging to keep an eye on them, this holding out the tempting prospect of having your weblog made famous by Salon. The downside is that it promotes software that will cost you money over (correct me if I am wrong) software that is just as good and costs nothing like Moveabletype (which I use). The (British) Guardian’s approach is more interesting - they are producing a contest to find the best British weblogs (which doubtless will also dramatically increase the number of links from British weblogs to the Guardian).

Malcolm Gladwell on the dangers of the pursuit of raw talent

An interesting polemic by Malcolm “Tipping Point” Gladwell in the New Yorker about the dangers of valuing individual talent over a sound organizational structure in business. Enron provides him with plenty of good raw material…

Among other things, it mentions that, “…the link between I.Q. and job performance is distinctly underwhelming. On a scale where 0.1 or below means virtually no correlation and 0.7 or above implies a strong correlation … the correlation between I.Q. and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3.”

Internet on a motorbike

A clever bit of lateral thinking to help close the digital divide in rural India - villagers request Internet information from a technician on a motorbike and a day or two later, he returns with the information that he has downloaded.

Computer games are bad for you?

Prolonged time playing video games could cause people to lose concentration, get angry easily and have trouble associating with others, a Japanese professor’s research has suggested.

The newspaper article doesn’t say what kinds of game were tested - my guess is that if there is an effect it is with shoot-em-up-type games rather than the more cerebral ones I normally prefer…

Looks like Gary Trudeau is getting into the WiFi "piracy" debate

Today’s Doonesbury cartoon suggests that people piggy-backing on others’ WiFi connections are perceived to be “stealing” from them. In fact, I imagine that in most cases the bandwidth “stolen” wouldn’t be missed - the Internet provider is the one with most to lose (though that is hard to put across in a cartoon!)

So I went to the Game On exhibition

For those who don’t know, Game On is an exhibition in the Barbican in London covering the first 40 years of the computer gaming industry. I found it a little disappointing, but only because the field is so large that doubtless everyone has their own ideas of how such an exhibition should be run and what its emphasis should be.
This one had almost nothing about multiplayer or strategic games, which are what I play, tending instead to concentrate on consoles (which, admittedly, probably are the most widespread games). I wanted the opportunity to actually play SpaceWar on the PDP-1 they had there, or at least to see it running, but of course the machinery was too old. An early console that played a closely-related game had to substitute.
I did run into a very well informed exhibition guide, however, who was able to give some interesting insight into why the exhibition was done as it was and knew more of the early history than made it into the gallery itself.
There was not very much in the way of detailed commentary on the history or socio-economic context to the games on display - this was because the space was an art gallery not a museum space. I leave you with some things I learned about pong there:

• When Pong was produced it cost $1000 for each cabinet… but could take in $300-400 a day.
• 10,000 pong cabinets were made.
• The main maintenance problem was that the coin tray jammed when it got full
• It was based on Table Tennis on the Magnavox Odyssey (the first games console).

Heterosexual HIV transmission not a risk in UK?

Spiked Online, the web descendant of Living Marxism magazine (which didn't have a great deal to do with Marxism, to be honest, when it was around) publishes some interesting counter-intuitive UK political and health stuff. I just came across this interesting article which points out that,

• "Britain's HIV/AIDS epidemic remains highly concentrated in London"
  
• "In the early 1990s, new cases passed 1000 a year, to reach a peak of 1853 in 1994; in 2001 some 558 new cases were recorded."
  
• "The total of deaths from AIDS follows a similar course, reaching a peak of 1531 in 1994 and declining to 221 in 2001."
  

and most interestingly,

"The big untold story of AIDS in Britain is that the epidemic explosion among heterosexuals that was anticipated in the 1980s has never happened... If we look, for example, at the figures for heterosexually acquired HIV infection in 2001, we find a total of 2226. This has been widely quoted to illustrate the rising tide of heterosexual transmission at a time when spread among gay men is declining...

How many people became HIV positive as a result of heterosexual contact with a partner who became infected in Europe? This figure - the key statistic of the indigenous heterosexual epidemic - is 52 (2.3 percent of the total). It is noteworthy that this number has remained remarkably steady over the past decade."

That isn't to say, of course, that the authorities were necessarily wrong to emphasise the risks of unprotected sex to everyone - after all, there are lots of other STDs that need to be curbed, the warnings may have incidentally prevented un-wanted pregnancies and, of course, without the warnings an epidemic just might have occurred. But it is nonethless interesting to see just how far we are in the UK from a real heterosexual AIDS threat.

An even better URL shrinking mousetrap

Last month I sang the praises of tinyurl.com - now I read of a challenger, snipurl (which also takes a long URL and makes it shorter, making it easier to remember and share). This site has all manner of features - you can give a url an easy-to-remember name as you shorten it, you can track how many times it has been accessed, you can even give a URL a password. And it is still as short and convenient as tinyurl was…

Thanks to Erick, who wrote to The Guardian Online…

E-democracy

The UK government has just launched a green paper (a policy discussion document) on the UK government’s commitment to e-democracy. According to VoxPolitics - an e-democracy campaign group - this was “the world’s first offical eDemocracy policy” (actually except for Finland’s). They say the initiative appears to be more about adding Internet elements to the existing process instead of changing the process in response to new possibilities. If this is so, then it is an opportunity missed.

It takes a long time to change systems as large and complex as central government, so the sooner it is recognised change is necessary, the sooner the changes can begin. Alas, if you look at the tiny amount of time spent discussing Internet issues at the last election you can see why there is apparently no great urgency.

A musician defends file sharing

Janis Ian has written a lengthy but interesting defence of MP3 sharing (saying, amongst other things, it helps smaller artists get exposure) and attack on the music industry.

It’s true that the music industry does not seem interested in using the Internet effectively as a promotional tool or to cut out the cost of distribution. But it is also true that 1) it is hard for the industry to figure out how to “cut the cake” of earnings in this new business environment, so “official” music sharing software tends to be experimental and offer only fragmentary access. And unfortunately 2) a widespread and well-marketed move to paid-for music downloading even at low cost might not stand much chance of success if a parallel system of easy to use totally free music download software exists alongside it. Some say that this would not be a problem, but if I was a music executive I would not be much interested in betting my company on it!

(Thanks to Harald for the link)

Good news/bad news for UK digital TV

The good news is that a company plans to offer a set top box by early next year that will bring consumers all 24 free to air digital TV channels in the UK for just £30. The bad news is that the company will be subsidising this box because it expects to get large sums from people gambling on sporting events. Just what the UK needs - more gambling…

(More on the new box here from ZDNet UK)

Simple arsenic filter could save millions

The story of Bangladesh's poisoned wells is a long sad one, but it looks as if at last there may be a happy ending. Aid agencies found that Bangladeshis didn't have easy access to clean drinking water, so they helped them to drill wells. Unfortunately, they later found that many of these wells were polluted by arsenic and slowly poisoned the people drinking from them. A variety of alternatives have been sought, but at last I read that a Bangladeshi professor has invented a simple, inexpensive (£3/$5) water filter that should extract arsenic, lead and iron from drinking water. The UN is organizing a campaign to put the filter in all of the wells in the country.

Woody Allen - who cares?

The New York Times points out not so much that the emperor has no clothes but that nobody seems to care any more whether he has clothes or not. Even in New York his films are not popular and people aren't even coming to see his recent lawsuit with a former producer over his earnings.

I suppose I will always be a Woody Allen fan (cruelly one lawyer watching his trial says "His sense of humor is sort of frozen in the 70's. He appeals to an older crowd.")

Nonetheless I just discovered to my horror that I have missed his last seven films.

It's official - this summer's weather is even worse than usual...

My wife has been complaining about the weather in the London (not that the weather in Paris is any better). I have been feebly alternating between "it isn't that bad" and "it's not usually this bad". Well, it seems that I was right - it has been even worse than usual... (thanks to pop-up toaster for the link).

Don't know whether to laugh or cry...

As I read this fundamentalist Christian site I kept repeating to myself that it has to be some kind of parody - but I have yet to find the spot where they "rip off the masks" and reveal themselves as fraudsters... [later]... someone has pointed out parts of this site which do give the game away, but it's an incredibly elaborate hoax - and apparently they were hosted for a time on a Christian ISP before they were discovered and booted off.

This site, seems to bring together every crackpot fundamentalist belief or practice you've ever heard of in one place. It also led me (I'm ashamed to say) to LustPleasure.com which, suffice it to say, is not what you think (and is perfectly safe to read at the office). Read on for a collection of rib-tickling quotes from Objective: Christian Ministries.

First from the 2001 Creation Science Fair:
This is also the first year that Muslim students from the Al-Jannah Islamic school have been invited to participate; two of their students presented a project on human anatomy entitled "Allah (SWT) Created Me" which, while it was found ineligible for a prize due to a number of Biblical inconsistencies, did win a special Interfaith Outreach ribbon.
Elementary School 1st prize winner
"My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.
Middle School 1st prize winner
1st Place: "Life Doesn't Come From Non-Life"
Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes.
From Evolutionism propaganda:
Shows like Pokemon, which features animals "evolving" into new forms, and movies like Jurassic Park provide a continuous cultural fog of Evolutionism that is impossible for innocent children to escape from.
...
The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.

But is this really such a shock? Lets look for a moment at Apple Computers. Founded by long haired hippies, this company has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values". But there are even darker undertones to this company than most are aware of. Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness.

Touching short streamed film

You wouldn’t think a 5 minute animated film called “Headless” by Wojtek Wawszczyk would turn out to be, in the end, uplifting, but it is. It’s not a masterpiece but it’s quite touching…

Salon's bankruptcy imminent?

At the end of June one of the longest running and best-supported online-only publications, Salon, told the SEC it might be on the brink of bankruptcy. Just a few days earlier it announced its Q4 2002 results. There’s been an ominous silence since…

How to get women to play Star Wars Galaxies

According to this interesting piece on the massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) market, Star Wars Galaxies will be trying hard to get more women than the 10-15 percent currently registered. How?

Of the 700 or so learnable skills available, only a third are combat-related, with a number designed to appeal to women — or at any rate to those less interested in a life of galactic swashbuckling. “I’m kind of embarrassed to mention this,” says LucasArts producer Haden Blackman, “but we have a hairdressing skill tree.”

That should fix the problem…

The first skirmish in the ISP vs open wireless war

In the US, Time Warner is starting to warn its users against sharing their bandwidth using wireless LANs. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, who brought this to my attention says, “I hope that 802.11a mesh-networks without any connection to an ISP (other than at a major network interchange like MAE West) take off soon, and put these fools out of commission.” But I can see the ISPs’ point - Every person who shares someone else’s connection free of charge is one fewer paying customer.

Now if wireless LAN users were charged by those that they shared from and some of that charge was funnelled back to the ISP providing the “backbone” - that might be sustainable. I suspect Sputnik and Boingo may employ this model.

The arguments arising are very similar in nature to those over sharing intellectual property. People are saying “I paid for this bandwidth I should be able to give it away to anyone I like”. But it’s important to realise that ISPs need to make money somehow or there won’t be any bandwidth around to share…

I'd like to thank my agent, my wife, my parents...

Someone put together a list of the top 30 UK weblogs and I found this weblog sitting there at #25… The other statistics available are a little more sobering - according to Alexa (used to do the ranking in the first place) this is (approximately) the 624,296th most popular site on the Internet, and my personal website is the 2,348,943th most popular. It could be worse - the website I created for my local urban regeneration group was too low to measure.

UK needs to commission broadband content?

It has been suggested that the UK government needs to fund broadband content to get people to take it up. The e-Minister, Stephen Timms, said,

"For many, speed alone is not enough to justify upgrading to broadband. People need to be able to do more than play games and swap music files to convince them of the benefits of broadband."

I am not so sure - while there is evidence that people enjoy the occaisional streaming video clip, research (like this recent US study) seems to suggest that most people get plenty of value out of broadband just by getting ordinary pages quickly without having to dial up or tie up a phone line to access them.

Gratuitous image

Just to break the monotony of my text, here's a fun image someone pointed me to - it came from here.

Good news for the wider adoption of Digital TV in the UK

The BBC-backed bid that will offer 24 free-to-air channels and a set top box to receive them costing less than £100 has been chosen by the government. The previous attempt to use broadcast ("terrestrial") digital TV to sell pay TV - ITV Digital - was a failure. Since this bid doesn't have as many channels it should provide better reception and because it isn't trying to sell customers a subscription it should be much more successful in winning viewers.

Legalising vigilante e-justice

The BBC reports, "Californian congressman Howard Berman has drawn up a bill that would legalise the disruption of peer-to-peer networks by companies who are trying to stop people pirating copyrighted materials..."

..."The law would also allow the record companies to place programs on the machines of peer-to-peer networks to let them trace who is pirating pop."

I have some sympathy for the plight of record companies, but this would be taking things much, much too far...

No escape from the tentacles of Big Pharma

The well-respected New England Journal of Medicine has announced it will no longer exclude doctors from reviewing articles if they are also earning money from pharmaceutical companies - up to $10,000 a year from any one company. The editor-in-chief said,

"There are areas where we simply have not published anything because we didn't think we could get a person who was good to write in an area that had absolutely no interaction with a commercial entity."

(Reported in ABC News and picked up via Follow Me Here)

Insultingly stupid movie physics

Yes, we all know that in many ways Hollywood's grasp of science is weak - but it is still fun to read in some detail why some things that you see on screen make no sense. And the creator of this site does point out some things that I hadn't thought of, like:

"A single inexpensive passive sensor can be used to detect the presence of human motion for an entire room. While multi-beamed laser security systems are not impossible, there's usually no reason to use one...

...When a sniper looks through the telescopic sight on his rifle, he knows where the bullet is going to go relative to the crosshairs. Adding a laserbeam would do nothing except tip off the victim that he's about to be shot and give him time to duck before the bullet arrived. It would also help reveal the sniper's location.

Hitting a moving target using a laser sight would be extremely difficult. The sniper would have to lead the subject and so the red dot would be projected in front of the target where it could easily be lost in the background."

... to say nothing of the fact that a laser won't help you aim if there is any wind...

The writer also gives mini reviews of several popular movies discussing just how scientifically accurate they are (usual answer: not very)

Thanks again to Harald/chk for the link...

The News Quiz is back...

... on BBC Radio 4 and you can listen to it online if you miss it live (or don't live here). It's not really a proper quiz show - it's just an excuse for comedians to read out funny clips from odd UK newspapers and make fun of what has happened in the news that week. It may be hard to follow if you aren't in or from the UK, but it is certainly more savagely satirical and entertaining than its American equivalent, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.