I found this fantastic book in our local Oxfam shop on Friday. It's a simple thing. Pictures of famous people jumping.

russell davies: jump

Is brain drain a reality?

Are some parts of the country able to retain and attract college-educated workers at the expense of other regions?

If so, how pervasive is the problem and what does it mean for rural areas?

It's not just a problem for rural areas. See also:

It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.

Rural Area Brain Drain: Is It a Reality?

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Taiwan finds Chinese Trojans on Seagate Disk Drives Produced in Thailand

Fairness doesn’t matter much in conventional economics, which assumes that, if you and I can make a deal leaving us both better off, we’ll make it. But, in the real world, if the deal seems unfair to me I may very well reject it, even if doing so leaves me worse off.

Striking Out

Although our national cybersecurity strategy might be announced in Washington, our national cybersecurity practice will be defined in the average Silicon Valley cubicle. It’s hard to see what government can do to affect what happens in that cubicle. Indeed, I’d judge our policy as a success if we have any positive impact, no matter how small, in the cubicle.

How Can Government Improve Cyber-Security?

A new paper by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues.

The Semantic Web drives towards the use of the Web for interacting with logically interconnected data. Through knowledge models such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Semantic Web provides a unifying representation of richly structured data. Adding logic to the Web implies the use of rules to make inferences, choose courses of action, and answer questions. This logic must be powerful enough to describe complex properties of objects but not so powerful that agents can be tricked by being asked to consider a paradox. The Web has several characteristics that can lead to problems when existing logics are used, in particular, the inconsistencies that inevitably arise due to the openness of the Web, where anyone can assert anything. N3Logic is a logic that allows rules to be expressed in a Web environment. It extends RDF with syntax for nested graphs and quantified variables and with predicates for implication and accessing resources on the Web, and functions including cryptographic, string, math. The main goal of N3Logic is to be a minimal extension to the RDF data model such that the same language can be used for logic and data. In this paper, we describe N3Logic and illustrate through examples why it is an appropriate logic for the Web.

N3Logic: A Logical Framework For the World Wide Web

As the Eurostar links improve, Paris is emerging as the hub of a new Europe, with high-speed international links to Germany, Italy and Spain. As such, the city is once again in the kind of central role in Europe that it has always assumed to be its destiny. At the same time, unlike the competing cities of Barcelona, Berlin or Milan, Paris has not been forced to reinvent itself since the Sixties. There is therefore none of the architectural daring that characterises the new Berlin or the truly globalised designer culture of Barcelona. Indeed, after long years of political and cultural stagnation, the big question is whether tired old Paris - once so proud of its status as the so-called the 'Capital of the 19th Century' - is even fit for purpose in the 21st century.

The problem is that Paris is still beautiful.

Islamic culture has contributed a number of ideas to western culture, including the development of domes in building construction.

The United States possesses neither the capacity nor the wisdom required to liberate the world's 1.4 billion Muslims, who just might entertain their own ideas about what genuine freedom entails. Islam will eventually accommodate itself to the modern world, but Muslims will have to work out the terms.

The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millenium is littered with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths.

Deception is justified if it advances human progress -- and then it is not deception.

Decade after decade, one century layering upon the last, the physical identity of this urban axis straddling two continents is constantly being reconsidered, if only bit by bit, piece by piece. So a visitor curious to understand contemporary ideas and influences in Istanbul, to know how the storied city is falling and rising today, should focus on individual elements.

We replay memories as though they were our own home movies. And other people's movies, and other people's stories, become, by some circuitous route, our own. The events unfolding up on the screen may not have happened to us, ... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

Science doesn't pave the way for engineering, it's the other way around.

The choice of architecture matters.

Where in the free world can one see 10,000 children dancing in synchronisation, dressed as eggs?

"Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures."

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

What was once the mark of utter uncoolness, a veritable byword of selling out, has become the norm.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes.

Steerage is steerage. ... the nominee is steering clear of a potential legal quagmire ... There is little romance left in long car rides.

Social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction.

I’m hearing from a lot of people that late 2007 is much like late 1997.

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. The truly subversive thing is to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands.

... some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

... the burden falls upon you to spread your idea.

"Think of the kids you don’t have. Think of your unborn grandkids."

From curious children, hackers were born.

A hugely entertaining slice of sunbaked Gothic.

The Byzantine system of power has triumphed.

"It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it."

... the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

It's like precrime in reverse.

"We sign these treaties to ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Remember how "peace is breaking out"?

Last week Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki mocked Iraqis calling for national reconciliation and dismissing them as self-interested conspirators. On Friday, he elaborated on his views of the current Iraqi political scene in a very intriguing, and frankly troubling, interview with al-Arabiya...The interview did not break any particularly new ground, but it did make one thing very clear: do not expect Maliki to pursue seriously any moves towards national reconciliation, defined in terms of legislation at the national level or agreements with Sunni political parties. The deadlock at the national political level, so clear at the time of the Petraeus-Crocker hearings in September, will not end any time soon. What that means for US strategy is something which I consider well worth publicly debating.

Maliki argued on al-Arabiya that Iraqi national reconciliation has not only already been achieved, it is "strong and stable and not fragile". There is no civil war in Iraq, or even any real sectarian conflict anymore - the sectarian hatreds incited by "some" in the past have been overcome. He made clear that he does not equate national reconciliation with political progress at the national level: "I think that national reconciliation will come about not as some understand it, as a reconciliation with this political party governed by an ideology or a specific mentality." Real national reconciliation, to Maliki, takes place at the local level...That, he suggests, has happened. The various Sunni awakenings demonstrate reconciliation at the local level, and their support for his national government. [...]

In other words, Maliki is gleefully hoisting the United States on its own bottom-up reconciliation petard. In order to sell the surge to Congress, the Bush team decided to focus on positive developments at the local level and downgrade the significance of the deadlocked national political process. Evidently, Maliki took notes. It's ironic, in a way which nobody could possibly have seen coming.

Clever.

Maliki: enough about reconciliation

Following up on the Tariq Ali op-ed:

The axe has fallen on the judiciary (Iftikhar Hussein Chaudhry). At the Supreme Court level, 12 judges have bowed out while in the provinces 48 judges have found themselves without a job. While confrontation will intensify in the coming days, the alacrity with which some of the key vacated slots have been filled indicates a national divide that might help the Musharraf administration to control the situation. He has a political coalition which will back him, and he has politicians like Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Ms Benazir Bhutto who opposed the “revolutionary” intent of the confrontationists and may now cooperate if the situation doesn’t get out of hand.

In the “struggle” for democracy, the retreat of the state in the face of Al Qaeda’s terrorism had been either “denied” or subordinated to the higher goals of untrammelled democracy. The unrealistic, and some would say adventurist, confrontationist slogan was: get the general out of the system, dump the “American agenda”, and terrorism will vanish overnight. On the other hand, the warlords who spearhead the Al Qaeda thrust in Pakistan put forward conditions of ceasefire that no one pays heed to: removal of America and NATO from Iraq and Afghanistan and the proclamation of Islam of the Taliban variety in Pakistan.

Wages of confrontation