"Decisions are made by those who show up""What I desperately want is a move toward an evidence-based culture in politics. Politicians are free to say: "I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral." That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: "I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that." That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."

via https://twitter.com/#!/jkerrstevens/status/190719470237515776

via http://louistheran.tumblr.com/post/14111619127/uk-as-isolated-as-someone-left-on-the-dock-in#disqus_thread

"A proper NI anthem would also be useful in for Irish rugby, where proper parity could be achieved through playing the team anthem (Ireland’s Call) and the local anthem (of the jurisdiction) at all matches"

via http://twitter.com/genericpoints/status/156023882560704512 "We arrive at our destination before dark, tired, emotionally drained and cross with each other. The next family on our itinerary gather to welcome us at their front door. I watch their faces change as they register everything: the state of the car; the number of bags; the two mud-flecked dogs bounding from the back.

"I think you should tell them how much the wine cost," I say to my wife. "And I think you should lie.""

via http://twitter.com/genericpoints/status/146319903140495361 "People say that the EU was created to ensure there were no more wars in Europe but personally I think a West European centered WWIII was never a very likely eventuality. In any event the EU could have been set up with a much more limited objective, namely to end periodic outbreaks of tribalism and jingoisim. This is the real European curse, and this is what we are now facing in one country after another, as – with the local national press in the vanguard – each blames the other for causing the crisis, or for not reaching the much needed agreement to end it. The sad reality is that Europe’s leaders fiddle even as Rome is about to burn."

I completely justify doing this, academically, because watching TV is a great way to learn about the ambient culture.

"One time I was watching a round where the question was “What do you associate with builders?” First off, builders are what Americans call construction workers. If it’d been me, I would’ve said that I associate them with, oh I dunno, building materials. If I had to be specific, I’d say cement, or wood, or some other material or tool. What do they say in Britain? Well one of the top answers on that particular round was: “tea.” As in builder’s tea (or even the brand, Builders Tea). Because, you know, builders take a lot of tea breaks, and they drink strong, cheap tea. Duh."

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“A new and bespoke festival mingles music and comedy with interactive art, cabaret and magic.” Metro

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"In 1962 the world had yet to be introduced to the internet, solar panels or Justin Bieber. Over 90% of houses in Britain didn't even have running water. "

"If the UK was embodied in a person, it would be a desensitized homeless addict without any morals, who'd taken advantage of and harmed every person they knew, and that was currently in mid air, about to hit the ground, after jumping off a bridge. I'm probably being too kind there though. From here on, this post is just going to be a collection of fragment paragraphs which hopefully illustrates."

"The ginger ale can be achieved. Saint Better Half only had to go to three shops before finding some. Here, it goes by the BrE name American ginger ale, which I find amusing because (a) where I come from, we think of it as Canadian, (b) I can see no other kind of ginger ale for sale, so why do they need the adjective? One can only guess that it's to distinguish it from ginger beer, a much spicier drink, which is far more common in the UK than ginger ale (which in the UK is thought of as a mixer and not a drink in its own right). I can feel a tangent coming on. Whoops, here we go... Ginger ale consumption in the US is fairly region-specific. I come from the kind of place (the northeast) where it's a drink that you can buy cold in a single-serving bottle from a convenience shop, but this isn't true throughout the US. And if there is a down-home 'American' ginger ale, then it's not the stuff that's used as a mixer. The Canadian mixer type is 'pale, dry' ginger ale (like this Schweppes or Canada Dry). But there is also 'golden' ginger ale, which is darker, heavier and gingerier (more like a traditional ginger beer). This is rarer in the US and even more regional. You'll know if you're in one of the regions for it if the names Vernor's or Blenheim mean anything to you (or a few others...see Wikipedia). At any rate, it's the dry stuff that one wants if one's had a (more BrE than AmE) tummy bug. Because ginger is good for nausea, you know. It should have lots of ice, so that it gets watery and flat and rehydrates you without causing any more gastrointestinal upset. But I live in England with a man for whom ice trays are one of those mysterious plastic things that come with a fridge yet have no clear connection to it, so I water mine down with water straight from the (BrE) tap/(AmE) faucet. Hey, I'm not well. I'm desperate.""not much work has been done on regional variation in prototypes. The only example I can think of is a small study by Willett Kempton (reported in John Taylor's Linguistic Categorization) on Texan versus British concepts of BOOT, showing that even though both groups considered the same range of things to be boots, there was variation in their ideas of what constituted a central member of the BOOT category, with the Texan prototype extending further above the ankle than the British one.

Though I've not done the psychological tests that would tell us for sure, I'm pretty sure that the American SOUP prototype is along the lines of this:
a warm broth with pieces of meat, vegetables, and/or starchy things (e.g. noodles, barley, rice, matzo balls) in it'
And the English one is more along the lines of this:
a warm, savo(u)ry food made from vegetables and possibly meat that have been well-cooked and liquidi{s/z}ed
"

via http://twitter.com/BreakingNews/status/36626632403992576
Not quite clear on the use of "marry" and "marriage" in this article.

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via http://twitter.com/eastgate/status/23071553214218240

"Ebooks are not exempt from VAT, being classed as, I believe, ‘electronic guides’ rather than ‘books’."

via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-01-03/News_and_notes

"the Lord Chief Justice of England (the very aptly named Lord Judge) has ruled that the use in court of Twitter on mobile devices is acceptable ‘as long as the judge believed it would not interfere with the administration of justice’. The matter had come up earlier in the proceedings involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, where the judge had taken a similar approach."

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"The Linked Data Web is not just about connecting datasets, but about linking information at the level of a single statement or fact." via http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/2010/11/08/some-more-things-some-extensions-to-the-hub-model/

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"A while back, I came across a blog post about a study that found intersection density—the number of street intersections per square mile, typically much higher in older, denser cities than in newer suburbs—to have a surprisingly high impact on overall walkability. It's one of those things that aren't immediately obvious but make a lot of sense when you think about them. The greater the number of intersections, the more possible routes there are, the less often pedestrians will have to take the long way around, and the easier it is to vary one's route and avoid boredom.

Old Town in Edinburgh is full of tiny narrow alleys, or "closes," that break up longer blocks of buildings and increase the overall number of intersections quite a bit. Some of them are wide enough that they're open to car traffic; others are for foot traffic only; and some consist of a flight of stairs, sometimes sheltered by the upper storeys of adjacent buildings and sometimes open. They have wonderful names, too: World's End Close, Writer's Close, Sugarhouse Close. This is Fleshmarket Close (there's also a Fishmarket Close nearby):"

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"the RDF data (e.g. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/24/contents/data.rdf), I noticed that it appears to make use of a FRBR-based model to deal with the challenge of representing the various flavours of "versioning" relationships.

I haven't had time to look in any detail at the implementation, other than to observe that the data can get quite complex - necessarily so - when dealing with a lot of whole-part and revision-of/variant-of/format-of relationships. (There was one aspect where I wondered if the FRBR concepts were being "stretched" somewhat, but I'm writing in haste and I may well be misreading/misinterpreting the data, so I'll save that question for another day.)

It's fascinating to see the FRBR approach being deployed as a practical solution to a concrete problem, outside of the library community in which it originated."

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via http://olnet.org/odet2010

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"Coming from Oxford, my transportation experience made me appreciate the fact that when the transportation shut down for one mode of transport (car, rail, plane), it shut down across all the other ones, too. So when my taxi to the train station canceled, and when the replacement taxi was 30 minutes late, it was all okay, because my train was also 30 minutes late! As long as the whole country was inefficient, inefficiency was fine by me."

via http://twitter.com/GalwayCycling/status/12875043890

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"built in the period between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s and which were intended both as architectural and as social statements. Like many of these places, this one had not worn well. The building material was overwhelmingly concrete, and it wasn’t perhaps top quality and a lot of it looked in poor shape. In addition, as was often the case around then, facilities, amenities and services were not provided in an ideal manner, and civic pride never established itself properly. At any rate the place looked run down and neglected and unloved. I suspect that various social indicators, from education to crime, will tell a typical story here.

But as I was strolling through the area (taking some photographs), I came across a display board outside a public building, and one of the news items pinned up there was a proposal by a pressure group to have the town centre protected by a preservation order, as the town was, as the statement put it, ‘an iconic landmark of the 20th century’. I looked around at the crumbling concrete and heavily littered shopping precinct and the ubiquitous graffiti and I wondered about the statement.

In fact, in Britain the Twentieth Century Society has over recent years made increasingly urgent calls for the preservation of that century’s architecture, including the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (including a good few of the concrete motorway bridges). The 1920s and 1930s produced some really great buildings, and I confess I love art deco. But the rather brutalist 1970s stuff? No, I find that much harder to like."

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See also http://www.mydavidcameron.com/

"The institute, which is a joint venture of the Faculty of Education and Homerton College, is being formally launched this week and will aim to study the messages and ideas that children pick up from books and other cultural sources in broader terms than ever before." "

The first programme of talks and seminars will cover subjects including Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House On The Prairie", pre-school picture books, interpretations of "Hamlet" for younger audiences and the "Twilight" saga by Stephenie Meyer, whose fantasy tales of vampire romance have scored a major hit with teenagers all over the world."

"None of these are true. In fact, the UK government is committed to publishing data as linked data because they are convinced it is the best approach available for publishing data in a hugely diverse and distributed environment, in a gradual and sustainable way.

Why?

Because linked data is just a term for how to publish data on the web while working with the web. And the web is the best architecture we know for publishing information in a hugely diverse and distributed environment, in a gradual and sustainable way.

If you’re a web developer, you already know that the best APIs are RESTful APIs."