The AJAX game Sternhalma (which the original name of Chinese Checkers) is back online again. My brother and I built this ages ago. We have more work to do on it to make it multiplayer, and we intend, in our copious free time, to port the multiplayer version to facebook, iphone, and android. It does record all games played including each move made by each player in order, so that analysis can be performed later.
As an attempt to get back to blogging regularly, I’m posting about the WP-Flickr plugin which I’m testing in my own WP blog for possible deployment at GOOD.
Here’s my first attempt:
Cool – it’s a beautiful coral I once had. This meat-eating non-photosynthesizing coral is called Tubastrea, or commonly Sun Coral. You pretty much have to hand feed these. My cleaner shrimp stole all the food right out of its mouths and while it lasted several months, I’m sure it eventually starved. So sad.
As for using WP-Flickr – yeah it’s cool – but it’s a one way thing. It just lets you select images from your Flickr streams. You can’t actually upload images TO flickr from your wp-admin panel and have them inherit tags from the story you’re writing. That would be a cool plugin. I guess I’ll have to mod this plugin to work that way… in my copious free time!!!
It does allow you to choose from your standard Flickr sizes and have a custom class appear when you insert, which is nice. Overall I think it’s a worthwhile plugin for the casual blogger, but it could be a GREAT plugin with a few extra features.
Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist, a reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.
I’m a chemist. I’m very interested in how the enormous amount of information that’s being put on the web can be used for science. The possibilities of doing things with that information are enormous. What we need to do, however, is to be able to access it. One of the frustrations that many scientists have is that they find the key bits of data they want aren’t available. I discovered this in chemistry—there’s lots of data out there, but only a very small proportion of it is easy to get without having to pay for it, or without having to ask permission to use it. As a result of this I, along with others, came up with the idea of open data—the assertion, if you like, that certain types of information should be inexorably free for the human race.
It’s discipline dependent, and the behavior varies by scientists—chemistry is a fairly conservative discipline in this area, while astronomy and particle physics make all of their data freely available. But there’s an increasing realization that if work is funded from public or charitable sources, then there’s a requirement on the researchers to make their data available. The various parties responsible for grant making in the United Kingdom, the United States, and in many other places are now actively starting to put requirements on grantees to make not only the textual publication work available, but also the data on which it rests.
There are two or three objective problems; one is that making data available is not trivial. It’s easier to make a single document (a copy of your publication, for example) available, than it is to package your data in a way that other people would want to use it. So there are technical aspects. There’s also inertia. It’s not common for many scientists to share their data; they don’t realize the value of doing it. So they need to change the way in which they work and the culture of how they reach out to people. Of course many scientists are naturally competitive because funding depends on publication; the more you get published, the more you are likely to receive. So people are naturally jealous of their results and in many cases, they don’t want to make their data available because then their competitors might be able to see things in their data that they hadn’t been able to see.
It’s fair to say that not all data can be made universally available, and that’s particularly true when you’ve got patient or sociological data which relate to human services. There do have to be areas where privacy makes it impossible to share data universally. But in many branches of science—and this is particularly true of physical science, material science, and so on—there’s no reason in principle why the data shouldn’t be made available. There has been a history of controlling data through commercial means, and there are a lot of organizations which up until now have made an income by collecting data from the community and then packaging it and selling it back. That was a reasonable thing to do in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, so much information is now born digital that it makes sense to think of an economy where as we create the data, we release it to the community rather than locking it up.
Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.
Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.
the OBJECTIVE Highlight executive compensation (as in, how much CEOs etc. are paid) in an interesting way.
the ASSIGNMENT Create an infographic that explores how much corporate officers in this country are paid. The infographic could compare such data with related figures, like a company’s profits, stock price, or the average salary of lower-level workers, or something else altogether. The winning entry will be the one that paints CEO salaries in the most interesting light.
the REQUIREMENTS Send us an e-mail at projects[at]goodinc[dot]com with your infographic. It can be in any image format, but it should be high enough resolution that it can be printed at 300 dpi. Make sure to include your sources, and a brief (one or two sentence) introduction to your concept. We’ll take submissions now through September 30. The winning entry will be announced on October 2, featured on our homepage, and printed in the next issue of GOOD. We’ll send a GOOD T-shirt and a free subscription (or gift subscription) to the winner, along with $250.
Urban policy is generally understood to include such things as housing, neighborhood revitalization, and poverty alleviation. While all of these are important to the success of cities, even in combination they don’t come close to equaling the importance of talent to the success of cities.
Talent—defined as the percentage of college graduates in a city’s population—explains almost 60 percent of a city’s success as measured by per capita income. To wit: If urban policy does not include the development, attraction, and retention of talent, it doesn’t have a prayer of making a real difference for cities. But this truth isn’t easily absorbed by urban leaders.
But if we could increase college attainment by just 1 percent in each of the top 51 metro areas—areas with 1 million or more residents—the nation will realize an additional $124 billion in personal income. We call that the “Talent Dividend.”
Break that number down locally and it becomes even more impressive. In Indianapolis, for instance, a 1 percentage point increase in college attainment would result in a $1.3 billion annual increase in personal income. According to the city’s leaders, that is roughly equal to the local payroll of the city’s largest employer, Eli Lilly.
If local leaders believed they could recruit a business that equaled the size of their city’s largest employer, what would they do? They would fire up the corporate jets, put together an aggressive package of tax incentives, stage lavish dinners, put the governor on call, and put the mayor out in front of the effort. That is essentially what is at stake with a relatively small increase in college attainment among a city’s population.
There are three ways to increase talent:
You can attract talent. You can develop talent. You can retain talent.
For many cities, attracting talent seems like a cheap shortcut to solving the problem. It doesn’t require the expensive, hard slog that developing talent requires. But if talent only moves from one place to another, that means no net gain of talent to the nation. Besides, it’s not a winning proposition for most cities. Only 16 of the top 50 metro areas gained 25-to-34-year-olds from 1990 to 2000, and they are the best-educated, most mobile part of the U.S. population. (Just to complete the math, that also means 34 metro areas actually lost 25-34 year-olds in that decade.)
There’s only one sustainable way to increase talent in most communities, and that is to develop it. It means we’re going to have to do the work all along the education spectrum to make it happen.
But the goal is by no means out of reach. We’ve found that in all 30 of the markets we’ve studied, if we could simply get 3 to 4 percent of those with some college to complete their degrees, we could achieve the Talent Dividend.
Jim Collins admonishes CEOs to “get the right people on the bus” if they want to build companies that last. Cities must do the same thing. But unlike companies, cities don’t have the luxury of hiring and firing their citizens. Instead, they have to work with what they have. And that means turning the city into a talent-producing machine.
Which city will step up to the challenge first? The one that does, wins.
Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.
Carol Channing is far more frightening in this scene from Alice in Wonderland than anything in that cheezefest Final Destination. I wonder what this movie would have been like in 3D with motioncode. Probably “much better…”
This is the trailer for Doug Wolens’ feature documentary entitled The Singularity: Will We Survive Our Technology. Can’t wait. And I’m very excited to be attending The Singularity Summit in NYC October 3rd and 4th (http://singularitysummit.com). Anyone else planning to attend?
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