Archive for February, 2011
Word of the day: gamification
February 5th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
Earlier this week, I attended Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for England (ACE) in my capacity as the member for England on the Communications Consumer Panel (CCP). Ofcom plans to abolish both ACE and the CCP, but meanwhile we endeavour to track consumer behaviour and promote consumer interests. ACE member John Varney gave a fascinating presentation on […]
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Save our libraries
February 4th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
So far, cuts in public expenditure have threatened the closure of over 400 libraries throughout Britain. On the Isle of Wight, 9 out of 11 are scheduled for closure. There’s a piece in today’s “Guardian” G2 supplement about these closures with particular reference to Ventnor library on the island. Now we have some great friends […]
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
Baby Catrin: progress report (1)
February 4th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
It’s Day 18 in the young life of my beautiful granddaughter Catrin and I visited her for the fourth time today. The poor thing is not looking her best because she has milk spots so no photographs here for a while. But she’s doing really well and already weighs 9lb 6 oz. Richard & Emily […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (5)
Happy Chinese New Year (1)
February 3rd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
For at least one and a half billion people around the world and at least a few readers of NightHawk, today is the Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Rabbit, the year of our Chinese ‘daughter’ Hua. On Sunday, we’ll be celebrating with Hua and her husband Zhihao and son Joshua. There […]
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (3)
Activism + the Net = revolution
February 2nd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
It seems that increasingly political change – especially revolutionary change in authoritarian regimes – is helped by online tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Look at Tunisia and now Egypt. This is something which I’ve explored in my latest – the 65th – of my regular series of columns on Internet issues. It’s called “The […]
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
How much crime in your area?
February 2nd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
From today, citizens in England & Wales are able to find out which crimes have taken place on or near their street within the past month and which officers are responsible for their area. Information on crime is broken down into six categories – burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, violence, other crime and anti-social behaviour. Local […]
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
The Arab world in turmoil (2)
February 1st, 2011 by Roger Darlington
On Saturday, I did a posting about some of the rapid and dramatic developments in the Arab world and specifically mentioned Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. I speculated that we might see a successive falling of autocratic regimes in the region as happened in Eastern Europe in 1989. Today the BBC […]
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The case for evolution (3)
February 1st, 2011 by Roger Darlington
In early December, I did a posting explaining that I had produced a new section of my web site entitled “The Case For Evolution”. In that posting, I commented: “One test of the extent to which this essay meets a need will be how long it takes for a Google search on the words ‘case […]
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)