In today’s The Independent, under the headline ‘Wear a veil or we will behead you,’ radicals tell TV women, I read: All 15 women presenters reported for work at the official Palestine Television station in Gaza yesterday, in defiance of death threats by a radical Islamic group that is believed to have links with al-Qa’ida. […]
Read moreFor want of any other page in Attica’s Computing the Other (yes, my book-in-progress now has a confirmed title) in which to write about it at this time, I must make a note here of my interest in getting my hands on what has proven to be an elusive book by an equally elusive author: […]
Read moreDzevad yesterday mailed me a link to a Google video that (as they say) blew my mind away and gave me some much needed inspiration for doing the requisite knowledge elicitation preliminary to the business of building knowledge interfaces (let’s say, to begin with, simply in the two domains of “peoples’ museums” and ICT4D). The […]
Read more[A blog post that I never completed. Published in its unfinished draft form] “The gulf between today’s rich and poor countries is”, observes Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty, p.28), “a new phenomenon, a yawning gap that opened during the period of modern economic growth”. Oddly, it seems not to occur to him that […]
Read moreIn the context of my current reading (Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden), Johann Hari’s column in today’s The Independent merits quoting (with all the standard legal disclaimers with respect to copyright and fair use) in full: The real scandal at the World Bank The Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world […]
Read more“consider a poor person in the countryside of Tanzania who wants to get a pothole repaired in front of his house. … If IBRD, IMF, UNDP, FAO, WTO, EU, WHO, AfDB, DFID, and USAID approve the PRSP and release new funds to the national government, then the government will allocate the money in accordance with […]
Read moreI went with Jatti Bredekamp yesterday to see the ‘Wilberforce table’ (more correctly, the ‘Buxton table’, since it was around this table in Thomas Buxton’s house that the key abolitionists met to hammer out the draft of the bill that would lead to the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833) at The Old Town Hall, […]
Read moreI’ve not yet read either Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (the paperback edition reviewed briefly in The Independent this weekend) or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, though look forward to (when I’ve the time) reading both. (Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation also, I note on Amazon, seem to […]
Read moreThis is, as much as anything else, a diary note to myself … but you’re welcome to read it, of course. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (and a little bit of research and reading) over the past 3 or 4 days (yes, the Easter vacation is mercifully upon us at last) with regard […]
Read more[Incomplete draft; published as is] Psephologists and pollsters are as famously impartial and non-partisan as those who cite them. “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is […]
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