I was watching Alexander Nevsky the other day and I noticed something very odd. I distinctly remember from somewhere that there was a famous scene where… (spoiler ahead!)

the attacking Teutonic knights fall through the ice on a frozen lake. The odd thing is that when I watched the film the scene wasn’t there! Where did I get the idea that there was such a scene I wonder? Is there an unexpurgated version of the film that contains the scene?99 loans approved paydayloan paycheck quick advance fixadvisor loan a jcar loan 1.99loans sc columbia title west absoluteadaire loans homebanker payday loans americanindian loan interest free 7-11ltv loans 125437 loan credit scorecredit act fair americanscredit $5000 check loans withoutsales car credit agreedsaving union american creditpersonal return tax credits 2008group 2007 consulting llc griffin credittherapy massage equine courses accreditedaccredited bs in degree electronics online Map

I have been going through the list of sites which visitors found this blog through and found some interesting results.

Whatis? is a handy dictionary of technology terms and a few weeks back it apparently nominated this weblog as one of its “Favorite Technology Blogs“. Thank you whoever put me on that list and I hope visitors find what they are looking for.

Also thanks to Kevin Morris at Becta for putting this weblog on a list of good weblogs for UK Online centres.

It’s nice to get visitors from French and Italian weblogs, and I’m gratified at the people from around the world including Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia who have written in to ask to see some of the papers I have written.

On a lighter note, I noticed a few people coming from “http://www.web-shite.co.uk/” (now Roraz.com) which seems to specialise in linking to sites that are either gross or pornographic. I couldn’t figure out why until I noticed this entry for bl0g.org: “The mother of porn blog/user intergration/dirty/filthy/websites on the net. Either that or someone seriously needs to get a girlfriend.” Yes it’s pretty much as described and no it’s nothing to do with me! The difference one letter can make…

P.S. Someone recently wrote me to say that he read my weblog wasn’t going to be updated after Nov 2002. Has anyone read anything similar and if you have could you let me know where so I can correct that impression?of scary cast moviesapphic daily moviesmovies dbz hentaifree movies sex amaturehentai free porn anime moviessex movies free dildoporn fat free moviesgalleries hentai movie freeediting movie software freefree movies sucking matureinterrassisch Sybian MPEGsHahnerei interrassisch Geschlechtporn Spione Völlig Cartoonhentai Pissing Mädchenfucking moms Duaghtersverspritzend Anker Frauenpics bbw JapanischFrauen nackt 70 über Reifesexo interrassisch gratis de VideosTarzan Comic-Pornoscheißend GayMILF dp InterrassischKostenlos Lesben fuckingGroße Milch verspritzend TittenPapas teches Tochter Dick Mompuissy BehaarteBehaarte Kitzler teenrimming anal MädchenBlume Tucci interrassisch GeschlechtNacked Lesben

… and there is no reason you should – this weblog has left Reid’s machine and is now hosted by Harald Koch (see the picture of the new computer at the right!). Thanks to Reid for two years of patience dealing with technical queries and the occaisional grumbling about periodic outages.

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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I have always preferred cold weather to hot – and yesterday London suffered its hottest day in recorded history – 35.3 degrees C (96 F). There may be Americans out there who scoff at such weather but in countries like the UK homes don’t have air conditioning and office air conditioners often don’t work (because they are rarely needed!)

Fortunately it’s a little better today but the latest is that the temperature may go back up on the weekend. This is the last thing I need now that I am trying to put together the first draft of my dissertation – I can hardly think! The rest of Europe is suffering, too…

There are several sites available to let you compare your favourite nations to one another online. Each has its merits and specialties so if you don’t find what you want from one, try one of the others.

NationMaster – the one I found out about most recently – lets you look at statistics in hundreds of different categories. Earlier I found the similar Your Nation.com – which relies on rather old CIA Fact Book data (1998) – and the UN’s “Infonation” aimed particularly at schoolkids which has a somewhat eccentric navigation system and a shorter list of countries to compare. It’s a pity someone doesn’t make a comparative database like these but which is dynamically linked to the latest sources of information – these while interesting will become increasingly out of date.

If you want to dig deeper Offstats provides a database of links to official statistics from several countries across the Internet, but without the whizzy direct comparison engine.

One key measure missing is the UN’s ever-popular quality of life (“Human Development”) index (report / index in PDF form). Of course how you score a country depends on what you value – one could come up with a different ranking with different criteria – but it’s always interesting to see how different countries fare. Canada long valued its top position through much of the 1990s (it dropped to 8th this year – behind the US(!)) and I notice the EU is blowing its own trumpet with six of the top ten countries.

The State Department’s assessment of the cost of living in many world cities is also entertaining, though it seems to find most places more expensive to live in than Washington DC which suggests to me that the “basket” of goods and services they use to generate the index is a little skewed.

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I just finished reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God – a diatribe about the way in which 1990s business writers (particularly the prophets of the new economy) tried to assert that the changes in business practices then (casualisation, outsourcing etc) were inevitable and could not and should not be challenged. I found the book somewhat irritating because it was hectoring and repetitious but one or two of the footnotes were interesting.

The paper Family Income Mobility– How Much Is There and Has It Changed? [a PDF] by Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon Danziger was particularly interesting as it provides empirical evidence for what is generally just “folk wisdom” (at least in left wing circles). It concludes that in the US:

“even though there is substantial income mobility, the extent of mobility has not increased over this period. As a result, the gaps between those at the top and those at the bottom have widened and remained at least as persistent as they were in the 1970’s.”

Also (based on earlier research not available online)

“The fact that the US has a less-regulated, more decentralized labor market than the Nordic countries or Germany has not generated greater economic mobility here, either in earnings or family income. Likewise, the more extensive systems of social protection in the European countries have yielded lower poverty and lower family income inequality, but not at the cost of lower mobility.”

It seems from the data provided that 80% of people who were in the highest quintile of earnings in 1968-70 remained there in 1989-91 while of those who started in the lowest quintile, 31% remained there and 25.4% only rose to the next highest (the actual argument is a little more complex so if you want to really dig into the figures I recommend you look at the PDF).

I also ran across an international comparison of poverty and income inequality which included some interesting charts of how much inequality there was in a number of nations including several European countries, Canada and the US, in the 1980s and 1990s and how much difference taxes made to reducing inequality.

I just tried the SelectSmart “who should you vote for” test and Sen. John Edwards came top of my list based on the positions he has taken, followed closely by Howard Dean (about whom I have already written). I thought I may as well check the sites of the main contenders to see for myself – and I find I don’t agree with SelectSmart.

(note – though I have made my home in the UK and left the US when I was two I am a registered US voter so this is not idle musing on my part).

I have to say I am still not happy with Edwards’ assertion on his website that:

“He has repeatedly called for delaying additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and believes the tax cuts for middle income families should be permanent. The Senator has also called for increasing the estate tax exemption to $7 million per family to protect small businesses and farmers, but not a complete repeal of the estate tax.”

He’s practically endorsing the Bush tax cuts for heavens sake! Delays not cancellation of the worst cuts, probably weaselling about what “middle income” means, and essentially removing the estate tax for large swathes of people who by any measure could be called wealthy.

Kerry (who is next on my list apparently) appears even worse – his website doesn’t even mention the Bush tax cuts.

Kucinich – next down on my list – is actually the closest to my views in most respects but he is a protectionist, which I find hard to stomach and I fear in any case he stands little chance of getting anywhere (though he did get 24% of the votes in the MoveOn.org primary).

Boy it’s depressing looking at the US political scene…

Months after I finished writing it, a pair of copies of my new book – Dealing with E-mail arrived at my door. The rest of you will have to wait until the end of August to get one but why not order now? It costs just £4.79 from Amazon in the UK ($7 in the US) and is designed to be a simple and practical guide showing not just how to use email software but also how to use it effectively and sensitively within an organization and as a business tool.

I’m hoping that businesses will hand it out alongside other training materials when they do their new employee inductions to discourage new hires from registering their work email addresses on websites that could sell them on to spammers, emailing everyone in the company to tell them about a missing earring and other email crimes.

Sometime in the next few weeks I will be adding a link from my home page to a resource of email related links and further advice about email use which I couldn’t squeeze into the book.

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On my recent trip to Venice I saw this work by David Della Venezia at the BAC Art Studio and as I am about to spend three years of my life for the most part surrounded by books doing a PhD I thought/feared this would be a useful picture/warning to stick by my desk!repayment 401k wachovia loanloan payday interest $500loans $500.00payments loans month $200,000 660alfred foundation sloanloans 100 fix and nj fliphome refinance fico 500 loantile loans car aaaloan company services financial americanafs credit improvement loanloans installment online 100 approved5 3 home bank loansloan 5000 dollar from commercea loan from millionares$2500 dollar loanloan 403badvantage loan student alaskahome loan americandream Map