“Here”:http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p1/src/sing/default.asp?key=w4hXB8a6 is a treat for you (if your computer has speakers). Some genius in “Sveriges Radio”:http://www.sr.se ‘radio for art, culture and ideas’ has dreamed up Let them sing it for you. It’s harder to explain than it is to experience so try it yourself and send the results to a friend!

It appears I am truly a Master of Science – I just got the results back from my recent “MSc in New Media, Information and Society”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm at the “London School of Economics & Political Science”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm and I discovered I have achieved a distinction (an A for my North American readers).

“Then let the throng our joy advance / With laughing song and merry dance…”:http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/webopera/song24.html

Come on – sing along!

It has been suggested that because weblogs are highly linked to one another, weblog postings are likely to “dominate Google search results”:http://www.robertkbrown.com/2002/07/16/blogging_killed_the_google_star.html In July “Microdoc News”:http://microdoc-news.info/ decided to test this and found that for a selection of typical searches weblogs seemed to have little effect. What this didn’t test, however, was whether weblogs dominated subject areas webloggers were writing about – after all, the discourse of webloggers tends to be concentrated in certain specific areas. I imagine if you searched for the stuff the most prolific webloggers tend to publish about – US politics, for example, or computing – you might still find a lot of weblog entries. Then again, why shouldn’t you?

From the BBC World Service. This series – The Giving Game looks critically at how NGOs, business and local governments of developing countries interact. Some of those he interviewed suggested that NGOs – which are generally not formally accountable to anyone, particularly anyone in the developing countries they minister to – are getting to be more powerful than some governments in those countries. It is suggested that this undermines the role of democratically-elected governments (where the governments *are* democratically elected). A lot of the criticism of NGO power comes from “Michael Edwards”:http://www.futurepositive.org/Edwards.html, an ex-manager of Oxfam and Save the Children. “Clare Short”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/profiles/story/0,9396,-4749,00.html (now no longer Britain’s Secretary
of State for International Development) is also an advocate of trying to build governing capacity in less developed countries rather than doing an ‘end run’ around them by giving money to NGOs.

I can see their points of course, but it’s hard to justify giving money to a corrupt or just ineffective government when you could give it to an unaccountable but dedicated NGO in a country.

Another of the interesting points that comes out of the series is just how small the amount of money is that NGOs have to spend compared even to the inadequate amount of government-directed aid. It does suggest that they might be more useful in trying to guide aid policy than actually doing work on the ground themselves (though they argue that it is only by being ‘on the ground’ that they can understand the needs of the people they claim to be speaking for).

Back in June, the Onion wrote about “social capital”:https://blog.org/archives/000799.html – now it is examining the social consequences of weblogging.

An article by “Dr Adam Swift”:http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/stafflist.asp?action=show&person=92 in the “Telegraph”:http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/11/12/tefswift12.xml&sSheet=/education/2003/11/12/ixtetop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=181438 (registration required) suggesting private schooling in the UK should be banned has inspired an interesting debate on the always-interesting “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ weblog. As so often is the case it seems clear to me that the left and right wings of the case arguing in the comments to the original posting will never agree because they have fundamentally different ethical premises. For me, Spock (and most of the left-wing commentators) ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one’. For the right wingers, parents have an absolute right to do what they can to better the lives of their children, whatever the harmful effects might be for society at large.
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Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age – the site speaks for itself. It’s not quite as humbling as it might be because by default it only includes people’s accomplishments at the same stage in their life, not all the things better people accomplished when they were even younger than you are.

Thanks to “Follow Me Here”:http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/2003_11_01_blog_archive.html#106859717029946217 for the link

Weekly INCITE comes from ten researchers and PhD students at the “Incite centre”:http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite/index.htm at “University of Surrey’s Sociology department”:http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk.

Recently one of them expressed concerns about “providing the raw data from academic research”:http://www.weeklyincite.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_weeklyincite_archive.html#106760924917923058 for others to analyse. It seems to me fundamental to the whole nature of the academic enterprise that raw data should be as widely available as possible. There is always the risk that people will take your data and interpret it in ways that you don’t agree with but one answer to this is to ensure that the data’s creator(s) are notified whenever the data is downloaded and/or republished. That way if you disagree with the new analysis you can present a counter-analysis of your own and/or point out any methodological issues in your research that make the interpretation given untenable.

There is also the question of whether research subjects should also be re-notified somehow every time the data is re-used. I suppose that would be ideal ethically but might make it practically impossible to use the data. I suggest the best course is full disclosure – something like this: ‘you will not be personally identifiable from this research and I intend to use it to do X but the anonymous data will also be made available to other academics who may do their own analysis.’ I wonder how often this is done at present?

It seems there is a larger question behind this issue – if the whole truth about a study could be damaging to an already disadvantaged group is it right to suppress the damaging information? Is an academic’s highest duty to do good science or to do good (as she or he sees it)? I guess I have absorbed enough of the values of the journalist to try to tell the whole truth first (including providing all your findings) then provide your own interpretation.

In the long run your ideological opponents will likely eventually do their own research and discover the facts you have omitted, putting their own spin on them and devaluing what you have produced. My gut feeling is you should get all the facts out in the open and get your retaliation in first!

“PC Support Advisor”:http://www.pcsupportadvisor.com/ has provided “free downloadable sample guidelines”:http://www.pcsupportadvisor.com/sasample/M0228.pdf for employee Internet use. Though they are fine as a starting point I would recommend tailoring them to your own circumstances and adding a clause warning that agreements entered into by email can often be binding so don’t discuss contracts with outside organizations if you are not authorised to make final decisions.

As most of you will know by now, Amazon has started enabling people to search for text within 120,000 of its titles and view selected pages from the books – a feature that has inspired some interesting thoughts about where search could go next.

Steven Johnson in Slate suggests you should be able to tell Amazon which books you own and do a search just on those – it would get info on what you have already which it can use to sell you new books and you would get a search engine covering your paper library.

“Gary Wolf in Wired”:http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60948,00.html uses the news of the new service to delve into the politics of copyright protection and puts the service into context with attempts to publish out of copyright works for free on the web like Project Gutenberg and on-demand book publishing.

Amazon in an attempt to calm nervous publishers “has announced”:http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3102731 already sales growth for searchable titles outpaced non-searchable titles by 9 percent – though “one blogger”:http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_scrivenerserror_archive.html#106764958373017865 has pointed out this could be a one-off novelty effect.

“Steven Kaye”:http://vheissu.typepad.com/about.html has been tracking the Amazon book deal on “his weblog”:http://vheissu.typepad.com/blog/ in more detail. P.S. I had refrained from commenting on this so far because for the moment I am unable to use Amazon’s book search. It turns out (in my case at least) since I haven’t bought books from the US operation recently they can’t verify my credit card even though it is valid and therefore won’t let me see the pages. Frustrating!

Following on from that news, it turns out Google has its own book search plans covering 60,000 titles and is also going to incorporate links to library catalogues – some two million of the most popular books will be indexed and readers in North America (and only there for the moment it seems) will be directed to their nearest library that stocks the book when they enter the postcode.

All of this is very welcome news – there is a lot more “quality” information around in paper form than the Internet alone provides so people should be encouraged to broaden their searches to include books.