I just read that Demos – an influential UK thinktank – has now put almost all of its catalogue up online for free download (using a “license”:http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/openaccess_page296.aspx derived from the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ license).

Worth a browse if you are a UK-based policy wonk…

Just for a change I thought I’d give my wife a turn on this weblog – she has just written a piece in this week’s issue of The Lancet analysing why more than 4,800 people died because of August’s heatwave in France and drawing the medical community’s attention to the need for better preventative health measures in such emergencies as well as better care facilities.

[Later – apologies – I didn’t realise only subscribers can read it. FYI she concludes, “often medical and public attention focuses on intervention rather than prevention. However, a heatwave is different in nature from a very hot summer and requires a different approach. Doctors will know how to rehydrate patients but may not think about systematically providing practical tips to prevent heatstrokes. This is a lesson that up to now seems to be relearned with each new crisis.”]

The UK Government’s “Strategy Unit”:http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page77.asp (a civil service department promoting forward planning) has just put out a report on “The Future of Social Exclusion”:http://www.number10.gov.uk/files/pdf/socexissues.pdf [PDF].

I am disappointed that it barely mentions the role of the digital divide and while it describes the gap (using figures that are four years old) it doesn’t say anything about how, in the Government’s view it has emerged, or what they intend to do about it. I know the Government is concerned about this issue – I hope the sketchiness of the response in this particular document is not representative of the priority the issue is now being given.

An old mate of mine, Jupiter analyst “Ian Fogg”:http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/fogg/, quoted in “this BBC News story”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3174644.stm pours scorn on Tiscali’s new “150Kbps for £15.99 offer”:http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/build/3xfaster.html. He says, “it won’t deliver rich content like video, audio, fast downloads, and online gaming” but I don’t buy this argument.

It’s true you can’t get decent video at that bandwidth, but it is perfectly adequate for audio and quite possibly for online gaming as well (where it isn’t the bandwidth but the latency that is important). And as for download speed – if a file is big you have to download it in the background anyway so a few more minutes here or there doesn’t matter much. I believe that this new product delivers most of what most people want from broadband – reasonable web browsing without watching the clock or tying up the phone. I think that’s consistent with the results of the “iSociety’s ethnographic research about broadband”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2504257.stm.

If Telewest offered a similar service I would likely downgrade to it – at least to see if I could live with it. I think the only real problem with it is the price which should be just under that psychological £15 a month mark.

“A new survey”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~oxis/index.html by the “Oxford Internet Institute”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ has provided some invaluable detail about the exact nature of the digital divide. I find the conclusions drawn in media reports as interesting as the data itself. The Guardian’s headline and opening paragraphs: Digitally divided by choice concentrate on the survey’s discovery that only 14 percent (mis-reported as four percent) of the UK population doesn’t have Internet access themselves and doesn’t at least know someone who could send an email for them.

It’s true that many of those who are not online themselves could get access at local libraries or ‘borrow’ Internet access from a friend, but without much first-hand experience of Internet access they are unlikely to understand what it could do for them.

The BBC: “Net ‘worth little to many Brits'”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3121950.stm gets more to the heart of the matter, though its headline is misleading – it should say something more like, ‘Net perceived as unimportant by many Brits’.

I think Tom Steinberg gets it exactly right when he “suggests”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/09/its_about_the_v.html that if 96% of Internet non-users don’t feel they are missing anything it is important that government and civil society organizations start giving them good reasons to get interested. I would add that the way the Internet is presented when it is discussed is also at fault. The Government depicts it as a way to learn and get employed, commercial organizations depict it as a place to shop and the news often depicts it as full of oddballs and paedophiles. There isn’t much room for discussion of how to use it to meet people (other than sexual partners), express yourself creatively or to organize politically.

It is worth noting that the questionnaire options for perceived disadvantages of lack of Internet access appear to be limited to: ‘could do job better [if I was online]’, ‘trouble being contacted’ and ‘disadvantaged at work’. Nothing about learning, information gathering or even saving money let alone political organizing as possible things someone might have missed out on.

The information available via the OII and news reports remains sketchy – the full results are due to be publicised and discussed “in Oxford on 22nd October”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events.shtml

Thanks to “Techdirt”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20030918/0047201.shtml for the link

David Docherty may be self-serving in this Guardian article plugging “YooPublica”:http://www.yoomedia.com/Public_Sector.html his commercial public sector digital TV initiative, but that doesn’t mean his idea is wrong. He suggests that the people at the bottom of the ladder who will be the last to switch to digital TV should get Government-sponsored set top boxes that also deliver government services – essentially a return to the “business model” of Minitel, which became a widespread interactive service in France because it was subsidised by the government to replace the phone book (not that it did, but that’s another story).

Back in November I suggested that something like this would “be a good idea”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_egovernment.html#000540 and if I hadn’t been busy on other things I always meant to write something for a think tank suggesting it. Glad to see someone else out there had a similar idea and is trying to make it happen.

A new, more computerised television production system being tested at the BBC could help feed the organization’s promised “Creative Archive”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000861 of publicly-downloadable BBC content. Among the new capabilities on offer:

New footage will be catalogued after it is shot, so different producers can access the same content simultaneously.

“In theory, all newly shot material will be digitised so it can be made available to all BBC programme makers. Think of the advantage: you don’t have to go to an editing suite with four hundred tapes,” Ms Romaine [the BBC’s director of production modernisation] explained.

Computer-based production can allow programmes to be enhanced with additional information (metadata) enabling archiving and content searches based on internet technology.

One might think this sort of thing would already be routine in a large, well-resourced organization like the BBC, but it’s hard to change complex production processes to keep up with the changes that technology makes possible. I hope this experiment proves successful, because it is not until new production techniques like this one become routine that the Creative Archive will really start to take off.

A rather densely-argued “academic paper”:http://www.brookings.org/dybdocroot/gs/events/paysatisfaction.pdf presented at the Brookings Institute has been summarised by “ScienceDaily”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031003060615.htm – ‘our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay’.

Pretty uncontroversial I would have thought but this suggests that, for example, it might be better for a country to risk a lower standard of living if it could also produce a more equal standard.

Irwin M. Stelzer in a recent article about European vs American attitudes to income equality (referenced in “last week’s blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_europe.html#000892) casts doubt on an earlier study that showed this effect – I hope this latest, more large scale study will put an end to remaining doubts on this point.

Prospect Magazine has an interesting article – “Europe is Strong”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=12246 by “Philippe ‘globalization is good’ Legrain”:http://www.philippelegrain.com/ on why you shouldn’t necessarily believe what you may have read about America being the economic powerhouse and Europe being a basket case. Turns out that once you factor in that Europe’s population is not growing while America’s is and Europeans work fewer hours, much of Europe is more productive than the US, hour for hour. I also didn’t realise that cross-border investment within the eurozone quadrupled in the first two years of the Euro.

Thanks to “Crookedtimber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000586.html for the link

… Then as I was about to post this up, “Arts & Letters Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ led me to a columnist in The Daily Standard who argues the more traditional “neocon anti-Europe case”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/123ezraq.asp. Neither article alas gives the key detail that would definitely enable me to decide one way or another – what’s the average European produce in an hour, how fast is that rising and how does that compare to the same measure in the US?

I find it interesting that “Irwin M. Stelzer”:http://www.namebase.org/xste/Irwin-M-Stelzer.html (the columnist) argues (correctly) that Europeans may find it difficult to trade less leisure for more income without acknowledging that Americans probably find the reverse even harder to do. I would also like to see the evidence that, “millions of Italians, Irish, Germans, and other Europeans have voted with their feet in favor of America’s balance between work and leisure, with no discernible flow in the opposite direction.” But maybe that’s because I am one of those shirkers who moved from Canada to Britain at least in part because of the work/life balance issue.

I have been visiting friends of mine – “William and Mona”:http://www.rahul.net/akerblom/ – and found to my delight that William had a ‘first edition’ (fifth printing) copy of Ted Nelson’s two part book – “Computer Lib/Dream Machines”:http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/.

It was written back in 1974 and included a basic description of his Xanadu project as well as many other prescient musings, rather loosely organized. Here’s an excerpt of a singing commercial for Xanadu as overheard by Ted Nelson at the National Joint Computer Conference in 1973:

It’s got everything to give
It’ll get you where you live
Realms of mind that you may roam
Grasp them all within your home.
The greatest things you’ve ever seen
Dance your wishes on the screen.
All the things that man has known
Comin’ on the telephone
Poems books and pictures too
Coming on the Xanadu
Xanadu – the world of you!

Sounds remarkably like the Internet doesn’t it?