#guardian (92 links)
- Yes, it can be hard to get a restaurant table. But it can be impossible if you’re a wheelchair user | Jay Rayner theguardian.com
My lunch with a disability access campaigner was an eye-opener. Even booking was a problem.
- This column will change your life: just sit down and think theguardian.com
To sit comfortably with your thoughts first requires seeing that there's a sense in which they're not real. A less new agey way of putting it is simply that you don't need to believe your thoughts. Whereupon they become fun to watch, and the need for distraction subsides. To quote the title of a book by Sylvia Boorstein, a meditation teacher: don't just do something, sit there.
It's painful for me to write critically about a project like care.data, because I love medical data, and I know the good it can do. We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS. Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.
So here's my advice: if you're thinking of opting out – wait. If you run care.data – listen.
So frustrating.
- How to remain secure against NSA surveillance theguardian.com
The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible. Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it.
- How to become an ethical investor | Money | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
- Climb every mountain: visualising the world's 50 highest peaks | News | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
"A multi-faceted visualisation of the world's 50 highest peaks. The interactive graphic, made using Tableau Public, features a clickable map of the summits, satellite images of each peak and figures for each mountain's prominence and overall elevation." Nice.
Sentiment building. "We're now at the stage where we should be getting the next wave of disruptive surprises. But – guess what? – they're nowhere to be seen. Instead, we're getting an endless stream of incremental changes and me-tooism. If I see one more proposal for a photo-sharing or location-based web service, anything with "app" in it, or anything that invites me to "rate" something, I'll scream."
Wondering how I missed Spitalfields Life until now.
- My dying friend found kindness to be the rule, not the exception | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer guardian.co.uk
The health service is portrayed as an intractable managerial nightmare. We spend so much time deploring the waste and inefficiency that we often forget that at the heart of the whole unwieldy system is a routine compassion, which is simply magnificent. And even more remarkable is that we attempt to guarantee this consideration to every person in the country who needs care.
Via blech.
- Central London Budget Eats guardian.co.uk
Useful Guardian guide.
- How to make perfect strawberry jam guardian.co.uk
- Britain's DIY food producers | Life and style | The Observer guardian.co.uk
They're net-savvy, small-scale producers, creating ice cream at home, smoking salmon in sheds – and making great food.
- Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice | John Naughton | Comment is free | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.
- Linked Data at the Guardian | Open Platform | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
"In the MusicBrainz/Wikipedia case, there is a deeper semantic option. DBTune.org provide awesome music datasets, among which is a MusicBrainz SPARQL service that contains relations identifying DBpedia entities, and consequently Wikipedia data, with MusicBrainz entities. A little bit of painful SPARQL, and your application is suitably enriched. And you are a happy developer because you have confidence in the join." Hawt. Hard.
- Alys Fowler: Pot pluck, plus an aphid survival guide | Gardening | Life and style | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
The secret to successful container planting.
- Gardens: Roof gardens | Life and style | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
Container-grown plants have restricted root space with limited access to water and nutrients, making them both hungry and thirsty. Add to this the increased exposure to the drying effects of wind and sun, and a lot of plants just won't be able to cope. The answer is to choose ones that have xerophytic modifications, which means they hang on to water for as long as possible.
- Silvena Rowe's meze recipes | Life and style | The Observer guardian.co.uk
The trick to really aromatic basil is to ration its water intake, to ensure that it grows slowly.
More disturbingly, [Jonathan Safran Foer] only considers a world where people are in a position to make choices about what they eat. Eating Animals is written by a well-educated, well-fed person for well-educated, well-fed readers. Nor does he contextualise his argument. It never ranges beyond the confines of America. He doesn't seriously examine why people might want to, or have to eat meat, or what meat means to individuals or societies. He proposes no solutions other than mass conversion to vegetarianism, although it doesn't seem to occur to him that the damage done by factory farming doesn't begin and end with animals but embraces all foods.
In the second extract from his book Eating Animals, the novelist reveals how intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement is essentially underwater factory farming.
Although these stories are reports about medical research, they are really about computing – in the sense that neither would have been possible without the application of serious computer power to masses of data. In that way they reflect a new – but so far unacknowledged – reality; that in many important fields leading-edge scientific research cannot be done without access to vast computational and data-handling facilities, with sophisticated software for analysing huge data-sets.
- The fourth plinth: it was just Big Brother all over again | Art and design | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no one can hear what they're saying.
"Last month, stretches of the river Lee were included on the list of 117 "bodies of water" across England and Wales that, according a new European rating system, are now classified as "bad". In total, just five of the 6,114 rivers surveyed received the "pristine" classification; three-quarters failed to attain the "good" grading."
The acrimonious split follows unsatisfactory negotiations which could have given Freecycle's UK moderators the ability to localise their web pages and allow them to serve the community better [...] The UK is probably the most enthusiastic Freecycling country in the world, hosting just 10% of all the branches but handling 27% of all Freecycling activities.
- Hack Day tools for non-developers simonwillison.net
For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. Here’s the list so far.
Twitter is becoming an ever present backchannel at conferences and events. However sometimes it needs curating and moderating, especially if it's to be displayed large as a part of the event. Here we talk about an app built in a few hours and open sourced today which we used for this purpose for The Guardian's Activate Summit.
- Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment » Nieman Journalism Lab niemanlab.org
"Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking." Brilliant.
You are the weakest link. T'ra.
Graphs of how often things feature on guardian.co.uk
Soufflé? Pah. Recipe for hot chocolate puddings further down.
- #DataJourn part 1: a new conversation (please re-tweet) | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog blogs.journalism.co.uk · Archived on
In short: OU academic Tony Hirst produced a rather lovely map, on the suggestion (taunt?) of the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, and the result? A brand new politics story for the Guardian on MPs’ expenses.
"Wired, [Albert Read] suggests, may not really be a tech magazine at all. "It's a magazine about innovation and the future, and should not be narrowly confined to technology in people's minds," he says. "You read Wired if you see yourself as a forward thinker or an early adopter." I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
Via blech.
- Guardian opens APIs and data | Media | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
"The Guardian launched its 'Open Platform' with APIs for all of its content and a sets of data collected by its editors." Brave. Ace.
- Charlie Brooker: To politicians, we're little more than meaningless blobs on a monitor | Comment is free | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
Straw and co blocked the release of the minutes, claiming that to actually let us know what was going on would set a dangerous precedent that would harm good government. Ministers wouldn't speak frankly at cabinet meetings if they felt their discussions would be subjected to the sort of scrutiny that, say, our every waking move is.