confused of calcutta

There’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of ACM Interactions, titled Digital Libraries for the Developing World. I think it’s a must-read for people interested in education, in opensource or in the developing world. [While I am a member of the ACM, my access to this article was on a public-domain basis using [...]

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Thank you everyone for your comments on my previous post on this subject. I’m working through them and learning from them.
In the meantime, I’d like to extend the conversation on just one theme within the comments:
Motivation.
I think it’s at the heart of the nature-versus-nurture debate.
Imagine going into Google and trying to find something. Imagine being [...]

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In a recent post titled On Control, I wrote about what happened to LIFE Magazine in 1972; in it I referred to a number of quotes from something called Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers.
As an aside, I asked if anyone knew where I could find my favourite LIFE photograph, one that has eluded me for three [...]

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Regular readers will know that I have a thing about education, and that my dream is to build a school from scratch as and when I have no role to play in traditional enterprise. A school that makes use of social software and Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder; that knows how to create value from [...]

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OK, I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m passionate about cricket and therefore feel I must say what I feel.
I’m appalled at the playing of the race card in recent discussions and debates about the last England-Pakistan Test.

Umpires can and do make bad decisions. They’re human, and often have to make the calls [...]

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Just a thought.
Why is it that the spam I get is usually about sex (porn sites and performance enhancers), drugs (performance enhancers and weight loss) rock & roll (ringtones and downloads) and money (every get-rich-quick scheme possible, along with a few that defy belief)? 99% of the stuff that Akismet blocks for me (thank you [...]

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I hear you say “Enough already!” to the A-list-blogger-as-gatekeeper debate; so no more on the subject.
What I’d like to do instead is open up debate on a question that kept bugging me throughout that debate:
If we believe in a Long Tail World, then why do we insist on looking at that Long Tail World through [...]

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A recent post of mine on group selection elicited a number of responses; some pointed me to the Beinhocker book, for which I’m immensely grateful. Others questioned the mere possibility of group selection making sense, challenging me on a number of fronts, ranging from the relationship (or more accurately the risk) of using biological evolution [...]

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Dennis Howlett commented on a recent post of mine, On Control, where I was musing over Big’s relationship to Control Failure, and arguing that we needed a Better But Not That Big approach. One of the things Dennis said was
“Big often means complex. So how do you propose to solve the complexity issues?”
That stayed [...]

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Opensource communities have always had some form of moderation.
Sometimes they are called “the core“, sometimes they are referred to as “1000lb gorillas”, and sometimes they’re just called “moderators”. The term itself doesn’t matter, but the function represented by the term does matter.
Unless the term itself is wrong.
Like “gatekeeper”. [Yup, this was partially triggered by some [...]

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