“You might recall that the United Nations Statistics Division launched UNdata about one week short of a year ago, which was an improvement on the previous United Nations Commons Database. UNdata provides a gateway into 22 United Nations databases and 66 million records. Yeah, it’s a lot of data, but what do we do with it? What does it mean? Progress: A Graphical Report on the State of the World is a modest attempt to make some sense of it all; and by all, I mean a small subset.”

Interesting to hear from someone “on the inside.” Also interesting to read the comments.

“The media companies clamoring about the death of print are not really worried that we’ll live in a world where there’ll be no more ink on paper. That will not happen until e-ink devices (like Sony’s ebook readers and Amazon’s Kindle) become as cheap and disposable as paper, and I’m not sure that will ever really happen. Ink on paper is still valuable, because it’s really good at what it does. But what it does is changing. We no longer print historical weather tables on paper. Maybe the news is just better distributed digitally. And, if so, what’s really wrong with that?

“The real reason traditional media companies are freaked is because they’re losing control. They’ve dropped the leash and the dogs are running wild. Now they’re sitting around with their arms folded saying, “They’ll be back when they realize they need us.”

“Sorry, guys. We don’t need you. You can join the pack and run with us if you like, but the leashes will never be back.”

“Just say ‘no’ to your inner DBA.”

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs…
“The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices…
“The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes…”

“Wikiprep is short for Wikipedia preprocessor and information extractor.
“It is a Perl script that parses MediaWiki data dumps in XML format and extracts useful information from them. It implements a subset of MediaWiki syntax (such as template inclusion with parameters, internal and external links, headings, redirects, etc.). Output is in the form of several files: some of them in simple, line-oriented format and some of them in XML. One of the files also contains processed Wikipedia pages in a simple HTML-like syntax.
“The goal of Wikiprep is to convert Wikipedia data dumps into a format that can be easily processed with other tools. These tools then do not need to have the full knowledge of all quirks and odd corners of MediaWiki syntax.”

“Today I put a new thing on the Internet: Demolition Hold List, Chicago, IL: A place for info about architecturally significant buildings in danger of being demolished (or are already gone). Please take a look at all of the great buildings and, if you can, contribute photos, text, and memories of the buildings listed there.

“I wanted to write down how I made this site because I think it could be useful to others in creating Web communities from spreadsheets and other structured text.”

“This is a complete list of all “structures subject to review for historic or architectural significance prior to the release of a demolition permit” in the City of Chicago since 2003.…

“Many of the buildings subject to these permits have been demolished. This is an archive of those buildings. The hope is that you can help build this archive by contributing photos, drawings, and memories.…

“Many of these buildings are still under review. The hope is that people can document these buildings while they are still here. Many people are already engaged in these efforts.…”

“What’s the most important thing people can learn from traveling?”

“A broader perspective. They can see themselves as part of a family of humankind. It’s just quite an adjustment to find out that the people who sit on toilets on this planet are the odd ones. Most people squat. You’re raised thinking this is the civilized way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not. It’s the Western way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not more civilized than somebody who squats. A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.”

“The policy itself doesn’t seem to involve any attempt to find middle ground with the publishers, as there is no grace period where journals would have exclusive access, in contrast to the NIH policy. Clearly, the MIT faculty produce a lot of research that academic publishers will be anxious not to lose access to, but MIT seems to be hoping that other universities follow along, citing similar policies enacted by individual schools at Harvard and Stanford.”

“There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules until you were blind, you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they are sweet. So, if you think ‘first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness,’ you’ve got it backwards.”

“Because unfettered capitalism is widely blamed for the global meltdown, economists and laborers alike say Brazil has become an example of what Lula likes to call “the financial strategy of the future.” By that he means a postideological approach that is equal parts wealth creation for corporations such as Embraer and wealth redistribution for underdogs like Da Silva. All this under the kind of prudent financial regulation that seems to have gone missing in the developed world of late.”