Group items tagged

It’s pretty hard to do anything beyond a gift. It’s more like organ donation, where you don’t get to decide where the organs go. What I’m working on is basically a donation, not a conditional gift.

people’s attitudes toward risk and benefit change depending on their circumstances. Their own context really affects what they think is risky and what they think isn’t risky.

I believe that the early data donors are likely to be people for whom there isn’t a lot of risk perceived because the health system already knows that they’re sick. The health system is already denying them coverage, denying their requests for PET scans, denying their requests for access to care. That’s based on actuarial tables, not on their personal data. It’s based on their medical history.

In Kenya, if you charged women just 50p for an insecticide-treated bednet (one of the most effective low-cost prophylactics against malaria) demand dropped 75 per cent. Uptake of deworming drugs—an important factor in child development—dropped 80 per cent if a small charge was applied. And in October 2005, the Bamako initiative received a fatal blow from a paper in the British Medical Journal. The study took epidemiological data from 20 African countries and projected what would happen if user fees were removed. The conclusion was that, each year, the lives of 233,000 children under five would be saved.

A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

"Like" culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has "constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself."

Google fusion tablesThis online database and mapping tool has become our default for producing quick and detailed maps, especially those where you need to zoom in. You get all the high resolution of google maps but it can open a lot of data - 100mb of CSV, for instance. The first time you try it, Fusion tables may seem a little tricky - but stick with it.

Tableau PublicIf you don't need the unlimited space of the professional edition, this is free - and means you can make pretty complex visualisations simply and easily with up to 100,000 rows. We use it when we need to bring different types of charts together - as in this map of top tax rates around the world, which also has a bar chart too.

After something simple - like a bar or line chart, or a pie chart? You'll find that Google spreadsheets (which you create from the documents bit of your Google account) can create some pretty nice charts - including the animated bubbles used by Hans Rosling's Gapminder. Unlike the charts API you don't need to worry about code -

For example, I had a teacher ask about free screen capture tools. I sent her a link to all the items I had tagged with screencapture in my Diigo account. For the groups to which I’ve joined (ie Diigo in Education), I can see resources tagged by others and shared with the group, as well as share what I’ve tagged. I also follow a few users with similar interests and can see their public resources

“The mixed model [using social media pages and official web sites] raises debate on a compelling issue: how to reconcile the requirements of accessibility with the innovative use of social media. Government web sites are strictly regulated. Private websites are not. Should one allow freer access to public information than the other?”

Another big issue concerning what observers are calling the ‘social cloud’ is information security.

Security emerged as the overwhelming concern among Hong Kong government officials at the FutureGov Forum, and Sophos research released in February gives officials good reason to worry. Spam and malware on social networking sites increased by 70 per cent in 2009, with Facebook the worst effected site.