I've tidied the place up a bit.

The blogroll (does anyone look at these any more?) was really out of date, so I binned it and made a new one. It's mainly blogs where I comment, blogs of people who comment or link here, friends, and family, with a slant towards including less prominent blogs and ones I agree with. It leans heavily towards the subject matter here (though not much technology), and I snobbishly include only blogs I am happy to tell people I read, so no trash TV blogs here. Not that I read any. 

I'd like it to be gender balanced, but it's currently 14 male/7 female/ 4 group blogs. I'll see if I can fix that over the next week or two. Any suggestions?

If you should be on the list and are not, let me know – I'm sure it was an accident.

And I added a Favourite Posts list, because even at my rate of posting there's quite a lot here since I started over five years ago and there are a few I'd like to remember.

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After the spectacular failure of financial experts everywhere to predict the 2008 crash the whole business of prediction has come under scrutiny. The consensus is that prediction is difficult, especially about the future, as everyone from Neils Bohr to Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, and so the questioning extends to the closely-related topic of how to act in the face of a future that we cannot foresee?

I've just read three books on these topics, by a Canadian, a Briton, and an American, and I'll do a post on each. Today, it's Dan Gardner's Future Babble. Next up is Tim Harford's Adapt, and I'll finish with Duncan Watts' Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer. Time-saver: on a scale of one to five, Gardner gets 2, Harford 1.5, and Watts 4.

So, Future Babble. It's a straightforward journalistic book built on the work of psychologist Philip Tetlock, who also figures prominently in Adaptand makes an appearance in Everything is Obvious. Tetlock (home page) is famous for an extended experiment in which he assembled "284 experts – political scientists, economists, and journalists – whose jobs involve commenting on or giving advice on political or economic trends."(p25) Several years and over … Continue reading

Julian Assange, in an interview with RT, is not shy about his opinion of Facebook.

RT: And social networking, what role, do you think, sites like Facebook and Twitter, have played in the revolutions in the Middle East? How easy, would you say, is it to manipulate media like that? 

JA: Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use. 

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to … Continue reading

Facebook has been deleting accounts of activist groups in the UK, according to the Guardian and to students at University College London, in what Adbusters is calling a #zuckup. Complaints are, of course, on a Facebook page.

Luckily, friendly old Liam says Hi on Facebook's behalf, and explains that terms of service technicalities outweigh speech:

Hi,

As you may know, Facebook profiles are intended to represent individual people only. It is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to use a profile to represent a brand, business, group, or organization. As such, your account was disabled for violating these guidelines.

Meanwhile, as Jillian York explains in Foreign Policy, Facebook has never identified with the liberation claims made on its behalf. Here is Adam Conner, reported in the Wall Street Journal a week ago:

"Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others," Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. "We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we're allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven't experienced it before," he said.

My only gripe about Jillian York's article – she has been critical … Continue reading

As measured by the byte, the Internet is increasingly a video-consumption medium dominated by a small number of large providers. Wired reports that "In the evenings, Netflix accounts for more than 40 percent of U.S. bandwidth usage, by some measurements", more than the cumulative amount of web browsing traffic.

So far as traffic is concerned, the Internet is becoming (as Tim Wu has warned us it might) a medium for commercial broadcast transmission of studio-produced products.

Netflix's success is starting to sideline peer-to-peer traffic in movies, just as iTunes sidelined peer-to-peer traffic in music. To quote from the Wired article again: “I think Netflix, iTunes and Direct Download all play a role in the diminishing P2P traffic volumes,” [Arbor Networks chief scientist Craig] Labovitz said. Direct download refers to sites such as Rapid Upload and MegaVideo that many have turned to, to share files with friends and the world, without the need for peer-to-peer software.

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I have a Google Alert that sends me an email when the name "Tom Slee" is mentioned on the Internet, which is why I read this piece on the failure of auditors during the financial crash. Very nice work, Mr. Slee (no relation).

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