I spent the last couple of days attending a "results-based writing" course hosted by my university. The main aim was to learn some things about writing concisely for scientific papers and finding a good structure for my thesis. However, the lessons are applicable to all many kinds of writing.

Social Media tools suck. On the one hand, it's kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it's a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail.

I found out about Freebase Gridworks through a post by Jon Udell. In the Freebase blog post, they quote the announcement from the mailing list. The important bits: "We at Metaweb strongly believe that Freebase can be helpful not only as a giant repository of heavily curated and interconnected data but also as a way to help people cleanup and integrate their own datasets by aligning their data with a shared substrate."

I recently came across a website, DNA 11, whose catchphrase is There is Only One Original. It sounds absurd but this is how it works. DNA 11 sends you a mouth swab that you use to collect epithelial cells from the inside of your cheek. You then mail these back to the company and they conduct a gel electrophoresis run of your genes. The results of this (the black and white bands often seen on CSI and the like) are then photographed professionally and digitally coloured.

Today this blog explores three topics in the field of recycling, disposal and robotics design. I have started with the most transparent first, then explored the environmental issues required when compacting rubbish in business and finally developed the topic of paper.

The answer to this question is I truly do not know, however I no somebody who does, and that somebody is you. how would you like to be part of the conception of this device. After-all we need a Trash Robot right? There's a niche for this and it is going to happen and it will be possibly the biggest idea of 2009, but by that time we will probably be somewhere near 2012. So in a bid to step up the procedures I have made this post to firstly explain just what the trash Robot might be, then secondly I will explore just what types of people the trash robot may help then finally I will explore a few more possibilities afterall Robot's and rubbish are made by man. We are the trashmen and trash women that create the heaps of rubbish which no-one else would think of going through. And like hoarders of rubbish there will always be resistance. So lets first start with the preliminaries, we live in an age of confusion and a world which is amounting some great new devices

The development of the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol has enabled repositories to start accepting deposits from remote systems and interfaces.

The H has quite the interesting story up, "Emacs and the Birth of the GPL," tracing how Emacs developed, and how that in turn led to the development of the GPL. Seeing the Future I quite enjoyed seeing how Richard M. Stallman tempered prophetic statements with unfortunate real-world experience.

Today, all eyes are on Haiti -- the island that was devastated by a natural disaster -- but in closely looking at the problems there, one has to wonder how human right issues have been overlooked. The slave trade cannot be tolerated. Poverty is no excuse for abuse.

As calls increase for the the Pope to resign over his alleged role in not dealing with pedophiles as the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich and subsequently head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, I was wondering if it has any historical precedent.

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