Foot and Mouth - nearly all clear August 30, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : foot-and-mouth, UK , add a commentI know how annoying it can be when a story I’ve been following just drops out of the news spotlight without informing me of the outcome. I want to know how it ended, even if the result was less newsworthy than promised. So just in case anybody is wondering what happened to the small but very worrying outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in Surrey, UK, this is the present position:
* No new incidences have occurred
* Animal movement restrictions are being lifted except for a small area in Surrey.
* EU export bans on UK meat are also ending.
Almost everything should be back to normal by mid September.
LIVESTOCK markets, animal gatherings and shows will re-commence in Wales from Monday (September 3), Welsh Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones has announced.
It also expected that activities will be able to resume in England from the same date, although this is still to be formally confirmed.
And on the subject of the cause of the outbreak:
Investigation by the U.K. Veterinary Medicines Directorate turned up no evidence of the virus coming from the Merial operation. No source for the infection has been found to date.
Convert Animoto to youTube August 27, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : animoto, Music, video, edublog , 2commentsIs it possible to convert an Animoto video for uploading to youTube?
At first it would appear not, through conventional means. But I found a way to do it. Saving directly from the browser doesn’t work, not even with the Firefox video download extension so I came up a lateral way of getting there. Here’s a 30 second Animoto video which I made using my own digital photographs and an MP3 of my own performance of a song to which I own full copyright because it’s mine.
Once the Animoto production process was complete, I then cued the video to play and booted up my screencast software, which in this case is Snapz Pro but it could be any screencasting package. At this point I could have added a narrative voice over, using a microphone connected to my computer as in normal educational screencasting, but since this is a music video I didn’t. I saved the resulting quicktime movie in format mpeg4 and uploaded that file to youTube. Thats all there is to it, here’s the embedded youTube:
PajamaNation CEO blog August 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, blogs and community , add a commentWalter de Brouwer, CEO of pajamanation has been blogging almost daily for over a week now, over on PajamaNationBlog
By reading Walter’s blog now and subscribing you can appreciate the detailed vision that he has for the enterprise called pajamanation, for the changing world of work and also gain an insight into his unique way of creating a company.
For those interested in blog community structures, the linkroll in the righthand sidebar is actually a list of invited joint authors of the blog, which is managed from within the blogger platform. Public comments are enabled now, and Walter also invites individuals from the company to write posts. My name is there, and I wrote Joining the conversation.
As the story of this company begins to unfold a lot more rapidly starting next month, there’s one thing we can be all be certain of. There will always be plenty of surprises.
Couscous Recipe August 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : couscous recipe, internet, Long Tail , 4comments
During the month of August I’ve been undertaking an intensive online course about the commercial internet and web 2.0. This course is called the Thirty Day Challenge and it has covered aspects including the crucial importance of market research, methods for measuring potential traffic, immersive learning, ethical writing, targeted posting, and authentic voice authorship. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster with unexpected community side effects and suchlike but the learning opportunites have been enormous and the potential application in a wider context cannot be overlooked.
One of the exercises for example has been to write three articles every day about a chosen topic, with the topic having been chosen not because of any familiarity with the subject matter, but from a purely quantitative set of metrics. Many have found that extremely difficult or given up.
On day twenty three of the challenge it was suggested that rather than write to a preconceived formula it would be better simply to tell an authentic story. This is how the best copywriting is achieved apparently.
Anyway, I decided after a while that rather than use a pseudonym or pen name, I would continue to publish all of my own writing under my own real name.
So here, as per the topic title of this post, is a piece of gonzo journalist cookery writing, which I produced yesterday afternoon as a response to lesson 22. I’ve no idea whether it fulfils certain criteria or not, but I enjoyed writing it a lot more than some other stuff, and that’s probably a good sign.
Here’s the article: Couscous Recipe
If you enjoyed that you might like to add it to one of the social bookmarking sites liested below under “share this”. Whichever you normally use or comes naturally.
Oh yes, if you are actually looking for a practical couscous recipe then you might be better off going straight to couscous recipe page or else visit the couscous recipe bookshop at amazon UK.
**update**
There’s now an illustrated Rabbit in Mustard with couscous and Quinoa recipe page up on the couscous recipes blog as well.
Amazon UK couscous recipe bookshop
wiki spam goes human powered August 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , add a commentWiki spambot fighting is an occupational hazard, but not something that bothers me too much these days. I try not to over react and avoid locking down pages as much as possible. There’s no need to make a whole wiki login-to-edit or install annoying captchas and so on. My approach is usually based on banning keywords in the type of sites spammers are promoting. So if you tried to add text and links with references to viagra or lotto onto the cider wiki for example, you’ll find that the page doesn’t get saved. The only downside is that the cider makers might want just possibly want to write something about viagra and lotto on the cider wiki . In a broad topic based wiki such as wikipedia, that would not be the solution.
Now via Facebook, Colin Donald of Futurescape has told me of a new scourge - human powered wiki spammers.
Internet Futures: Chinese human-powered spam
Automated responses won’t work nearly as easily when there’s a real intelligence on the spamming side, rather than a bot. Yet the cost of using people to defend against this on the receiving end would very quickly be disproportionate.
I suppose it’s all part of the co-evolution of a predator / prey ecology but unfortunately it seem to be one in which if there is any weakness on behalf of the wiki techologist, then the predator, against advice from the lessons of population simulation software, is all to often willing to kill the prey it depends upon.
Meteor shower over Wales August 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : astronomy for beginners, UK , add a commentI know this is a bit off-topic for DARnet but it is August after all, and during this month I’ve been doing some research about astronomy for beginners. The perseids watching was a genuine interst and now after the main part of the event I read a newsreport from South Wales, one of my favourite places, which taught me two new facts.
1) The Perseid meteor shower is caused by remnants of a comet, I knew that already, but the name of the comet is not usually quoted. It is Comet Swift Tuttle
2) The Leonids are another annual meteor show which takes place in November, but this year the most spectacular will be the the Geminids in December
News Wales > Environment > Meteor shower over Wales
Meteor shower over Wales
14/8/2007
University of Glamorgan astronomers recorded a total of 123 meteors during this year’s annual Perseid meteor shower on the night of August 12 and 13.
This was a good total despite cloud cover ruining the latter part of the viewing session.
“The evening was very clear with the Milky Way clearly visible as a shining ribbon of broken light extending right from the northern to southern horizon. Most city dwellers will have never seen our home galaxy due to the ever pervasive glow of street lights, but the Brecon Beacons is one of the best areas in the UK to view this elusive wonder. The dark lanes of the Cygnus rift were clearly visible and the knotty condensations of star clouds were clearly etched, almost like real clouds on the sky.”
The Perseids are one of the year’s best showers. It has a regular meteor count of between 30 to 50 per hours, the meteors having bright, yellow trains, many ending with a brief flash of light as the dust grain explodes on our upper atmosphere.
These dusty remnants are all that is left after comet Swift Tuttle visits the inner solar system every 120 years, its last visit being in the late 1990s. Cometary dust makes up the vast majority of micro-meteoritic particles which rain down upon the Earth totalling some 40,000 tonnes of material per year.
Glamorgan astronomers anticipate the next meteor shower; the Geminids in December, to provide an enjoyable display.
Hovercraft Ferry between Kirkcaldy and Portobello August 20, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK, Action Research , 1 comment so far
Hovercraft at Portobello
Originally uploaded by rongorongo
An experiment took place in Scotland this year to test the waters for a proposed new transport route. In July a transport company conducted a two week trial provision of a hovercraft ferry service between Kirkcaldy and Portobello across the Forth estuary near Edinburgh. The results proved a demand beyond all expectation. The hovercraft seats 130 passengers and at peak times there were queues waiting at least 2 and a half hours to board.
More than 16,000 passengers used the service in the first week of the trial on a total of 148 trips. Most trips were full and the craft made the crossing in an average of less than 18 minutes – two minutes faster than its scheduled journey time. So does this mean that the service will go in to operation for real? Not necessarily. It has to be taken into account that this was a particularly busy time of year and that the Forth railway bridge was out of action for engineering works during some of the trial.
Forthfast: Embarkation at Portobello originally uploaded by rongorongo
The actual hovercraft used for the trial was one which has been used normally to ply the trade between Ryde on the Isle of Wight and Southsea across the Solent.
Why do I blog this?
It links in with a previous story about the proposed ferry route across the Bristol Channel and it demonstrates a serious type of real world research on a major scale.
Working around the limits of geolocation August 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, Pajamanation , 1 comment so farI had some queries over the reliance on Geolocation for managing the local aspect of ‘glocal’ in pajamanation. The logistical problems are well expressed in mediajunk:
When Geolocation Gets Too Clever - mediajunk
Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user’s IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server’s IP address, which may be in a different location.2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.
The solution that we will be able to implement is one based on giving priority to user choice, which is always a good thing in my book. So there will be two ways to determine location :
- registered users - they choose where they are .
- visitors - GeoLocation is the only way to know where they are coming from
Combining Wikis and forums August 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, Wiki , 3commentsZbigniew from Wiki Wednesday has some interesting ideas about combining wikis and forums. A bit mad 
, but very interesting!
In Brudnopis: Wikis and fora - other ideas
For example, the suggestion to allow some wiki functionality in the middle of threaded discussions, which to me seems like a license to rewrite history, except that there would be revision control over the various versions of a conversation.
- ‘overwrite’ a part of the conversation with a summary that would be a wiki page, editable by all the participants in the overwritten part of the conversation with the expectation that it will contain a consensus between them on what was written, the overwritten text could be available behind a link
I don’t warm to the prospect of ever having to take part in such a consensus, in fact I’m strangely attached to the notion of leaving archived conversations to stand where they took place but it strikes me this technique could become a useful part of the workflow in a close working team or managed community.
Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging August 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , 3comments
Here’s a point of view that seems to be coming from a different perspective compared with much of what is written within that which is sometimes referred to as the “technorati blogosphere”. And just because of that, I think it’s worth taking notice. Stuart Dredge writes about Facebook and blogging:
Tech Digest: Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging
When it launched, Vox was all about getting your mum and less tech-savvy friends to blog without needing a certificate in geekery. It’s a great, well-designed, easy-to-use service. Yet my friends and family aren’t on Vox; they’re on Facebook. One of my aunts is on Facebook. They don’t want to blog, but they do want to be part of a social network that lets them communicate in bite-sized chunks of text or media.And that’s the problem for blogging companies. People who’ve blogged in the past won’t necessarily dump LiveJournal or Blogger. But all those millions of new people who were supposed to take personal blogging into the mainstream? I don’t think that growth is going to happen.
Interesting?
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
