Great little piece on the Today Programme this morning about a guy who’s going to try to walk to India from Bristol relying entirely on generosity and exchange for food and shelter. He’s not taking any money with him.
Listen here.
Don't panic
Great little piece on the Today Programme this morning about a guy who’s going to try to walk to India from Bristol relying entirely on generosity and exchange for food and shelter. He’s not taking any money with him.
Listen here.
I picked up a copy of this in a bookshop when I was in the US and absolutely love it. Great for kids of all ages.
“Howtoons: The Possibilities Are Endless” (Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen)
Cory has a post on BoingBoing about the completely absurd headline boards that go up around London each evening to try and make you buy the papers — especially the terrible Evening Standard. Check out his Flickr set here.
I always see them as I head to the tube from our office in Bethnal Green. The one that made me laugh out loud last year was this one. It was a nervous laugh, you understand.
One of the possibilities we considered in the Retail Futures work I did with Forum for the Future last year was the idea of allotment produce trading. Well here it comes — VegExchange.com got a good plug on Broadcasting House this morning.
PlanningAlerts.com is another great site from MySociety. Richard Pope just talked about it at BarCampUKGovWeb.
Also Tom Steinberg mentioned EveryBlock in the US. There’s some really interesting stuff going on around how you find out what’s going on in your neighbourhood.
Just a quick post on the UK Government’s decision a couple of weeks ago to give the go ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations. The decision for me is a stupid one rather than a dangerous one — I’m not anti-nuclear for safety reasons — my main objection is that the Government has just reduced the chances of an entrepreneurial set of solutions to a secure low carbon energy future.
I think they’ve pushed investment in micro and renewable energy in the UK back by a decade. It’s an industry that could grow really rapidly, providing employment and massive value but now the money is going to go to a few big firms that will — however you try to cut the figures — end up being be publicly subsidised.
Actually, my guess is that by 2020 nuclear construction will have halted. There will be court case after court case, protest after protest (and by the way, there are also hardly any trained nuclear engineers in the UK). We will end up with a set of mothballed nuclear construction sites and collapsed companies who have invested billions. Somebody is going to pick up the bill and you can expect lawyers to make tens of millions of pounds over the coming years writing the liability contracts for all this. If it doesn’t bring down the energy companies, it will bring down their insurers. Or Government will pick up the bill.
It’s an awful decision that shows no foresight and no trust in green innovation or entrepreneurialism.
I’m at BarCampUKGovWeb today about how Government could best use technology and set itself up so that other people can use their data too. Best thing I’ve found out about so far is Farmsubsidy.org. I’ve long thought the CAP is absolutely bonkers, but these guys prove just how crazy (and secretive) the system is.
Doing a couple of conference talks later this week about School of Everything. First, on Thursday, at BETT about social networking and education and secondly on Friday at the World Entrepreneurship Summit about what it’s been like setting up an internet start-up in London. If you’re coming along to either, do come and say hi.
I’ve been fascinated by prediction markets for a while. I often do a couple of tricks in conference talks to get the audience to make predictions to show their power. Turns out Google have an internal prediction market that seems to be getting some interesting results.
The guys at Demos (where I used to work and remain an associate) have put together a great little video explaining the idea of ‘everyday democracy’.
I keep on meaning to post about the controversy about party funding. More soon…