Dick Sblog

Futurelab’s ‘Flux‘ blog carries a recent piece by Ben Kirkland entitled “Website Blocking: bear hunts, battlefronts and missed opportunities?” in which he laments the use of blocking software in schools. He points out that this stops teachers and pupils accessing a wide range of useful materials and prevents them engaging in the use of social [...]

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I’m grateful to Jonathan B for his comment on my last post, so I’m giving it a bit more prominence by repeating it as a separate post. He said:”I recommend for anyone interested in Docking@home or any other BOINC project to check out GridRepublic and use their website to join.
GridRepublic is a nonprofit working in [...]

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In a world where competition has been seen as the way to achieve efficiency and high performance, it’s a relief to find examples that illustrate the fact that it’s actually collaboration that moves us on. The recent global concern about a flu pandemic has prompted an initiative by researchers at the University of Texas Medical [...]

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If that’s not an oxymoron…
Anyway, there’s an interactive ‘Intelligent Car Quiz’, informing players about modern, ICT-based safety and green vehicle technologies. It’s available in 6 languages, so there’s no excuse for you not to go there and find out how cars could contribute to saving the planet
(As if !)

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For those of you interested in all aspects of flexible working, I’ve located some relevant webcasts from the Act Now initiative in Devon and Cornwall…
From a conference on flexible working
A presentation from Peter James of the Sustainable IT initiative
Robert Mannings, the BT futureologist
The growth in interest in what are [now] called Cloud applications is really [...]

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Martin Parker, the Professor of Organisation and Culture at Leicester Unversity’s School of Management, makes some interesting points in his piece in the Observer’s business section on November 30th.
He talks about the multiple forms of organisation that have been adopted by people throughout the time we’ve been around and comments on the fact that business [...]

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Starting on World AIDS Day on 1 December, the World Community Grid will sponsor a month-long challenge via its FightAIDS@home project, with the goal of increasing the number of computers and computer cycles available to researchers conducting HIV/AIDS research. At the laboratory of Arthur Olson in the molecular biology department at The Scripps Research Institute [...]

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The European Schoolnet has recently produced an interesting brochure on iClass, a system developed to support self regulated personalised learning. Behind this term is “what teachers have always been trying to achieve in schools: motivate the learners by empowering them, teaching them how to make meaningful choices and reflect on them.
The iClass system translates the [...]

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New computing architectures are increasingly important in today’s world in all sorts of ways. Perhaps if the financial regulators of the US and UK had had been running on their own computing grids, instead of relying on figures from the banks, they may have noticed the staggering insecurity of the complex financial ‘innovations’ that earned [...]

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Take a look at the article ‘Grids and Kids‘ in the latest issue of the quarterly newsletter of the UK National Grid Service (NGS).
Georgina Ellis from SGI introduced Year 6 at her local primary school to the wonders of grid computing with a little help from the National Grid Service.
The NGS supports a number of [...]

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