Fortnightly Mailing

The link between health and wealth

This 3 page summary of Retirement, health and relationships in the older population in England: the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing 2004, edited by James Banks, Elizabeth Breeze, Carli Lessof and James Nazroo (eds.), published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in June 2006 is, overall, a model of clarity, as well being a stark reminder of the extent of health inequality. Here is an extract:

"Across the [English] population, there is a strong relationship between wealth levels and both mortality and morbidity. For example, people from the poorest 20 per cent of the wealth spectrum were much more likely to die between the first and second wave of the survey [the waves of the study were two years apart] than their richer counterparts. Unsurprisingly, the older people were more likely to die, but the differential pattern by wealth is consistent across all age  groups and strongest for the youngest. Of those aged 50–59 in the first interview 2.5 per cent of the poorest fifth had died, compared to only 0.2 per cent of the richest fifth. Of those aged 60–74, deaths accounted for 5.9 per cent of the poorest and 1.3 per cent of the richest."

Mozy remote back-up - seems to work well

I am currently trialing Mozy, a remote back-up service. Here is how it works.

You create an account and tell Mozy which directories you want to be backed up. Mozy runs in the background when your PC is online - it can cope with interruptions - and makes a, say, daily (you set the frequency) back-up of the files that have changed since the last back-up.

If you need to restore, you tell Mozy which back-up you want to restore, and it creates a remote copy of the directories you need to restore. You can then download these to wherever you want to put them.  For data-volumes up to 2GB the service is currently free; for more than this you have to pay a modest monthly fee.

Mozy has a well-implemented feel, and uses what to my semi-amateur eye look like solid and secure encryption, with the option to choose your own encryption key instead of the one provided by default. Technical support is by email, and, despite my use of the free service, was quick, clear, and efficient.

Have I given up making a weekly local back-up of my 6GB of data? Not yet. But for the first time I am tempted to rely on a third party solution. And for readers who do not make back-ups of any sort (own up, you know you are out there) Mozy must surely be much, much better than nothing.

Update - 14 October 2006. For a brief comparative review of different remote back-up services, dated 31 January 2006, but with over 250 comments on it, see http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Openomy/.

Participation inequality: encouraging more users to contribute - article by Jakob Nielsen

"In most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background."

Although partly a plug for a forthcoming conference, this typically confident article by Jakob Nielsen provides a well-grounded overview of the problem of participation inequality on the web, and makes suggestions as to what can be done to reduce it.

Eduforge (part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment project) now has a team blog

Eduforge was founded in January 2004 as part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project. (Now that really is an acronym to conjure with.)

"The NZOSVLE is a major collaborative education project funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). The project's goals are to adopt, adapt and develop open source e-learning infrastructure for its consortium members, composed of polytechnics and universities. The software developed will be made available on Eduforge under the General Public Licence (GPL) for members of the community and the greater public."

Richard Wyles mentioned that Eduforge is now publishing a team blog. While you are looking, you might want to take note of the Planet Eduforge Feed Aggregator, which pulls in the RSS feeds from a fairly restricted worldwide list of (English language) educational blogs, including this one, into one convenient place.

Unlimited Learning - computer and video games in the learning landscape

This 66 page report  [1.2 MB PDF] by Hilary Ellis, Stephen Heppell, John Kirriemuir, Aleks Krotoski, and Angela McFarlane, with a Foreword by Lord Puttnam, and an Introduction by Stephen Heppell, has just been published by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA). The report:

"offers a snapshot of what is already happening in the context of games in education and, importantly, offers an evidence base from which informed decisions can be made by practioners, policy makers, the games and education industries."

As you might expect, an industry association publication is not going to hide the industry's light under a bushel:

"The hours they spent with fingers on controllers has transformed how we do business and has set the benchmark for the next generation of digital citizenry. Grown-up gamers’ cultural consciousnesses are suffused with interactive experiences, and it is through interactive methods that they are training the future of Britain."

"Technology has saturated workplaces, homes and classrooms. The availability of ICT hardware and software in the classroom means that a nation of young citizens will push out the possibilities for the Britain of the future in the global digital economy. We no longer need to predict when this will happen – it’s already happening."

But that said, the report is valuable. It is shot through with examples of succesful use of computer gaming in (mainly school-based) learning, seeks to explain how and why games can work educationally, provides clear overview information about the games industry, and includes some useful Appendices, with, for exampe, 36 learning principles essential in good gameplay, an extensive list of references, and, useful for people whose lives are not touched by computer games, a definition of genres.

Setting up an RSS feed from a site which does not have one

Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for showing me FeedYes, a service (free or USD30/year premium) that enables you to creat an RSS feed for a site that does not have one. The example Mark created is this feed from the Policy Hub, which I covered earlier.

Policy Hub - "the first port of call for all concerned with policy making"

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for reminding me about Policy Hub, a web site developed by the UK Government Social Research Unit. The site provides:

• "tailored access to initiatives, projects and tools that support better policy making and delivery;         
• extensive guidance on the use of research and evidence in the evaluation of policy;         
• links to a wide range of research resources and tools from the UK and around the world."

Although you can sign up for monthly email bulletins, it is a pity the there is no RSS feed available, and digging around the site I felt it would benefit from some "cleverer" underlying structure. By chance today I was looking at something which an Oracle blogger describes as a Semantic Web supported "navigator" to Oracle's press release archive, and it struck me that something like that might make the Policy Hub rather easier to browse.

elearning: Coping in a world with software patents

This long piece by Paul Bacsich, partly informed by Paul's involvement in ALT on the Blackboard patent [~110 kB PDF], has recommendations about how individuals and organisations such as universities, state agencies, and membership bodies could/should respond in the new "post-patent" environment. Paul is looking for comments on the piece.

A quick plug for an online conference: "VLEs - Pedagogy and Implementation"

Geoff Minshull asked me to give a list minute plug, which I am glad to do, for:

"VLEs: Pedagogy and Implementation, the theory and practice of learning platforms and virtual learning environments

Date: 16 - 19 October, 2006

This four day online conference is aimed at everybody who is responsible for using and implementing learning platforms, including Virtual Learning Environments, in education."

Presenters's abstracts. It costs £68, which is probably a snip.

Trusting the people. An astute piece by Zack Exley.

Via David Weinberger I found An Organizer's Guide to Trusting the People, which is an honest and sharp self-reflection - in part an attack on leftist condescension - by Zack Exley, who worked in the US as a union organiser, was then heavily involved in MoveOn during the 2004 US election campaign, as well as working for the British Labour Party during the 2005 election campaign.

Exley's three main points, which he substantiates at length with examples from his own and others' experience (and which look stark and simplistic in their unsubstantiated state) are:

1. All groups of people - even very small ones - are strong and brilliant. This is not true of all individuals.
2. Leadership is not a role played only by "leaders," but equally by "followers" in the act of temporarily and voluntarily granting to leaders their special role. Also: leadership is ephemeral in individuals and is sometimes expressed by the most unlikely people.
3. Groups will fight for a cause only if (A) it is worth of fighting for and (B) they can see a winning plan.