Fortnightly Mailing

Sun policy on public discourse

"After 23 years in the e-learning industry, a founder and CEO of Epic Group plc, which was sold on the stock market in late 2005, I am now free from the tyranny of employment." So says Donald Clark in his newly started blog, the launch of which coincides with the publication by Epic of Donald's new white paper "Blogs and e-learning". I guess I'm mildly sceptical about a white paper on blogging by someone with little direct experience in the medium as a writer, but there is no doubting the high quality of the many white papers which Donald has written over the years, all of which are free to order (not download) from the Epic web site. One thing I particularly liked in the white paper was its inclusion of Sun's policy on public discourse, through which a major IT company gives active, if constrained, encouragement to its employees to discuss things openly on the web. Fortnightly Mailing's coverage of Huveaux's 2005 purchase of Epic.

The mathematical theory behind Google

January 29th 1998 paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd:

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a mathod (sic) for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to efficiently compute PageRank for large numbers of pages. And, we show how to apply PageRank to search and to user navigation.

Your Work and Your Health Information System

Back in the early 1990s I was involved in the development of an "expert system" which generated advice to workers about the likely effects on health of different jobs, and the legal and technical remedies. The main architect for the system was my friend Jos Kingston (featured here previously for her work on HTMLtag, which produces clean, automated html from simple Word files, as well as for her candid writing about being terminally ill). Jos has just put full details of the information system on her web site, partly for the record, and partly in case anyone wants to develop the idea further.