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Davos jumped the shark when Robert Scoble started interviewing, via cameraphone streamed to a server, numerous utterly baffled Great and Good.

Meanwhile, Helen’s under the impression that Davos created the Daleks.

Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

The US Library of Congress has uploaded over 3,000 photos from the 1930s and 1940s, inviting Flickr members to add metadata to them. An innovative collaboration  – and the photos are beautiful.

a website, like CiF, which has no real sense of community, in part, because of the terrible design of the site

From Harry’s Place. Over to you Ben

Last Sunday the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, supported the proposal that consent to organ donation should be presumed unless an individual had expressly opted out. By a curious coincidence, the BBC published a glowing item about the donor system in Spain on the same day Mr Brown’s article appeared in The Sunday Telegraph.

Polly Toynbee’s tediously predictable cheerleading for Gordon Brown, in which objectors are superstitious reactionaries and she is the torch-bearer of the Enlightment, failed completely to grapple with issues of ownership, property rights and the meaning of consent, as Norman Geras pointed out in his thoughtful post, Organ donation and consent.

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Milton Friedman famously claimed there are four ways in which you can spend money.

• You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
• You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
• You can spend somebody else’s money on yourself. And if you do that you’re going to have a good lunch!
• You can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if you spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, you’re not concerned about how much it is, and you’re not concerned about what you get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.

That 4th option would account for the news that the public sector is being fleeced by contractors (a direct and honest reporting of the story obscured by the BBC as Watchdog exposes PFI charges gap).

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Switched again from Drupal to WordPress…still working on a few changes.

Happy New Year – and congratulations! You have been short-listed in the Digital Camera Photographer of the Year competition.

Your image, Coventry Cathedral, has been chosen to enter the final judging stage in the Architectural category.

We received more than 81,000 entries in the 2007 competition, so to reach this stage is a real achievement.

You will probably never have heard of Edwin Poots. He is a member of the Board of Governers of Drumbo and Carr Primary School. He is also the Minister for Culture in the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. He thinks the entire universe is about 6,000 years old.
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