Sorting, Writing and Hacking

Bit of a mixed week with bits and pieces up in the air as I'm trying to get some listening tests done, which as ever means things are a bit crazy given deadlines and the fact I'm off with Mikael for a COST meeting to Brussels next week.

A couple of nice Ruby articles worth a read are SVD recommendation system in Ruby and Decision Tree Learning in Ruby.

There are a couple of interesting political posts on PDF, "Le Internet campaign" and "YouTube: Who Gets It?". The people and parties who do understand the Internet will be easy to spot and to be fair we are already prepared to showcase them and to offer awards so I'd expect to see some parties making the effort for the forthcoming election.

Worldchanging throws up the usual interesting mix from commerical Rooftop Wind Turbines to some Earth Day Voices commentaries by

William McDonough (Cradle2Grave - "To move from improvement to revolutionary transformation, we need 5% of the human population committed to cradle to cradle flows—clean healthy materials in closed cycles seen as nutrients, clean energy, clean water, and social fairness.")

and by

John Thackara (Doors of Perception - "The problem is that our collective knowledge footprint is still tiny in a global context, and is growing far too slowly relative to the time available for us to to turn things around. This is why we have to crack the distribution question: How do we ensure that knowledge about sustainable practices is available where and when it needed? As scavenger-innovators, our first response to the question should be to ask another: who has cracked a similar distribution question in the past? How might we learn from, or piggyback on, their success?").