• Bill Thompson on Lord Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, and why peer review beats Peer dictatorship every time.
• Peter Wilby’s cover piece for this week’s New Statesman on the financialisation of British society.

Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sun newspaper, as calling for a complete closure of the internet. Apparently, Reg was advocating an experimental halt to all internet traffic in order to see whether, as he believed it might, such a return to our creative roots would stem the tide of mediocrity in popular music. As part of his Luddite rant, Elton chastised Sun readers, telling them to “get out there – communicate”, which prompted one of my more sardonic email pals to quip: “You can see he’s really got the whole internet thing, can’t you?”

Read the rest here.

The day after I wrote it, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released an altogether more sensible critique of personal security online. It’s well worth a read, just for the amazing expert evidence their Lordships collected.

After the Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, its reform of the education system included expanding the country’s schools for the deaf. The schools’ methods had been harsh and broadly ineffective, consisting of drilling the children in lip-reading and spoken Spanish. But eventually – simply by bringing previously isolated deaf children together – they generated an unexpectedly positive side-effect.

Largely, the children had been living with hearing relatives, and had had no opportunity to communicate with other deaf children. Brought together, however, they pooled the makeshift gestures they had used at home. What resulted was a usable jargon that was all the children’s own. When new groups of deaf pupils arrived at the schools – their minds ripe for natural language-learning – they took the jargon of the older children and turned it into a fully-fledged, expressive language. Now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), this was the type of language, according to the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, with which “a child can watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another child”. It is a language that can be used in poems, jokes and life histories, one that “is coming to serve as the glue that holds the community together”.

Read the rest here.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

Here I am with Open Business Hannah – you can see lots more photos here. I was especially pleased to meet Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian, and Mark Pilkington, mission control for Strange Attractor.

“Those who have not yet heard about Second Life, the online virtual world, can’t have read a newspaper for the past six months. Since May, when Business Week splashed the story of Anshe Chung, an in-world entrepreneur who dominates Second Life’s virtual real-estate market, all branches of the UK media have featured specials outlining the machinations of this playground of the imagination. Now Reuters has set up its own Second Life bureau, promising to break stories from the virtual frontiers.

“The media orgy was predictable. Here is a world that exists only on a rack of web servers in California. Yet more than half a million people (a population that’s growing furiously) log on for more than a week per month, on average. Could anything do more to confirm our fears of technology disconnecting us from reality?”

Read the rest here. One small note: it appears the subs at the New Statesman make no distinction between a “working week” (35-40 hours) and a “working week” (168 hours), rendering a reference in the article wildly inaccurate. The rest of us get to go home after dark, but poor sods, John Kampfner must have his subs on the “stay awake” pills, turning round copy through the night in anticipation of the launch of their new website. For reference, then, the Wired travel guide to Second Life has excellent figures.

He seemed to propose the stripped-down laptop as an alternative to the dystopian “information appliance” of his theory. Then he posed the question, should OLPC laptops be identified as such on the network, so they can actively seek each other out to swap code? Or would this be a kind of discrimination, or a violation of privacy that outweighed the benefits of collaboration?

More for the ideas scrapbook…

A trip to Brussels earlier this week served to do the same. We were there to discuss citizens access to information, and Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex, said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since: “The logical conclusion on the Gutenberg Press was compulsory schooling”. There’s a theory that bears exploring.

Anyway, for those that can bear a stretched metaphor or two, here’s the column (and before you ask, why the headline has referenced phishing is beyond me):

“Batten down the firewalls, release the anti-spyware hounds, and up the spam alert to red status: 21 per cent of us are now more worried about online crime than about being burgled. According to a survey for the UK’s Get Safe Online campaign, fear of being duped by hackers is enough to put some of us off going online altogether.

“And we’re right to be concerned. In the week the survey was released, coinciding with the national internet safety roadshow, Microsoft issued a record number of security patches for its software, and the online virtual world Second Life was attacked by a code storm of self-replicating grey goo…”

Read the rest here.

“Advertisers are harnessing technology that targets and follows Internet users on their journeys through cyberspace, collecting data and tracking behavior. Virtual software marketing tools will be deployed across the digital landscape so that wherever we go, whatever we do do–e-mail, instant messaging, mobile communications or searches–we will be immersed in enticing content for the lifelong sell…”

Read the rest here.