It appears that NASA have $4M for prize competitions but not enough competition ideas. Well at least they’ve come clean and said so; inviting ideas for challenges. I’ve fixed that for them here. The challenge starts from wondering along these lines.

What struck me about the submission form was that there was no place to put the description of the challenge. You had to say how it would be measured etc. but no space for the core matter. So they’d given it to somebody to try then… Presumably not. A bit of a poor show when you’re asking for ideas to miss out the “what is your idea” bit.

Here’s a very simple idea: Create a club for people with 14th and 15th century buildings. Typically owners and occupiers are proud of their building, detective work and structural discoveries. When they come across interesting items they enjoy sharing them. If they want advice or some expert knowledge then the club might be able to help by putting people in touch and having a directory of respected experts. Taking good care of a bit of heritage, even if it isn’t listed, is a serious responsibility for which mutual assistance would be welcome. Between them the members of the club would have a lot of experience dealing with practical, legal and financial problems which would be an important resource.

So for usefulness of calling on group experience, and the pleasure of sharing and discussing with similar house owners, this club could be a real benefit.

What work, by whom, contains, amongst other things, speak-your-weight machines being trained to sing the Hallelujah Chorus?

What we are always forgetting in East Anglia is that there are lots of people just on the other side of the water who are dying for a weekend of wonderful East Anglian pubs and ale interesting ale. Something should be done to invite beer tourists.
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Is your computer little more than an electronic heap of documents? has anyone ever shown you how to organise your files properly? This article explains essential file system organisation and how to make it happen.

The basic theory is simple you have four different types of file on the computer

Programs – Archive – Current – Temporary

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There are few things so satisfying as hearing how the roads are jammed and the trains are cancelled when you work at home. Oh dear how very sad. Shall I have another coffee before strolling upstairs? The small bedroom still has nursery wallpaper from over 20 years ago but so what – it’s as good as any other. In that 20 years I’ve made my self at home if you like with various experiments to improve that bit of life that others call work.
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As far as I’m aware there is no measure of how difficult a road is to cross.

Of course pedestrians don’t merit any consideration as the motor car must have priority. Now of course all sane people understand very well that roads, far from enabling transport are often a barrier to travel. The more the traffic is sped on its way, the more the volume the worse the conditions for the poor pedestrian.

One way to highlight the needs of pedestrians is to measure this barrier effect. In simple terms the Fox barrier score is a number representing the number of times the road can be crossed in one hour. Suppose on average you have to wait for one minute before being able to get across and it takes 15 seconds then the score would be
1 hour / 1min 15 seconds which is 3600 / 75 = 48. The higher the score the easier it is.
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We need some way to assess:

• how well a person meets our expectations,
• how well some course works,
• and gauge how a particular ‘score’ matches with our real world experience.

If the 12Rs are to be taught then there needs to be some measure for how well people are progressing and when they ‘make the grade’. Any tests need to be fair because their ability to get a job and further education may depend on them.
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A lot of the power of the internet comes from using a web browser. The trouble is that the content providers have their own agenda and want to direct you to their own sites, skip over important but profitable opt-outs, serve endless advertisements and capture all your private information for more marketing. What this post is all about is using a browser to do what you want to do with it.

There are two sections here: Firstly getting rid of the avalanche of clutter that obstructs your daily browse. Secondly getting new tools to make what you want to do a lot easier.

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