An episode of the BBC program Horizon on 'Big Data' recently caught my attention. The content was a fascinating insight into how we are living in a data-rich age and how trawling/mining/dredging such data has the ability to advance medicine, predict crime and even make someone a few quid/dollars/euros on the stock market.Gone (data) fishing @ Wikipedia  I'm a big believer in big data. In particular how, with the right sources, technology, techniques and people, big data might be able […]

A new video has appeared that shows a large progressive rockslide in action. It was taken at the town of Riddes in Switzerland in Friday

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques. To help them, Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive diffusion", the essence being that "you are not […]

There’s a fundamental fact one learns about trees when growing up in dry country forests: they’re flammable. Folks in Flagstaff, Arizona can tell what part of summer it is by the smell. If it’s all piney-fresh, it’s May or early June, and everything’s still safely damp from the spring snowmelt; if it smells like warm [...]

The organisational centerpiece of the child study group.They tried digital and other fancy stuff, they said. But in the end, chalk prevailed. Howdiflex is still going on. In the parrot room.