State of the Art

I've just been introduced to AJAX, not the football club, but Asynchronous Javascript And XML. There's a very good essay on AJAX here from the people who came up with the name. Unusually for technology they're not the same people who came up with the idea - indeed it's not clear who did since it's really just plugging a number of existing technologies together in a new and interesting way.

Plus it's named after a football team - or maybe a Greek hero. Either way it's cool.

Another non-miracle

This story on CNN suggests that China is going through exactly the same labour+capital=growth process I talk about below.

If the new higher estimate is accepted as a consensus we can expect oil prices to drift up a little further. It also does very bad things to predictions about Chinese emissions of CO2.

Corruption

High levels of corruption are almost always indicative of low economic growth. The Iraqi economy is currently flat on it's back thanks to invasion and insurgency, but as the post WWII Japanese economy shows with a sufficiently large infusion of capital that can be overcome. Simply put if you have an economy with lots of labour but little capital you can get a lot of growth quickly by levelling the mix off. These events are usually trumpeted as economic miracles - they're not, they're exactly what you'd expect in this situation.

However Iraq's chance to go through this process (which would only undo some of the damage done) may be endangered by high levels of corruption. Capital just won't go to places where it won't enjoy a return - and if system wide corruption takes hold in Iraq there'll be precious little reason to invest at all.

Climate Change

It's happening everywhere.

Victory for common sense?

Tony Blair's latest round of scaremongering, liberty curtailing legislation has been thrown out by the Lords. It's outrageous that an unelected chamber packed with political appointees is a better safeguard of our democracy than the elected chamber which supposedly represents the people.

The guardian has the details.

Too good not to link

300 Days of Demonstration

There's a place in Japan called Okinawa, and just off the coast of Okinawa live some of the last Dugong in Japan. Sadly this is where the US has decided to build a new airbase - despite the opposition of local residents who overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.

So for 300 days the locals have been resisting the construction - occupying the proposed site (offshore, on a coral reef) - it's the kind of thing that deserves anyone's support. Especially yours.

Boxes and Arrows

Have just been introduced to Boxes and Arrows which appears to hold a great deal of good thinking about usability and information architecture related issues.

In other usability news Jakob has announced his top intranet's for 2005(surely 2004?), which means my current project will have to wait for the 2006 awards. I've been involved in one award winning project before, and this time round I've had lots of experience working with one of the winners. (pre-redesign). I can only assume that the redesign made it a lot better.