United Kingdom, Great Britain and England

Why does our 51st state still have the Queen on it's money? What's up with Ireland? (Are they part of UK or not?) Finally, someone explains what the difference between Great Britain and UK, and all the places that still worship the queen.

Hand writing makes you smarter?

Need more links for this one.. but:

• How writing by hand makes kids smarter. The Week, Oct 2010
• How Handwriting Trains the Brain: Wall Street Journal, Oct 2010
  

RIAA/MPAA

Slashdot pointed out a piece in the Harvard Business Review on how the “RIAA/MPAA: the Greatest Threat To Tech Innovation”. Amazon would certainly agree with this! (Note the illegal prime number)

GPS Jamming

David Hambling in New Scientist has a good read on how a $30 GPS jammer can screw just about everything up. Everything including the serious, like airports, to the odd, like ATM machine. GPS is so intertwined in our lives today, that one of these easy to get, very low power devices can do some major hosing. The cure? Bring back LORAN!

“The cost of setting [LORAN] up again would be a fraction of the cost of one GPS satellite, and there’s a total of 31 of them in orbit at the moment. So just for a, a very small extra expenditure it could make sure that that kind of catastrophe could be avoided.” [David Hambling]

Elsewhere:

• The Economist: No jam tomorrow (March 10, 2011)

• On the Media: How to Jam GPS (March 11, 2011)

Governmnet Visibility?

What to see where your tax dollars are going? Heres a list of a few sites that provide visibility into where and what your tax dollars are doing.

• usaspending.gov : displays data pertaining to obligations (amounts awarded for federally sponsored projects during a given budget period)
• itdashboard.gov : information on the effectiveness of government IT programs and to support decisions regarding the investment and management of resources
• citizen.apps.gov : See how Federal Agencies are using our free tools
• data.gov : [To] increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
• paymentaccuracy.gov : Current and historical rates and amounts of improper payments, why improper payments occur, [and] what agencies are doing to reduce and recover improper payments.
• uspto.gov :Dashboard seeing the status of the patent office
• fcc.gov : Spectrum maps, broadband maps, etc.
  

Bad news is this openness makes it harder to swindle money from the taxpayers. Good news is John Boehner’s 112th Congress is going to cut funding to these sites forcing many of them to shut down. (Thank god the American dream is still strong!)

No Secrets

On the Media, a radio show produced by WNYC, had a good piece on privacy titled "Your Tweets May Be Betraying You". They pointed out the governments overzealous warrantless wiretapping and how this has affected the Telco’s, how corporations are tracking us so heavily so as to make the government appear disinterested in us, and most interestingly, how we now are volunteering so much information that it makes this entire topic mute.

As an example of how much information is publicly available, they pointed out the script Creepy, which “allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services.”