Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he's right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people.

[Following the release of the minutes of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee's meetings for 2001-2006...]

It makes for quite a fun read if you get past all the boring economic analysis parts. In fact, if the stenographer was accurate, the Committee broke into laughter 45 times in just the January meeting! That's at least 45 jokes (some didn't get laughs – if only we knew the quality of each laughter!). I would have guessed that would be a lot relative to other meetings, right? I mean how funny would it be if the top of the housing market was also when the FOMC was telling the most jokes in their meetings?

Well, being a data nerd with nothing better to do on a Thursday night, I looked into it. To be precise, I went back for just the last six years (2001-06) and searched for how many times the stenographer's notation for laughter appeared in the released transcripts of each FOMC meeting.

Suffice it to say the data is funny…

Sadly, the minutes of meetings of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee are written in a rather dry, formal style, so there doesn't seem to be much scope for a similar analysis of economic policymakers' behaviour over here.

[Via The Morning News]



[Via jwz]

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

I, like most people, gave a little patriotic cheer when Eric Pickles announced that the pointlessly bureaucratic rules on flag flying are going to be relaxed. Pickles has always been a man that is willing to confront the issues that others shy away from. [...]

[Via We Love Local Government]

Detective Inspector 'D' told the tribunal that unveiling the files could deter informants from coming forward in future, and could even put off members of the public from phoning Crimestoppers or the antiterrorist hotline.

"The interpretation on the street will be that the police have revealed the identity of informants," said 'D'.

"Confidence in the system is maintaining the safety of informants, regardless of age."

Det Insp 'D' said the passage of time did not make publication of informants' identities less sensitive because their descendants could be targeted by criminals with a grudge.

"Look at one of the world's best-known informants, Judas Iscariot. If someone could draw a bloodline from Judas Iscariot to a present day person then that person would face a risk, although I know that seems an extreme example," the officer said.

STOP PRESS: News reports have been received of the murder of a Mr Julian Iscariot of 1 Gethsemane Gardens, Whitechapel, London. Detective Inspector 'D' of Scotland Yard has announced that the Metropolitan Police will be interviewing every Christian in the UK to establish whether they had an alibi for the night in question.

[Via The Morning News]

Hennessy was very interesting on this function of the Prime Minister, which he calls "end of the world stuff". The big issue is the instructions that Trident captains are given before embarking on the 90-day patrol during which time they are are largely incommunicado. Each incoming PM is now required to write, on four handwritten sheets of paper, the four options that the commander of the submarine is given. These sheets are then sealed and the envelope lodged in the submarine's safe. Hennessy raised a grim laugh when he claimed that Tony Blair "went white" when this was explained to him, and speculated that one of his concerns was that the trident patrols are not synchronised with the electoral cycle: when Blair arrived in Downing Street, one of the subs was on patrol – with John Major's handwritten instructions in the vessel's safe!

"The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says [retired librarian] Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that."

[Via The Morning News]

I was surprised to see how Cumbria fared; it always felt to me as if places like Carlisle, Penrith, Whitehaven and Workington had strong ties to the North East, or certainly to Newcastle, but judging by this data that corner of the country seems to be fairly equally interested in talking to Manchester, Scotland and Tyneside.

[Via The Yorkshire Ranter]

Assange didn't liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn't a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else's national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It's just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

[Via The Null Device]