The website of my neighbourhood’s residents association, North West Two, is now up and running. Do drop by and visit them at www.northwesttwo.co.uk Take a moment to register and then you can post comments on the news and information posted to the site. There will also be two mailing lists for the community, one distributing information from the association and a second one of local freecycle, skill swap and other announcements....
I received an email from the MapRA Network advising me of some local Open Gardens in the National Garden Scheme. In this scheme, private gardens of national interest are opened to the public, in aid of charity. Here is a map of the local open gardens. View Larger MapFor more information on the NGS visit www.ngs.org.ukThe main charities supported are: Macmillan Cancer Support; Marie Curie Cancer Care; Help the Hospices.
This week NorthWestTwo organised a neighbourhood walkabout with local Councillors Matthews and Hashmi, officer(s) from Brent Council Street Care, John Rymer and Vikash Mistry from the Neighbourhood WorkingTeam along with the officers from the Mapesbury ward Safer Neighbourhood Team. I also made a map - click on Read the rest of this entry ...
What factors are increasing the price of oil, recently over $135 a barrel? Is it the speculative ‘unregulated’ oil trading that William Pfaff, writing in the IHT, criticises? Certainly the black magic of contract trading is a factor, a parasite on the ‘real’ market for the commodity. According to the BBC, OPEC has so far blamed price rises on speculators and says there is no shortage of oil. Likewise, Pfaff considers the present situation with rising prices dissimilar to the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC announced that they would no longer supply oil to nations that supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. Paul Krugman, also in the IHT, is somewhat naive if he thinks that we are entering merely an era of scarce, expensive oil. This is more than an era. The buried sunlight that we like to burn is running out. Scarcity is the true reality. It’s more than Half Gone. Not only is the raw material that we are critically addicted to becoming more expensive as it becomes increasingly scarce, feeding our addiction in consuming oil is one of the major causes of global warming. ...
Hacking the Networked Society. Abstract: The dynamic between free-software and open-source is often misunderstood by social and political theorists. As a consequence it is also under-theorised within socio-political theory. In this paper, I show how philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes have engendered new forms of socio-political consumption and new political economies of meaning. My emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global/structure and agency, shows new ways of ‘thinking’ the cosmopolitan, sedimented in the interconnected networks of the technical age....