Category Archives: demography

the Andover gig

About 3 weeks ago I got a request from Stephanie Aude, the Local History and Genealogy librarian at the Andover Public Library, to use a map I had drawn (in 1976) of the world around me when I was 10-11-12 (1953-1956) and lived in Shawsheen, a village that is part of Andover. In short order I volunteered to talk to the genealogy resources group at the Library, and the Event took place on April 10th… and was a grand success from my point of view. http://oook.info/etc/Andover.html has the materials I prepared for the presentation (along with links to various other bits I had gathered and shown and talked about). To my great surprise and pleasure one of the participants (Alice Mooney, as she then was) was a classmate from the Grade 6 class picture. Small world, as they say.

Along the way I revisited material Broot and I had gathered for a project we did on our own families in 2001, and was pleased with its eloquence.

As seems to have become routine, I’ve set up pages to gather links to revisit from April incoming, YouTube videos of particular salience, and videos specific to the current contretemps with Canada. And now I’ll get back to work on the Lexicon project.

The morning’s harvest

…of provocative bits:

Meet your new landlord, the Big Tech “data rentier”:

ON DATA RENTIERSHIP IN ‘BIG TECH’: WHY SILICON VALLEY MIGHT NOT BE THE INNOVATION MODEL WE’RE LOOKING FOR

By discoversociety January 08, 2020

Kean D Birch

…the increasing trend amongst tech companies towards innovation goals and strategies framed by the pursuit and creation of monopolies, market power, or regulatory capture – that is, of economic rents – as opposed to the creation of new goods, services, and markets… a key characteristic of Silicon Valley is the pursuit and entrenchment of a strong intellectual property (IP) regime.

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Living the Stories of Astounding Futures
mcgeesmusings.net

What science fiction makes you think about is the interaction between the relentless advance of technology and the equally relentless commitment to the status quo of groups and organizations. People are gonna people whether they travel by covered wagon or starship.

What science fiction encourages you to do is to think about how people will react in any kind of scenario. And, it gives you permission to imagine a much richer variety of possible scenarios beyond what history or contemporary society serve up.

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Mapping how railroads built America: a superb 15-minute Financial Times MAPTASTIC video, with transcript of audio

A new look at antique US railroad maps reveals how cities grew over the past 200 years. The FT’s Alan Smith and Steven Bernard trace how cities, people and the economy spread from coast to coast

and see QGIS Uncovered, Steven Bernard’s video tutorials

and see Dataverse.Harvard.Edu, “a repository for research data”

Hans Rosling yet again

What a marvelous condensation, the perfect intro to a Human Geography course, or to a lifetime of study for that matter. For my money, it’s at 3:30 that the big leap occurs, as he disaggregates China into provinces, but the whole package is simply brilliant pedagogy: