Open This

Searching on the Royal Society website was a little trickier than I thought it would be. It was like being given a key to an extensive and ancient archive but not really knowing what the archive held, where the shelves were, what order things were kept, etc. 

As they have a biological component I looked for any articles on GRIDS or Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome / Symptoms which was a forerunner to the HIV/AIDS in that before we knew what the latter was, epidemiology suggested that there was a specific set of symptoms associated with a set of people which pointed to an underlying medical condition. 

The RS seem to have nothing though. Maybe I’m not searching right and perhaps they don’t cover it but either way I couldn’t find anything. So I went to their website to see what kind of material they have and looked up Darwin instead. Plenty of hits there. 

For the Open Source Software part of the session I looked at Freecode and GitHub. GiitHub sounds like a dating website for people who self confessed gits or a nastier version of mysinglefriend.com and lo and behold there is a picture of a smug, self satisfied bloke on the main page. He even describes himself as a ‘git instructor’. Remarkable. 

Anyhoo, I preferred the older Freecode site as it wasn’t full of meaningless pictures. I understand they are trying to humanise technology, especially social media related, but Freecode felt more professional and listed itself well. Plus the gits seem to be trying to flog you something straight away instead of letting me see if I need training, etc.

The names of the software – vifm, burp, dbeaver, kwave, sunflower et al, all peppered with 3, 4 or 5 digit version numbers of course– is meaningless. They could be nuclear release codes for all I know or ways to hack into my bank and add £45,000 to my account risk free, but it all appears to be so much frippery. 

In the interests of fairness I went over to SourceForge as well and that was much nicer. Set up like an ‘older’ system, it presented options in far easier ways. So out with the new, in with the old I cry!

For the open data mashup I looked at borough data and the rateof male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol per hundred thousandpopulation (2005-06). Tower Hamlets came in at a respectable 1,130 (rounded up). Less than Islington (1,218) and Hounslow (1,194)but more than Richmond Upon Thames (785) and Sutton (692). 

If this data was mapped over to cover male homelessness and demographics as well we could perhaps see two things. First of all, we could see if boroughs with high homelessness had higher rates of male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol.

Secondly if we took the demographic data, sorted by age so we could see the 16 – 22 age group and then looked at male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol we may get an idea if it is ‘students’ (used as a catch most term here) in the population that result in high levels of admission due to binge drinking. 

By looking at Alcohol Non Consumption Zones we may then be able to see if areas with these zones had lower rates of alcohol abuse resulting in hospital admission and homelessness than areas without. 

With this data we may then be able to see if ANCZ's would be useful in cutting down male admissions due to alcohol in two key groups, one vulnerable and the other, often, just a bit silly.  

Just put the MBE in the post, I don't have to to come to the Palace to pick it up at the moment.