links for 2008-12-01

"No one in authority ever seems to say to the bewigged authoritarian or uniformed goon: 'This isn't Zimbabwe, you know. This is Britain and you just can't do that here.'"

"UEFA has agreed to pay compensation to broadcasters who lost live pictures as a result of a power blackout during a Euro 2008 match, Germany’s Spiegel news magazine reported."

"The Independent, of all our national newspapers, had a reputation for terrible, half-hearted blogging, and has done for years. It was quite a surprise, then, to see that it's entered into partnership with blog-as-social-network site Livejournal to relaunch its blogs...An interesting idea, certainly. But does it have any more legs than The Independent's last effort in blogging?"

"We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today's nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today's national development outcomes. Our strong and robust results are for 1500 A.D. determining per capita income today."

"Yes its a list. I started compiling this for internal usage to help the teams I work with but as the examples started to grow then i thought i might as well have it outside the firewall for posterity. This is probably part one. After all I haven’t mentioned Robert Peston yet."

"Britain scored 40, placing it 11th overall" - so not strictly on top then, but why let the facts get in the way of a good headline, eh?