As reported in the BBC this week (Science and tech committee reborn), once again the UK Parliament has a committee to oversee science.  In recent ministerial revamps, the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS) was merged with BERR to form a new super-ministry - Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) - for Lord Mandelson, who seems to have emerged from the political wilderness to which he was consigned after a scandal too far a few years ago.  Interestingly, this means there's no Government department with Education or Science in its title.

Lord Drayson, Minister for Science and Innovation is quoted as saying:

Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was one of the first albums I bought (a late starter, I didn't start buying LPs until I went to University in 1977).  It's long since disappeared from my vinyl collection - probably as a result of a burglary a couple of decades ago.  Of course pretty soon after I started buying LPs, bands like Pink Floyd were excoriated as rock dinosaurs during punk rock's year zero...

Probably it's a function of my age, but I've started paying a bit more attention to some of this old stuff recently, and just the other day I downloaded a copy of Wish You Were Here from Amazon.  And what do I think of it over three decades after I first listened to it?

Installing Internet Exploiter 8* on a laptop that dual boots Linix and WinXP...it's checking for malicious software**...will it spot Windows?

*Need this to check development websites.

I've blogged before on the Great Australian Firewall - this being the plans of the Australian Government to take concepts of child protection to the extent of internet filtering to levels seen in (for example) China.  The whole process got rather murky with the release of the details of banned sites via Wikileaks.

Now, The Register reports (Great Australian Firewall to censor online games) that as one might predict the repertoire of websites deemed unsuitable will include those offering games rated as suitable for over-15s (because Australia doesn't have a game certificate for 18+). Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia is quotes as saying:

Well, this event marked my return to racing after a 4 week layoff (away for cycle touring - see elsewhere in this blog, then last week's event got called off).  It did feel a little strange.

The evening was really quite nice, probably a little over 20 degrees, and sunny, though rather windier than the BBC's predicted 14mph easterly, I reckon.  Still, it made for a fast opening leg to Chicheley.  In fact it was pretty fast almost to North Crawley.  As usual, I lost focus a bit during the drags after North Crawley, but even so I was surprised when Tony P. came past at about 18 minutes.  Still, he didn't get far away from me, finishing in around 22:37 to my 23:40.

OK, so installing the FCKeditor (see part 1) was quite fiddly.  I've now installed a couple more add-on modules, and they were pretty easy to do.

Taxonomy Menu - I'm hoping to be able to list key words for research topics as a menu or tag cloud.  Not had time to play with this.

Well, I now have an embryonic website.  And I've got to grips with the document structure (actually, it makes a lot of sense to me).  User access permissions seem to be more configurable than the default state in Joomla.

Unfortunately my Ubuntu laptop threw a wobbly this morning while I was editing menus, and that had the effect of damaging the database.  Had a bit of trouble repairing the damage, but all seems to be well now.  

I've been using Joomla! quite extensively over the past few years, and at the moment have four websites built in Joomla! (version 1.5.11 at the time of writing):

Flies&Bikes (this site - uses the commercial blogging component MyBlog)

So, over the last few weeks (and while I've been away and not blogging), the vile company Phorm - formerly spyware merchants 121media - have been in the news. In rough chronological order:

• They raised £15 million in some share deal or other
• They began talking of (and, I think began) trials of their vile DPI system in South Korea
• They pre-empted their financial results with the announcement of a desktop implementation of their behavioral advert targeting (strangely undescriptive)
• Financial results were released, revealing no income over the year, but expenditure of $50 million

The question in my mind is, how long can a company with a poor reputation (due to their previous activities), with an intrusive and possibly illegal technology, which has no ISP partners signed up (even after three trials - one open, the other two secret) keep going?

Some time ago I signed an e-petition at www.number10.gov.uk - this aimed to question the establishment of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), popularly known on the blogosphere as Ofquack.  I have little sympathy with quackitioners, practising a startling array of "therapies" which pretty much all lack evidence of efficacy.  Singh and Ernst's Trick of Treatment offers a good and clear overview of the major CAM treatments out there.  The petition read:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require evicence of basic efficacy and safety for licencing by the CNHC."

Details of Petition:

"The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) issues approval certificates to Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine practitioners, but this approval is currently independent of actual evidence of efficacy or safety. It is likely that practitioners will use CNHC approval to imply efficacy and safety, even though it promises no such thing. We, the undersigned, therefore petition that the CNHC requirements be tightened to include evidence of efficacy and safety."