When we were putting S&R together in 2007 I hunted down Gavin Chait and begged him to join us. He’s one of the smartest guys I know, a relentless, good faith thinker and someone you can count on to hit you with a perspective you hadn’t thought about. He wrote our very first post and also penned at least one of our absolute very best posts.

We don’t always agree, though. (Which is good – how boring would it be if we did?) In a recent post, Gavin addressed the topic of the latest Discworld novel in a post entitled “Terry Pratchett and the redemption of the Orcs.” If you review the post and the comment thread you’ll see that I take Gavin to task for misrepresenting Pratchett. Gavin’s reply (@2) neatly gets to his overarching point: Full story »

2010? Not so good for some of us at S&R.

But we also recognize—not just today, for Thanksgiving, but all the time—that we each have much to be thankful for. As we Scrogues sit down for our Thanksgiving meals, wherever we are and whomever we’re with, we’ll be counting our blessings. And you, Faithful Reader, are among them.

Here are some of the things we’ll be thinking about: Full story »

Aid and trade are essential to Africa’s further development. The US dollar declined by 30% during 2007. This has an effect both on the real value of aid and on the world economy.

Scholars and Rogues is pleased to introduce the first in a series of talking and speaking type Scrogues. This Scrogcast was presented by Gavin Chait at an informal interactive gathering of analysts at Frost & Sullivan. The seminar is about 11Mb, is in MP3 format, and is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License

Download the Scrogcast: The US dollar in Africa.

Welcome back to day 2 of the S&R Year in Review. Today we tackle some of 2007′s big moments in news and current events.

The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq Surpasses the American Civil War in Duration: The United States’ involvement in World War I lasted only 19 months and World War II lasted 44 months for the United States, even though the war itself was nearly six years long. The occupation of Iraq (aka the Iraq War) outlasted World War II in November of 2006, making the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq the third longest foreign occupation in U.S. history. The American Civil War lasted 48 months, and the Iraq occupation surpassed that duration on March 20, 2007. This makes the Iraq occupation the third longest running period of continuous conflict in U.S. history, behind only the Vietnam War and its sister conflict in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Full story »

Scrogues Converse is our new feature where scrogues engage in informed discussion of fringe topics fast approaching from the grey fog behind you. In our first conversation Martin Bosworth and Gavin Chait discuss the nature of Open-source vs Open-standards and the way in which Web 2.0 is not so much re-inventing the web as in repeating the past at a higher level.

Does Web 2.0 undermine net neutrality?

Gavin: I feel that net neutrality is being undermined by all the new upstarts; from Facebook to Digg to WordPress. My issue is this: closed-standards, like all the Web 2.0 platforms, seem a step backwards rather than a step forwards. Try and imagine if Google declared that henceforth Gmail subscribers could only email other Gmail subscribers? They’d go bang in a week.

Yet, that is precisely how Facebook, Digg, WordPress, etc all operate. I need new login addresses – new identities – for every single Web 2.0 ap. Yet I only need one email address to contact anyone via email anywhere in the world. Various initiatives (like Identity 2.0) aimed at reducing this complexity seem merely to reinforce it. Full story »