Neo - Starcadia by Gil Sherman and Lenka Della-Porta. Photograph John Davies. The UK is widely believed to have a business department, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). However, something which has gone largely unnoticed is that slowly, but steadily, a new business department is emerging and one with a remit that threatens to overshadow the current incumbent. Once mocked as the Ministry of Fun, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has been acquiring portfolio after portfolio....

Street Art in Shoreditch, photograph John Davies It begins: an area near the city centre is less developed, artists and independent businesses move in, culture and creativity thrive increasing the area’s visibility and desirability. At which point a less fashionable (but richer) crowd arrives, rents and prices rise and the artists/independents, and original inhabitants, get forced out. Many of us intuitively feel there’s something troubling about this, and it has been a focus of much debate in London in particular, but our reasons for caring about it are often not entirely clear - which isn’t to say we shouldn’t care....

Establishing new markets where things can be priced and traded creates incentives for people and companies to work out how much something is worth to them and to trade and innovate accordingly. It is hoped that allowing us a greater ability to control access to our personal data, in exchange for services and money, could encourage similar benefits.[1] Part of this may involve the growth of Personal Information Management Services (PIMS)....

Art is, of course, about emotions, society, things it’s impolite to talk to strangers about (sex, politics and religion), etc. Ostensible meanings aside, very sophisticated interpretations are possible and there is the massive literature of criticism devoted to this. Art’s shapeshifting, eternally changing, nature (installation art, post-modernism, post-internet, who knows what next) is a challenging moving target - even for humans. Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that computers will be increasingly influential in assessing it....

‘Something is free, if someone else pays’ - Anon. We get many free goods and services online via an opaque barter where, in exchange, companies access our data and try and sell us things. We say we care about our data[1], though if we could retain it, but pay for these products, would we? This option is not always available, but even if it was, it is not clear that we would take it....

Geotagged Flickr photography in and around Hyde Park in London. Sights with visibly high levels of activity include the Serpentine, the museums in Exhibition Road. Image John Davies Into the city In the past, people walked the streets and left no trace. This is no longer true. We are creating large amounts of data about the places around us: how we move through them, and how they move us. One source of this data has been the growth in smart phone and social media use....

Don’t forget the unelected. Not those shortly to be unsuccessful in the election, but the great unsolved problem of British politics: House of Lords reform. A problem notable for the lack of excitement surrounding the proposed solutions. We should change the terms of debate and consider using technology to involve the public in Parliament’s second chamber in a radical new way. Members of the House of Lords currently occupy their seats by virtue of birth or political appointment (plus a few more through religious status)....

“But we don’t want to teach ‘em," replied the Badger. “We want to learn ‘em” Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame.* We are told that the future of the UK economy lies in a better educated, and hence more productive, workforce. Some of this extra productivity is expected to come from the intellectual benefits of higher education - an area where there is an ever greater focus on student choice. What is less often noted is that the market for university degrees has many characteristics which make it difficult for student choice to drive higher levels of teaching quality....

Geotagged photos in central London, John Davies. Image based on the locations of over a million geo-tagged photos on Flickr by 38,255 photographers or, at least, photo accounts. Social media data, such as that produced by Twitter and Facebook use, is opening up new ways to understand society, but how do people obtain this data, and what are the challenges in using it to learn about our lives? API days...

Locations of geo-tagged photographs taken in central and inner London The new tracks Cities are carpeted with pictures, but these pictures are not public art or the work of a subversive street artist. They are the geo-tagged photos continuously being uploaded to sites like Flickr and Twitter. This is creating a new world to explore. A world which could change how we think about the built environment and its heritage....