Category Archives: General

Legal Foundations

An elderly woman in Manhattan walked into the door of an Apple store. Rather literally: the door was too shiny and clean, and she broke her nose on it. Now, that’s no fun for anyone, but she’s suing Apple for a million dollars. Must have been quite a nose.

I wonder what the success rate for this sort of case is? I mean, could I make a living out of walking into doors, slipping on floors, etc? I’d be willing to sustain quite a few minor injuries at $1M a time.

The law of costs is a wonderful thing, and it helps most nations avoid a great deal of the silliness that afflicts the American legal system. This case is very reasonable compared to some. I don’t think Apple should be fined $1M, but something should probably be done – they should apologise and should be required to buy a roll of stickers to put on their doors. Giving her an iPad would be a nice gesture.

It really bugs me that so many people in the world seem to operate on this basic principle:

IF

  • Something bad happens to me

AND

  • You have lots more money than me

THEN

  • It must be your fault

AND THEREFORE, NATURALLY

  • I should have lots of your money

 

If exactly the same thing happened at, say, your sister’s house, would you ask her for a million dollars? Of course not. It’s attempted redistribution of wealth through forceful means, that’s what it is. Communists.

 

 

 

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Is the ‘Internet of Things’ the BBC Micro of the future?

Domesday ProjectThere was a great opportunity in Cambridge today for techies of a certain age to get all nostalgic about a machine which, for many of us, changed our lives, at the 30th anniversary party for the BBC Micro.

Organised by Jason Fitzpatrick’s soon-to-be-Cambridge-based Centre for Computing History, with the assistance of ARM, Redgate and several others, this brought together most of the original team, and many of the original machines and peripherals, that we remembered so well.

There was much discussion about the legacy of the project, and my friend Eben Upton gave an inspiring talk about the aims of the Raspberry Pi team, which many hope will be the BBC Micro for the next generation.

One thing that occurred to me during the presentations was that the original BBC Model B sold for £399, or approximately £1200 in today’s money. (That’s about the price of a MacBook Pro now.) The investment that my parents were making in my future was not the cost of a Raspberry Pi. It was the cost of about 40 Raspberry Pis – a whole classroom-full. Eben, significantly, pointed out in his talk that they hoped it wouldn’t really be schools or parents who would buy most of these. It would be the children themselves. And I think that’s important.

Beeb peripheralsNow, progress always depends on building new layers of technology on the platforms provided by the past. When I was young, the transition in play was from a world in which we bought electronic components to one in which we bought computers. Sinclair and Acorn made that transition accessible to kids. But computers are now a commodity, and you can argue that what’s really important for kids to learn is the different ways of connecting them together in the real world. So my hope is that initiatives like Raspberry Pi will allow kids not just to own a computer, but to own a network. To learn about how networks work, to invent new ways of making use of them. Yesterday’s solder track is today’s ethernet cable. Yesterday’s 6502 assembly language is today’s IPv6 routing table.

And if we believe that there’s any mileage in the internet-of-things/automated-home ideas, then perhaps the equivalent investment that today’s parents might make could be, say, a ‘connected room’ kit, which allowed kids to give a URL to each lightbulb, each plug socket, each radiator valve, each loudspeaker, and the door. And then see how they link those together, and to their Facebook account, and to the Xbox, and so forth. Turn the music on when you turn on the light. Turn the heat down when you go to bed. Turn the lights down when you turn on the TV. It’s a Lego kit that lets you play with the living spaces of the future, and perhaps monitor your carbon footprint at the same time.

Maybe… I don’t know. There may be better ideas. This sounds fun to me, though! It could teach you a lot about networking.

And it could still cost much less than the original BBC Micro did.

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Science and Religion

2012_03_21-15_52_11.jpg

Pick your route to heaven…

🙂

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Immersive TV and the IOT

One of the things those clever chaps at the BBC R&D are considering is the transmission of extra metadata alongside the programmes, whether on broadcast channels or over the net. This gave me an idea…

We watch TV in a room where I can, from my perch on the sofa, reach the dimmer switch on the wall. This is handy because I don’t think it’s ideal to watch TV in complete darkness, but I do often find that we start with the lighting at a certain level, and then, when we get to the gloomy, sinister scenes, I turn down the ceiling lights to make the low-contrast images more visible and reduce any reflections.

But as we move into an automated-home-internet-of-things type of world, where my dimmer may be accessible via zigbee, Z-wave or similar, perhaps the TV should be able to control the lighting? Screenplays generally specify whether a scene is ‘interior, daytime’ or ‘exterior, night’, for example, so including that in the transmission should be straightforward, and could possibly be automated. Maybe I as a viewer would feel more involved in the action if my lighting conditions matched those of the scene?

The next stage, of course, would be having the central heating automatically turn off when watching a documentary about Shackleton. Perhaps that’s a step too far…

For a more serious immersive experience, I liked the idea the Beeb guys came up with a couple o years ago for ‘surround video‘.

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Second-hand bookshelves for sale?

The Encyclopedia Brittanica announced this week that, after 244 years, and like the OED not long ago, it was discontinuing its print-based editions. Tim Carmody has a very nicely-written piece on Wired, entitled “Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Brittanica. Windows Did.”

Extract:

Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying.

Historian Yoni Appelbaum notes that from the beginning, Britannica‘s cultural project as a print artifact was as much about the appearance of knowledge as knowledge itself. Britannica “sold $250 worth of books for $1500 to middle class parents buying an edge for their kids,” Appelbaum told me, citing Shane Greenstein and Michelle Devereux’s study “The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica.”

In short, Britannica was the 18th/19th century equivalent of a shelf full of SAT prep guides. Or later, a family computer.

“I suspect almost no one ever opened their Britannicas,” says Appelbaum. “Britannica’s own market research showed that the typical encyclopedia owner opened his or her volumes less than once a year,” say Greenstein and Devereux.

“It’s not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper,” adds Appelbaum, “it’s that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable ‘edge’ for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica.”

The article’s not long, and it’s worth reading the whole thing.

In the meantime, I love the fact that I can now carry both the Shorter OED and the Encyclopedia Britannica in my pocket…

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A vision of the future? Yes, indeed.

In 1994, Knight Ridder’s Information Design Lab produced a video which was their vision of the future of newspapers: The Tablet Newspaper. Have a look at around 2:20, and see if it looks at all familiar!

(I guess my nearest equivalent in gadget prediction is shown here.)

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Personal Analytics

I wrote a few months back about how I was using a GPS logger to keep a record of my movements. Some people think I’m a little eccentric – I think that’s the word – for doing so.

But my data-gathering is nothing compared to Stephen Wolfram’s. In a splendid Wired article called The Personal Analytics of My Life, he discusses some of the insights he’s been able to glean from his own historical records. One inspired idea, which I confess had never occurred to me, is to run a keystroke logger; he’s captured everything he’s typed for many years. (Now, that’s data you wouldn’t want to fall into the wrong hands!)

I once thought seriously about capturing, say, once or twice a minute, the image of my screen, which I could then later OCR, search, use to recreate lost documents, etc. But other than helping Sheng Feng Li with a system that did some of this for VNC, I never took it any further. Worth reconsidering, perhaps…

Anyway, many thanks to Richard for pointing me at the Wolfram article, which is worth a read.

I suppose that another way to analyse data about your life is to do the analysis on the fly and record the results there and then. That’s called a blog.

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Embarrassing admission

A conversation with friends this week turned to the subject of recipe websites: epicurious.com and suchlike. I realised that I’d never looked at any of these sites. Mmm.

In our household, we believe in specialisation of function, and, despite my offers to help out, Rose has always preferred doing the cooking to surrendering control of the kitchen! We’ve been married just over twenty years, hence my somewhat embarrassing realisation this week that the reason I’d never seen any recipe websites was actually quite simple…

The last time I looked at a recipe, there was no such thing as a website.

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Hidden Implications of Social Linking

Once, when having dinner at the house of some good friends, I discovered that the other guests, a delightful couple, had a place in New York which they would sometimes rent out to friends and acquaintances. They had a strict rule: they would only let this fine apartment on the Upper West Side to people with whom they had personally had dinner. The rationale for this was simple: they wanted something more than a simple contractual agreement with those who would be occupying their home, and they felt that a certain level of social acquaintance was a good first level of filter, as well as imposing some extra obligations of responsibility on the tenants.

Most people apply similar filters to social networks. At the very least, if you are likely to be reading somebody else’s tweets or posts, you don’t want to read that which is likely to be tedious or offensive. You’re likely to be more forgiving of those who are within your real-life social circle. The concept of a friend, contact or buddy in the online world is open to a wide variety of interpretations, of course, but one network which has traditionally had a clearer definition than others has been LinkedIn.

Linking to someone on LinkedIn has, for me, always implied a little bit more than simple acquaintance. In fact, I think the original site suggested that you should link to people you know and trust, though if that wording is still there, it’s much less obvious now. This was, presumably, because others may use the system to ask you for an onward connection to others; a process which is likely to be somewhat awkward if you don’t really know them, or don’t feel that their acquaintance would be beneficial to your other friends!

So I’ve tended to have a fairly strict rule that I only link to people with whom I’ve at least shaken hands, and ideally had some sort of conversation. I’ve waived the former occasionally for those with whom I’ve had videoconferences, but in general it’s worked well since I joined LinkedIn – gosh! – eight years ago.

But it seems to be going through massive growth recently, and perhaps it’s now more of an address book than something that implies any level of recommendation? Is LinkedIn the new Plaxo? At any rate, I’m starting to get more requests for links from people who are just interested in making contact, they’re in related fields, they say nice things about stuff I’ve done, and they seem like people I would like if I did get a chance to shake their hand. So my resolve is slipping. Should I stick to my principles, or am I being very last-millennium to insist on a physical meeting?

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Tell It Like It Is

Joy Rosen comments on the new NPR Code of Ethics and Practices. Extract:

In my view the most important changes are these passages:

In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

and….

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.

With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.

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A blog worth watching?

One of my more interesting acquaintances is Jane Wilson-Howarth: writer, GP, speaker, broadcaster, corporate travel health consultant… Her web site is enjoyable and unusual.

So I’m pleased to hear that she’s venturing into the world of blogging. I think this will be entertaining.

Have added it to my Feed My Inbox account…

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EmailBay

Ah – here’s an idea, following on from the last post…

I’ve always wished I could have an email address that cost the sender 1p per message. That would have such a nice effect on spam while not really inconveniencing anyone else, once the system was set up. But here’s a refinement of the idea:

Imagine that, when you sent a message, you could choose how much you wanted to pay. And inboxes were sorted, by default, with the most expensive messages at the top. You could override the order, of course, for friends and family, but would this be a good way of prioritising your email? Or am I taking capitalism too far?

It would have different dynamics, of course, depending on whether the money earned went to the recipient or, say, to a charity of their choice. How about that? If you really want to get my attention, it will involve a £1 donation to Oxfam. (Remember, a transatlantic call might have cost you a lot more than that anyway). I’d even be happy to read a lot of your spam at that rate…

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