Status-Q

Nice.

I spend an enjoyable but exhausting couple of days in Bath last week, at the ‘sandpit’ brainstorming session which distributed a modest chunk of UK government academic funding to projects working on ‘Bridging the Global Digital Divide’.

It was a great experience – meeting some wonderful people with whom I had much too little time to chat – and I came away pretty impressed by the overall process. Getting 30 academics to agree on anything is a well-nigh impossible goal, and these ones came from a wide variety of disciplines and from institutions around the country and around the world. Amazingly, we managed to come up with what I think will be four interesting and valuable projects and divide the money between them in a way that seemed to meet with general approval. Bill Thompson was there and has a nice write-up. Kudos to Alan Blackwell and all of the others involved in making it happen.

Alex Lindsay of PixelCorp has some interesting things to say about the out-sourcing of media to the developing world, in this IT Conversations podcast.

Simon Jenkins has an interesting article in the Guardian – thanks to John for the link – where he talks about how newspaper circulation in America and much of Europe is declining, while, surprisingly perhaps, the quality newspapers in Britain are seeing rises in circulation. He attributes this to the fact that in the US and elswehere, “publishers are trapped by archaic unions in a quasi-monopolistic market stripped of any zest to compete”.

Well, I think he may be right, but I’m still pessimistic about the UK situation. I don’t think we produce any major publication now that is of the quality of the New York Times, for example, though we have a few that come close.

And while it’s encouraging to see that the fall in tabloid sales is offset (though not matched) by a rise in the quality papers, I don’t think that this is because the average Brit has realised the folly of reading the Daily Mail. It’s because the entire press has slipped down-market to the extent that many people who used to read the Mail and the Sun now read the Times and feel at home.

Thanks to Seb for pointing me at this rather nice optical illusion.

You may think that a BlackBerry is only for use in the cities, for those who can’t be parted from their email at any time. But today I found a good use for mine in a most unlikely environment, and it actually helped me get away from the hurly-burly of modern life…

Rose and I are on a short break in Suffolk, and we wanted to visit the town of Woodbridge. I found a web page with a description of an interesting walk around the town and the surrounding area, but in my hotel room I had no way to print it out. Then I realised that by cutting and pasting the contents into an email to myself, I would have a copy in portable form on my BlackBerry.

This worked exceedingly well, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the BlackBerry was a great deal easier to slip in and out of a pocket than a sheet of A4 paper. And believe me, in that weather, I wanted my hands in my pockets for as much of the time as possible. And secondly, the jog-wheel on the side proved to be a great way to follow a long sequence of instructions. When we reached the end of a field or a fork in the path, I’d pull the BlackBerry out of my pocket, scroll down a little to read the next bit, and put it back. It took much less time than finding my place on a map or even on a sheet of printed instructions. One rare time when a smaller screen was much better than a bigger one!

Anyway, it was a great walk, and kudos goes to the railway company for publishing their station walks, which showed us more of Woodbridge than we would ever have found otherwise. Recommended.

Update, April 2007: The ‘station walks’ page has moved to a new location here. I hate it when people do that. It should be part of the contract when a company moves to a new web designer that old URLs will be preserved or redirected, especially, as in this case, when it was an eminently sensible URL in the first place. It’s in your best interests, too, to keep things stable where possible – it’s foolish these days to assume that the majority of visitors are going to find the page they want by coming to your front page and then following your links…

Another thought… I bet this doesn’t work as well on the new Blackberries with trackballs as it did on the old ones with jog-wheels!

According to The Independent, the UK police are going to be using number-plate (license-plate)-reading software with CCTV & traffic cameras around the country (of which there are many) to allow them to track the movements of all vehicles in the country, in the interests of crime prevention. They talk about big crimes like vehicle theft, though it could also be used to detect things like road-tax evasion. If they can get their act together with the insurance companies and use it to reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the roads, that would be a major benefit, though that may require a little too much competence on the part of the organisations concerned.

Anyway, no doubt conspiracy theorists civil liberties campaigners will be up in arms about this one, but I have other things on my mind, like the interesting algorithms you could come up with to detect license-plate duplication.

I’m anticipating a renaissance of James Bond’s rotating number plates, or, even better, highwaymen on horseback…