Category Archives: Observer

In the world of Big Data the man with only Excel is blind

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

One of the most famous quotes in the history of the computing industry is the assertion that “640KB ought to be enough for anybody”, allegedly made by Bill Gates at a computer trade show in 1981 just after the launch of the IBM PC. The context was that the Intel 8088 processor that powered the original PC could only handle 640 kilobytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) and people were questioning whether that limit wasn’t a mite restrictive.

Gates has always denied making the statement and I believe him; he’s much too smart to make a mistake like that. He would have known that just as you can never be too rich or too thin, you can also never have too much RAM. The computer on which I’m writing this has four gigabytes (GB) of it, which is roughly 6,000 times the working memory of the original PC, but even then it sometimes struggles with the software it has to run.

But even Gates could not have foreseen the amount of data computers would be called upon to handle within three decades…

The Kony video: an ethical virus?

Posted on by

My take on the Kony video.

According to YouTube, 60 hours of video material are uploaded to it every minute – an hour a second. In the midst of such abundance, how can anything get noticed? Attention is now the scarcest commodity in cyberspace – which explains why virality is so craved by those with things to sell or messages to transmit. In that sense, the most significant thing about the Kony video is that it represents the most successful exploitation of virality to date. But when you delve deeper, it turns out that its success owes something to network theory as well as to storytelling craft.

Many years ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter published a seminal article in the American Journal of Sociology on the special role of “weak ties” in networks – links among people who are not closely bonded – as being critical for spreading ideas and for helping people join together for action.

An examination of the spread of the Kony video suggests that one weak tie in particular may have been critical in launching it to its present eminence. Her name is Oprah Winfrey and she tweeted: “Have watched the film. Had them on show last year” on 6 March, after which the graph of YouTube views of the video switches to the trajectory of a bat out of hell. Winfrey, it turns out, has 9.7 million followers on Twitter.

The venerable PC: not dead yet

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Unless you have been holidaying on Mars, you will have gathered that Apple launched a new version of its iPad last Wednesday. They’re refusing to call it the iPad3 but everyone else is. I’d be more inclined to call it the iPad2S, following the nomenclature the company has adopted for its mobile phones. That’s because, no matter how the Apple Reality Distortion Field spins it, the latest iPad is really just an evolutionary advance on its predecessors.

Granted, it has a significantly better display, a more powerful processor (therefore better graphics performance), a better camera, which will record HD video, and a wider range of mobile connectivity options. But otherwise, it’s the mixture as before – though that didn’t stop the Apple website being swamped on Wednesday evening, presumably by folks anxious to pre-order the newest new thing. (Memo to Apple: why not set up a system whereby customers’ salaries are paid directly to the company and they are then issued with food stamps and other necessities as the need arises?)

Raspberry Pi today. Jam tomorrow

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The Raspberry Pi project – a philanthropic effort to create the contemporary equivalent of the BBC Micro of yesteryear – has graduated from idealistic vapourware dreamed up in Cambridge to a finished, deliverable product manufactured in China. (In a nice touch, the Pi device comes in two flavours, Model A and Model B, just like the BBC machine, which was also designed in Cambridge.) Over the next few months, we’ll see container-loads of the little computer boards delivered to these shores. The time has come, therefore, to start thinking about how this astonishing breakthrough can be exploited in our schools.

Here are a few suggestions.

First, we need to jettison some baggage from the past. In particular, we have to accept that ICT has become a toxic brand in the context of British secondary schools…

Sovereigns of Cyberspace?

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

One of the central ideas in MacKinnon’s book is the concept of what she calls “sovereigns of cyberspace”, – companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon that now exercise the kinds of power that were hitherto reserved for real “sovereigns” – governments operating within national jurisdictions. Witness, for example, the way in which Amazon arbitrarily removed Wikileaks from its cloud computing servers without any justification that would have withstood a First Amendment legal challenge ; or the way that Facebook took down a page used by Egyptian activists to co-ordinate protests on the grounds that they had violated the company’s rules by not using their real names.

The powers to curtail people’s freedom of speech in this way were traditionally reserved for governments which – in democracies at least – theoretically derived their legitimacy from John Locke’s notion of “the consent of the governed”. (It’s worth saying that some political scientists balk at the notion of companies as “sovereigns”. After all, Zuckerberg can’t lock you up, whereas a real government could.) The question MacKinnon raises is: in what sense do Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google enjoy the consent of the networked?

From web pages to bloatware

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

In the beginning, webpages were simple pages of text marked up with some tags that would enable a browser to display them correctly. But that meant that the browser, not the designer, controlled how a page would look to the user, and there’s nothing that infuriates designers more than having someone (or something) determine the appearance of their work. So they embarked on a long, vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to exert the same kind of detailed control over the appearance of webpages as they did on their print counterparts – right down to the last pixel.

This had several consequences. Webpages began to look more attractive and, in some cases, became more user-friendly. They had pictures, video components, animations and colourful type in attractive fonts, and were easier on the eye than the staid, unimaginative pages of the early web. They began to resemble, in fact, pages in print magazines. And in order to make this possible, webpages ceased to be static text-objects fetched from a file store; instead, the server assembled each page on the fly, collecting its various graphic and other components from their various locations, and dispatching the whole caboodle in a stream to your browser, which then assembled them for your delectation.

All of which was nice and dandy. But there was a downside: webpages began to put on weight. Over the last decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB.

Quite a few good comments disagreeing with me. In the piece I mention how much I like Peter Norvig’s home page. Other favourite pages of mine include Aaron Sloman’s, Ross Anderson’s and Jon Crowcroft’s. In each case, what I like is the high signal-to-noise ratio.

Baron Zuckerberg: the Haussmann of the Internet

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

In Morozov’s view, something similar has happened to the internet. It’s no longer a place for strolling – it’s a place for getting things done. “Hardly anyone ‘surfs’ the web any more.” Mobile apps, which bypass most of the internet, make cyberflânerie less likely. And much of today’s online activity revolves around shopping. “Strolling through Groupon isn’t as much fun as strolling through an arcade, online or off.”

So Amazon is the equivalent of La Samaritaine – a place you go to buy stuff. And Facebook? Ah well, says Morozov, Zuckerberg wants to wipe out the individualism that was at the heart of flânerie. He wants everything to be “social”. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself,” he asked recently, “or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” His answer: “You want to go with your friends.” My answer: I’ll go by myself, thank you. But then I’m so 19th century.

Footnote: Earlier in the column I mentioned Newton’s First Law, a reference which prompted this lovely email from a reader:

“Sorry to be so pedantic, but when you mentioned Newton’s first law I think you had his third in mind. The third law states: the mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and co-linear. (The law is usually imprecisely stated: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.) How do I know? Well, I spent most of my working life teaching engineering dynamics at graduate and post-graduate level.”

Real hero of the Facebook story isn’t Zuckerberg

Posted on by

My take on the Facebook story — from yesterday’s Observer.

The number to watch is not the putative $100bn valuation but the 845 million users that Facebook now claims to have. The observation that if Facebook were a country then it would be the third most populous on the planet has become a cliche, but underpinning it is an intriguing question: how did an idea cooked up in a Harvard dorm become so powerful?

Thanks to a compelling movie, The Social Network, we think we know the story. A ferociously gifted Harvard sophomore named Zuckerberg has difficulties with women and vents his frustration by creating an offensive web application that invites users to compare pairs of female students and indicate which is “hottest”. He puts this up on the Harvard network where it gets him into trouble with the authorities. Then he lifts an idea from a pair of nice-but-dim Wasp contemporaries who need a programmer and, in a frenzied burst of inspired hacking, implements the idea in computer code, thereby creating an online version of the printed “facebooks” common to elite US universities. This he then launches on an unsuspecting world. The Wasps sue him but lose (though get a settlement). Zuckerberg goes on to become Master of the Universe. Cue music, fade to black.

It’s all true, sort of, but the dramatic imperatives of the narrative obscure the really significant bit of the story. So let’s rewind…

TCP/IP and the dim future of universities

Posted on by

This week’s Observer column.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title “Electronics and the Dim Future of the University”. In it, Professor Noam argued that the basic model of a university – which had been stable for hundreds of years – would be threatened by networked communications technologies.

Under the classical model, universities were institutions that created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students or scholars wished to access that knowledge, they had to come to the university. But, Noam argued, the internet would threaten that model by raising the question memorably posed by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: “Where is the Library of Congress when it’s on my desktop?” If all the world’s stored knowledge can be accessed from any networked device, and if the teaching materials and lectures of the best scholars are likewise available online, why should students pay fees and incur debts to live in cramped accommodation for three years? What would be the USP of the traditional university when its monopolies on storage and dissemination eroded?

If that was a good question in 1995, it’s an even better one today…

Facebook and the sociopathic mindset

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The truth is that companies such as Facebook are basically the corporate world’s equivalent of sociopaths, that is to say individuals who are completely lacking in conscience and respect for others. In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout of Harvard medical school tries to convey what goes on in the mind of such an individual. “Imagine,” she writes, “not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the wellbeing of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.”

Welcome to the Facebook mindset.