Category Archives: Observer

Computational science

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From this morning’s Observer column.

One of the diseases studied was lung cancer. The research revealed 23,000 mutations that were exclusive to the diseased cells. Almost all were caused by the 60 or so chemicals in cigarette smoke that stick to DNA and deform it. “We can say that one mutation is fixed in the genome for every 15 cigarettes smoked,” said Peter Campbell, the scientist who led the lung cancer part of the study. “That is frightening because many people smoke a packet of 20 a day.”

Although these stories are reports about medical research, they are really about computing – in the sense that neither would have been possible without the application of serious computer power to masses of data. In that way they reflect a new – but so far unacknowledged – reality; that in many important fields leading-edge scientific research cannot be done without access to vast computational and data-handling facilities, with sophisticated software for analysing huge data-sets.

In many significant areas, advanced research is no longer done by individuals looking through microscopes or telescopes, but by computers enabling investigators to collate, visualise and analyse the torrents of data produced by arrays of instruments…

How we came to see the world differently

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This morning’s Observer column.

Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.

The latest of these for physics was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss’s boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted “not more than an hour” as Smith later recalled they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.

If you want to see the fruits of their work, log on to Flickr.com, the world’s leading image-hosting site. Launched in 2004, it was bought by Yahoo in 2005 and now holds more than 4bn images. Since you began reading this column, more than 600 pictures have been uploaded to it, automatically resized and each assigned a unique URL. It is one of the wonders of the modern world…

Facebook to join the UN? If it can find a way of financing the subscription

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This morning’s Observer column.

It was announced last week that the population of Facebook now exceeds that of America. Since mid-September the social networking service has added 50 million users, which means it now finds itself with 350 million of them. I am sure that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, takes the same view of his subscribers as PG Wodehouse attributed to the male codfish – “which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all”. But even Zuckerberg must be wondering how he can monetise the little darlings.

There they are, cavorting in the corner of cyberspace so thoughtfully and expensively provided by him, where they post photographs of themselves in embarrassing situations, write affectionate or silly messages on one another's "walls", become "fans" of obscure comedians, join witty "groups" to support the Tiger Woods driving school and do other cool things too numerous to list. And all without paying a cent…

LATER: It’s interesting to see how this piece has been picked up across the Twitterverse — and slightly misinterpreted as a claim by me that Facebook won’t make money. I have no idea whether it will or not. All I was trying to say is that advertising isn’t necessarily the key to Facebook profitabiity. This is because the service is not primarily about content but activity. Maybe that can be monetised, but at the moment it’s not clear how.

What I was trying to say is that the hopes of content providers that they will make money from advertising may turn out to be fantasies. The only online business that really makes money from advertising is search. Which is why Google is as big as it is.

Google: the latest control-freak on the block

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This morning’s Observer column.

A basic principle of warfare is never to fight on terrain chosen — or dominated — by your enemy. This principle seemed to explain why, as Google rose to challenge Microsoft as the world’s most powerful technology company, the one market it eschewed was that for operating systems. That territory was dominated by Bill Gates & Co and so Google concentrated on building dominance in areas where Microsoft was feeble or non-existent: search, cloud computing, web applications, advertising. It all seemed so sensible.

But then last July, Google gave notice that it had changed tack by revealing it was working on a radical new operating system called Chrome OS. Just over a week ago, the product was officially launched at the company’s Californian HQ, which left the technology community intrigued and puzzled, and the mainstream media salivating over the prospect of a head-to-head battle between Google and Microsoft…

The links of O’Reilly

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This morning’s Observer column.

LIKE MANY people in his business, the technology publisher Tim O’Reilly is a heavy user of the Twitter microblogging service. He also has a Facebook account. To save effort, he has arranged things so that his Twitter posts are automatically forwarded to Facebook where they are transformed into ‘status updates’.

So far, so good; many of us do the same. But O’Reilly is a proper techie, which means many of his tweets are links to web pages containing interesting or useful information he has come upon in his daily browsing. One day recently, a friend of his noticed that something strange was happening to those links: when they left Twitter they were clickable links, but when they arrived in Facebook they were just plain text. In other words, they were no longer clickable. To follow them one had to copy and paste them into a browser window.

This led to a brief outbreak of conspiracy theorising…

Turning Fleet Street into Quality Street

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This morning’s Observer column.

If you want to return to the past, it makes sense to understand it, and here we run into some puzzles. Take the notion that, in the good ol’ days of print, customers paid for content.

Shortly before writing that sentence I was handed a copy of the London Evening Standard, which contained lots of ‘content’ but was, er, free. And although this is the most conspicuous example in the UK of printed content being given away, free newspapers have been thriving for decades. The only thing that marks out the Standard from a provincial freesheet is that its content is of a higher class. So even in the newspaper world, lots of content has been free for ages…

Consumer ‘rights’ in a digital world

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This morning’s Observer column.

You go to Waterstone’s, buy a copy of Orwell’s 1984 and take it home. Two days later you get up and find that agents of Waterstone's have entered the house during the night and removed the offending volume. They’ve left a terse note explaining what they’ve done and enclosing a credit note for the cost of the book. Enraged, you phone the manager of Waterstone's, who explains that everything is in accordance with the service agreement you accepted when you bought the book.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that this would not be tolerated in the real world of physical objects.Yet it's commonplace – indeed universal – in the world of information goods. And what makes it possible is the ‘End User Licence Agreement’ (EULA) that most of us click to accept when we first use hardware, software or online services.

The Kindle EULA is a good example…

Overturning Apple’s cart

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This morning’s Observer column.

IF YOU want to understand what’s going on in the mobile phone business just now, think of it as a hen coop into which two foxes have recently arrived.

The first intruder is Apple, which was once a computer company and then had the temerity to break into the mobile phone business, where it has been wreaking havoc ever since. The second predator is Google, which began life as a search engine hell-bent on world domination, and sees mobile phones as a logical stepping-stone on the way. It has only recently found its way into the coop, but last week demonstrated its formidable potential for creative destruction…

The myth of teenage omnipotence

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This morning’s Observer column.

THE OLD SAYING that “if you’re not thoroughly confused you don’t fully understand the situation” applies with a vengeance to our new media ecosystem. Take the strange case of teenagers, whose brains are being scrambled and rewired by nature to make them fit for adult life. Until the 1960s, “teens” as they are called in the US barely existed as an interesting social category. Like sex in Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilis, one might say they were “invented in nineteen sixty-three/… Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”.

Then they acquired spending power and became interesting to retailers and advertisers – and therefore to the mass media – to the point where our society is now obsessed with them. This obsession is particularly neurotic whenever cyberspace is mentioned, and leads adults to project on to the younger generation all kinds of fears and fantasies…

Tupperware 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column.

SOMEWHERE IN your email inbox last week you may have received from an acquaintance an invitation to a “Windows 7 Launch Party” scheduled for some time in the next 10 days. Do not be offended by this unsolicited and impertinent communication. Look at it in a positive light. The person who sent it meant no harm. He or she is offering you an opportunity to participate in an exciting new way of selling operating-system software. Its secret codename is ‘Tupperware 2.0’….