Category Archives: Technology

Election news: machines are faulty!

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Er, why are we not surprised? Here’s a Forbes.com report…

A lawyer stood with a cellphone in one ear, a landline connected to the other, all while typing on his BlackBerry. Twenty phones weren’t enough to handle the calls streaming into the election protection center monitoring Ohio.The lawyer was one of 20 volunteers manning calls from Ohio voters in a conference room at the New York offices of law firm of Proskauer Rose. By early afternoon the hotline had received over 500 calls reporting problems in Ohio alone, according to coordinating lawyer Jennifer Scullion.

Ohio wasn’t the only state facing voting difficulties in the most fully automated election in the nation’s history. Electronic or optical scan systems, operating in about 90% of precincts, caused problems across the country. The new voting machines often froze or failed to turn on. In multiple states, voters faced long lines as poll workers scrambled to find extra paper ballots. New laws requiring voters to show their ID also caused confusion…

Hack early, hack often

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This morning’s Observer column — on the security vulnerabilities of voting machines.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t these flaws that forced the ministry’s hand, but the further discovery that the ES3B emitted enough electromagnetic radiation for its operations to be monitored by snoopers, thereby violating the constitutional requirement for secret ballots.As a result, municipalities that had planned to use the ES3B have gone into panic mode. There was a stampede to purchase the alternative – and supposedly safe – voting machine, but supplies soon ran out.

Officials in Amsterdam, having decided to go back to pencil and paper, discovered that some ingenious jobsworth had sold all the old ballot-boxes for €25 apiece – and the Dutch media have been gleefully unearthing the uses to which their proud new owners have put them. (One has made an attractive barbecue from his.)

Exploring the web

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I wrote a post on the Guardian‘s Comment is Free Blog about the newly-announced partnership between MIT and the University of Southampton to study “Web science”. Extract:

Ah, poor Southampton (or Soton, as it’s known on the net). It’s about to learn that entering into a “partnership” with MIT is like marrying into the British royal family. As Ry Cooder might put it, you get to ride in the white Lincoln Continental with the red upholstery, but you must learn always to walk two paces behind your “partner” and never, ever assume that you have any rights to the fawning and adulation that followed upon your elevation. MIT doesn’t do partnerships in the normally understood sense of the term; what it does do are pragmatic or strategic liaisons that are deemed to be in its institutional interests. Ask the ancient University of Cambridge, which knows a thing or two about this. Gordon Brown put up £64 million of UK taxpayers’ money to lubricate a partnership between Cambridge and MIT. Guess who got the lion’s share of the loot?

At last — a good reason for running Windows!

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Because of my arthritis and occasional worries about RSI, I’ve been wanting to try modern dictation software for a while. (I’d tried earlier generations and found them woefully inadequate.) This arrived the other day, and it’s simply stupendous. In fact it’s positively eerie. to be able to talk naturally to a machine and have it faithfully transcribe what you’re saying. It only required about five minutes’ ‘training’ — though I managed to screw up even that. The program offers you a number of scripts from which to read while it’s getting used to your voice. Choices included JFK’s Inaugural speech, a passage from Alice in Wonderland and Dave Barry’s column on “How Computers Work”. Needless to say, I chose Dave Barry. As a result, the training session took much longer than expected because I kept dissolving into hysterical laughter. The only problem is: Dragon software only runs under Windows. But it’s so good that I’m tempted to install XP on my Mac and run it under Parallels so that I can switch seamlessly from OS X to Dragon and back again. That way, I’m selling only half my soul to the devil.

IT spending continues downward spiral

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Nicholas Carr has been going on about this for a while, so it’s not surprising that he returns to the theme somewhat gleefully. Still, the facts do seem to be supporting his thesis…

It’s become clear that the slowdown in IT spending is not a passing cyclical event but a secular trend, a reflection of a basic change in the way companies view information technology. That fact was underscored last month when Information Week published the latest edition of its annual survey of IT spending among the “InformationWeek 500” – the companies that it identifies as being the most innovative users of IT. The survey reveals not only that IT budgets haven’t jumped since 2003, but that in fact they’ve continued to erode. Between 2003 and 2006, IT spending as a percentage of revenue has on average fallen from 3.66% to 3.21%. Of the 21 industry sectors tracked by Industry Week, only 5 saw in an increase in IT spending as a percentage of sales over the last three years. In absolute terms, IT expenditures have dropped as well, from an average of $353 million in 2003 to $304 million today. Of those shrinking budgets, moreover, the percentage devoted to purchases of new hardware and software slipped from 37% in 2003 to 34.5% today.

Remember, these are the most innovative users of technology, the ones that set the pace for everyone else…

The CrackBerry habit

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British employers are being warned they could face multi-million-pound legal actions from BlackBerry-addicted staff on a similar scale as class law-suits taken against tobacco companies.

Research by the University of Northampton has revealed that one-third of BlackBerry users showed signs of addictive behaviour similar to an alcoholic being unable to pass a pub without a drink.

The report found that some BlackBerry users displayed textbook addictive symptoms – denial, withdrawal and antisocial behaviour – and that time with their families was being taken up with BlackBerry-checking, even at the dinner table.

Professor Nada Kakabadse, joint author of the study, said that lawsuits were a growing issue for employers who were being sued for failing in their duty of care to staff and in following health and safety guidelines.

In one case in the US, a female business consultant claimed that her marriage fell apart because she was constantly checking messages. She ended up losing custody of her children and sued her employer for damages.

“Enlightened companies that issue BlackBerrys as standard like pen and paper should also have policies on how to use them, so that people can use technology in a way that doesn’t have an addictive side,” said Professor Kakabadse of Northampton Business School.

The BlackBerry backlash has already begun in the US, where firms are settling out of court to avoid negative publicity.

[Source.]

I’ve had a BlackBerry for well over a year. It is by far the most useful gadget I’ve ever owned. But I don’t recognise any of these symptoms. Could it be that most BlackBerry users haven’t figured out how to filter their mail? In my case, the only mail that reaches my phone comes from:

  • a few selected colleagues in the various organisations where I work
  • my kids
  • a few special friends
  • my editors on the Observer.

    Everything else goes to my computer, as usual. The result: really important email reaches me instantly. Everything else has to wait until I’m at a computer.