Interesting simulation suggesting that autonomous vehicles might be more efficient at utilising traffic junctions.
Krugman: a technological optimist?
From Business Insider. The only problem: will these new technologies create jobs? My guess: probably not.
Seascape
From the site to the stream
This morning’s Observer column.
The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observed that “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror”. And that “we march backwards into the future”. Amen. Remember the horseless carriage? Not to mention the fact that we still measure the oomph of a Porsche 911 in, er, brake horsepower.
But the car industry is a ferment of modernism compared with the computer business. When the bitmapped screen and the Wimp (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface first surfaced in the early 1970s at Xerox Parc, its geeks searched for a metaphor that would make this new way of relating to computers intelligible to human beings. So they came up with the “desktop” on which were displayed little images (icons) of documents and document folders, just like you’d find on an actual desktop. Well, on the desktop of an efficient bureaucrat anyway…
I inadvertently added 100 years to John Locke’s life in the last line of the piece. The essay dates from 1696, not 1796. I should have spotted that: Locked died in 1704. What a difference a key makes.
LATER: Some commenters on the piece asserted that it was Apple who put the trash can on the desktop. Not true: Here’s the desktop of the Xerox 8010 with the trash clearly visible on the bottom.
Hiding in plain sight
The other day a colleague related an aphorism he had picked up in conversation with someone who had been in Tony Blair’s inner circle during his time in government:
“The best way to bury bad news is to publish it on the front page of the Guardian, because then the Daily Mail won’t touch it.”
It sounds like something from an Armando Iannucci script, but I’m sure it’s true. It’s also perceptive, as the phone-hacking story demonstrated: for over a year the story was doggedly pursued by the Guardian while the rest of the UK Fourth Estate determinedly looked the other way.
And then I remembered one of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms:
“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
Which of course brought to mind the case of John Edwards’s extramarital affair, news of which was first brought to the world by the National Inquirer, a journal of, er, highly-blemished reputation which admits to paying for information and other breaches of Best Practice as taught by US journalism schools. Because the story was broken by the Inquirer, mainstream media wouldn’t touch it at first.
So maybe the best contemporary advice for Cameron & Co when they want to bury bad news is to by-pass the Guardian and go straight to the Daily Star.
How the Obama regime has made killing easy
The leaking of a secret US government White Paper setting out the supposed ‘legal’ justification for killing US citizens abroad using drones has lifted a corner of the veil that occludes the policy of the Obama Administration in this area. David Cole has thoughtful piece about this in The New York Review of Books. Sample:
On Monday, NBC published a leaked Justice Department “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s case for when the president, or indeed any “informed, high-level official” of the federal government, can authorize the secret killing of a US citizen without charges, a hearing, or a trial. The paper, which appears to summarize a still-classified internal memorandum drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to authorize the targeted killing in September 2011 of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, provides more detail than has yet been made public about the administration’s controversial drone program.
Consistent with the positions taken in public speeches by former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, Attorney General Eric Holder, and White House counterterrorism advisor and CIA director-nominee John Brennan, the sixteen-page white paper argues that killing a US citizen with a drone and without trial is legal under domestic and international law, even if the individual is far from any battlefield, not a member of al-Qaeda, and not engaged in planning an imminent attack on the United States. To date, much of the concern about the administration’s drone program has stemmed from its largely secret character; unfortunately, the more we learn, the greater those concerns become.
Drone warfare is the coming thing, and it’s already a much bigger deal than most people realise. It’s more serious, in a way, than cyberwarfare. And yet it receives very little attention.
Google drops sweetener to French media…
…in order to persuade the French to forget about that nasty “link tax” idea. Well, that’s how The Register describes the deal reached by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and the French President on Friday. Google, unsurprisingly, describes it in more statesmanlike tones: “Google creates €60m Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to support transformative French digital publishing initiatives”.
Of the two, I’m afraid I’m more convinced by the Register‘s interpretation.
Frederic Filloux’s take on it is here. Excerpt:
Dealing with Google requires a mastery of two critical elements: technology (with the associated economics), and the legal aspect. Contractually speaking, it means transparency and enforceability. Let me explain.
Google is a black box. For good and bad reasons, it fiercely protects the algorithms that are key to squeezing money from the internet, sometimes one cent at a time — literally. If Google consents to a cut of, say, advertising revenue derived from a set of contents, the partner can’t really ascertain whether the cut truly reflects the underlying value of the asset jointly created – or not. Understandably, it bothers most of Google’s business partners: they are simply asked to be happy with the monthly payment they get from Google, no questions asked. Specialized lawyers I spoke with told me there are ways to prevent such opacity. While it’s futile to hope Google will lift the veil on its algorithms, inserting an audit clause in every contract can be effective; in practical terms, it means an independent auditor can be appointed to verify specific financial records pertaining to a business deal.
Another key element: From a European perspective, a contract with Google is virtually impossible to enforce. The main reason: Google won’t give up on the Governing Law of a contract that is to be “Litigated exclusively in the Federal or States Courts of Santa Clara County, California”. In other words: Forget about suing Google if things go sour. Your expensive law firm based in Paris, Madrid, or Milan will try to find a correspondent in Silicon Valley, only to be confronted with polite rebuttals: For years now, Google has been parceling out multiples pieces of litigation among local law firms simply to make them unable to litigate against it. Your brave European lawyer will end up finding someone that will ask several hundreds thousands dollars only to prepare but not litigate the case. The only way to prevent this is to put an arbitration clause in every contract. Instead of going before a court of law, the parties agrees to mediate the matter through a private tribunal. Attorneys say it offers multiples advantages: It’s faster, much cheaper, the terms of the settlement are confidential, and it carries the same enforceability as a Court order.
Legless
I came on this surreal scene on Friday morning. What the photograph doesn’t show is a frustrated van driver who’d been ordered to deliver these mannequins to a shop in town but found when he arrived that his instructions failed to specify which shop! So he’d ben unloading them in the hope that eventually one of his phone calls to base would be answered.
Gove’s decision
This morning’s Observer column.
Michael Gove is possibly the most unpopular minister in the government, but on Wednesday he made a courageous and enlightened decision. On that day, the Department for Education announced that computer science will be included in the science options for the Ebacc (English baccalaureate), which is one of Mr Gove’s keystone reforms of the school curriculum. Given the amount of hostility there is to these reforms, this development attracted little attention, but in the long run it could turn out to be a really big deal.
Why? Because it signals a determination to undo an educational disaster that’s been running for decades in British schools – the ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum. This was based on the idea that most of what the young needed to be taught about computing was how to use software. In practice, this turned out to be learning how to use Microsoft Office. For both the schoolchildren who had to endure this, and the teachers who had to instruct them, this was a demoralising and dysfunctional experience. Kids would come home from school complaining (as my children did): “Dad, you’ll never guess what we had to do today – PowerPoint!” The result was that ICT became the educational world’s equivalent of a toxic brand.
The Zen of Python
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!
By Tim Peters.