Getting things done — with a keyboard
Last week I blogged about the Logitech Ultra-thin Keyboard
From now on I’m not leaving home without it.
Trinity Lane
Vladimir Nabokov’s rooms were (I think) in the medieval building on the right — just beyond the point reached by the cyclist in the photograph.
Larger size here.
And my brother Bob is an hairy man
Leveson: a regulator’s view
Alex Andreou, who used to work for an industry regulator, is not impressed by the hysterical response of the British press to Leveson’s prescription.
The Leveson report did not arise out of someone getting up one fine morning and thinking “I know what I’ll do today; curtail the freedom of the press”. It sprung forth from an industry’s repeated and miserable failure to regulate itself. It is a direct result of an industry’s totally out-of-control behaviour.
In my many years work for a regulator, I never once sat across the table from an industry facing any kind of change in the rules that hasn’t claimed this would bring about the death of said industry and/or the demise of western civilization as we know it. In my experience, this is usually a knee-jerk reaction with little logic behind it.
One thing I can tell you with certainty is that the market players that come out best, are invariably the ones that are first to concede a change is needed, embrace it and work with the body seeking to regulate them to ensure it is well crafted.
This brings me to my most contentious and most positive point: The Leveson recommendations may be the best thing that has ever happened to this industry.
Spot on. Taken as a whole (there are a few exceptions) the British newspaper business has been one of the worst-managed industries in the industrial world. Its response to Leveson confirms that.
Samuel Johnson on the Daily Mail
Seeing the Daily Mail applaud the Prime Minister’s rejection of Leveson’s prescription (“Cameron leads the fight for liberty”) reminds me of Sam Johnson’s famous question (in Taxation No Tyranny): “How is it”, he asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Leveson report: the nub of it
Andrew Rawnsley nails it.
Imagine we were talking about a 16-month, £5m, government-commissioned inquiry into abuses perpetrated by doctors or lawyers or members of the armed forces. Imagine that this inquiry had catalogued repeated illegality, systematic breaches of the profession’s codes, the corruption of public officials, the compromising of political integrity and outrageous misconduct that had maimed innocent lives. Imagine that the report had arrived at the verdict that, while this profession mostly “serves the country well”, significant elements of it were “exercising unaccountable power”.
Imagine the prime minister who had set up that inquiry then responded that it was all very interesting, with much in it to commend, but he was going to park this report on the same dusty shelf that already groans with seven previous inquiries and allow this disgraced bunch one more chance to regulate themselves. We know what would be happening now. The newspapers would be monstering the prime minister as the most feeble creature ever to darken the door of Number 10. But since this is about the newspapers themselves, David Cameron has received some of the most adulatory headlines of his seven years as Tory leader.
Who you lookin’ at, Mister?
The custodian at Brancaster Staithe.
Thinking about the unthinkable
This morning’s Observer column.
Then Google launched its autonomous vehicle (aka self-driving car) project. By loading a perfectly ordinary Toyota Prius with $250,000-worth of sensors and computing equipment, the company created a vehicle that can safely navigate even the more congested road conditions. So far, these cars have logged something like half-a-million accident-free miles, which implies that robotic cars are actually far safer than ones driven by humans.
For me, the implication of the Google car is not necessarily that Kurzweil’s “singularity” is near, but that our assumptions about the potential of computers – and, therefore, artificial intelligence – urgently need revising. We need to think seriously about this stuff, along the lines demonstrated by the philosopher David Chalmers in a terrific paper, or by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book, Race Against the Machine.
Agribusiness: full steam ahead
An East Anglian sugar-beet factory in full production.
Larger size here.