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.
Norfolk sunset
It was bitterly cold on the coast yesterday. But beautiful — as usual.
HDR shot using iPhone.
The Leveson Prescription: and why it’s unlikely to work
Lord Leveson’s prescription for the British press is a cunning mixture of carrot and stick. The carrot consists of the incentives offered to newspapers who opt in to the ’voluntary’ new self-regulation scheme — basically liberation from the swingeing risks of old-style libel litigation. The stick is that newspapers that do not opt in have to subject themselves to a statutory regulator — OFCOM — which has no experience of the newspaper industry. The problem with this prescription is that it does not address the biggest problem with the British tabloids, which is that they are fiendishly attractive to the great British public.
This was the elephant in Lord Leveson’s court-room throughout his hearings, and yet nobody was tactless enough to draw attention to it. But it goes to the heart of the matter. The reason there are such appalling abuses of newspaper power in Britain is that the products of these abuses are so popular. Bad behaviour is rewarded by newspaper sales, and is therefore incentivised within the industry. If the British public really disapproved of what the News of the World et al were doing, then the remedy was obvious: people could have boycotted the paper. But they didn’t. The biggest-selling newspapers in Britain are all publications that are ethically challenged. What Lord Leveson ignored was the fact that Britain gets the newspapers it deserves. And that is something that neither self-regulation nor statute will change.
Google+ vs Facebook
Or: what is Google+ for?
I like his sandwich-board metaphor.
Speed-reading day
The Leveson Report on the “culture, practice and ethics” of the British press is being published today at 1.30pm — the time when Lord Justice Leveson is giving a press conference in the QE Conference Centre in Whitehall. The report is apparently 2000 pages long and so even as I write (at 9am) all over London hacks who have signed a non-disclosure agreement in blood are locked in rooms frantically trying to speed-read it. The rest of us can see it for ourselves — it will be downloadable from the Leveson Inquiry site this afternoon.
Augmenting the iPad
As some readers of this blog may remember, I was sceptical about the iPad when it first appeared, mainly because it didn’t have the software ecosystem that I needed. I could see that it was a terrific device for media consumption, but initially it was hopeless for anyone who, like me, spends most of their time creating stuff. Over time, however, the software ecosystem materialised and — rather to my astonishment — I found that the device had become an almost-indispensable working tool. Apart from the software (terrific stuff like DropBox, SoundNote and iThoughtsHD, iAWriter and Day One) the key factors were the instant-on feature, the ten-hour battery life and a 3G SIM card — which meant that I could, for example, do a whole working day away from base and never have to look for either a power socket or an Internet connection. Bliss!
But one snag remained — the on-screen keyboard, which I found ok for short messages and notes, but a real pain for long-form typing (partly because I’ve never been able to stop myself hitting ‘m’ instead of the spacebar, which meansmthatmmanymofmmymmessagesmcome outmlooking likemthis). So of course I looked round for a bluetooth keyboard — and remembered that I had a neat little Apple one, which works fine with the iPad but means that I wound up lugging two devices around and wondering if it would have made more sense to bring a MacBook Air instead.
Then the Microsoft Surface appeared, and many of the reviewers remarked on the fact that the covers for the device include a keyboard. It seemed such a good idea, so I started looking for an equivalent for the iPad. Last week I found one. It’s the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover
Logitech claims that one will get six months of normal usage from the (USB-rechargeable) battery. It does add slightly to the weight of the iPad, and in tactile terms is slightly inferior to, and more more cramped than, the Apple bluetooth keyboard.
But it has a really neat groove with holds the iPad securely at an angle and overall is a really clever solution to a design problem. Recommended.