Those were the days

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I’m stuck in bed with a stinking cold but am greatly cheered by (a) news of the latest arrests at The Sun (a newspaper) and (b) Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. I’ve just go the the point where Roper, having failed to get an All Souls Fellowship, has had to console himself with the status of a mere graduate student. He is unimpressed by the supervisor assigned to him, who is profiled by Sisman thus:

Canon Claude Jenkins, then in his sixtieth year, had been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History since 1934. He was an Oxford eccentric, who dressed in a low-crowned hat and antiquated clerical garb, collected cigar butts to smoke later, and surreptitiously pocketed fingers of toast from the breakfast table. Piles of books on both sides of the steps up to his rooms left only a narrow corridor for visitors to ascend, before they squeezed into a study so stuffed with books as to be almost impenetrable. Even the bath was filled with them. Jenkins’s mind was as chaotic as his rooms. He lectured all morning on the hour, each lecture commencing directly after the other. An alarm-clock hanging from a string round his neck served as a prompt to change subject, though his few listeners (sometimes as few as one) found it hard to distinguish one lecture from another.

Sigh. They don’t make ’em like that any more. And if they did the Teaching Quality Assessment, or some other wheeze dreamed up by McKinsey, would do for him.

Baron Zuckerberg: the Haussmann of the Internet

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This morning’s Observer column.

In Morozov’s view, something similar has happened to the internet. It’s no longer a place for strolling – it’s a place for getting things done. “Hardly anyone ‘surfs’ the web any more.” Mobile apps, which bypass most of the internet, make cyberflânerie less likely. And much of today’s online activity revolves around shopping. “Strolling through Groupon isn’t as much fun as strolling through an arcade, online or off.”

So Amazon is the equivalent of La Samaritaine – a place you go to buy stuff. And Facebook? Ah well, says Morozov, Zuckerberg wants to wipe out the individualism that was at the heart of flânerie. He wants everything to be “social”. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself,” he asked recently, “or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” His answer: “You want to go with your friends.” My answer: I’ll go by myself, thank you. But then I’m so 19th century.

Footnote: Earlier in the column I mentioned Newton’s First Law, a reference which prompted this lovely email from a reader:

“Sorry to be so pedantic, but when you mentioned Newton’s first law I think you had his third in mind. The third law states: the mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and co-linear. (The law is usually imprecisely stated: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.) How do I know? Well, I spent most of my working life teaching engineering dynamics at graduate and post-graduate level.”

Ideological consistency

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I love this. The announcement that Margaret Thatcher will have a State funeral when she dies has prompted this e-petition.

In keeping with the great lady’s legacy, Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders. The undersigned believe that the legacy of the former PM deserves nothing less and that offering this unique opportunity is an ideal way to cut government expense and further prove the merits of liberalised economics Baroness Thatcher spearheaded.

It needs 100,000 signatures and currently has only 27,000. I found out about it in Julian Barnes’s lovely review of The Iron Lady in the New York Review of Books.

The School of Data

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Here’s a fantastic initiative by the Open Knowledge Foundation. (Disclosure: I’m on the OKF’s Advisory Board). What lies behind it is an awareness that there’s a huge — and growing — skills gap in data-analysis, visualisation, etc.

To address this growing demand, the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU are collaborating to create the School of Data.

The School of Data will adopt the successful peer-to-peer learning model established by P2PU and Mozilla in their ‘School of Webcraft’ partnership. Learners will progress by taking part in ‘learning challenges’ – series of structured, achievable tasks, designed to promote collaborative and project-based learning.

As learners gain skills, their achievements will be rewarded through assessments which lead to badges. Community support and on-demand mentoring will also be available for those who need it.

So What Next?

In order to get the School of Data up and running, the next challenges are:

To create a series of learning challenges for a Data Wrangling 101 course. Developing Data wranglers will learn to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.

To recruit community leaders to act as ‘mentors’, providing community support and on-demand mentoring for those who need it.

To curate, update and extend the existing manuals and reference materials, e.g. the Open Data Handbook and the Data Patterns Handbook etc.

To design and implement assessments which evaluate achievements. Badges can then be issued which recognize the relevant skills and competencies.

To openly license all education content (challenges, manuals, references and materials) so that anyone can use, modify and re-use it, including instructors and learners in formal education.

Get the word out! Promote Data Wrangling 101 to potential participants.

Get Involved!

At this stage, the OKF is seeking volunteers to help develop the project. Whether you would like to design educational materials, construct learning challenges, donate money or mentor on the course, we’d love to hear from you! Equally, if you are part of an organisation which would like to join with the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU to collaborate on the School of Data, please do get in touch by registering on the form at the end of the link.

That awkward question

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Uncomfortable questions from David Pogue following on from the NYT’s big story on conditions in Chinese electronics factories.

It’s safe to say that most electronics sold in the United States are made in these Chinese factories.

So yes, we should pressure Apple to continue putting pressure on Foxconn. But at the same time, we seem to be ignoring a much bigger and more important question: How much do we care?

That Chinese workers are paid less than American workers is no big shock. We’ve known that forever. That’s why everybody outsources to China in the first place. There’s a long list of Chinese manufacturing costs that are lower than American manufacturing costs: hourly employee rates, worker benefits, taxes, the cost of power, buildings and equipment, and more.

Bringing workplace standards and pay in Chinese factories up to American levels would, of course, raise the price of our electronics. How much is hard to say, but a financial analyst for an outsourcing company figures a $200 iPhone might cost $350 if it were built here.

Do we care enough about Chinese factory conditions to pay nearly twice as much for our phones, tablets, cameras, TVs, computers, GPS units, camcorders, music players, DVD players, DVRs, networking gear and stereo equipment?

Good piece, and those of us who cheerfully live inside the Apple ecosystem are all a bit compromised. But there is one aspect of the question that Pogue omits, namely the extraordinarily high margins that Apple squeezes from its products.

Lie (back) and think of England

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I know nothing about football, but I do know about the mass media and I’ve been studying the feeding frenzy about Fabio Capello, Harry Redknapp and the newly-vacant post of England manager. My conclusion: Redknapp would have to be clinically insane to put himself forward for the job. This has nothing to do with football, and all to do with the British tabloids, which have a standard operating procedure for this kind of stuff. Here’s the algorithm:

1. Inflate — to ludicrous degrees — public expectations about England’s prospects for winning the forthcoming European/World championship (delete as appropriate) .
2. At the same time, intrude on the Manager’s private life by tapping his phone, intercepting his email, harassing his family and friends, etc. etc. (And yah, boo, sucks to Lord Leveson and his ‘inquiry’).
3. Then, when the England squad crashes and burns, turn on the hapless ‘manager’ with a spiteful fury that might have staggered even Shakespeare.
4. Make hysterical calls for the sacking of said Manager.
5. Go to 1.

Davos, 1472

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Just caught up with this lovely dispatch from Davos by Jeff Jarvis.

I began this trip to Europe with my pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (blogged earlier). I recall Jon Naughton’s Observer column in which he asked us to imagine that we are pollsters in Mainz in 1472 asking whether we thought this invention of Gutenberg’s would disrupt the Catholic church, fuel the Reformation, spark the Scientific Revolution, change our view of education and thus childhood, and change our view of societies and nations and cultures. Pshaw, they must have said.

Ask those questions today. How likely do you think it is that every major institution of society–every industry, all of education, all of government–will be disrupted; that we will rethink our idea of nations and cultures; that we will reimagine education; that we will again alter even economics? Pshaw?

Welcome to Davos 1472.

Let us spray

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The graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s first proper ‘corporate’ office in 2005 was offered $60,000 to do the job but opted for stock instead. That stock is supposedly worth $500m now. Smart lad. Smarter than Stanford, which was offered Cisco stock many years ago, but opted for cash instead.

Apple: ARMing OS X

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Fascinating piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian pondering the implications of revelations that Apple has been porting OS X to the ARM chip.

Written by Tristan Schaap, the paper describes working in the PTG [Apple’s Platform Technologies Group] for 12 weeks, porting Darwin to the MV88F6281 – an ARMv5-compatible processor that’s a couple of generations old now. They were then porting Snow Leopard, aka 10.6; Mac OS X is now onto 10.7 (“Lion”), released last year.

“The goal of this project was to get Darwin building and booting into a full multi-user prompt,” Schaap wrote in the introduction that’s generally visible on the DUT page.

But in the paper he goes significantly further: “The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform.” Emphasis added. That tells you: Apple is working on porting Mac OS X to ARM, and thus giving itself fresh options if the ARM architecture – known for its low power demands, but equally not until now seen as a competitor in processing heft to Intel – starts offering the horsepower users need.

And there have been indications that ARM is moving up the horsepower ratings, even while Intel tries to lower the floor on its chips’ power consumption.

Sky News clamps down on Twitter use

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It’s Back to the Future time, folks. This intriguing story from the Guardian

Sky News has told its journalists not to repost information from any Twitter users who are not an employee of the broadcaster.

An email to staff on Tuesday laid out new social media guidelines for Sky News employees, including a contentious ban on retweeting rival “journalists or people on Twitter”.

The new guidelines also warn Sky News journalists to “stick to your own beat” and not to tweet about non-work subjects from their professional accounts.

So much for the link economy, then. But the Digger’s (surprisingly entertaining) Twitterstream will, presumably, be exempt from the ban.