The Blogosphere at its best — contd.

Posted on by

Last month I wrote about a discussion which showed what a useful part of the public sphere the blogosphere has become. Now comes another example — in this case a calm explication by my colleague Doug Clow of the background to Britain’s Bloomsbury-based New College of the Humanities. The initiative has attracted an extraordinary amount of hostility and ridicule in the newspapers, which leads Doug to observe, mildly, that he is “shocked, shocked to discover that the accounts presented in the mainstream media are not perfectly in accord with the situation as I understand it.”

That’s putting it mildly. Doug then goes on usefully to clarify a number of important points: that NCH is in reality just another organisation preparing students for degrees awarded by the University of London International Programmes; that it isn’t a ‘university’ or even a ‘university college’ because in the UK university status can only be bestowed by the Privy Council (though I guess that that would be forthcoming if the government decided to award it); and that it’s a for-profit company with a charitable arm.

The OpEd firestorm that A.C. Grayling and his fellow-adventurers have generated is interesting because, among other things, it shows how resistant some establishments are to change. The truth is that NCH is not the end of civilisation as we know it, but the first appearance on British shores of a phenomenon that’s an established feature of the US scene, namely an expensive Liberal Arts school mainly aimed at the offspring of the wealthy. I wouldn’t want my own kids to go to it (and not just because of the fees), but there are plenty of parents in London who spend more than £18k a year on lunch, and to whom Grayling College will look like an excellent finishing school for their offspring.

T.S. Eliot, the iPad and me

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was first published in 1922, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. And in case you’re wondering what a technology columnist is doing making pronouncements like that, I should explain that I’m just quoting Andrew Motion, who used to be poet laureate and knows about these things. But for mere mortals, or at any rate engineers like me, the complexity of the poem has always put it out of reach. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to read it before concluding that it would have to be added to my list of futile aspirations.

Until now.

What has changed is that last week Touch Press, an innovative publishing outfit founded by Max Whitby, Theodore Gray and Stephen Wolfram, in partnership with the olde-worlde publisher Faber & Faber, launched a digital edition of the poem for the Apple iPad…

LATER: Interesting blog post by one of the App’s designers.

The Dutch do the right thing

Posted on by

Hurrah! The Netherlands has become the first European country to enshrine Net Neutrality in law. This from The Register.

The Dutch Parliament yesterday agreed to make the Netherlands the first nation in Europe to officially put net neutrality principles into law. The law will force ISPs and telecom operators to ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network.

The new telecom law has won a near unanimous vote, despite fierce opposition from telecom operators, who had been planning to charge for over-the-top services, such as Skype or WhatsApp Messenger, which bypass traditional cellular communications. Vodafone Netherlands is currently still blocking the use of Skype on its 3G mobile network.

Facing sharp criticism, the largest Dutch political party – the liberal VVD – withdrew an amendment which would still allow carriers and ISPs to charge extra for services. The proposal came from Afke Schaart, who until last year was Director of Public Affairs for KPN, the biggest telecom operator in the Netherlands.

In recent months, Dutch telecom operators have complained that the volume of text messaging is slowing sharply because of cross-platform mobile messaging apps which allow users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMSes.

Poetry corner

Posted on by

This is a passage from T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,  
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,  
Endeavours to engage her in caresses  
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.  
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;  
Exploring hands encounter no defence;  
His vanity requires no response,  
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all  
Enacted on this same divan or bed;  
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows on final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…

Q: Why does this passage remind one of a famous international banker?

The madness of the US healthcare system

Posted on by

Astonishing column by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.

Everyone knows — or should know — that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts: the government’s share and the private sector’s share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results to figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And here’s the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.

Think about that for a minute. Canada has a single-payer health-care system. The government is the only insurer of any note. The United Kingdom has a socialized system, in which the government is not only the sole insurer of note but also employs most of the doctors and nurses and runs most of the hospitals. And yet, measured as a share of the economy, our government health-care system is the largest of the bunch. 

And it’s worse than that: Atop our giant government health-care sector, we have an even more giant private health-care sector. Altogether, we’re spending about 16 percent of the GDP on health care. No other country even tops 12 percent. Which means we’ve got the worst of both worlds: huge government and high costs.

Online banking, pshaw

Posted on by

Much to the annoyance of some of my consultancy clients and my bank — and the amazement of friends (“What? Call yourself a technology columnist and not use Internet banking!!!”) — I don’t use online banking for the simple reason that I don’t think it’s secure. So this report from Good Morning Silicon Valley is grist to my mill.

The high-profile cyberattacks continue: Citigroup has been hacked, too, it told the Financial Times Wednesday. The May attack allowed hackers to access the names, account numbers and contact information of about 200,000 North American customers of the company, according to Reuters. Citigroup says other information such as card security codes, expiration dates and customers’ Social Security numbers are kept elsewhere and were not accessed.

While the FT quoted a Gartner analyst who said that “for the actual breach to happen at a bank is a very big deal,” because banks’ online systems are usually more secure, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said this morning that banks are frequent targets, according to the Reuters article. Bair said the FDIC may push banks to improve their online-security measures.

On a related note, and in case you missed it: What does happen when your bank gets hacked and your money is stolen? According to a judge’s ruling in one case in Maine, the bank can only do so much. Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that a construction company that fell victim to a password-stealing Trojan on an employee’s computer is out of luck in trying to recover about $300,000 from Ocean Bank. While Magistrate Judge John Rich agreed that the bank could stand to have a more secure authentication system, he said the law does not require it to have such a system, and that its system is comparable to that of other banks.