iCloud roundup

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The combination of iCloud with Apple’s coming mobile operating system will allow make its mobile devices more like standalone computers. Users will be able to activate and operate iPads and iPhones without ever needing to connect them to a computer running iTunes.

“We’re living in a post pc world,”said Scott Forstall, Apple’s SVP for iOS software, who shared the stage with Jobs, “if you want to cut the cord, you can.”

Forstall said that many of Apple’s customers were now people without computers who wanted their iPad or iPhone to be their only device.

(Emphasis added.)

[Source: Technology Review.]

The “post-PC” claim was made when the iPad was launched, but seemed idiotic at a time when the only way of activating the device was to hook it up via an umbilical cord to iTunes running on a PC. The surprise is that it took Apple this long to get around to it.

LATER: The NYT reports it like this:

Mr. Jobs said people will no longer have to manually sync mobile devices with their PCs, an approach that he said has become too unruly now that millions of people own music players, smartphones and tablets, each with photos, music, apps and other types of documents.

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” Mr. Jobs said, speaking on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference here. “We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”

“Everything happens automatically, and there is nothing new to learn,” he added.

STILL LATER: I love the Register’s headline over its report on the WWDC presentation:

Apple opens iCloud to world+dog

Jobs: ‘It’s not as crap as MobileMe. Promise’

EVEN LATER: Nieman Journalism Lab has a useful analysis of the iCloud announcements.

Webs of deceit

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Fascinating research using network analysis of email communications.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, wheel-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a wheel with a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

In the chart, the network of email communications about a corrupt project came out looking like the left-hand graph.

So network analysis tools are useful in forensic examination of communications. But so also are less sophisticated tools. Prosecutors in a recent big insider trading investigation in New York found that a key phrase to look for in email communications was “phone me”.

Personalisation and its discontents

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I’m reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. If you haven’t got time to read it, then his TED talk is a pretty good summary. He covers some of the same ground as Cass Sunstein did in Republic.com 2.0. This is a worrying and under-discussed unintended consequence of what seems like a useful affordance of networked technology. And ultimately it’s about politics.

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…

The power of metaphors

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My Observer column for today.

At first sight it looked like an April Fools’ joke. A branch of the US intelligence service called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it would be pouring millions of dollars into a “Metaphor Programme”. “Perhaps it’s a red herring,” observed a colleague, entering into the spirit of the thing. But then we remembered that the US intelligence establishment doesn’t do jokes, on account of it comprising lots of smart folks whose sense of humour was surgically removed at birth. So I read on.

“The Metaphor Programme,” said the solicitation (ie call for research proposals) from IARPA’s Office of Incisive Analysis (I am not making this up), “will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture. In the first phase of the two-phase programme, performers [IARPA’s intriguing term for researchers] will develop automated tools and techniques for recognising, defining and categorising linguistic metaphors associated with target concepts and found in large amounts of native-language text.”

Ah! So it’s computational linguistics on steroids. But why would US spooks suddenly develop an interest in an area that has hitherto been the preserve of humanities scholars?

Why YouTube’s adoption of Creative Commons licensing is a Big Deal

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GigaOM explains.

Making legal YouTube mashups just got a whole lot easier. The site’s video editor is now allowing its users to remix existing YouTube videos without violating anyone’s copyright. This is made possible by YouTube adopting Creative Commons licenses, offering users the chance to publish any video under the liberal CC-BY license. It’s a big step forward for YouTube, and a giant leap for Creative Commons, which previously hasn’t played a big role in the web video world.

Leica: bouncing back from near-bankruptcy?

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After sticking too long to film technology, it looks like Leica is finally getting the digital game figured out. Yesterday it announced a record profit of €248.9 million for the latest fiscal year, a significant increase from the €158.2 million it earned the previous year.

[Source]

Surprise, surprise: for-profit ‘universities’ put profits before students

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Nice LRB piece by Howard Hotson about the background to the private ‘university’ to which David Willetts seems so attached.

In 2004, a scathing report issued by the US Department of Education concluded that Phoenix, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, had a ‘high-pressure sales culture’ that intimidated recruiters who failed to meet targets and encouraged the enrolment of unqualified students – in short that it rewarded ‘the recruiters who put the most “asses in classes”’. Apollo illegally withheld the report, but it was leaked and the group’s value on the stock market crashed. A suit was brought alleging that its management had ‘disseminated materially false and misleading financial statements in an effort to inflate its stock price and attract investors’.

In 2006 the company’s controller and chief accounting officer resigned amid allegations that the books had been cooked; in 2007, the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council threatened to withdraw Apollo’s listing from the stock exchange; in 2008, a US federal jury in Arizona found Apollo guilty of ‘knowingly and recklessly’ misleading investors, and instructed the group to pay shareholders some $280 million in reparations. Apollo appealed, but the appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court on 8 March this year.

In the face of strenuous lobbying from the for-profit university industry, the Obama administration is now reversing the regulatory changes of the Bush years that allowed this bonanza. It has just been revealed that attorney-generals in ten states are investigating the University of Phoenix ‘for possible deceptive practices in its student recruiting and financing’ dating back to 2002. It looks like the party may be over, at least for the Apollo Group. Enrolment at Phoenix dropped by 42 per cent in the last three months of 2010. In January the group conceded that it expects applications to drop by another 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2011.

Is it possible that Willetts just doesn’t know what the Apollo Group was up to at the University of Phoenix? Or does he imagine that for some reason the same thing couldn’t happen here?