The only thing more depressing than the actual TV ‘debate’ between Clegg, Brown and Cameron is the brain-dead mainstream media ‘follow-up’ this morning. (You know the pattern: get a few randomly-selected ‘ordinary’ people and ask them what they thought about the debate. Zzzz…) So it was encouraging to find that one of my OU colleagues, Simon Buckingham-Shum (who has done a lot of work on visualising discourse and reasoning using tools like Compendium) had done a cognitive mapping of last night’s discussion. You can find his interactive map here. He also has a blog post about it. Great stuff.
LATER: The Google Blog has an interesting post about what Brits searched for during the debate. Includes this chart:
Lorcan Dempsey pointed me to an interesting essay by Evan Schnittman about different kinds of reading. Evan distinguishes between extractive reading (as in consulting reference works), immersive (“the exercise of deep reading that is dominated by narrative prose and requires a significant investment of time and concentration”) and pedagogic (“designed to train, not immerse. It is designed to move a reader through a series of deeper understandings of a topic, by building on a fairly specific sequence of learning objectives”).
To this, Lorcan has added a fourth type: interstitial reading (“reading in the interstices of our lives. The bathroom comes to mind, but I am in particular thinking about reading and travel.”)
The iPad seems an ideal device for interstitial reading, supporting social networking, immersive reading, extractive interaction with the web, and so on. However, it does not have the portability of the magazine, newspaper or paperback. For this reason, rumours about the smaller iPad seem to make a lot of sense. The Kindle on the other hand is eminently portable, and, importantly, can be held with one hand. But it is less well able to support the full variety of interstitial reading and network interactions. For this reason, it is not surprising to see it open up as a platform to other apps, although one imagines its niche will continue to be the immersive reader, albeit one that fits such reading into the various interstices of his or her daily routine.
This echoes my own recent experience. I have an iPod Touch and was initially sceptical about eBook software for the device. But then I started to use Stanza and Eucalyptus and have become totally converted — especially by the latter, which hooks directly to Project Gutenberg. So downloaded onto my iPod is a nice little library of books that I love re-reading (like Joyce’s Ulysses), or have wanted to read for ages.
Because I do a lot of ferrying of teenage kids around, I’m often waiting for people to turn up. In the old days, if I didn’t have a newspaper with me, that was dead time (I rarely remembered to bring a physical book in the car). Now, this ‘dead time’ is often a delight. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve read two E.M. Forster novels. And large chinks of Mr Bloom’s adventures.
Wow! Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens are investigating whether Papa Ratzi could be arrested on an ICC warrant when he visits the UK. Dawkins writes:
Lashing out in desperation, church spokesmen are now blaming everybody but themselves for their current dire plight, which one official spokesman likens to the worst aspects of antisemitism (what are the best ones, I wonder?). Suggested culprits include the media, the Jews, and even Satan. The church is hiding behind a seemingly endless stream of excuses for having failed in its legal and moral obligation to report serious crimes to the appropriate civil authorities. But it was Cardinal Ratzinger’s official responsibility to determine the church’s response to allegations of child sex abuse, and his letter in the Kiesle case makes the real motivation devastatingly explicit. Here are his actual words, translated from the Latin in the AP report:
“This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.”
“The young age of the petitioner” refers to Kiesle, then aged 38, not the age of any of the boys he tied up and raped (11 and 13). It is completely clear that, together with a nod to the welfare of the “young” priest, Ratzinger’s primary concern, and the reason he refused to unfrock Kiesle (who went on to re-offend) was “the good of the universal church”.
But Papa Ratzi is a head of state — and thus surely could claim Sovereign Immunity. Geoffrey Robertson QC says “not necessarily”:
This claim could be challenged successfully in the UK and in the European Court of Human Rights. But in any event, head of state immunity provides no protection for the pope in the international criminal court (see its current indictment of President Bashir). The ICC Statute definition of a crime against humanity includes rape and sexual slavery and other similarly inhumane acts causing harm to mental or physical health, committed against civilians on a widespread or systematic scale, if condoned by a government or a de facto authority. It has been held to cover the recruitment of children as soldiers or sex slaves. If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic, but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto authority then they fall within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC – if that practice continued after July 2002, when the court was established.
“At last”, writes George Monbiot, “we are waking up to what international law means. For the first time in modern history the underlying assumption of political life – that those who exercise power over us will not be judged by the same legal and moral norms as common citizens – is beginning to crack.”
If only… Somehow I can’t see Ratzi coming down the steps of his plane handcuffed to Inspector Knacker. But it’s interesting that people are beginning to think like this.
Clearly Vatican Inc. doesn’t know anything about Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes (“when you’re in one, stop digging”). Take what happened yesterday in Chile when Papa R’s leading aide did some more digging. According to the Times:
Speaking on a visit to Chile, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, said: “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and paedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.”
This kind of stupidity proved too much even for the Vatican, which moved rapidly moved to distance itself today from Bertone’s comments. A spin doctor, Father Federico Lombardi, was mustered to explain that:
the remarks by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, went outside the remit of Church authorities, adding that the comments had been misunderstood.
“General assertions of a specifically psychological or medical nature” were the responsibility of specialists and not Church officials, he said in a statement.
Father Lombardi said that Cardinal Bertone had been referring only to cases of paedophilia in the clergy and not to “the world population”.
Ah! I see.
In the meantime, can I recommend this terrific lecture by Stephen Fry on why Vatican Inc. is not a force for good? Which, when you think about it, must be the understatement of the — still young — century.
The iPad's like an amazing hairdresser — who wants to monitor your bathroom for authorized shampoo, conditioner, and water. By building a device that liberates services, but locks down ‘product’, Apple’s shooting itself in the iFace. It’s as if Apple wants to step into the hyperconnected network age — but also keep one foot firmly planted in the industrial era.
The iParadox is this: Apple should be striving to commoditize products if it wants to benefit from services (or vice versa). But it’s trying to benefit from both at once — which is, simply put, strategically self-destructive. One is the mirror image of the other.
The real promise of the iPad is to help the beleaguered media industry, bereft of imagination, kickstart the great shift from products to services. Media’s been stuck for too long in the the industrial era, trading in mass-produced, mega-marketed stuff. But in a hyperconnected world, as media players are finding out the hard way, mere stuff’s a commodity. Service economics are superior: services are less risky, less capital intensive, higher skill, higher loyalty, and dramatically less imitable. The result is that service-centric businesses tend to have higher margins and create significantly more value than product-centric businesses. That’s why every economy (and sector) that transitions past the industrial era is built on them…
From Tim Bray, who has recently started at Google.
I woke up before the alarm went off in the Google Apartment where I was staying, not far off Castro street in Mountain View. The apartments are comfy but don’t have a lot of personality. Each has good WiFi, two bedrooms and two bathrooms; my flatmate was a taciturn Czech who worked on “data security”. Tim, curious: “What sort of data security work?” Heavy Czech accent: “Every sort of data security.” [Silence falls.]
I didn’t allow time for more than showering and dressing; headed out in the morning cool from the Google Apartment to pick up the early Google Bus on Mercy Street, didn’t Peter Gabriel write a nice song about that? An extremely multinational sprinkling of fellow Googlers boarded with me, but at that hour there wasn’t much chatter. That particular route is circular, the long way around the circle on the way in so I opened the laptop and did some morning input using the Google WiFi on the Google Bus.
At Sun, my closest collaborators tended to be at points east, often across the Atlantic, so when I woke up there was usually lots of email waiting for me. Google is sufficiently West-Coast-centric that it’s not uncommon for the morning harvest to be just routine mailing-list traffic; feels weird. But this particular morning I had an early call with Reto in London.
By the time that was finished, breakfast was in full swing at the Google cafés; I favor one across the street from the building where I sit. When breakfast starts they put on weird cheery eclectic music; cowboy stuff last Wednesday. I lean to the Google bacon, fresh fruit, a little wee scoop of hash browns, and Google coffee, which is perfectly OK.
I didn’t see anyone I knew, so I was one of the substantial proportion of solitary breakfasters, reading feeds and poking at the weird Java introspection hairball that I’d failed to sort out before bedtime…
A top White House cybersecurity aide said yesterday that transnational cybercrime, such as thefts of credit-card numbers and corporate secrets, is a far more serious concern than ‘cyberwar’ attacks against critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.
Christopher Painter, the White House’s senior director for cybersecurity, made his comments at a conference arranged by top Russian cybersecurity officials in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Russia is a major source of cybercrime, but its government has declined to sign the European Convention on Cybercrime–the first international treaty on the subject. The treaty aims to harmonize national laws and allow for greater law-enforcement cooperation between nations.
Painter acknowledged that critical infrastructure needed to be made more secure, but said that the best defenses start by cracking down on crime. “There are a couple of things we need to do to harden the targets, and make the systems as secure as possible,” he said. “But the other thing you need to do is reduce the threat. And the predominant threat we face is the criminal threat–the cybercrime threat in all of its varied aspects.”
… in 1970, the Apollo 13 mission was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. The Hollywood version of the crisis and its resolution (which starred Tom Hanks) is one of my all-time favourite movies. I often recommend it to kids who are thinking of studying engineering because it’s one of the best advertisements for the profession that I know of. It’s interesting also to think that if a similar crisis occurred today one of our strategies would be to ‘cloudsource’ the brainstorming.
Just as Microsoft announces that it is to offer free, ad-supported Web versions of Office applications, Google unveils some really significant enhancements to Google Docs. Could the two things be connected? Perish the thought. And isn’t it interesting that some of the Docs enhanvements remind one of, er, Wave?
