Email is so…well, 20th century

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Well, according to the Wall Street Journal anyway.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time…

A typical example of those potboiler pieces that the Journal and the NYT churn out every few weeks. The journalistic equivalent of boilerplate. No thought required.

The China syndrome

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James Fallows is back from his sojourn in China. His reflections on the health risks of living in a Chinese city are sobering. Sample:

The health situation for ordinary Chinese people is obviously no joke. After stalling, the Chinese government recently accepted a World Bank estimate that some 750,000 of its people die prematurely each year just from air pollution. Alarming upsurges in birth defects and cancer rates are reported even in the state-controlled press.

How long could outsiders live in big, polluted Chinese cities before facing the same actuarial risks as the people who’d grown up there? Now that foreigners have business, cultural, and sheer-fascination reasons to spend time in China, should those opaque skies scare them away? While we were in China, my wife and I joked with friends that now was the time to take up smoking, since our lungs would never know the difference. After returning to the U.S., I decided to ask doctors and public-health experts how much long-term damage foreigners do themselves in exchange for the experience and opportunity of China. This was no one’s idea of a comprehensive survey—and informants still working in China asked me not to use their names—but I was struck by three recurring themes.

The first one was, It’s really bad! As a foreign-trained doctor in Beijing put it, “Just using your eyes, you know this can’t be good for anybody.” Another way to know this is via a clandestine air-quality station that the U.S. Embassy has built in Beijing. The Chinese government does not report, and may not even measure, what other countries consider the most dangerous form of air pollution: PM2.5, the smallest particulate matter, tiny enough to work its way deep into the alveoli. Instead, Chinese reports cover only the grosser PM10 particulates, which are less dangerous but more unsightly, because they make the air dark and turn your handkerchief black if you blow your nose. (Spitting on the street: routine in China. Blowing your nose into a handkerchief: something no cultured person would do.) These unauthorized PM2.5 readings, sent out on a Twitter stream (BeijingAir), show the pollution in Beijing routinely to be in the “Very Unhealthy” or “Hazardous” range, not seen in U.S. cities in decades. I’ve heard from friends about persistent coughs and blood tests that show traces of heavy metals. “I encourage people with children not to consider extended tours in China,” a Western-trained doctor said. “Those little lungs.”

Sex 2.0

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Hmmm… This is from a site called I Just Made Love which claims to show “on the map of the world places where people just made love”. Now I know that funny things go on in aeroplanes sometimes, but somehow those markers in mid-Atlantic look, er, fishy. Especially since some of the, ah, entries claim that the happy couple employed up to five different positions. Still, it just shows what can be done with Web 2.0

Coping with the data tsunami

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Interesting article in today’s NYT about the challenges posed by the coming avalanche of experimental data.

The next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and could store about 500 billion pages of text.)

It was not long ago that the notion of one company having anything close to 40 billion photos would have seemed tough to fathom. Google, meanwhile, churns through 20 times that amount of information every single day just running data analysis jobs. In short order, DNA sequencing systems too will generate many petabytes of information a year.

The article makes the rather good point that today’s university students, for the most part, will be imprinted on the rather feeble personal computer technology that they use today, and so are not attuned to the kit that will be required to do even routine science in a few years. It cites some of the usual scare stories — e.g. from astronomy:

The largest public database of such images available today comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has about 80 terabytes of data, according to Mr. Connolly. A new system called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is set to take more detailed images of larger chunks of the sky and produce about 30 terabytes of data each night. Mr. Connolly’s graduate students have been set to work trying to figure out ways of coping with this much information.

Acorns, oaks and Silicon Fen

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This morning’s Observercolumn.

For those of us who were around Cambridge in the 1970s and 1980s, Micro Men, BBC4’s dramatisation of the days when Britain (briefly) led the home computing business, raised some awkward questions. Were our jackets really so awful? (Yes.) Did geeks use oscilloscope probes to eat takeaway noodles? (Probably.) Were the technology programmes on TV really as embarrassing as all that? (Yes.) Was Clive Sinclair's hair really as improbable as the hairpiece welded to the pate of Alexander Armstrong, the actor playing him in the film? (No.) Was Sinclair as insufferably pompous as he was portrayed? (Mostly.)

And did he assail his rival, Chris Curry (co-founder of Acorn Computers), in the Baron of Beef pub with a rolled-up newspaper shouting, “You fucking buggering shit-bucket!”? (Yes, according to the Guardian.)

Heady days, eh? But at the core of this story of rivalry between former collaborators was a problem that still plagues the start-ups in the Cambridge ‘technology cluster’, namely how to make the transition from being a small team of bright people to being a global company…

Osborne’s arithmetic

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Damn! The country needs a new government and it turns out that the only possible contenders under our daft electoral system are this crowd of old-Etonian amateurs.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said the shadow chancellor's proposed saving, outlined at the Conservative party conference this week, would take five years longer than estimated and fall £3bn short.

NIESR said Osborne’s team had made a mistake in their calculations, misreading a paper written by the thinktank earlier this year. Osborne's aides originally based their calculations on a NIESR document in the House of Commons library. After his speech the thinktank sought clarification of his assumptions. It has recalculated the figures and will present them at a conference on Monday.

Mind you, we’ve known this for a while. A year ago they misread the banking crisis almost as comprehensively as John McCain.

It wasn’t me, guv

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I’ve always believed that the best general philosophical null hypothesis is that nobody knows anything. This week’s Economist has a lovely tongue-in-cheek editorial about bank bosses which confirms the wisdom of my position.

Certainly, bank bosses displayed the hubris of all big corporate baddies: paying themselves loads, making nutty expense claims try an $87,000 rug and, in one case, playing bridge in Detroit as their firm collapsed. Compared with Kenneth Lay of Enron or Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, however, they were amateurs. Most were useless rather than venal.

Far from expertly manipulating their firms’ books, many could not understand them. Citigroup’s boss reportedly learned of its $43 billion of toxic assets only in September 2007 he was told losses were unlikely. UBS’s own post mortem found that “at no stage” did managers have a decent assessment of its subprime exposure. Merrill Lynch signalled a $5 billion write-down in October 2007, only to increase it to $8 billion a mere 19 days later. Even when they had decent numbers, executives struggled to manage their mutinous staff. One ex-boss says his job was “less management, more crowd control”. Meanwhile shareholders pushed bosses to take risks. The vast majority backed RBS’s suicidal takeover of ABN AMRO.

The paper notes that, faced with the catastrophe, corporate-governance gurus are “scraping around, like scholars of jurisprudence in a state of nature”, and suggests some common-sense measures instead:

What firms need is a culture of excellence—but that is like saying all football teams should be like Manchester United. Perhaps the clearest lesson is that big banks are as close as businesses can get to being unmanageable. Bank of America’s assets are now ten times those of Exxon Mobil, America’s most valuable firm. A balance-sheet of $2.3 trillion is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Even firms staffed only by all-knowing deities—such as Goldman Sachs—look like giant black boxes to outsiders. If the new bank bosses want to be in charge, they must shrink and simplify their firms. That way, next time round, they really can be blamed for everything.