Fake identities to be available without prescription

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Now, let’s get this right. the purpose of the government’s ID card scheme is to make identity theft more difficult. So here’s how it will work, according to this Guardian report.

High street chemists, post offices and photo shops are to be used to record the electronic fingerprints and other biometric data needed for the national identity card scheme, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is to announce today.

The decision to use high street shops sidesteps the need for the Home Office to set up a network of enrolment centres with mobile units to operate in rural areas.

The move comes as the latest Home Office report to parliament on the costs of the scheme show they have risen by a further £221m to a total of £5.3bn over the next 10 years. That figure excludes the costs to other government departments and agencies of scanners and other equipment for verifying the identity of those trying to access public services…

So, who will vet Boots employees? Luckily, this nonsense is unlikely to survive New Labour’s forthcoming election defeat.

RSS RIP?

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Steve Gillmor thinks it’s dead.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Wolfram Alpha vs Google

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At last, some data. David Talbot got a login id from Wolfram and ran some comparative tests. For example:

SEARCH TERM: 10 pounds kilograms

WOLFRAM ALPHA: The site informed me that it interpreted my search term as an effort to multiply "10 pounds" by "1 kilogram" and gave me this result: 4.536 kg2 (kilograms squared) or 22.05 lb2 (pounds squared).

GOOGLE: Google gave me links to various metric conversion sites.

Tentative conclusion: the semantic web is still a long way off. The problem of search is only about 5% solved. Google accounts for 3% of that. Mr Talbot’s experiments suggest that Wolfram isn’t going to move it much beyond 6%. Still, it’s progress. And Google could do with some competition,

Bluebells

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High point of this Bank Holiday was a walk in a wood carpeted with bluebells.

Flickr versions here and here.

LATER: Nice message from Harry M:

Glad to see that yours are the native British variety. Round my neck of the woods we have been invaded by the Spanish variety which hybridises with the native and produces inferior offspring. See Bluebells in Wikipedia. From which an extract below.

“In Britain and probably elsewhere there has been extensive hybridisation with the introduced Hyacinthoides hispanica producing fertile seeds. This has produced hybrid swarms around sites of introductions and, since the the hybrids are able to thrive in a wider range of environmental conditions, the hybrids are frequently out-competing the native Bluebells. Hybrids show a great range of characteristics and any one of the following features indicates some hybridisation. Stems upright and not nodding; flowers borne on more than one side of the flowing stem; the flower is more open and bell shaped and does not have a long and more or less parallel sided tube; the anthers, at least when young are blue or cyan and not white or cream; the leaves are broader; the scent is less strong and less sweet.”

Wolfram Alpha hype machine gathers speed

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Well, well. “An invention that could change the internet for ever” is how the guy in the Indie describes it.

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

All based on second-hand ‘shock and awe’ quotes, I note. It’s conceivable, of course, that there’s something in it. For one thing, Jonathan Zittrain (who is no fool) seems to take it seriously — see his respectful introduction to Dr Wolfram’s lecture at Harvard Law.

Encarta RIP — the NYT’s belated obit

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This is odd — weeks after Microsoft announced that it was abandoning Encarta, the NYT publishes a piece by Randall Stross.

IN 1985, when Microsoft was turned down by Britannica, the conventional wisdom in the encyclopedia business held that a sales force that knocked on doors was indispensable, that encyclopedias were “sold, not bought.” Encarta showed that with a low-enough price — it was selling for $99 when Britannica introduced its own CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1994 for $995 — it could become the best-selling encyclopedia.

But the triumph was short-lived. Microsoft soon learned that the public would no longer pay for information once it was available free. Other information businesses, of course, are now confronting the same fact, but without the Windows and Office franchises to fall back upon.

Randall Stross is a good reporter, so my hunch is that this is a piece that’s been lying on the shelf for a while until a quiet news day arrived.

The World of To and For

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A few months ago I went into the local branch of my bank (Lloyds TSB) to do a non-routine transaction involving transferring a significant amount of cash. I’ve been a regular customer at the branch since 1985 and several of the staff know me by sight. All of my personal accounts and those of one of my companies are managed by the branch. But when it came to do the transaction, the cashier requested evidence of my ID. “Eh?” I replied. “What kind of ID?” Back came the reply: “A passport or driving licence will do”. Why did she need this, I inquired? “So that we know who you are.”

At this point I became rather, er, annoyed. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it isn’t a pretty sight. So eventually the ‘manager’ was called and in due course the transaction was carried out without production of any further documents. Of course this branch ‘manager’ didn’t know me personally. It’s not his job to know people. That function is now delegated to my “personal customer relationship manager” — i.e. the chap who writes to me at irregular intervals to say that he’s just taken up this interesting new post and would like to get to know me better. Needless to say, I’ve never met any of the holders of this important post.

Given this background — which I’m sure is entirely unexceptional — you can see why I have been struck by Charlie Leadbeater’s lovely essay for Cornerhouse. Here’s a taster:

Often in the name of doing things for people traditional, hierarchical organisations end up doing things to people. Companies say they work for consumers but often treat them like targets to be aimed at, wallets to be emptied, desires to be excited and manipulated. The person who calls himself my ‘personal relationship manager’ at a leading high street bank does not know me from Adam but in the cause of trying to sell me some savings products I do not want pretends that we are lifelong friends. In the name of doing something for me, actually he wanted to do something to me: relieve me of some money. Many experiences of public services are often little different. Social services departments were created to help people in need. Yet those on the receiving end of services often complain they feel they are being done to, processed by a bureaucratic machine.

How Google does it

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If you came on US Patent #7508978 you might stifle a yawn. Certainly you’d never suspect that it might be a design for radically changing our communications environment. Here’s what the Abstract says:

Detection of grooves in scanned images

A system and method locate a central groove in a document such as a book, magazine, or catalog. In one implementation, scores are generated for points in a three-dimensional image that defines a surface of the document. The scores quantify a likelihood that a particular point is in the groove. The groove is then detected based on the scores. For example, lines may be fitted through the points and a value calculated for the lines based on the scores. The line corresponding to the highest calculated value may be selected as the line that defines the groove.

Eh? And yet it turns out that this is the basis for Google’s amazingly efficient book-scanning technology.
In a lovely blog post, Maureen Clements explains how:

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who’ve pondered “How’d They Do That?” you finally have an answer.

LATER: How the Internet Archive scans books. As you can see from the movie, it’s pretty labour-intensive, despite the robotics.

The Two Cultures: fifty years on

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This morning’s Observer column.

…Over the years, Snow’s meme has been subjected to criticism and abuse, but the idea of mutually uncomprehending cultures still seems relevant to understanding why important segments of our society are struggling to come to terms with a networked world. In our case, the gap is not between the humanities and the sciences but those who are obsessed with lock-down and control, on the one hand, and those who celebrate openness and unfettered creativity on the other. The odd thing is that one finds arts and scientific types on both sides of this divide….