Am still grinning at this. First tweet: “Wrecked the boat. Totaled. Everyone dead. FAIL”. And the last one? Why, isn’t it obvious? “Back Home! Who R all these random dudes?”
Ye olde advertising
Spotted in Cambridge today. Hasn’t changed in — what? — 70 years?
Eye-Fi
Hmmm… If I’d come on this on April 1 I’d have thought it was a good spoof. But it seems to be real.
The Eye-Fi Card stores photos & videos like a traditional memory card, and fits in most cameras. When you turn your camera on within range of a configured Wi-Fi network, it wirelessly transfers your photos & videos. Better yet: you can automatically have them sent to your computer (PC or Mac), or to your favorite photo sharing website – or both!
As far as I can see, the Eye-Fi to Flickr link only works in the US. (It’s a bit like the Amazon Kindle in that respect.) But it still looks like a really neat idea.
Thanks to Rory Cellan-Jones for the original link.
The consolations of ignorance
It’s always agreeable to find idiots talking nonsense. But it’s depressing to find good people doing it. Henry Porter has done great work in defence of liberty in Britain, but he’s written a truly idiotic rant this morning about Google. I was particularly struck by this passage.
One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.
Then he invokes (who else?) Why, our old friend Thomas Jefferson:
In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.
Well, up to a point, Lord Porter. I’m be all in favour of newspapers that perform that noble function. The only problem is that 95% of them haven’t performed it for decades, if ever. Mostly they operated by printing as much crap as could fit between the advertisements. When Craigslist took away the ads they were left with only the crap — for which, oddly enough, customers are reluctant to pay.
The annoying thing about Porter’s piece is that there are really good grounds (e.g. these) for being worried about Google. But they have almost nothing to do with its impact on print newspapers, which would have withered of their own accord because of the way the Internet dissolved their value chains. Google is a monopoly that will present the Obama administration with its first serious anti-trust headache. If they thought that General Motors was too big to fail, just imagine what they will face when the time comes to take on Google.
Beeb haters: be careful about what you wish for. You might just get it
Lovely column by Marina Hyde.
Only this week The Wire’s own Dominic West said that British TV lacked high-end contemporary drama but did costume drama brilliantly – a statement swiftly spun and used as a stick to beat the BBC by the very people who would like nothing more than for most of the corporation’s output to be bonnet- and corset-wrapped. Fortunately, by yesterday morning the mother of all anti-BBC bandwagons was fully operational again, as Ofcom finally handed down its fine to the BBC for the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross Sachsgate business, allowing Beeb bashers to once more swarm the airwaves and internets to rail against the monstrous licence fee.
Have any of these people seen the likes of Moment of Truth, one wondered idly, in which our hero Mike Darnell hooked up semi-witting participants to lie detectors, whereupon they were asked “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”, or questioned about their porn-watching habits?
Whether or not it is a fact capable of being grasped by those who wish to destroy the BBC, this is what their telly will look like if and when they succeed. Not necessarily immediately, but give it a couple of years and we’ll be slinging nymphomaniac dwarves on to an island with the worst of them.
The reason we are forced to make do with BBC shows such as Blue Planet or Little Dorrit, or indeed acclaimed programmes on commercial channels, is that rival broadcasters cannot compete with the BBC for funding. They therefore have to compete for quality, an arrangement that in the good times raises standards across the board. In these grim economic times for commercial broadcasters, the licence fee might be the only guarantee that programmes will be made at all…
Great stuff. Every time I have an American guest and they listen to Radio 4 or see BBC4 or 2, they shake their heads in wonderment that such things are still possible. And yet there are lots of folks around in the UK (not to mention in the Daily Mail) who would like to destroy it.
The Wikipedia ‘debate’: time to move on
This morning’s Observer column.
Unwillingness to entertain the notion that Wikipedia might fly is a symptom of what the legal scholar James Boyle calls ‘cultural agoraphobia’ – our prevailing fear of openness. Like all phobias it’s irrational, so is immune to evidence. I’m tired of listening to brain-dead dinner-party complaints about how ‘inaccurate’ Wikipedia is. I’m bored to death by endless accounts of slurs or libels suffered by a few famous individuals at the hands of Wikipedia vandals. And if anyone ever claims again that all the entries in Wikipedia are written by clueless amateurs, I will hit them over the head with a list of experts who curate material in their specialisms. And remind them of Professor Peter Murray-Rust’s comment to a conference in Oxford: “The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.”
Of course Wikipedia has flaws, of course it has errors: show me something that doesn’t. Of course it suffers from vandalism and nutters who contribute stuff to it. But instead of complaining about errors, academics ought to be in there fixing them. Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions we have. Isn’t it time we accepted it? Microsoft has.
Speak up, man, speak up
Hmmm… In the old days, the only risk to one’s hearing from playing golf came from listening to 19th Hole bores. But things have moved on, as I discover from this interesting column by a prof at my old university.
The coefficient of restitution (Cor) of a golf club is a measure of the efficiency of energy transfer between the golf club head and the golf ball. The upper Cor limit for a golf club in competition is 0.83, which means that a golf club head striking a golf ball at 100km per hour will cause the ball to travel at 83km/h. The thinner faced titanium clubs, such as the King Cobra LD, have a greater Cor and deform more easily on impact – the “trampoline effect” – not only driving the golf ball further, but producing a louder noise than the stainless steel golf drivers. The King Cobra LD had a Cor greater than 0.83, but I understand that the current King Cobra drivers are allowable in competition and have been tuned to reduce noise.
The BMJ paper describes a man aged 55 who presented to an eye, ear, nose and throat clinic with tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. He had been playing golf three times a week for 18 months using a King Cobra LD titanium club and he described the noise of the club hitting the ball as “like a gun going off”. He found the noise so unpleasant he was forced to discard the club. After detailed examination it was concluded that his hearing impairment was due to the noise of the golf club hitting the golf ball.
The researchers did an internet search of reviews of the King Cobra LD club. Typical comments were: “It can be heard all over the course, it is mad!” and “This is not so much a ting as a sonic boom which resonates across the course.”
Buchanan and colleagues measured the sound levels produced by six different titanium golf drivers and six standard thicker- faced stainless steel drivers, at a distance of 1.7m from the point of golf club impact with the ball, the average distance between the golfer’s right ear and the point of impact. The thin-faced titanium clubs were all louder than the stainless steel clubs. The King Cobra LD was not the loudest – that distinction went to the Ping G10.
The BMJ paper concludes: “Our results show that thin-faced titanium drivers may produce sufficient sound to induce temporary, or even permanent, cochlear damage in susceptible individuals. The study presents anecdotal evidence that caution should be exercised by golfers who play regularly with thin-faced titanium drivers to avoid damage to their hearing.”
Will Google be a benign foster-parent? Don’t bet on it
When you think about the way the academic world allowed itself to be hooked by the scientific periodical racketeers, it makes sense to be wary of any commercial outfit that looks like acquiring a monopoly of a valuable resource. The obvious candidate du jour is Google, which is busily scanning all those orphan works (i.e. works whose copyright owners cannot be found) in libraries in order to make them available to a grateful (academic) world. Some people are (rightly) suspicious and are going to challenge the legal settlement which Google negotiated with publishers in the US. At the JISC ‘Libraries of the Future’ event in Oxford last Thursday, Robert Darnton of Harvard (pictures above) said some perceptive things about the potential threats ahead. So it was interesting to see this piece in this morning’s NYT.
These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June.
While most orphan books are obscure, in aggregate they are a valuable, broad swath of 20th-century literature and scholarship.
Determining which books are orphans is difficult, but specialists say orphan works could make up the bulk of the collections of some major libraries.
Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.
The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”
Yep. I’ve always thought that Google will be Microsoft’s successor as the great anti-trust test for the Obama Administration. I hope the DoJ is tooling up for it.
Colloquialisms
“If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better”.
Strunk & White, Elements of Style, page 34.
Mea culpa. This is an abiding sin of mine. I will try to do better in future.
It’s a Depression, stoopid
From Robert Reich’s Blog.
Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.
Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.
All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted…