What’s the point of technology, really?

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Mark Anderson in thoughtful mood.

What is the fascination with technology today? Who needs another megahertz of this, or to shrink that a bit more, or to cut another ten percent off the production cost? Why would anyone care?

Oh, but this screen does this, and that drive is a little faster, and this flash chip is cheaper this year, and IBM is said to be monopolizing mainframes while Rackspace commoditizes servers. Really?

Without application to human needs, the thrill quickly wears off. Yes, when it can do something really meaningful, like provide food to a village, or health care, or clean water, then technology really is magic. But, after all the stories of this kind, how often does this really happen? Like the short-queens of the hedge fund crowd, aren’t we really, ultimately, just mostly messing with each other, on someone else’s nickel? Is it a game? And, if so, is it a game with a hidden cost as large as the hedge queens’?

What can we do to make technology, or anything, meaningful ? Maybe we need to re-allocate our teams, and put more emphasis on revolution, on real science, and less on evolution, or incremental change. Will technology be the answer to the world’s energy problems? Or will we discover that Clean Coal is really nothing but a PR ploy? How many of us are working on real problems, and how many on improving the next MP3 player? Can we tell the difference?

A sobering question for those of us who gambol delightedly in fields of gadgetry. Also I wonder what the gender dimension of this is: although there are some very distinguished women in this space (I think, for example, of Karlin Lillington and Laura James and the late, great Karen Sparck-Jones) it seems a predominately male playground. And I’m reminded of a lovely story Dave Barry told years ago when the Humvee was first released in civilian form and he was given one for a day. He relates how he proudly took his wife for a drive.

“So what can it do?” she asked.
“Lots of cool stuff” replied Dave.
“Like what?”
“Well”, said Dave, “I can inflate or deflate the tyres while we’re driving along.
“Why?” asked his wife.

He had no answer. I suspect that lots of us are really in that position. The stuff is endlessly fascinating, sure. But does it really matter? Isn’t much of it just leading-edge uselessness?

Joined-up government, not

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Fascinating post surveying the linking policies of UK public sector websites. I particularly liked the London Fire Brigade site which operates one of the most restrictive linking policies in existence, banning deep-linking and threatening “further action” for “breach” of this “legal restriction” if you’ve not informed LFB you’ve linked to their site:

ATTENTION: LINKING TO THIS WEBSITE INDICATES THAT YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS OF USE AND LEGAL RESTRICTIONS AND THAT YOU WILL ABIDE BY THE GUIDELINES SET OUT BELOW. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THESE TERMS OF USE OR YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ABIDE BY THESE GUIDELINES, DO NOT LINK TO THIS WEBSITE

If you provide hyperlinks to this Website, you agree that you…

* shall not link to an internal page of this Website that is located one or several levels down from the home page or bring up or present Content of this Website on another website without our prior written permission; shall not link to a website that is not owned by you;

* shall inform us in writing of the link; and

* shall immediately discontinue the link if instructed to do so by us.

We expressly reserve the right to revoke the right granted in this section for any breach of these Terms of Use and to take any further action it deems appropriate in respect of such breach.

Something for Tom Watson, I think.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for the original link.

Premature obituaries

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From the Editor of The Buffalo News…

Maybe this is what Mark Twain had in mind when he quipped, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

The former Buffalo newspaper editor must have understood what it’s like to be alive and well, even as the public wipes away a quiet tear at your demise.

That’s what life is like these days for many of us who work at The Buffalo News. People seem to think we’re at death’s door.

It’s far from true. There’s no question that American newspapers are going through difficult times. Large, well-established papers in major cities are going bankrupt or, in a couple of cases, closing altogether.

Here at The News, we’re more fortunate— although certainly not unaffected by the difficult trends.

How are we more fortunate?

1. We’re making a profit. The decline in advertising revenue is significant—and likely to get worse— but we’re still in the black and planning to stay that way.

2. We have none of the crippling debt that many newspaper owners are carrying. Many of those debt-heavy papers would be making money if it weren’t for their debt load.

3. We have extraordinarily high acceptance among local residents. The News, as a print newspaper, has the highest “market penetration” among the 50 or so largest metropolitan dailies in the United States.

4. Our Web site is the leading local media Web site, by far, in Western New York. When you combine the Web site and the newspaper, we’re reaching 80 percent of Western New Yorkers on a regular basis…

The power of Art

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Here’s something I ought to have known, but didn’t until I heard an art critic on Radio 4 talking about it this morning. This report dates from February 2003.

In an act with extraordinary historical resonance, United Nations officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural “Guernica” during US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.

Picasso’s painting commemorates a small Basque village bombed by German forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painter, in desolate black, white and grey, depicts a nightmarish scene of men, women, children and animals under bombardment. The twisted, writhing forms include images of a screaming mother holding a dead child, a corpse with wide-open eyes and a gored horse. Art historian Herbert Read described the work as “a cry of outrage and horror amplified by a great genius.”

The reproduction has hung outside the Security Council chamber at UN headquarters in New York since its donation by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1985. As the council gathered to hear Powell on Wednesday, workers placed a blue curtain and flags of the council’s member countries in front of the tapestry.

UN officials claimed that the cover-up was simply a matter of creating a more effective backdrop for the television cameras. “When we do have large crowds we put the flags up and the UN logo in front of the tapestry,” asserted Stephane Dujarric. New York Newsday, however, reported that “Diplomats at the United Nations, speaking on condition they not be named, have been quoted in recent days telling journalists that they believe the United States leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq.”

This is an extraordinary story. It reminds me of the anecdote (possibly apocryphal?) of a German diplomat looking intently at the painting and then turning to Picasso. “Did you do this?” he asked. “No”, replied the painter, “you did”. As the Italians say, if it’s not true tehn it ought to be.

Digital = ‘free’ (to all intents and purposes)

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Very perceptive column by Emily Bell.

In the struggle to find new terminology that accurately describes concepts we don’t fully understand, sometimes language fails us. ‘New media’ is one such term that fails to describe seismic structural change, and insultingly foists the moniker of ‘old media’ on to vibrant formats such as broadcast television and newspapers. What we mean when we say ‘new media’ is most often ‘digital’.

This is much more helpful, as ‘digital’ carries with it a whole set of properties that can be readily understood and that go beyond media and into other areas of society. One key, defining principle of things that are ‘digital’ is that they can be very easily copied, compressed and transmitted. In other words, ‘digital’ and ‘free’; (in every sense, not just the monetary sense) go together like Morecambe and Wise, fish and chips, or banks and bailout.

This is something that the media, their ruling institutions, governments and regulators are all currently coming to terms with: once something is digitised, the ability over time to control it, charge for it, regulate it or contain it exponentially decreases…

Let me through — I outrank PageRank

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From Advertising Age.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine’s undifferentiated slush of results.

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.

“You should not have a system,” one content executive said, “where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately.”

Glyn Moody is not impressed.

Let’s just get this right. The publishers resent the fact that the stuff other than “professional content” is rising to the top of Google searches, because of the PageRank algorithm. But wait, doesn’t the algorithm pick out the stuff that has most links – that is, those sources that people for some reason find, you know, more relevant?

So doesn’t this mean that the “professional content” isn’t, well, so relevant? Which means that the publisher are essentially getting what they deserve because their “professional content” isn’t actually good enough to attract people’s attention and link love?

And the idea that Google’s PageRank is somehow “penalising” paid content by not ignoring the fact that people are reading it less than other stuff, is just priceless. Maybe publishers might want to consider *why* their “professional content” is sinking like a stone, and why people aren’t linking to it? You know, little things like the fact it tends to regard itself as above the law – or the algorithm, in this case?

Darwin in statu pupillari

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Well, well. So Charles D was a perfectly normal undergraduate for his day.

Two hundred years after Charles Darwin’s birth, historians have gained new insight into his days as a student at Cambridge after unearthing bills that record intimate details of how he spent his money.

The revolutionary scientist was, it would appear, ahead of his time in his willingness to pay extra to supplement his daily intake of vegetables. And, as one would expect of a 19th-century gentleman, he was happy to pay others to carry out menial tasks for him, such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes.

But there is little to suggest that he bought many books, or that he did much else to further his studies. The evolutionist famously spent little of his time studying or in lectures, preferring to shoot, ride and collect beetles.

The records, which were found in six previously overlooked college books, are due to be published online tomorrow on the Complete Works of Charles Darwin website (darwin-online.org.uk). They allow historians to pinpoint the date of his arrival at Christ’s College (26 January 1828), as well as providing previously unknown detail of his undergraduate life.

Darwin’s time at Cambridge, from 1828 to 1831 – which he would later describe as “the most joyful of my happy life” – is also one for which there is a comparative shortage of information. “Before this, we didn’t really know very much about Darwin’s daily life at Cambridge at all,” said Dr John van Wyhe, director of the Darwin website. “It had been assumed that there were no significant traces of his time here left to discover, which meant that we were short of information about one of the most formative parts of his life.

Now, in his 200th anniversary year, we have found a real treasure trove right in the middle of Cambridge.”

As it happens, I was in the Zoology Museum the other night, at the launch of the Cambridge Science Festival, when I came on some display cases showing some of Darwin’s finches (above) and the beetle collection he amassed during his time as a student (below).

There’s something magical about coming face to face with objects like this. They have the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin used to go on about in The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.