Mapping Professional Networks

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I’ve often reflected on the discrepancy between the structures of companies shown in official organisation charts and the informal networks that orchestrate the real work that’s done. An obvious way of charting the ‘real’ networks would be to map the email and other communications of workers — though of course it would raise privacy and other issues. (Not that corporate employees should assume that their email is ever private.) Now comes an interesting post about how IBM has developed tools (one code-named Atlas) for doing just this:

Atlas’s most powerful features rely on the data available through Connections… It collects information about professional relationships based not only on job descriptions and information readily available through the corporate directory, but also through blog tags, bookmarks, and group membership. Atlas can be configured to look at e-mail and instant-message patterns, and to weigh different types of information more or less heavily. The result, Lamb says, is a set of tools that go beyond the simple networks that are clear from a corporation’s structure…

Getting your retal… er, review in first

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Rory Cellan-Jones has written a pre-emptive of 2008

January

At CES in Las Vegas, Bill Gates makes his final keynote before stepping down at Microsoft. Guess what? The digital home of the future is here at last and it is powered by Windows Media Center.

One week later in San Francisco, Steve Jobs uses his Macworld keynote to show us round the iHome (“way cool”). It is run by a revamped Apple TV set-top box, and allows you to get all your stuff – movies, music, photos and groceries – piped to you through iTunes….

Neat idea. Wish I’d thought of it.

Blogging: reality check

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I’ve just come across a lovely New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory.

One dog is saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.

Copyright thuggery takes a new twist

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Interesting report in the Washington Post…

In an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

The piece attracted 283 comments, one of which usefully pointed to the RIAA’s own FAQ page. This says:

11. How is downloading music different from copying a personal CD?

Record companies have never objected to someone making a copy of a CD for their own personal use. We want fans to enjoy the music they bought legally.

Quite so. But later there’s a link labelled “for more on what the law says about copying CDs, click here”. This leads to the MusicUnited.org site and the following claims:

# It’s okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.

# It’s also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R’s, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) – but, again, not for commercial purposes.

# Beyond that, there’s no legal “right” to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:

* The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own

* The copy is just for your personal use.

What this highlights is that there is no limit to what the copyright industries will seek to extort from consumers unless they are constrained by law. It’s only a short step from the RIAA’s apparent position as revealed here (that being allowed to rip a CD onto your hard drive for your personal use is a privilege which “won’t usually raise concerns”, rather than a right) to arguing that merely looking at a web page constitutes making a copy — because a computer can only display a web page after a copy of the page has been loaded into the video RAM of the user’s computer.

If these industries were allowed to get their way, they would reduce the web to a shambles of permanent ongoing micro-payment negotiation.

Thanks to Chris Walker for the original link.

We’re in this together, Mervyn. Do stay, please, and get us out of it

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From a letter to Mervyn King from Gordon Brown (as imagined by my colleague, William Keegan).

…The great thing about the tripartite system of financial regulation (I know I shouldn’t say this!) is that everyone blames everyone else and the public gets confused. I agree with you that our strategy must be to learn the lessons and try harder.

Nevertheless, before all this hit us for six, you were rightly seen as a highly successful chairman of the monetary policy committee. I also note that while I thought balance-of-payments and sterling crises were things of the past, you persistently warned that the economy needed ‘rebalancing’ and that the exchange rate was too high.

Well, the balance-of-payments figures for the third quarter were horrendous. We may now be on the verge of a full-scale sterling crisis. I need you to handle this, Mr Governor, and many other little local difficulties. Please stay. All is forgiven.

Good news and bad

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This morning’s Observer column…

That’s the good news. The bad news is that spam will continue to increase and we may finally discover what the Storm ‘botnet’ – the colossal network of compromised Windows machines someone has been covertly building over the past year – is for. My hunch is that the net is headed for its own version of 9/11. So enjoy it while it lasts. Happy New Year…

Huckabee Hound on the Bhutto business

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Good to see that the crisis in Pakistan is occupying candidates for the Republican nomination for President. Mike Huckabee, for example, sees Pakistan as a reason for a border fence.

DES MOINES — Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.

On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”

Fact: according to the Department of Homeland Security, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam.

Huckabee’s first response to the assassination, btw, was to express “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”