Photographed by my colleague, Geoff Peters. It’s next door to JanetUK’s new offices at Harwell. Funnily enough, I was under the impression that the Bush library was to be based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Perhaps the protests are getting to him. Harwell’s nice and quiet.
Dan Bricklin has some interesting reflections about the Wikipedia entry on the spreadsheet. I’ve always thought that Dan invented the spreadsheet, but the Wikipedia entry begs to differ. I’ve just looked at it and it fails to give a date for the first release of VisiCalc and doesn’t mention Microsoft’s first stab at a spreadsheet program — Multiplan — at all.
From David Blair’s (no relation) Telegraph Blog…
I have just watched the G8 leaders yawn and scratch their way through a toe-curling session with the so-called “junior eight”. This is an absurd innovation at G8 summits where eight rather dim teenagers are brought before the world’s most powerful leaders.
George Bush and Angela Merkel in Heiligendamm
Bush and Merkel share a joke at the G8 summitEach of the kids gets to read out a pathetic little speech consisting of a string of platitudes. The world’s most powerful leaders do their best to feign interest. OK, none of them actually yawned. But Nicolas Sarkozy took the opportunity to scratch his head and smooth his hair while the French adolescent stumbled through her script. Sarko also forgot to remove his translation earplug while she was talking – in French, of course – suggesting that he really was mentally out-to-lunch.
George Bush began chewing peanuts while the Tanzanian kid was talking. Vladimir Putin looked sinister and bored in equal measure as each of the teens ran through their cringing little speeches. Romano Prodi’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier.
The two most obscure members of the G8, Shinzo Abe and Stephen Harper, the Japanese and Canadian prime ministers, appeared utterly bewildered. (Incidentally, most of my fellow journalists have no idea who these guys are). Only Tony Blair had some success in pretending to be interested…
Still, George Bush got to meet St Bob Geldof and Bono, so the Summic can’t have been entirely pointless.
Er, vintage indignation from Boris Johnson…
And there I was – all set to blame Brussels. As soon as I heard there was some loony plan to put health warnings on wine bottles, my
As I prepared my continental bombing raid, I could see my target in my imagination.
That’s right: it was some Swedish divorcee health commissioner, sitting in her velour slacks in her taupe-coloured office in the Breydel building, Brussels; and I could just imagine the imperious set of her jaw as she put down her glass of Badoit and prepared to Mont Blanc her initials under the EU edict that alcohol was henceforward to be clearly labelled as a poison; and in my rage I reached for another lunchtime glass of Mazis-Chambertin 2000, to fortify myself for the rigours of composing my column, and I can tell you that it was with all bomb bays fully loaded that I arrived at my desk; and I was on the very point of launching the great Brussels-busting task force when I paused.
I had a spasm of journalistic scruple. I picked up the phone….
You can guess the rest. Lazy column, but still amusing.
From yesterday’s Radio Time to Join List of eBay Items Up for Auction – New York Times…
SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — The auction giant eBay said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers starting Wednesday, expanding into a business that Google entered last year
EBay, through a partnership with Bid4Spots, a 2-year-old company in Encino, Calif., will offer advertisers a way to buy unsold radio inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 media markets in the United States
Advertisers can go shopping for airtime on the eBay Media Marketplace, originally a forum for cable television ads which began in March. EBay was hired to create the service by a consortium of major advertisers like Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Home Depot.
But the eBay ad exchange has had little success so far. Broadcasters have vocally protested that they were not adequately consulted on its development and that it goes too far in removing people from the process. Only Oxygen, the cable network, currently sells some of its ad time on eBay’s service…
Wow! Technology Review report:
A massive genetic study carried out in the United Kingdom has pinpointed 24 genetic markers that increase risk for illnesses such as diabetes, arthritis, and Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. The findings illustrate the success of a new approach to gene hunting known as genome-wide association, made possible by recent advances in gene-sequencing technologies. The results were published in this week’s issue of Nature.
“This is a powerful way of identifying genes for common diseases,” says Anne Bowcock, a geneticist at Washington University Medical School, in Saint Louis. “These genes will point to altered pathways that will then point to novel therapies.”
Scientists analyzed 500,000 genetic markers in each of 1,700 people, making it the largest such study to date. By comparing the DNA of 2,000 patients with one of seven different diseases–Crohn’s disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and bipolar disorder–with 3,000 healthy controls, researchers identified 24 genetic regions strongly linked to specific diseases: one in bipolar disorder, one in coronary-artery disease, nine in Crohn’s disease, three in rheumatoid arthritis, seven in type 1 diabetes, and three in type 2 diabetes. Known as the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, the project is a collaboration among 50 different research groups…
Wonder how long it will take insurance companies to start demanding genetic scans before providing insurance.
Behold the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. This little masterpiece took two years to develop and cost £400,000 (according to the Today programme this morning).
James Cridland has some intriguing things to say about it. He’s also knocked up a more attractive alternative.
Well, well. I’d been wondering about this, and now ArsTechnica confirms it…
With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple’s new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.
We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we’ve found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there’s more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn’t much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.
Concerned users could convert selections to MP3, but there will be a generational loss in quality resulting from the transcoding. We also have to wonder: who is buying DRM-free music with the plans of slapping it up on a P2P share, anyway? It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other ways to get access to music without paying for it…
Now here is something genuinely original from Microsoft — Photosynth. (Well, some of it seems to rely on Seadragon, a technology developed by a company recently acquired by Microsoft, but still…)
It’s software that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
There’s a fascinating TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas which demonstrates the idea.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Later… Quentin points out that the online demonstrations will only work in IE. Well, what do you expect…?
Before you submit that Nobel-winning article, it might be worth having a look at this from Rob Weir…
It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.
“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”
Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news:
“Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 — for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us — was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word.”
Nature appears to have the same problem…