Seen in the Apple Store on Regent Street, early yesterday evening. He was probably waiting for his Dad to finish drooling over the kit.
The revolution acknowledged
Jeff Jarvis blogged Alan Rusbridger’s speech to the assembled staffs of the Guardian and Observer (for which I write). Here’s a snippet of Jeff’s account:
Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.”
This came in each of three all-hands meetings with the editorial and business staff held at a theater 15 minutes from the paper’s offices, the first such meetings since the Guardian went through its last metamorphosis to its medium-sized Berliner format. (I happened to be consulting at the paper yesterday and I went along for the ride. Rusbridger gave me permission to blog the company event.)
So that was the line that struck me: preeminent. I suspect it was the line that resonated with staff members a few hours later. Rusbridger said that some would find the content of yesterday’s meetings no-big-deal and others would find unease. But the message was clear, although it was shoehorned into much else in the presentation; you had to listen to hear it. He also said that the paper will serve the public 24/7; it does not yet do that. So the Guardian, he said, will be a 24-hour, web-first newspaper. To do that, the paper’s management needs — he called it the F word — flexibility. And that means that jobs will change. It’s all in a parcel…
The interesting thing about the Guardian is that it’s owned by a Trust rather than being a commercial company. Some people mistakenly think that this ownership structure makes the paper more cosy and resistant to change than a more straightforwardly commercial outfit. In fact the opposite it true: the Guardian has moved faster and more aggressive to embrace change than any other British publication.
Remember old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. We do.
Hennessy’s lucrative moonlighting
There’s a guy called John Hennessy on the Google Main Board. There’s also a guy called John Hennessy who is President of Stanford. And guess what? They’re the same chap! Dan Gillmor quotes what the WSJ wrote about this…
In the month of November, John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, made $1 million. It didn’t come from his day job.
Mr. Hennessy, an engineer who co-founded a semiconductor company, has used his talents, Silicon Valley connections and academic position to help win billions of dollars for Stanford. He has done well for himself, too. Mr. Hennessy’s November haul included a $75,000 retainer from Cisco Systems Inc., on whose board he sits, plus $133,000 in restricted Cisco stock, proceeds of $452,000 from selling stock in Atheros Communications Inc., where he is co-founder and chairman, and a $384,000 profit from the exercise of Google Inc. stock options. He sits on Google’s board.
That month makes up only one part of an income stream that many in academia consider without precedent for a university president. In the past five years, through exclusive investments and relationships with companies, Mr. Hennessy has collected fees, stock and paper stock-option profits totaling $43 million, securities filings show. That dwarfs his $616,000 annual compensation at Stanford, where he has been president since 2000.
Debunking the debunkers
Splendid column by George Monbiot on Channel 4’s idiotic film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’…
For the film’s commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited – such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.
Assignment Zero
Billed as An Experiment in Pro-Am Journalism
“One day stories with a thousand people on the masthead might become routine, and we’ll know how to do them. For now we just need hundreds, acting in the spirit of the enterprise, to help us take apart and put together a single, sprawling story. Assignment Zero is a starting point, a base line. Who knows where we will end up. But if reporting in the open style ever comes into its own–at our site or someone else’s–that might very well change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.”
So IT matters, then?
The use of information technology was “the major driver” of economic growth over the past decade, adding $2 trillion a year to the economy, according to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Fueled by “the phenomenal growth of computer power” since 2000, the use of IT has given new tools to businesses and improved productivity while controlling costs, said Rob Atkinson, a researcher and government adviser who heads the IT Foundation.
But the full impact of the “IT revolution” has not been recognized by government officials because of lingering skepticism from the dot-com boom the late 1990s and the bust that followed, he added. The 53-page report was an effort to catalog the IT industry’s impact.
Atkinson’s foundation is a think tank backed by such tech companies as Cisco Systems, IBM and eBay, and its goal is to push an “innovation agenda” in Washington. Atkinson said that doesn’t mean subsidies for specific industries but greater investment in research, use of the tax code to spur investment and “do no harm” policies that don’t hinder growth.
Hmmm… Full report is here. I bet Nick Carr has something to say about this. After all, he shot to fame with a sceptical book entitled Does IT Matter?. Just checked his blog [23:50 on 14.03.2007]. Nothing.
Tories discover Open Source
The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has posted a shortened version of a speech to the RSA on IT and government. Excerpt:
I think that our willingness to change needs to match the scale of the technological revolution taking place all around us. Just as companies all over the world are changing the way that they do business, so too must we evolve.
In short, I believe that we need to recast the political settlement for the digital age. We need open source politics…
The Guardian version of the speech attracted 45 comments, the majority of which seemed to miss the point in one way or another. Of the 45, only about four were genuinely thoughtful or illuminating, and perhaps another four were trying to be helpful by adding links or references. It’s a sobering illustration of the problems with online ‘debate’.
In the Blogosphere, though, there was a good deal of intelligent discussion — for example from David Wilcox. There’s something interesting going on here, with the New Tories sidling up to the Google/Web 2.0 gang while New Labour clings to Microsoft and Sir Billg.
Snap search
From Technology Review…
Searching for information on your cell phone by typing keywords can be cumbersome. But now researchers at Microsoft have developed a software prototype called Lincoln that they hope will make Web searches easier. According to Larry Zitnick, a Microsoft researcher who works on the project, phones equipped with the software could, for example, access online movie reviews by snapping pictures of movie posters or DVD covers and get product information from pictures of advertisements in magazines or on buses.
“The main thing we want to do is connect real-world objects with the Web using pictures,” says Zitnick. “[Lincoln] is a way of finding information on the Web using images instead of keywords.”
The software works by matching pictures taken on phones with pretagged pictures in a database. It provides the best results when the pictures are of two-dimensional objects, such as magazine ads or DVD covers, Zitnick says. (See the accompanying chart to find out how compatible certain pictures are with Lincoln.) Currently, the database contains pictures of DVD covers that link to movie reviews uploaded by Microsoft researchers. However, anyone can contribute his or her pictures and links to the database, and Zitnick hopes that people will fill it with pictures and links to anything from information about graffiti art to scavenger-hunt clues. Right now, Lincoln can only be downloaded for free using Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and it can only run on smart phones equipped with Windows Mobile 5.0 and PocketPCs.
Why you should be allowed to use mobile phones in hospital
One of the most irritating things about hospitals is the regulation about switching off mobile phones. I’ve often wondered whether there was any real evidence to support the injunction. Now, the New York Times reports that a study published in the latest edition of the Mayo Clinic Journal says that it was all baloney.
Another article in the same journal describes an experiment testing cellphones at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., over a four-month period in 2006. The researchers used various phones and wireless handheld devices in 75 patient rooms and the intensive care unit, where patients were nearby or connected to a total of 192 medical machines of 23 types.
In 300 tests of ringing, making calls, talking on the phone and receiving data, there was not a single instance of interference with the medical apparatus. For many of the tests, the cellphones were working at lower received signal strengths — that is, showing fewer bars on the screen — which means they were operating at the highest power output levels. The authors conclude with a recommendation to relax existing cellphone rules.
But Mr. Shein said changing hospital cellphone regulations on the basis of these findings might be premature. “I think it’s dangerous for someone to go around doing ad hoc testing and conclude that it’s not going to be an issue for others,” he said. “There was no result, but there may have been if the circumstances had been slightly different.”
Dr. David L. Hayes, the senior author and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, disagreed. “Cellphone technology is the same throughout the country,” he said, “and hospital equipment is similar. I don’t think that testing in another part of the U.S. is going to have different results.
“I’m advocating based on this testing that we should change the rules,” Dr. Hayes continued, “and in fact many people ignore the rules anyway. In a way, the policy is already antiquated and violated de facto.”
During the 18 months that Sue was in an out of hospital, the injunction against mobiles proved a nightmare for me as I tried to be with her while keeping in touch with our children and those who were looking after them while I was away from home. I often had the dark suspicion that the real reason for the ban was to safeguard the business model of the firm which provided bedside fixed-line telephones at an extortionate cost.
Spring?
Yeah, I know it isn’t Spring officially, but these daffodils don’t know that. They were planted in 2000 by Sue and her friend Mary.