The change has come in for criticism from a number of search experts. "Search engines are supposed to send you away to the best information, even if they don't have their own in stock," noted Danny Sullivan, who added that Google has previously been excellent at providing links to the most suitable information. "Today's change is one of the few times where I'm thinking 'What the hell are you doing, Google?' "

He thinks that Google's move, which clearly promotes its own nascent service – which was only launched last year, but which Google said had 40m users last October – could attract antitrust scrutiny, because it is only listing information from Google+ posts, and because it is offering suggestions of users to follow on Google+.

In the US, it is illegal for a company which is dominant in one field to use that dominance to gain competitive advantage in another.

The "says Twitter" bit feels a bit like one of those situations where a football player waves his/her empty hand in front of the ref to try and get another player sent off.

On the other hand, this development does seem at odds with the "do no evil" mantra at Google, and in particular with the last bullet point of point 6 of their philosophy:

We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

??

The teaching of computer science in school is to be dramatically overhauled, with the existing programme of study scrapped to make way for new lessons designed by industry and universities, Michael Gove will announce on Wednesday.

In a speech, the education secretary will say the existing curriculum in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has left children "bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers".

Instead he will, in effect, create an "open source" curriculum in computer science by giving schools the freedom to use teaching resources designed with input from leading employers and academics, in changes that will come into effect this September.

Great news in many ways.

My only concern (based on my experience as a primary school governor and a parent of 3 kids who have been thru UK secondary schools) is whether your average teacher (ICT-focused or otherwise) has the necessary skills and understanding to move beyond the 'boring' curriculum.

So I think there's a huge level of up-skilling (and mindset changing) required here. I don't think there;ll be any quick wins.

Still, it's a start... and we should be grateful for that.

Sobolev spaces

This photo was taken in the former office of Sandy Davie, a recently retired professor at the University of Edinburgh. The writing on the board is the result of conversations with another professor, Istvan Gyongy, about partial differential equations in Sobolev spaces. It’s a great example of a typical mathematician’s blackboard, with chalk being drawn over old chalk  and some evidence of half-hearted rubbing out with hands. Mathematicians usually prefer to make this kind of a ‘mess’ rather than interrupt the flow of ideas to clean the board properly.

 

 

January 5, 2012 | Categories: Analysis, Differential equations | Leave A Comment »

Blackboards (though an occasional white board seems to have been allowed in), alive and kicking!

Nice image from the last evening of the Field of Light experience at the Holbourne Museum in Bath.

I don't think we've yet begun to crack the nut at the potential that will be unlocked with a durable, interoperable, and user-friendly solution for internet identity — especially one that acknowledges and works well across multi-modal device contexts.

Chris Messina, on his decision not to run for re-election to the OpenID Board of Directors.

It is unlikely that the PATRIOT Act is routinely invoked, or that US officials spend much time reading Europeans’ email. The cloud — even the parts run by US companies — remains broadly safe, secure, and reliable. Safe Harbor provisions, model clauses, and the ability to insist that data normally resides in one territory or another remain an effective means of ensuring that day-to-day cloud operations meet user needs whilst complying with relevant local, regional and international legislation. But, every now and again, the PATRIOT Act will be invoked, and data will be taken. Whilst it’s something to be aware of, it’s probably not something for most people to lose too much sleep over. You’re more likely to lose data yourself, or have it escape into the wild because of an error in your own systems or a malicious hack by a competitor. And you could and would be held accountable for those breaches, in a way that you almost certainly wouldn’t for a PATRIOT Act data seizure.

So the PATRIOT Act may not be as scary as it might now appear. But it remains a visible illustration of a rather more worrying issue; a belief that the laws of one country should be able to trample over the laws of other countries at will — even inside those countries. Further, it suggests a (growing?) disconnect between the attitudes and expectations on either side of the Atlantic. And one particular aspect of that is the subject for my next post.

Nice summary and balanced conclusion from Paul Miller.

I would add only one thing to Paul's closing paragraph... that this also highlights the divide (or perhaps I should say confusion) between Internet-space and geographic/legislative-space.

But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

Vint Cerf on the importance of focusing on ends rather than means.

He goes on to say, "In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers. Technologists should work toward this end."

The choice of "viruses and worms" as threats seems a little odd? What about privacy (from governments and large corporations in particular), protecting children online, identity theft, online fraud...? These seem like a rather more fundamental set of online threats to me.

If your organisation :-

• embraces change and is acutely aware of inertia barriers
• has primary goals based upon disruption of existing markets and growing ecosystems rather than a focus on profitability and growth into emerging geographical markets
• views commoditisation not as a liability but an opportunity
• operates through small, highly empowered teams building and creating services
• builds and exploits ecosystems by enabling others to build upon its services
• uses data analytics rather than metrics to determine action
• continually challenges and removes processes
• understands evolution and avoids one size fits all mentality
• builds distributed systems designed for failure that use commodity IT where possible
• considers itself to be as, if not more, efficient than Amazon
• games behaviour both internally and externally
• views culture as malleable and focuses on talent density
• views open source as a tactical weapon
• is seen by others to be simultaneously highly innovative, customer focused and efficient despite what Porter said on the subject

... then you're Next generation. If this isn't you, you're not. If you're not, then just hope this war doesn't stretch into your industry or that IT isn't a major barrier to entry into your space or this hypothesis is completely wrong.

Interesting numbers... though not much sign of the death of email everyone used to go on about - worst luck! I guess that 167,999,999 of those 168 million emails are spam :-(