All posts by Kevin

Humour

Nothing happened here

Someone in Paris has a sense of humour. According to the most recent Paris briefing from the Economist Cities Guide:

A mysterious public artist seems to be poking fun at the city’s glorification of its notable former residents. Now, along with plaques on houses boasting Victor Hugo as an erstwhile tenant, there are signs proclaiming that on "the 17th of April 1967 nothing happened here". On a wall in the chic seventh arrondissement, a plaque now informs us that Karima Bentiffa, an otherwise unknown civil servant, lived at 9 rue Pérignon from 1984 to 1989. How long can this phantom plaque-maker continue his entertaining mischief?

Media

Predicting the news

It really bothers me when professional journalists manufacture news. One morning last week BBC Radio News began several reports with the phrase "Tony Blair will say in a speech later today…". I don’t believe reporters should EVER report events that have yet to happen, and it is disappointing to see that the BBC now does it. I mean what happens if he’s run over by a bus in the meantime? I suppose in that case they’d have some real news to report.

It’s even happening in new media as well. Yesterday BBCi posted a story on a newly revised forecast for the UK property market (BBC News | Business | House price forecasts slashed) that constantly referred to new statistics for the month of November, which as I write has yet to come to an end!

Overall price rises averaged 0.2% nationwide in November, down from 0.5% the month before.

How can they publish a statement like that without some explanation for their readers? Don’t they realise that anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that such a statement, and by extension the journalists that published it, cannot be trusted? Don’t they care that such sloppy reporting undermines everything else they produce? The real news is that journalistic standards continue to slide.

Media, Technology

Just a bunch of pamphleteers

It occurred to me some time ago that webloggers are the modern equivalent of pamphleteers, and last weekend I did a little research on this idea. As you might expect, it’s been suggested before, most notably by Dan Bricklin, creator of the very first spreadsheet program, Visicalc (see Pamphleteers and Web Sites).

Now from the BBC comes news (BBC NEWS | Technology | Life lessons for web users) of a recent conference on the Internet’s potential to change society (Beyond the Backlash: Where next for the digital economy?). According to Mark Ward, who reported on the conference for the BBC:

John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, said there was a pressing need to nurture public discussion spaces online and to keep them free of the usual vested interests that can hobble debate.

His comments were echoed by John Perry Barlow, founder of US cyber-liberties watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who feared that badly drafted laws would severely curtail the freewheeling spirit of online discussion.

"I thought we would be spared the governments impositions by its incompetence," he said, "but we cannot trust to that anymore."

Instead, he said, the US Government and corporations were pushing a unified agenda that stressed control, censorship and the removal of basic rights over freedom of discussion and action.

Challenges to the corporate and federal axis were limited because, so far, net activists and protesters were not fighting on a united front.

"What we have now is 10 million lonely pamphleteers crying out on lonely street corners and not getting together as a block or getting together as opposition to traditional institutions," said Mr Barlow.

He said there were profound dangers in letting the government and business-backed view of what can be done online prevail because the net was at a pivotal moment in its development.

"If we design it to serve existing models of business and government and to follow short-term goals we will be bad ancestors," he said. "Do not, I beg you, be bad ancestors."

I don’t know enough about the history of journalism to compare the effectiveness of the pamphleteers with that of webloggers, but it seems to me that it might be premature to draw any conclusions. Perhaps the "10 million lonely pamphleteers" will get together soon.

A number of interesting organizations appear to have produced this conference, including Demos, The Work Foundation, and vitamin-e.

Media

National Post delay

It’s amazing to note that five years after the web was adopted by the mainstream media, it’s still not being used properly. Canada’s National Post displays the following image when introducing its columnists:

National Post advertisement

The two main advantages of the Internet are its global reach and its speed. In this case the National Post purposely negates the second benefit, and so undermines the new medium’s value. Does that make sense?

Obviously they want you to buy the newspaper instead of reading the free web site, but to those of us living in places where a subscription is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive, this artificial constraint on a technology’s natural strengths seems increasingly absurd.

Management

Failures to face reality

This week’s Economist contains a review of a new book that sounds interesting: What Management Is: How it Works and Why it’s Everyone’s Business by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone (Economist.com | Management | The wood as well as the trees). The line that caught my eye was:

Management is about understanding people and all the heartache that flesh is heir to. "Failures of strategy", she [Magretta] says, "are often failures to face reality." This echoes some of the most original current writing about management, where the findings of psychology and sociology are applied to the building of organisations.

Culture

A diversity of food

Yesterday, while waiting in line for the cashier at the grocery store I looked to my left and right. On my right were lots of exotic convenience foods, such as single servings of Thai pineapple rice, and on my left I saw “instant Miso soup”, “Organic Japanese green tea” and bottles of Sake. This was in a small urban branch of Sainsbury’s, although admittedly it was in central London.

I can’t think of an aspect of British life that has changed as much as food in the last three decades. If you transported someone here from even 1980 they wouldn’t recognise the country’s culinary choices at all. Prospect magazine wants to provoke a debate and so has asked Did British food really get better? It’s an interesting question. There can be no doubt that British food has changed.

Culture

Bookish Martel man wins Man Booker

Life of Pi book coverAn acquaintance of mine, Yann Martel, won the Man Booker prize last night for his novel Life of Pi. His life will almost certainly never be the same. As I write, he’s being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today after having been up all night partying somewhere in London.

The best newspaper coverage has been in the Guardian. The day before the winner was announced, novelist and prize judge Russell Celyn Jones wrote (Read between the hype):

The whole point of the Booker prize is to bring attention and new readers to such books that would otherwise struggle in a market dominated by commercial fiction. Life of Pi is a good example.

More can found in the following two Guardian stories. The first, more interesting piece, is about Yann; the second focuses on the prize itself.

I can’t comment on his book because I haven’t read it. I hardly ever read fiction. Real life is so fascinatingly bizarre who needs to make stuff up?

Technology

The reality of text

Yet more interesting stuff from this week’s Economist (Economist.com | European telecoms). It seems …

One of the fastest-growing uses of text messaging, moreover, is interacting with television. Gartner’s figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows.

I hate “reality television” shows, such as the Big Brother series, which have been the prime source of this interactive television trend. I have yet to see or hear any participant or fan with anything significant to say on any of these programmes. As far as I’m concerned the primary benefit of getting them all to communicate by text message is that each one is limited to only 164 characters. You can’t have too many run-on sentences with that reality!

Technology

Computers and people

Here’s an excerpt from an interesting editorial in this week’s Economist: Economist.com | Computers and government (subscription required). Although it’s really commenting on IT projects in government, I think the same points are relevant to all organizations. In fact, it shouldn’t be titled "Computers and government" but "Computers and people".

Most private-sector bosses - especially since the bursting of the dot-com bubble - hope for nothing more than a return on their investment through lower costs and some improvement in competitiveness. But politicians (vide Mr Blair), desperate to find quick fixes and unencumbered with any understanding of what technology can and can’t do, often expect miracles. And one of the things that technology can’t do is to alter people’s attitudes towards change. "Change management" is never easy, but in the public sector it is especially hard because there is too little competitive pressure pushing it, and there are too many powerful unions holding it back. The commonest reason for IT failures is that custom-made systems are built to fit existing ways of working. Such systems, which consultants are only too happy to create, are expensive, deliver only marginal benefits and are inherently likely to go wrong.

So how can civil servants avoid disaster? First, they should regard installing new software as an opportunity to re-engineer the way they work in the light of both the Internet and how they want to operate for the next 20 years. Consultants cannot make those decisions for them. The new business processes must also fit unmodified software, not the other way round: the more modifications to the software, the greater the risk. Second, they should beware of incomplete automation: if one area of operations still depends on hand-written forms, little will be gained. To this end, they must buy business applications that have been engineered from the outset to work together. These may not individually be the "best of breed" that consultants often recommend, but they are more likely to be properly integrated - think of Microsoft Office. Finally, IT systems should provide managers with vital information; most fail to because data are fragmented and hard to find. With an Internet-based system, important information can be kept in one place, and managers can get at it when they need it.

Humour

A Passion Killer

Norwich City underwearMy very first wedding anniversary is coming up, and I’ve been racking my brains for anniversary present ideas. However, I think I’ll pass on this one from the BBC:

An aggrieved wife has said “knickers” to her husband because of his obsession with Norwich City [football club]. Joanne Bradley was sick of playing second fiddle to the First Division club and is filing for divorce. The final straw came when husband Neil bought her some tasty Norwich underwear… as an anniversary present.

What would Delia, who’s part owner of Norwich City FC, say?