a-cubed.info

As this blog has been down for a while due to technical issues, I posted this on my LJ already. From 1st April I have a new job. I will be a professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics, at Meiji University in Tokyo. I will be travelling to Japan at the beginning of March.

PM on Radio 4 today incldued interviews with people about the launch of ID cards for “volunteers” in Manchester. A frelance journalist was first in the queue to get one and was interviewed about the process. She reported having to create five “secret” questions and answers (i.e. passwords with menmonics). The quality of these, represented by her interview, leaves much to be desired: “What is your favourite food?” being the one quoted. There is some very good recent evidence regarding the flawednature of such questions. These flaws are both false negative (people’s preferences change) and false positive (easy to remember, and therefore not likely to be forgotten, are generally easy to find out or even guess). For example, the answer to “What is your favourite food?” is probably “chocolate” in a large proportion of cases. Next, they discussed the “biometric” elements. Due to having burnt her finger on foodstuff recently (not an uncommon occurrence, I would think) she had a plaster on the index finger they use, obscuring part of the print. Again, this presents both false positive and false negative issues.

Once again, the UK ID Card scheme is shown to be deeply flawed at the most basic level.

According to this article in The Grauniad, the UK government is set on ignoring the recommendations of yet another report it commissioned (this time the Digital Britain Report, last time the Gowers Report) and are set to introduce proposals for a two strikes law on suspending/removing internet access from those accused by rights’ holders of illicitly sharing copyrighted material online (official government details). (more…)

Three Youtube videos from the same guys doing episodes one, two and three of “If Google Was Your Roommate”. Very well done. Reminds me of the Idiots of Ants’ “Facebook in Real Life”:

• Episode 1
  
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Facebook in Real Life

So, I’ve managed to go swimming twice more and it reminded me of a couple of thing that are different that I didn’t mention in the previous post on this.

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Yesterday I went swimming for the first time in nine years. I haven’t been swimming since I moved to Reading, and the last time I remember being in a pool was during 2Kon in 2000. I’m pretty out of shape and have been gaining weight again recently. I blame the stress, but also the disruption to lifestyle that the travelling I’ve been doing produces. It’s hard to take regular exercise and eat healthily when you spend a third of your time jet-lagged and ten 1-4 day trips away from home in three months is awkward. So, while in Tokyo for the summer I figured that swimming would be a good habit to get into. There’s a public pool attached to a nearby High School (the usual deal of the School provides some of the funding and gets first dibs for lessons/competitions while the city provides the rest of the funding and it’s open to the public the rest of the time). So, swimming in Japan was an interesting experience. (more…)

“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne; Meditation 17). Similarly, when an academic speaks it is with their own authority, and not as an “official spokesman” for their university unless they explicitly (and officially) claim to do so. Of course, any academic is always associated with their institution(s) and it is this association in part that legitimates the greater weight given by many in society to their statements. But the claim by UEL (University of East London) that it had good cause to suspend a professor over comments he made in advance of the G20 summit in London in 2009 (and the protests expected to surround it, which they did) regarding police expectations and violence because “the comments brought the university into disrepute” is utterly specious. These statements by university managers are reported in a recent THE article regarding a subsequent case between the professor and the university on which I make no comment here. What I find utterly abhorrent is the idea that any statement made by an academic could lead to a suspension on the grounds of “bringing the university into disrepute” unless that statement can be found to be factually inaccurate or an illegal statement (such as incitement to violence). And then the suspension should only happen after a suitable process (in the case of illegal speech, that process should be the conclusion of a court case). No academic speaks for their university rather than themselves unless they are officially and clearly doing so. The assumption when any academic speaks is that they are speaking as an individual academic. (more…)

In the 30th April 2009 issue (1,894) of the Times Higher Education magazine, Prof Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford Unviersity wrote an ill-considered and wrong-headed attack on digital communication in general and on Open Access in particular titled Those who disseminate ideas must acknowledge the routes they travel. (more…)

I commented in agreement with Matt McCormick’s post on The God Projector:
There is a very good book by Reeves and Nass called “The Media Equation” looking at the psychological responses of human beings to various media, including television and computers in particular. One of the telling elements which jibes quite well with the ideas presented here is solid evidence that our psychological reactions to computers automatically ascribe human emotional contexts to machines. One of a number of well-documented examples is the subconscious positive bias we make when filling out a survey about the qualities of a computer program. If we fill it out on the same physical computer on which we used the program, then we give higher scores than if we fill it out on a different (but otherwise identical) machine. So, given a lab with two identical Dell computers in them if we fill out the questionnaire on the one we used a program on then we give higher results for the program than sitting at an identical machine. The only mechanism that seems plausible for this conclusion is that we’re hardwired to avoid hurting the feelings of the computer we used. These results are consistent even among people with a high level of education about computers and a high level of intelligence. So, there are hard-wired subconscious elements of the human brain that attempt to ascribe human-like qualities to everything we interact with. Hence “don’t make the lightning mad” is perfectly reasonable as a first hard-wired reaction. (more…)

The Counter Terrorism Act 2008 includes the provision:

76. Offences relating to information about members of armed forces etc

(1) After section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (collection of information) insert:
“58A Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc

(1) A person commits an offence who:

(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been:

(i) a member of Her Majesty’s forces,

(ii) a member of any of the intelligence services, or

(iii) a constable,

which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or

(b) publishes or communicates any such information.”

This is in addition to a prior claim in December 2008 where the Home Secretary informed the National Union of Journalists that photography in public places may be restricted when it “may cause or lead to public order situations or inflame an already tense situation or raise security considerations”.
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