Category: billblog

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Machine Love

 [As ever you can read this on the BBC News Website. It was inspired by a debate at the ICA which I chaired, and has attracted some comment online from Tara, Jordan,  and Clare, among others]

Much as I adore my MacBook I have no desire to form a life-long union with it or attempt to interface in any way that doesn’t involve keys, trackpad and my fingers.

Others seem to feel differently about the matter, like David Levy, who reckons that by the middle of the century our relationships with the machines that currently service our social lives will have grown significantly, and that intelligent robots will be sexual partners too.

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Networking Journalism

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website. And thanks to my City students for the inspiration!]

I’ve just finished marking the essays my students at City University have to do as part of the course in online journalism that I teach. They’ve done some good work, especially the assignment where I get them to argue that the BBC should be forced to close down its online service because the license fee is really only there to pay for television.

They also seem to have realised that anyone who wants to break into professional journalism needs to have some sort of online presence beyond a Facebook profile, as it’s the first thing an editor will look for when they apply for a job, so there are a few new blogs and online publications out there that might not otherwise have appeared.

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My tweetcloud




My tweetcloud

Originally uploaded by BillT.

Tweetcloud takes all your public tweet and makes a tag cloud out of them. It’s far too accurate… home, coffee, cambridge, sitting, watching, train, time…

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Who Will Write Tomorrow’s Code?

[As ever, this is available on the BBC News website]

On Monday 31st March I was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, for the dinner to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Mathematical Laboratory, which later became the Computer Laboratory.Maurice Wilkes Maurice Wilkes, who build the EDSAC in 1949, was there, and gave a speech.  And the conversation on my table was largely about the problems of finding good programmers and of persuading young people that Computer Science is a good degree to do.  This article was the result. 

Sixty years ago, on June 21 1948, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, or ‘Baby’, ran its first program and the age of the stored program digital computer properly began.

Built by a team led by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams at Manchester University, Baby showed that storing the instructions for a computer in the same memory as the data it was working on was both feasible and effective.

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Lunch at Les Deux Magots




Lunch at Les Deux Magots

Originally uploaded by BillT.

I went to Paris yesterday to see the Patti Smith exhibition, Land 250, at the Fondation Cartier. It was fabulous, a thrilling insight into the mind and work of someone I have admired for many years.
And afterwards I sat on the bench where de Beauvoir and Sartre worked, in Les Deux Magot, for a coffee and a baguette.

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Denial of Democracy Attacks

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website]

In common with other administrations the UK Government is concerned about the security of the realm and its ability to cope with natural disasters, foreign aggression and terrorism.

Over the years the importance of computer systems, networks and of course the internet have become apparent even at the highest level of the administration, so it is unsurprising that the National Security Strategy announced by the Prime Minister last week contains a number of references to the network and to the growing fear of what they call ‘cyber-attack’.

The strategy notes that ‘the internet is itself a trans-national, fast-changing and loosely-governed entity, but is also part of our critical national infrastructure’ before stating the obvious by pointing out that ‘it is both a target and an opportunity for hostile states, terrorists and criminals’. (p21)

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The Offline Cost of an Online Life

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

The next time you want to search for something on the web, try going to ‘www.blackle.com’ instead of your usual search engine.

The page you get looks remarkably like Google, and queries you type in are fed through to Google, but there’s  one obvious difference. Instead of the generous amount of white space which has characterised Google’s home page since its 1998 launch, the page is mostly black.

Heap Media, the Australian company behind Blackle, claim that  black pixels take less power than white and so using their search saves energy. They believe that small things matter when it comes to reducing our energy use, limiting our C02 output and reducing the likely extent of global warming as a result of human activity.

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@bbccouk Finished my column and going to make coffee…

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website]

Unlike many of my friends and colleagues I wasn’t able to make it to Austin, Texas for this year’s  SXSW interactive, the four day technology conference and festival that is currently firing the imagination of the technology world.

So I wasn’t in the ballroom when the keynote address by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went awry under the less-than-forensic questioning of technology journalist Sarah Lacy.

I didn’t see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.

And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.

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Teaching in the Networked World

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

When Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was asked what was most likely to cause problems for governments he famously replied ‘events, dear boy, events’.

Coping with the completely unexpected, the sort of thing that simply cannot be anticipated, is a skill in itself and one that all politicians have to develop if they are to survive long in power.

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Playing with the Wii

[As ever, you can also read this on the BBC News website]

The Nintendo Wii is an astonishing computer, the console for people who don’t play games, nestling next to the TV like a family pet and encouraging those who would normally sneer at a PlayStation to wave their arms around in order to play virtual tennis.

The Wii remote has a lot to do with its success, of course. This motion detecting wireless handheld controller gives players a far more direct sense of engagement with the game than the buttons, pads and triggers of traditional consoles, and accounts for much of the Wii’s success as a family gaming platform.

Like other games systems the Wii is as far from an open platform as you can imagine. Games cost a lot of money to develop, and Nintendo have worked hard to make it difficult to get inside the Wii for fear that easy access would allow games to be copied and distributed.

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