In Microsoft Word, I doubt it would have heard of either, so I would have hit "Add to Dictionary" and handed my dissertation in uncorrected. Thanks, Google!

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Then I thought… would a grandmother know how to do that? No way. Would Apple make a mistake like that? Unlikely. Hey, why don't Apple have an e-reader, anyhow? We know it'd be sleek and simple, they already sell ebooks through iTunes, and they might even have the clout to challenge Amazon. Puzzling.

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It’s probably a better deal to sell it for £200+ on eBay and buy a second monitor with the proceedings for most people. Considering when I move out of this house in a few months time I’m going have to do it on the bus, I’m rather averse to gaining more (heavy or cumbersome) possessions than strictly necessary. So I might hang on to it a bit longer using this handy technique, what I describe in the video. Feel free to watch and do the same.

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For instance, if you look at what a lot people were predicting at the the turn of the twentieth century, the majority thought human flight was an unlikely pipe dream. Within seventy years, we had flown a man onto the freaking moon.

I hope that’s how this century will turn out. But with fewer world wars. Because right now the future isn’t looking rosy, for nature and for people who live in it, I.e. all of us. But if I could legitimately predict the future, I’d be a trillionaire stockbroker. So fingers crossed.

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Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate | Video on TED.com
TED Talks In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far…

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Tax Havens

First we learned about tax havens. This is a pretty shocking scam going on globally, and it's defrauding nations. A company sells stuff to another branch of itself, charges itself administration/handling fees and then sells the stuff back to itself, having at no point made any "profit" on paper. Except in the tax haven, where it made tons of profits, except the tax haven doesn't charge any tax. And since they didn't make any "profit" in the place where they made the stuff, or the place they sold the stuff, they don't pay any tax there either.

Using nifty accounting practices distributed among many havens like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, most of which have extremely lenient laws on reporting financial transactions, this is also tremendously tricky to prove, so libel laws being what they are in this country (medieval), I can't name any names. Because I couldn't be told any names. But I can at least requote that crackpot, paranoid, erm, president of the world's only superpower, Barack Obama:

"You've got a building in the Cayman Islands that supposedly houses 12,000 corporations," he said during a Jan. 5, 2008, debate in Manchester, N.H. "That's either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record."

Christian Aid

I was quite skeptical about this organization, but I talked to two of their representatives over lunch, and though I’m still woefully ignorant about the confluence of religion and aid, I can definitely see they’re doing good work worthy of any secular charity. They largely don’t favour Christian recipients or field partners (I still can’t help thinking it might play a role, for instance when choosing between two partners, one of which is tied to a church) but rather were founded and continue to be run by church groups.

Despite saying earlier that I wouldn’t give money to them as an atheist when I could always donate to Oxfam or similar, I am pretty tempted to sponsor a cool ex-Cardiff student I met called Moses who’s running from Scotland to London, via Cardiff. Aargh just tried to find a link for you, but what I wrote down doesn’t seem to be working. If you’re out there Moses, get in touch! Update see his JustGiving page (http://www.justgiving.com/run4climatejustice) or follow him on Twitter (@MosesTT).

Green Energy

This has been a hobby horse of mine lately, so I’m not sure I learned a lot from this talk. I asked the speaker from Stop Climate Chaos Cymru afterwards what his opinions were on Bjorn Blomborg, but disappointingly he hadn’t seen his film Cool It or his TED talk, and though he was aware of the fellow and his contrarian views, it felt a bit like talking to a butcher about vegans. It’s a shame to me, because angry as I was when I first heard his “denialist” conclusions, I think maybe he has some good points. Julian came on quite strong about climate change causing all sorts of disasters and indicated it was the worst crisis facing humanity and was only going to get worse.

Of course, all of that is true, or at least, it’s true for the UK. But our next speaker explained that some of his labourers didn’t come into work sometimes, and when he’d asked why, he’d found out it was because they had malaria. The days they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid, their family couldn’t eat, their children were more likely to die before the age of 5 or get pulled out of school before puberty to earn a living, and so on. Malaria is both treatable and preventable, and for a teensy, tiny fraction of the cost of changing our entire, petrol-driven economy. And Lomberg says that by the time it is at its worst, the poorest people in the world today, if still living in the affected areas, will be at our current, western levels of wealth (we’ll have moved onto almost Godly status of course, though it’d be hard to argue we’re not already there today, even if it’s not equally distributed).

So yes, it’s easy to get wrapped up in panic about the world coming to an end five years from now, and yes I’d love us to make a turnaround and find sustainable ways to live, but I’m pretty doubtful we’re going to find it in ourselves as a species, and there are more immediate, awful perils already here that we might want to get working on too. Even if we invented the perfect electric car/plane/ship tomorrow and wiped out transportation CO2, that would still be less the damage caused by greenhouse gases (methane) from livestock. And we’d still have the problem of where the electricity was coming from.

I’m not saying these problems are impossible, I’m saying we don’t have the will as a race of people to do it. It’s like the way people smoke, even though they know it’s got a 50% chance of ultimately killing them, 30 years later. We haven’t evolved to worry about 30 years later. We’re tragically ill-equipped mentally and I’m just not seeing enough action being taken now to prevent calamity in 2050, and I don’t expect that to change until it’s too late. Given our limited resources and campaigning potential, I do think it makes sense to stop HIV/AIDS and malaria, provide education and infrastructure to the people already suffering as a priority. If we can do that in a green way, so much the better. But I’m about ready to write an obituary for Mother Nature. I honestly think by the end of my lifetime, we’ll be in a post-nature world. Better enjoy it while you can.

A Young Engineer’s Perspective

Sorry I can’t quite recall the actual title of this talk, but that was the gist. We had a young project manager from an engineering firm that erected windmills explain the case for them, and the difficulties the industry faces everywhere from NIMBY protesters. Basically, everyone wants wind power, and no one wants it in their back yard, so it’s pretty tough going getting sites to build on. A shame really, because as David pointed out, Britain is a pretty windy place. I was interested to learn companies are trying horizontal, rather than the traditional vertical, windmills, which might be less controversial to residents and potentially even better at capturing wind energy.

As I’ve said above, it seems like we’re not doing anywhere near enough to explore these promising, sustainable energy sources, and I wish I could believe in my previous optimistic outlook that “technology got us into this mess, and technology can get us out”. But there was immediate wealth and prosperity to be gained from exploiting steam, electricity and oil, so no wonder they attracted a great deal of investment. Come on, people of the world, it’s not too late, start investing in green energy, for your children’s sake! You might find an even cheaper way to power things! Oh, what’s the use, no one’s going to listen. So yeah I’m now arguing against myself, I said above we should prioritise our current problems over climate change. I’m not saying it’s a binary choice, I think that ignores that ridiculous fecundity of our system to provide people specialising in absolutely everything. I just think we should keep our heads in the face of what looks like armageddon, and say let’s do both, but let’s first and foremost do the cheap and easy things that will improve the lives of present billions, even if it’s not quite as glamarous as the catastrophists’ scenario.

Summary

I don’t go on Reddit and such much these days, but I’m aware of the “First World Problems” meme going around, and I really see that around me all the time, to the point where I feel this disconnect between what literally everyone I meet worries about, and what I worry about. Going to this event today was captivating for me, I was finally in the company of a lot of people putting their heads together and seeing what they could do to help this unhinged world back on to its, er, hinges. It was empowering to think that together we really could make a difference, and not just make a difference, but make a targeted difference by being smart about what we focus on. And if I differ with people about what’s urgent, that’s also okay, because we have a lot of problems and we need people working on every one of them. It was heartening to see what I guess used to be called “people power”, and I’d love to go to more events like this in the future. If you’ve read this far, maybe you should too.

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If you’re not a keen Facebook user or Twitter enthusiast, that premise for a post probably sounds laughable. After all, how much could one miss something that only came into being five years ago, and many people do happily without? Well, I’d argue that the internet and the web only became popular about fifteen years ago, but even “normal”, non-techy people I know really struggle and become uncomfortable if they lose internet access for a week, settling into a new house for instance (how will I know if I have an important email?). I think we’re changed by these tools we use every day, just like our social precursors were changed by the telephone and the automobile, the printing press and the cotton gin. So it interested me to see, effectively, how social networking has changed me, and my interactions with people.

To start with, life didn’t feel very different. I remember telling someone “it’s pretty much the same, except you have a little more time in the day”. I kept coming up with an idea, a joke, an opinion or more often, a website or video I really liked, and wanting to share them with people, and remembering I couldn’t. But it didn’t bother me too much, and I realised that although I didn’t get the reward of people enjoying the stuff I shared and adding their own (often amusing) take on it, I also didn’t have that slight feeling of risk either. What if I’m posting crap, what if my friends just barely tolerate my mountains of oversharing, what if no one Likes the stuff I say several times in a row, does that mean I’m wasting my time and theirs?

I guess I felt more relaxed, now that I was no longer sticking my neck on the line. But I think that approach to life, taken to it’s logical conclusion, leads to a hermetic habit of staying out of society, afraid you’ll make the wrong move. If I’ve learned anything in my battle with depression, it’s that not getting out there and meeting people is ultimately worse than any rejection people can inflict. I hadn’t really considered it when I began the experiment, but this digital discommunication played out in just such a way, and I became more detached and a little lonely as a result.

Isn’t it true that we spend less time physically together than we used to? Think of young people in movies and tv past, they’ve always hung out together somewhere, from icecream socials to diners, and from coffee shops to discotheques. One could argue that’s because it’s hard to advance a plot when the protagonists are just sitting alone in their bedrooms. But I think it reflects a trend in the last couple of decades. Even back in the late 90s when I was at school, we all went home and talked all night on MSN, instead of hanging out physically. And now we don’t even have that immediate, connected aspect to our social groups. We drop in and out of Facebook when we want some social contact, then go back to servicing our own wants and needs.

The reason I bring this up is to give some reason to why abstaining from Facebook has made me lonelier and more isolated. Perhaps it’s not because without it, I couldn’t stay in touch with people I rarely see on a day-to-day basis (although I certainly did miss that). It’s that everyone else was still using their social networks, and they were getting their social “hit” in that manner, while staying home or going to the library or whatever, and meanwhile I had plenty to do and no one to do it with. Or maybe that’s just an excuse, and the reality is I just don’t have many friends around here – maybe Facebook fools me into thinking I do, and really I should be getting out and meeting people in real life. I don’t know, but I know that as it turned out, stopping using it didn’t make me compensate, it didn’t improve my “real” social life. It just left me a littler lonelier and a little sadder.*

So, what conclusions can I draw from this experience? Well, first, I guess I’m really surprised that the change has had such a strong effect on my life over the past month. I’ve felt that the web and finding new ways to connect people were important and quite possibly a good area to focus on in my career as a computer programmer, but I’ve certainly never felt it as keenly as now, having gone without. I’m also going to be more appreciative of the benefits I get from social networks, and the next time I hear them sneered at in my presence, perhaps I’ll be able to better elucidate what they mean to me and change someone’s mind.

But most of all, I’m going to be glad to be back in the company of many of the wonderful people I’ve met over the years, many of whom are many miles away. Plus some of the good folks on Twitter and Google+ I enjoy following without having ever met them. I suppose if I’ve learned anything, it’s what it’s like to be without every single one of them individually, and in the next few days, I’m going to learn what it is to have them back, one by one.

*Full disclosure, I think I did go a little more out of my way to meet people – I went to my first meeting of the Cardiff University Green Party tonight, and perhaps if the experiment had continued, I’d have tried other things. Or perhaps I would have gone anyway, there’s no way of knowing.

Anyway, I now have the type of bee in my bonnet of which I would usually unburden myself by releasing onto Google Buzz (well, G+ but I liked the pun). It concerns the whole “Do Not Track” movement, and the latest attempted privacy furore to come out of the Wall Street Journal in an article called “How Google Tracked Safari Users”. I am angry that people are angry. Let me explain.

I use a lot of websites, and I only pay money for a couple of them – Netflix and Remember the Milk, which charge me £5.99 per month and $25 per year, respectively. All of the other sites I know and love like Gmail, Google search, Lifehacker, TreeHugger, StackOverflow and many more, don’t charge me a penny. How can they afford to provide such splendid content and/or helpful services for free? Largely through advertising.

Okay, so they sell the space for companies to advertise to me, there’s nothing that sinister about that, I grew up watching lots of TV like everyone else and I’m used to it. But wait, what’s this I’m hearing? The advertisers use cookies to track what other websites I’m going to, they follow my behaviour and use data mining to work things out about me?? That’s like 1984 all over again!

Well, there are three points I would make in response to that hysterical and frequently echoed reaction.

1) I can see that this is not actually a bad thing, nor is it to my personal detriment. We can infer from the ways that these cookies work that these marketing companies can find out (anonymously) about you or me – what we like, what we tend to do, what makes us spend money, whatever. But just gaining that knowledge isn’t implicitly bad – it’s what they do with it, right?

You mean, they’ll use what they know about me to develop products and services that better augment the way I already live? They’ll show me adverts for things I might actually want (I’d love never to see another tampon ad in the rest of my largely male life)? They’ll… what? What are we afraid of?

2) I wasn’t going to use that data anyway, and I’m glad if people can make use of any data about me. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me, but I love big data and the ability to gain insight into populations. We didn’t know smoking caused cancer until we had good enough epidemiological data across a large sample of people and could draw causal links. Imagine how many thousands of years your ancestors were smoking tobacco, and before that, “hemp”, without ever knowing it was foreshortening their lives (or at least if they were lucky enough to live to old age).

Obviously, these companies aren’t doing this for the good of humanity, but if my data is worth something to someone and it isn’t to me, good luck to them and they can have it. Perhaps my wiling away hours in internet backwaters wasn’t completely in vain. And if selling that data lets sites provide me with free stuff that I like in return… so much the better.

3) It’s intuitively “creepy”, but intuitions in humans weren’t built to relate to computers and anonymity. For our whole evolution as a species, we’ve been in small communities where everyone has been aprised of everyone else’s business, but on the other hand we’ve learned not to violate the norms of our society without expecting retribution, so we have learned to conceal our less honorable natures. We instinctively see too much scrutiny as a dangerous thing – it makes sense that we have evolved to keep our privations from others, but computers are so new that we see any logical entity as a threat to our security if it knows too much about us. But this isn’t how computers work. I can tell you that as a computer programmer.

A computer can scan your whole email archive, it can determine things about you like grammar and brand names you mention often, but it will still know nothing about you in a personal way. It won’t know your brothers name, or what you get up to on weekends that you’d rather your colleagues didn’t find out about. It is a machine with a set of rules to follow that spits out some information. But it is no more aware of your dark side than the pigeon roosting opposite your bedroom window. Computers may do superhuman things, finding that one document on the internet you need in under a second, and to take the analogy further, even pigeons are far better at flying than most people I know, but neither are sentient. The only reason to fear computers reading behaviour from you is if you are also afraid of judgmental birds in your vicinity, i.e. you are ignorant of the lack of thought process in them, or you are simply a paranoid lunatic.

I’m not saying companies that use computers can’t invade your privacy, I’m just saying that computers processing large amounts of data about you sounds creepy but really, really isn’t, and that’s an idea that society needs to start warming up to.

I’d like to close with the quote, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Call me an apologist for industry, but where some people would put the emphasis on “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“, I would personally put it on “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Let’s hear it for free stuff and better advertising.

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I wonder if it's because you come back fresh and prepared to rip bits up and start again where necessary. After spending all day on your code, perhaps you either subconsciously don't want to recognize that's necessary and you no longer have the energy. Or maybe you're just 'code blind', the same way you don't 'see' grammatical errors in a document you've been writing for a while.

Either way, I say it's a good argument for giving programmers longer lunch breaks

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