An Artificial Intelligence on developments in Science, Technology and Education.
With a bit of Humour and Robotics thrown in for good measure.
About the Unreasonable Man
Ian Yorston is Head of Digital Strategy at Radley College, OX14 2HR, UK
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
Contact me by .
I lecture more than I probably should - details here.
Lots of students are doing public exams at the moment.
One of them (thanks James) sent me this:
From Randall Munroe's hugely entertaining xkcd - a site which not only offers "romance, sarcasm, maths and language", but also makes very clever use of img tags if you mouseover his cartoons.
All of which led me back to this tv ad from the late 1980s
The ad, created by agency J Walter Thompson, is priceless and was the watercooler moment of its time - making "you got an ology" a veritable catch phrase.
The ad also has a wonderful outro:
"It's the teachers who are wrong. You know, they can't mark. A lot of them can't see..."
I've bought an Eee PC from Asus. It runs Linux. It runs all the Office applications. It runs the Firefox browser. And it runs my e-mail client of choice.
I'm chairing a session tomorrow at the Independent Schools Annual Conference. We're looking at the threats and opportunities presented by Social Networks within a schools' context - so primarily YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.
It should be a good session: we have Dr Zoe Hilton and Emily Knee, both from the NSPCC - who are experts in child-protection issues.
And then we have Antony Mayfield from iCrossing, who is a specialist in the interactions of People and Brands through the medium of Social Networks.
I'm guessing we'll be faced by a bunch of Heads who think that Social Networks are just a threat, pure and simple - but I'm hoping that I'll be wrong...
Are you reading this website on its "home" page at www.UnreasonableMan.net or are you getting some sort of a feed into your own information channel?
Did you get here by chance or did you try typing the word "unreasonable" into Google?
Are you reading the comments on the right hand side of the page ("del.icio.us ideas") or just the main entries down the middle of the page?
If you're reading this in some sort of feed reader then do you have the latest feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheUnreasonableMan or are you reading something quite different (and perhaps older)?
I'm trying to push everything through the one channel...
It's becoming ever more obvious that the future of ICT lies with Web Based Applications.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Flickr, Twitter, etc
If you want to keep an eye on the future then you could do a lot worse than to have a look at this list of the best web-based apps of 2008.
It is worth noting that Google appears in just about every category (bear in mind that Picassa, Blogger and YouTube are all Google products - and iLike is essentially a Google product).
Also note that Amazon do a lot more than just sell books, music and DVDs; they're rapidly becoming a major force in the ICT world.
There's now a blogging application within Facebook - written by those nice people at Typepad, who host this weblog of mine. It's got pretty neat functionality - and supports various blogging accounts (WordPress, Typepad, Blogger) as well as supporting Twitter and Facebook status posts.
Once upon a time there was a really neat program for the Apple Mac. It played your music. It shuffled songs and albums. And it was called SoundJam.
Apple bought it - re-badged it - and iTunes was born. The rest, as they say, is History.
Or, more to the point, the rest is the Future of Computing for the next 10 years or so.
Because Apple have leveraged iTunes into the interface of choice for every form of content that you might want. Music, Film, TV, PodCasts, Lectures. You name it (er, "Books?" I hear you cry), and Apple have figured how to put it on your iPod. And as the iPod (and now the iPhone) has become the smart device of choice, so iTunes has become the interface that everyone uses.
For content.
And as everyone knows (and Sony learned) content is king.
But actually, that's changing. Because now the iPhone is actually a computer - it runs Apple's OS X operating system and is well on the way to functioning as a fully fledged laptop/tablet. And that means that, well, iTunes is growing into something more.
It's now the conduit for all the functionality you wanted.
Apple have had the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) triumvirate covered for a while. But now they have a hotline to every Form and Function you might possibly want.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that Tony Blair got just one thing right and then utterly failed to stay focused - to whit Education, Education, Education.
It applies to Foreign Policy just as much as to Drugs, Unemployment, Social Disorder and Third World aid. The Fukuyama thesis wasn't just about Western Democracies - it was about delivering sufficient Education to get people as far as those Democratic assumptions.
Part of the framework of Europe's enduring peace has been the rise and rise of effective education.
According to Microsoft, XP has one or two problems that just might mean you want to upgrade to Vista. Personally I'd recommended you upgrade to a Mac and run OS X - but I'll leave you to read Microsoft's own views on their own issues - or, as one colleague put it, "here are some reasons why Microsoft reckon that XP is rubbish".
How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade: This article outlines how IT managers can make a case for upgrading the OS, with a focus on practical tips
Standardizing on the latest operating system and having enough RAM to support everyone’s applications would make your life so much easier and more productive. It could also make your systems efficient and secure. Sounds like an easy decision, right?
But, in fact, convincing business managers to upgrade company desktops or migrate them to a newer operating system can sometimes be a very hard sell. Often, management cannot see the value in spending money on something that, from their perspective, already runs smoothly the way it is.
Bruce Johnson, principal consultant with Toronto-based ObjectSharp Consulting, and a 25-year veteran of the computer industry, has spent the past 14 years on projects at the leading edge of Windows-based technology. He has some useful insights on how IT can talk to management in a language they will understand – especially when it comes to spending money in order to save money.
In Summary:
• New security features alone (such as enhanced Group Policy capabilities) can make upgrades worthwhile – know in advance what reacting to security issues is currently costing you
• When selling an upgrade, be sure to divide your reasons into clearly defined benefit “categories”
• Start slow – a phased in approach may be easier to sell than a large-scale upgrade
Security is the message
According to Johnson, management may not be aware that the most compelling reason to migrate to a newer operating system, such as Windows Vista, is to take advantage of the latest security features.
“The problems with positioning upgrades is that, from a user perspective, the changes may not seem significant. But from an administrative perspective, some of the security features are huge,” he said.
“So, as an IT person, who is responsible for the security of the company from viruses and for making sure that everyone is safe, there are many features in Windows Vista that I like. It does a great job of keeping people from being able to browse certain sites. It protects from viruses, because there are a lot more things that will get locked down, and the lock down tends to be tighter. You have a tougher time having things happen accidentally. Probably the biggest hassle from a security perspective [with past technologies] is that users tended to run as administrators. In Vista, that’s not the default anymore.”
The challenges
Johnson said upgrades can be challenging for IT as well. It requires the team to be a lot more involved in the installation and testing of the individual machines, because users are typically not going to be the administrators. Users may also be resistant to this idea at first, because they can no longer download all those fun, quirky applications that may, inadvertently, make their machines vulnerable.
“We have a bit of a Catch 22 here because, as much as people complain about their perceived lack of security, as soon as you try to do something to make it more secure, the users don’t want this, because it keeps them from doing all the things that they have always done,” adds Johnson.
Another challenge is the fact that the OS install requires more RAM, so IT also has to convince management to upgrade the desktops to support this. “That can be problematic for large companies, because it can get expensive.”
The hidden cost of vulnerability
What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, “because you are paying for an administrator’s time to deal with these issues,” Johnson said. The trick is to show management this in a way that translates into dollars saved.
“It’s a hard sell, because security is not a line item on their income or expense sheets. There also is not a line item that says they lost, say, $100,000 on their security problem last year. Or lost staff productivity because people had viruses on their machines,” he said.
Make a list
Johnson says as a first step, before even talking to management, IT first needs to classify and itemize the work that they do in several categories: improved productivity, security breaches, recovering from problems, etc. and then start dropping them into categories. “Once they do this, they can then start to map how much of it falls into the areas that Windows Vista, for example, may very well have been able to prevent from happening.”
Save me the money
So how do you convince management to buy new machines, or upgrade the RAM and get the latest OS, if what they are doing right now seems to work OK?
Johnson said that they have to realize that they are going to have to move there eventually, in order to match the capabilities of their competitors. And once they see the cost savings they could be gaining by the increased security and productivity, they will be more open to the idea of upgrading. Even if they are not ready to do an end-to-end migration just yet, they can build the OS migration into a succession plan, and do a few machines at a time.
Proactive versus reactive
The best thing about the upgrades, once they are done, is that administrators will have more time to devote to preventing problems before they happen, Johnson said.
“The increase in security – the inability for users to just simply install stuff, means that you are decreasing the amount of reactive tasks that an administrator has to perform,” said Johnson. “This allows him to become proactive in all things you want in your company.”
I've quoted the whole of the Microsoft page for two reasons: firstly as a public service on behalf of Microsoft; secondly, because I'm darn sure that Microsoft Canada will take down the source page pretty soon...
This is an extraordinary story about the decline of British Education. But let me start on the subject of football. Because there are some interesting parallels.
Last week the various UK soccer sides all fell out of Euro 2008. Only 14 teams were able to qualify - and not one of our national sides made the cut. England promptly fired their national coach. Newspapers agonized over the decline and fall. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. This was, by all accounts, a national disaster.
This week the OECD published its Pisa survey. This is a comparative study of academic performance around the world. It publishes every three years and considers reading, maths and science skills. It too points to a national disaster.
The UK did VERY badly. Among 15-year-olds in 57 countries the UK ranked "between 12th and 18th place".
The organisers give a country's position as being ranked between certain positions because it says with a sample of students it is not always possible to state a comparative ranking with 100% accuracy. Instead, OECD calculates, with 95% confidence, a range of ranks that the country falls within.
So we can be 95% certain that UK school science is bad enough to see the national coach sacked.
Only that isn't quite how the BBC reported the story. Read on and be amazed:
The UK is among the better performers in an international league table on school science
This is unbelievable reporting - not just rose-tinted spectacles but a full-blown case of myopia. Nor is this the first time that the BBC have reported an educational disaster as some curious form of triumph.
It obviously occurred to the BBC that people might - just might - check some of the facts. So the report continues with this extraordinary excuse:
In 2000, the UK was 4th, but the organisers say comparing results is not strictly valid because the tests have changed.
Note: not strictly valid. Hmm. I can't help thinking that a fall from 4th to 14th is sufficiently dramatic to be worthy of comparison despite some minor caveat.
The BBC then throws in this curious observation:
The UK as a whole was not included in the last Pisa study.
Well, yes, that's true - but a quick search of the BBC's own pages would reveal that in the last survey of 2003 the UK failed to provide enough data for the analysis of Maths and Science to be statistically valid (there's some deep irony in there somewhere).
So the last time the UK was properly assessed was back in 2000. And everything has been in decline ever since. The BBC reported that millennium survey in euphoric terms - and even managed to employ a footballing metaphor. Sadly the report is now most notable for the unfulfilled optimism of its closing paragraph.
Of course, it isn't only Science and Soccer that are in decline. Only last week it was announced that England had dropped from third place to 19th in the world in an assessment of reading.
FactFile
The Pisa survey is based on tests carried out in 2006 in 57 countries which together account for 90% of the world's economy. It tested students on how much they knew about science and their ability to use scientific knowledge to address questions in daily life.
Finland come out on top, followed by Hong Kong (China), Canada, Chinese Taipei, Estonia and Japan. Countries that have moved 'sharply upward' include Canada, Germany, Austria and Denmark.
Note that Estonia were part of the Soviet Union until 1991. Next thing you know, we'll be losing football games to Croatia...
Update
The BBC have now changed their article to better reflect the reality of the original Pisa Report.
It now reads:
There seems to be a growing number of scientists addressing the structure and functioning of the brain. I've been reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (the entrepreneur who started both Palm and Handspring), which builds a very convincing case for the brain building invariant models which it then uses in a pattern/prediction sequence.
I've also been reading Steve Grand's book "Growing Up with Lucy" - which claims to be 20 steps to building your own android, but is really a discussion about the practical implementation of AI and robotics.
And, in turn, this led me to Cordelia Fine's excellent book "A Mind of its Own" - which has to be one of the more unnerving books I've read recently because it presents a very plausible case for the hypothesis that your brain lies to you most of the time - just to keep you cheerful...
I put some brief notes together in MindMeister - which is an OnLine brain storming tool that we've started using at Radley.
GoogleMaps is very cool - and an excellent tool for mash-ups such as WalkJogRun. Of course, just for fun, Google also added imagery for the Moon and for Mars. Which is pretty neat - particularly for those of us who teach. Or pretty much anyone who likes to think.
But GoogleEarth has always been much more impressive. The third dimension, and the software's capability as a layered browser - means that GoogleEarth has the potential to do so much more - perhaps even become the VirtualWorld that everyone is really waiting for.
Recently GoogleEarth acquired the functionality to overlay buildings and other architectural features. Including the ability to overlay historical data - such as Ancient Greece. Or London before the Great Fire of 1666.
More recently still, Google added Google Sky, which lets us look upwards and outwards to the stars.
And now - albeit without any fanfare - they've added a Flight Simulator.
I've put a taster of the Flight Simulator - and an appropriate link - just at the bottom of this text. But what I actually want to write about is the next steps that we may yet see from GoogleEarth.
Because this is very nearly the Universal Explorer that will allow us to ride around the Battle of Waterloo, to float around the Barrier Reef, to reach to the outer edge of the Solar System, to wander the streets of Ancient Rome and to swim around the inside of the human circulation.
And I'm guessing that Google will have a whole heap of Engineers who recognise all those touchstones.
----------
Flight Simulator Keyboard Controls
This document describes the various keyboard combinations that you can use with the flight simulator features of Google Earth. Ensure you have the latest version of GoogleEarth (v4.2 or higher). Click somewhere on the main image of the software. Now press Cmnd-Option-A on a Mac (Ctrl-Alt-A on a PC) to enter the flight simulator mode. Once you have entered flight simulator mode for the first time, you can re-enter the mode by choosing Tools > Enter Flight Simulator.
To leave flight simulator mode, click Exit Flight Simulator in the top right corner or toggle out of the mode by again selecting Cmnd-Option-A on a Mac (Ctrl-Alt-A on a PC).
High levels of computer technology in schools can improve attainment to an extent, a four-year study has found.
The £34m ICT Test Bed project by Becta in three deprived areas of England showed gains in some GCSE and primary school test scores.
The study involved 23 primary schools, five secondaries and three further education colleges.
These were in Barking and Dagenham, Sandwell and Durham - all areas of relative though different social and economic disadvantage.
Which sounds great until you read on:
[The schools] drew up their own plans and were given money - totalling £34m - to spend on "high levels" of hardware, software and training.
Results of the Test Bed schools were compared with similar institutions elsewhere and with national averages, in a study evaluated by Manchester Metropolitan and Nottingham Trent universities:
at Key Stage 1 (aged seven): "no significant differences"
in Key Stage 2 tests (aged 11), the rate of improvement was higher for Test Bed schools and some even passed the national average for English
at Key Stage 3 (14-year-olds): no significant differences
at GCSE (aged 16): no difference in overall pass rate, but Test Bed pupils did better than those in comparator schools in getting five good grades including English and maths
post-16: little change - Test Bed students scored same points per exam but took fewer A-levels than comparators.
So let's get this clear.
A government agency spent over £1 million per school, across 30 something schools, and the best they can report after four years is that there was some unquantified improvement for the 11 year-olds in the study.
And that no-one else showed any obvious benefit whatsoever.
Sheesh...
I can't quite get over that the BBC ran this with such a positive headline.
Read on and you find:
Schools struggled to improve links with pupils' homes and to cater for those without computers or the internet.
Schools had found it "hugely time-consuming", prohibitively costly in software and "fraught with problems".
And how much has all this cost us?
Over the past decade the government has spent almost a quarter of a million pounds per school on ICT - more than £5bn in all.
And has, it appears, very little to show for it...
Of course there is an opportunity cost. In fact £5bn would have paid for some 20,000 teachers across that same timeframe.
According to my calculations that's roughly five teachers for every state secondary school in the UK. [data]
Becta were presumably pretty disappointed with their findings and their press release was just desperate to find some positive spin.
They tried this:
"There has been a shift in the views of teachers, in particular, with initial scepticism and apprehension being gradually replaced by optimism and confidence."
Well, yes. But that optimism and confidence isn't particularly justified. Certainly not in any meaningful sense.
Or, as Becta put it:
"At present the evidence on attainment is somewhat inconsistent, although it does appear that, in some contexts, with some pupils, in some disciplines, attainment has been enhanced."
Should you happen - like me - to be a UK tax payer, then I have very bad news. Because this is how Schools' Minister Jim Knight sees the matter:
"The Test Bed project demonstrates just how ICT has the power to transform young people's learning - both at school and beyond the school gate."
He added: "We will be looking to capitalise on this project and replicate it across the country."
I'm pushing Facebook as a tool for our students. It provides them with pretty much everything they want: connectivity, e-mail, blogging, photos and media linking.
The real challenge is to then bring learning and creative endeavour into Facebook.
So I read with interest this suggestion from Nicholas Carr:
Facebook should capitalize on Wikipedia's open license and create an in-network edition of the encyclopedia.
It would be a cinch: Suck in Wikipedia's contents, incorporate a Wikipedia search engine into Facebook (Wikipedia's own search engine stinks, so it should be easy to build a better one), serve up Wikipedia's pages in a new, better-designed Facebook format, and, yes, incorporate some advertising.
There may also be some social-networking tools that could be added for blending Wikipedia content with Facebook content.
She used 3 Billion years of evolution to endow Homo Sapiens with the smartest mind in the known universe, and then added a streak of idleness which means that we would prefer not to think unless it is absolutely necessary.
Thus it is that people run their lives on "hunches", "suspicions" and "gut feelings". Herein lies the success of slimming pills and conspiracy theorists. Even when the Truth is Out There the vast majority of people would rather sit in by the fire and read a good novel. They might even write a brief review of the book - an opinion - a critique, if you will. Something for the Arts programme.
Now there are those who will tell you that the Arts are simply Sciences waiting to happen. That all subjects move from the Arts to the Science if only you are prepared to hang around long enough. Indeed a significant number of subjects have travelled this road already: Biology has moved from Nature drawing to metabolic pathways; Geography has moved from coloured maps to Geomorphology; even something as unlikely as Cooking has transformed itself first into Food Science and, more recently, into Molecular Gastronomy - which isn't quite full-blown Chemistry, but does at least allow you to use a bunsen burner when making Creme Brulee.
In practice, almost any area of academic endeavour can subject itself to the Scientific Method if its protagonists are prepared to work hard enough; an art is just a science with too many unknowns. Thus it is that one of the most successful History books of recent times - Guns, Germs and Steel - was written by Jared Diamond, whose Cambridge-based PhD is rooted in membrane biophysics.
But most people don't enjoying juggling such a plethora of variables. Because Science is hard. Particularly if you are stupid. Anyone can hold a view on Shakespeare, however ill-judged or ill-informed. But it's rather harder to calculate the residual stress in polymer-bonded carbon fibre, because it isn't obvious how to construct the question - let alone answer it.
And we know that Science is hard because some kind academics at Durham University have proved as much. They've shown that the average candidate will clock lower grades at Physics or Chemistry than at any other A Level subject of their choosing.
Note carefully, I said "the average candidate"; because it turns out that the "smart candidate" will almost certainly do better at these subjects, for the very reason that they do understand the questions and they can do the maths and, well, it isn't very hard really and, honestly, you can scream through prep in 20 mins flat and then play football. Smart people do Science precisely because it isn't that hard to them. Indeed, smart scientists are often extraordinarily lazy: Einstein is a good example; Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the World Wide Web) is another; I could go on (but I'm not sure I can be bothered).
OK. So let me summarise our findings so far: most people find science hard.
There, that wasn't too painful.
So, for the many, many people out there who think that weight and mass are pretty much the same thing and that Ohm's law is really, really hard - well, Global Warming is going to be a tough one.
Because Global Warming has LOTS of variables. Just tonnes of them. Honestly.
And so given the choice of either: reading a hefty academic tome, signed off by some 2000 leading scientists, and endorsed by the UN - or: watching a Channel 4 expose and then chatting to a mate at the pub; you can be pretty damn certain that the average citizen will plump for option 2, and then head home in a gas-guzzling SUV whilst muttering about the curious nature of hosepipe bans.
Which would be fine by me were it not for the curious nature of democracy. "Curious" because no-one seriously thinks that we should take popular opinion into account when it comes to doing sums; no-one punches numbers into their calculator and then argues about the result. But those same people who shrink at the thought of data analysis will happily offer their view on Global Warming - and expect me to care about their opinion.
Save £0.02 when you spend £100,000.00 or more on Qualifying Items offered by Amazon.co.uk. Enter code M7575XH9 at checkout. (restrictions apply)
It seems a few days too early for an April fool?
I particularly love the idea that "restrictions apply"
* I'm seeing it here for example - 29 Mar 2007, 13:35
** UPDATE: 29 Mar 2007, 17:15 - Gone a few hours later ... Anyone care to comment on whether this an April Fool that got loose a couple of days early. I'm tempted to try the checkout code just see what happens - and to see if it checks for a spend in excess of £100,000.00
Long known for its outsourcing, India is now increasingly marketing itself as a destination for affordable education.
From his bedroom in Bangalore, biology teacher Vishal Bhatnagar uses an electronic pen to highlight the main parts of the human endocrine system on the laptop screen in front of him.
"What I'm trying to show you," he says, speaking into a headset, "is that most of the chemicals in the body are poured into the blood to be effective."
Eight thousand kilometres (5,000 miles) away in London, student Veenesh Halai follows along, making notes and asking questions.
[...]
For centuries, Indians have sent their own children to the best boarding schools, colleges and universities in the West. India is still one of the world's largest exporters of students. But India is now trying to reverse that trend.
The International School of Bangalore looks like a tropical resort. Its lush, manicured lawns are fringed by palm trees and fragrant, blooming vines. There are more than 400 foreign students enrolled at the school, which boasts an international GCSE curriculum, as well as a swimming pool, golf course, spacious residence halls and 24-hour medical staff.
On the football pitch, 14-year-old Josh and 13-year-old Will, both from the UK, kick a ball back and forth.
"I miss the food in the UK. I miss beans on toast," said Josh. "But here, I haven't seen any bullying. You don't have to be good at sport to be liked here. If you're a nice person, everyone likes you. And there's no messing about when it comes to studying."
"Here, the fee is about a quarter of a comparable British boarding school," said Dr Matthew Sullivan, the school's American principal.
"And all Indian schools are smoke-free, drink-free, drug-free environments. There are no mobile phones or iPods, so there are no distractions from learning."
I have to blog this - and thanks to David for the pointer.
Ralph Nader may be the most polarizing figure in American politics.
In 2000, he lost many allies and friends because of his decision to run for president. [His decision to run again] in 2004 cemented the hatred of many liberal Democrats while some Americans stood firm that he had the right to run, whatever the popular opinion.
However, Nader used to be one of the most loved figures in America. He fought for protections Americans now take for granted; airbags, seatbelts, even the air we breathe.
Who is this man that inspires such passion? Find out how the leader of the modern consumer movement and champion of American citizenship fell from grace.
Hero or villain? Crusader or spoiler? Right or wrong? You decide.
More about Ralph Nader at Wikipedia. And the film trailer is here.
"Forget about having 10,000 songs in your pocket. Forget the Apple iPod. The latest cultural fetish - if you believe what you see advertised - is the “iRaq,” which offers you '10,000 volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent.'”
This seamlessly deployed political statement was originally posted on Flickr by kwc
Moore's Law suggests that computers double in power every 18 months or so.
But then the BBC report this:
A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.
The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm. The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.
[...]
The first time teraflop performance was achieved was 11 years ago on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That machine took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by almost 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.
The new Teraflops chip uses less electricity than many current high-end processors, making the design attractive for use in home computers. It consumes 62 watts, and the cores can power on and off independently, making it more energy efficient.
I'll leave you do the sums yourself - but Moore's Law suggests that computers improve by a factor of 10 every 5 years. In educational terms that is pretty significant because it tends to be the length of time that a student stays in each stage of their education...
So it should take approximately 20 years to get an improvement of 10,000 times baseline. Yet here are Intel suggesting that they have workable technology that is 10,000 times better than hardware they were producing 11 years ago.
Even allowing for a couple of years to get this off the workbench and into a workstation it looks as if technology is running ahead of Moore's Law.
Stand by for some seriously smart machines. And ask how your local school is even beginning to prepare for the implications...
I've been trying to clean up the content of this WebLog. It won't come through to those who read the feed, but the site itself looks a little tidier - and now includes my del.icio.us links in readable format.
I'm chairing a session tomorrow at the 
This has appeared on some pages at 
I was lecturing today and gave my usual plug for John Naughton's book 
