The Unreasonable Man

Homeopathic A&E

XKCD - On Extrapolation

Updating Old-Fashioned Technology

Just occasionally I find myself needing to revert to old technology. Like writing letters. Or sending faxes.

Which is difficult if you are averse to paper.

Step forward two cool services that make my life a little easier.

1. L-Mail. This lets me write letters by e-mail (or via a web interface) which are then printed, stuck in an envelope and posted by hand. Neat. I can even choose from which country they are posted. Which is fun. I can pretend to be in India and send birthday cards to my children.

2. PopFax. This lets me send (and receive) faxes from my computer. Either scanned files (photos, handwritten notes, etc) or standard desktop files (.pdf, .doc, etc).

Both services are web-based, cheap and efficient.

How much ? NHS spends money like water on ICT

According to the Guardian "BT Group will next month become the third major contractor in as many years to take a multimillion pound writedown on its work with the government's crisis-stricken GDP12.7bn overhaul of the NHS computer system."

This is the most astonishing amount of money.

The NHS is pretty much the biggest employer in Europe. There are something like 1,330,000 employed by the wider NHS - of whom some 133,000 are Doctors.

Yet despite that vast workforce we could (takes deep breath) give every-single-one of those employees TWO top-of-the range laptops (one for work and one for home) AND an iPhone each - and still have some change left over from GDP2.7bn.

Leaving some GDP10bn to spend on connecting them all up...

Let's look at that one more time. Two laptops and iPhone for every single NHS employee, and still have GDP10 Billion left over.

For pity's sake, who runs these contracts?

Because we sure know who's paying for it all.

Magistricide isn't nice

Connected Students

Found on TwitPic, via Twitter, from one of my students.

Ouch: Virtual Learning Environments are Expensive and Ineffective

Wow. According to the BBC, Ofsted have produced a hard-hitting assessment on the costs (high) and benefits (err, very few apparently) of the VLEs that we are all supposed to be purchasing.

Some of the quotes:

• The use of online materials to help students with their lessons has been "slow to take off".

• In many schools and colleges VLEs are still on a "cottage industry" scale.

• The benefits to learners are so far "not yet obvious".

• "Despite expectations", dating back some 3 or 4 years, the arrival of these online support services for learners are "still in the early stages of development".

Here at Radley, we bypassed a formal VLE and went for a simple school-wide wiki - using CourseForum software. Much simpler. Surprisingly powerful. And it works.

BBC Education

A trip to Canberra in October 2009

I'm taking a trip to Canberra between October 4th and October 11th 2009.

Australian School Business Administrators Conference 2009

Dilbert: Life, The Universe and Doctors

I'm married to a Doctor - so this struck a particular chord.

From my iPhone

I now have a shiny new 3G iPhone - on the O2 PAYG contract. It really is a very impressive handheld computer. And it runs fully fledged apps for many purposes. Including an excellent blogging tool. But the real strength of the iPhone is the excellent browser, coupled with its excellent connectivity (both WiFi and 3G).

A peek at the future: Google Flu Trends

 This sort of thing is seriously smart. And a real indication of where Google can go by using the "Wisdom of the Crowds" as evidenced by activity passing through its own search engines.
Google Flu Trends.

Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends can use aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in US states up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

This work is overseen by Google.org - the multi-billion dollar charitable arm that Google have established. They aim to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease. In collaboration with experienced partners working in each of these fields, Google plan to invest resources and tap the strengths of their employees and global operations to advance five major initiatives:

• Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE<C)
• RechargeIT
• Predict and Prevent
• Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services
• Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

.

45 Years

American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr. - I Have a Dream

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C..

Barack Obama

It's 02:45 in the UK - and I'm about to head for bed, confident that Barack Obama will be a junior Senator for only a few hours more.

The world could yet become a much better place.

Wikipedia: "Barack Obama is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 United States presidential election."

Google Maps: Zoom In

from XKCD - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

from www.adennak.com.

The Return of the Unreasonable Man

Time to start blogging again.

You get an ology, you're a scientist

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..."

Ready for the Small Screen

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.

Cool.

And just 200 GBP.

Independent Schools Conference

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...

Save the Internet

Important (and informative) movie. Click through and watch...



See also: Save the Internet

Even more Unreasonable

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...

The Future of ICT

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.

BlogIt - Blogging from Facebook

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.

You can get it here

Why iTunes matters, and how it happened.

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.

Neat.

Gates takes on new challenges

As reported by the BBC website. No sooner does the guy announce that he's leaving Microsoft than he turns to Ice Dancing...

Happy Christmas

Education, Education, Education

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.

Discuss.

Downgrading to Vista

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...

It's the End of the World

R.E.M: It's the End of the World - as interpreted by George Bush and the Americans... so to speak

There is no bubble...

...won't you blog about this song...