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When Surveillance Goes Private: A 2027 Retrospective
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4–6 minutes·
No comments on When Surveillance Goes Private: A 2027 RetrospectiveI’d like to begin with a story. I was born in the UK — in Birmingham — although obviously I don’t have the accent! My parents came from Hong Kong, but we didn’t visit it until I was a few years old, since it’s quite the trip for any family. The approach to the old Hong Kong airport in…
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A History of the Future in 100 Objects
Last year, I listened to a programme on Radio 4 called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It took 25 hours, or 1500 minutes. In the show, the BBC and the British Museum attempted to describe the entire span of human history through 100 objects – from a 2 million year-old Olduvai stone…
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iPhone 4: The Last Mobile Phone
The iPhone 4 may be the last major advance in mobile phones we’ll ever see. There’ll still be plenty of incremental and useful improvements, but it’s hard to see what kind of attention-grabbing features are left: The Retina screen, at 326 pixels per inch, approaches the limits of human vision; it’s the end of the…
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The Long Decline of Reading
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” – Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the Amazon…
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Meeting Room Yield Management
Six to Start is based in a large building containing dozens of managed and serviced offices. On the way to the shared kitchen at work, I noticed two empty meeting rooms. It occurred to me that, just like an empty seat on a plane, an empty meeting room is lost cash. Sure, there is a…
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Tip of the Tongue
A phenomenon well-known by psychologists, and pretty much everyone else, is called ‘tip of the tongue’, and it’s described in this American Scientist article: When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops.…
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Puzzle Quest, and the USA alone
Unfortunately I’m going to have to disappoint you – I’m not actually going to write a review of Puzzle Quest here; there are plenty of good ones already out there. The one thing I will say is that the game ended far earlier than I imagined – it comes with a large, scrollable world map,…
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STT
The acronym TTS is well known among those who develop call centre software, GPS car navigation devices and software for the blind. It means ‘Text To Speech’, and is more commonly known as voice synthesis, such as the conversion of written text (e.g. ‘Take the first turn on the left into Coronation Street’) into a…
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The Death of Publishers
Update: Virginie Clayssen has done a wonderful French translation of this post on her weblog teXtes. Adrian Buys an eBook Reader A couple of weeks ago, I idly visited mobileread.com and discovered something incredible – Tiger Direct in the US were selling Sony eReaders for $100, a discount of $250. Thanks to the rampaging power…
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Arup’s Key Speech
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the values that companies hold, and how they influence what they do. Many companies have mission statements or tenets or core values; some of them adhere to those values, some ignore them, and some can literally be defined by them. But are they actually helpful, and how do you come…
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