David Pogue writes in his latest Personal Tech article "Online, How Much Security Is Too Much? " about IT professionals who give security a higher priority than convenience or productivity. He concludes

"Maybe companies need to hire a PT person as well (Productivity Technology), somebody who's a counterweight to the IT person. Somebody whose job it is to argue: "Oh, come on. Is this really necessary?"

 There is no need for a new breed of professional 'The Productivity Technologist" In the short term effective senior managers will stop IT getting in the way of company productivity ; ineffective senior managers will encourage another layer of control. In the long term the upcoming generation show every sign of attaching no importance to security or privacy so it's a temporary inconvenience. How soon will you be able to log into your bank account with your Facebook login?

The British Medical Journal reports a study by Elizabeth Robb et al BMJ 2010;340:c1234 which showed that if staff  followed  "care bundles" which are reminder/checklists of simple but important steps in managing treatment, signing off when steps had been completed, death rates can be reduced. 

Whilst less dramatic than rushing around and shouting this approach helps medical staff, who may be both inexperienced and exhausted, to remember to follow the correct sequence of actions for dealing with serious and fast moving clinical events.

The authors report that

 "The main expenditure was the small cost of printing these checklist sheets (about £300 for each batch of 100 sheets)."

Sometimes the answer isn't more computers

This may come as a shock to people in the IT industry but sometimes the answer isn't bright,shiny and made by them. In a rare foray into the real world IT Consultants have come across a client base that seems to be more interested in saving peoples lives than slick user interfaces into relational databases. IT companies are used to presenting their half-arsed projects made from the computing equivalent of toilet roll centres and sticky backed plastic to rapturous applause from adoring, over-indulgent parents so dont know how to deal with underpaid, over worked health care professionals.
We are a long way from an agreed user requirement for a computer system for the UK National Health Service - but wait, we have already spent £12 billion on it. It has now become a political issue. I assume that a Conservative Party junior research took my ranting on this topic, packaged it for his masters who are now barking about simple, sponsored by advertising, google solutions to accessing information. Ah well.
The surprising thing about this sad episode is pointed out by the Financial Times which states that we can't afford to stop the contracts. Still paying billions to IT companies to do nothing keeps them out of mischief.
But where can these companies redeploy their hyperactive, unstructured clowns (sorry, I mean IT professionals) the circus tent of National Identity card is already full and taking money with an almost embarrassing efficiency.
I know - a real time database of every single banking and retail transaction. It's obvious that we need to profile those people who buy ethnic food with cash. We could have links into the local authority databases to check whether they have a record of their dogs fouling the footpaths. I had better stop there I have an uneasy feeling that I might be taken seriously

I spent the weekend trying to get my cheap pay-as-you-go broadband to get above morse code speed. Soon I won't have to bother. Once there is broadband in every home with wireless networking to every child's bedroom I will be bathed in a rich soup of bandwidth and able to connect to any access point from across the street. I can guarantee that the majority of access points will still have the default password.
I can also guarantee that people who use obscure passwords will find 20 armed policemen knocking on their door with a battering ram with full media coverage.

I'm still waiting to see how broadband in every home is going to power the economic recovery, solve childhood obesity and decrease our reliance on imported food - to name just a few real priorities

In olden times if you wanted to exchange snippets of information on-line you signed up for a bulletin board or forum or chatroom. This was a self selected group of people with a common interest. In the quaint way of old fashioned computing there was a complex hierarchy of topics and sub-topics and an administrator. Conversations ambled along at the speed of a dial up modem and people spent the night sleeping so conversations across timezones were even more leisurely. Joining the community required access to exotic equipment and technical knowledge so the major topic of discussion was computing or science fiction.

Inside all of this structure you would find short abbreviated comments from people with funny pseudonyms - yes it was just like twitter!

Calling twitter a chat room would immediately cause most users to abandon it. Twitter is way cooler than that, twitterers would cry.

Quite simply, twitter has abandoned structure. It is a free form playground of excitable toddlers all jammed on transmit.

The intriguing thing about it is that it has become subject to evoultionary pressure and primitive structures are beginning to appear.

All very philosophical but "What's in it for me?  you chorus

My advice for those whose curiosity has been piqued by their broadsheet twittering on about twitter is

- Only sign up if you know someone already using it
- Use twitter advanced search to select an area of 10 miles from where you live. You can then quickly find out if there is anybody interesting out there
- Treat it like an item of fashion clothing  - fun for the moment.
- Don't use it for important things,  it can be unreliable

You will of course find the bof on twitter mixing it wiv his mates, wicked