1. nudge: A book that offers advice on how to improve decisions about health, wealth and happiness.
Nice piece of counter-think. Photographed in Oxford.
Found on Tumblr : Koufukuron
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.
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.
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:
Australian School Business Administrators Conference 2009
I'm married to a Doctor - so this struck a particular chord.
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:
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..
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."
from www.adennak.com.
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.
Cool.
And just 200 GBP.
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...
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...
You can get it here
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.
