a-cubed.info

I’m part of the committee running HalCon next month in Omiya just North of Tokyo. It’s a (hopefully annual) bi-lingual Japanese/English SF convention. We’ve got two guests this year, Charlie Stross from the UK and Ooishi Masaru from Japan. As part of our con online presence we have a blog on which I posted the following piece about Charlie Stross, which I thought might interest people here as well.

Charlie’s Just This Guy I Know (more…)

In all the time I’ve spent in Japan over the last three years I’ve never felt a significant earthquake. People keep asking me if I’m OK whenever they hear there’s an earthquake in Japan, but I’ve either slept through the minor ones tangible in Tokyo or they’ve been in Hokkaidoor Kyushu. But, we’ve just moved in to a new apartment on the 9th floor of a building and on Sunday night there was a minor tremor with epicentre close to Tokyo. I definitely felt that one. It seemed to go on for quite a long time, but I suspect some of that was the building anti-earthquake measures stretching out the energy into smaller vibrations which go on for longer, rather than shorter time scale but bigger movement. Or maybe it was just a relatively long but minor earthquake. This convinces me about my wife’s concerns regarding furnishing the new apartment fully, making sure particularly the bookshelves are securely fixed to the walls, and have either bars on the front of the shelves, or doors with anti-earthquake latches on them.

As this blog has been down for a while due to technical issues, I posted this on my LJ already. From 1st April I have a new job. I will be a professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics, at Meiji University in Tokyo. I will be travelling to Japan at the beginning of March.

PM on Radio 4 today incldued interviews with people about the launch of ID cards for “volunteers” in Manchester. A frelance journalist was first in the queue to get one and was interviewed about the process. She reported having to create five “secret” questions and answers (i.e. passwords with menmonics). The quality of these, represented by her interview, leaves much to be desired: “What is your favourite food?” being the one quoted. There is some very good recent evidence regarding the flawednature of such questions. These flaws are both false negative (people’s preferences change) and false positive (easy to remember, and therefore not likely to be forgotten, are generally easy to find out or even guess). For example, the answer to “What is your favourite food?” is probably “chocolate” in a large proportion of cases. Next, they discussed the “biometric” elements. Due to having burnt her finger on foodstuff recently (not an uncommon occurrence, I would think) she had a plaster on the index finger they use, obscuring part of the print. Again, this presents both false positive and false negative issues.

Once again, the UK ID Card scheme is shown to be deeply flawed at the most basic level.

According to this article in The Grauniad, the UK government is set on ignoring the recommendations of yet another report it commissioned (this time the Digital Britain Report, last time the Gowers Report) and are set to introduce proposals for a two strikes law on suspending/removing internet access from those accused by rights’ holders of illicitly sharing copyrighted material online (official government details). (more…)

Three Youtube videos from the same guys doing episodes one, two and three of “If Google Was Your Roommate”. Very well done. Reminds me of the Idiots of Ants’ “Facebook in Real Life”:

• Episode 1
  
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Facebook in Real Life

So, I’ve managed to go swimming twice more and it reminded me of a couple of thing that are different that I didn’t mention in the previous post on this.

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Yesterday I went swimming for the first time in nine years. I haven’t been swimming since I moved to Reading, and the last time I remember being in a pool was during 2Kon in 2000. I’m pretty out of shape and have been gaining weight again recently. I blame the stress, but also the disruption to lifestyle that the travelling I’ve been doing produces. It’s hard to take regular exercise and eat healthily when you spend a third of your time jet-lagged and ten 1-4 day trips away from home in three months is awkward. So, while in Tokyo for the summer I figured that swimming would be a good habit to get into. There’s a public pool attached to a nearby High School (the usual deal of the School provides some of the funding and gets first dibs for lessons/competitions while the city provides the rest of the funding and it’s open to the public the rest of the time). So, swimming in Japan was an interesting experience. (more…)

“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne; Meditation 17). Similarly, when an academic speaks it is with their own authority, and not as an “official spokesman” for their university unless they explicitly (and officially) claim to do so. Of course, any academic is always associated with their institution(s) and it is this association in part that legitimates the greater weight given by many in society to their statements. But the claim by UEL (University of East London) that it had good cause to suspend a professor over comments he made in advance of the G20 summit in London in 2009 (and the protests expected to surround it, which they did) regarding police expectations and violence because “the comments brought the university into disrepute” is utterly specious. These statements by university managers are reported in a recent THE article regarding a subsequent case between the professor and the university on which I make no comment here. What I find utterly abhorrent is the idea that any statement made by an academic could lead to a suspension on the grounds of “bringing the university into disrepute” unless that statement can be found to be factually inaccurate or an illegal statement (such as incitement to violence). And then the suspension should only happen after a suitable process (in the case of illegal speech, that process should be the conclusion of a court case). No academic speaks for their university rather than themselves unless they are officially and clearly doing so. The assumption when any academic speaks is that they are speaking as an individual academic. (more…)

In the 30th April 2009 issue (1,894) of the Times Higher Education magazine, Prof Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford Unviersity wrote an ill-considered and wrong-headed attack on digital communication in general and on Open Access in particular titled Those who disseminate ideas must acknowledge the routes they travel. (more…)