a-cubed.info

I’m now back in Japan for the summer. I arrived on Air Canada flight 1 (I suppose most airlines have a flight number 1, but I found it odd when I booked the ticket). Unfortunately, not all my luggage arrived with me. The good news is that they’ve found my missing case and it came on the same flight today, and will be delivered tomorrow (Saturday) morning. In further bad news, I broke a tooth on the flight over from Toronto (I came to Japan via a conference in Boston, so have visited Philadelphia, Boston and Toronto on the way to Japan from the UK). I’ll have to claim on the University travel insurance to get it sorted. I’m hoping they don’t have to do an extraction – that wouldn’t be a great way to start a ten week visit. I think there’s maybe enough left to cap it if nothing else. I was four hours delayed getting to Boston initially as well. It’s a good job I really enjoy coming to Japan, otheriwse this trip would be turning out rather depressing. As it is, I’m just happy to be back in Japan. (more…)

OK, I admit it. I was ego-surfing Pandora’s Box on various Amazon sites. While looking at the list of other sellers on Amazon.co.uk, I found somewhere that’s selling our book, published in November 2007 and still fully in print, at over £130. The new retail price is less than £30. Do people really buy things listed at such outrageous prices, when one can get it for less than a quarter of the cost direct from Amazon (and over 30 other sellers). This is bizarre.

Amazon.com have an “editorial review” by Karl Jones of Liverpool John Moores University (why this is only on .com and not also/instead on .co.uk I’m not sure) which says: “This book provides a breath of fresh air in the subject… with numerous examples. Further, it provides a nice link between ethical behaviour, professionalism and the law.”

I’ve painfully pushed my way through “Cult of the Amateur”, despite its huge flaws. As mentioned last time, the author constantly follows the “broken window fallacy” in all his economic arguments so far.

A couple of sections cover the issues of accountability in the press and the undermining of advertising. Keen offers up examples of where mainstream media have been caught out, including outright lies, poorly researched stories etc. He offers these up as examples of the higher quality of the infrastructure because of the sanctions then applied. However, the very fact that these failings exist in the mainstream media rather undermine his case, particularly as there’s no way of knowing how many flawed articles aren’t spotted. He also excoriates the self reinforcing groups “talking only to themselves”. These groups are no worse than the existing examples of biased media, for example “Fox News”. One of the differences between mainstream media and the new online media is that new media does not generally make the same claim to lack of bias, or claim to “authority” made by existing media. (more…)

While writing my earlier post criticising Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, I looked up Pandora’s Box on Amazon. I found the “Customers Who Bought Items Like This Also Bought” list interesting. It mostly included work by or about Dawkins’ radical atheism. From my point of view, not bad company to be seen in.

Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen looked like an interesting counterpoint to another book awaiting my reading, Wikinomics. I’m only about 10% of the way through Cult of the Amateur, and I’m finding it hard going. Not that it’s badly written in terms of the phrasing; that’s probably the best thing about it. Keen had a Saul on the road to Damscus moment and turned against “Web 2.0” a few years ago and this is his poorly researched and badly thought out screed against the Web 2.0 ultra partisans. He makes so many mistakes it’s hard to pick them out for scrutiny. Here’s just a couple (I’m using wikipedia links here because it’s one of Keen’s biggest targets and he fails to acknowledge its utility as a starting point):

• Zork and Myst are not MUDs. The closest they come is later episodes in the series being MMORPGS. Zork, of course, derives from Colossal Cave Adventure, and the original MUD was partially derived from Zork.
• He entirely fails to address any real economics, despite the subtitle claiming the book is about how new web technology is “assaulting our economy”. In fact, he follows the typical Broken Window Fallacy in claiming that changes to the economy which undermine the profits of certain players must be bad.

(more…)

Another positive review (scroll down to the third review) of Pandora’s Box has just appeared. This one is in the Engineering & Technology magazine of the IET.

I just heard the “Budget Response” by the Shadow Chancellor, George Osbourne. It was on after “The World Tonight” and I was only half listening to it. However, I was appalled to hear him, in a major radio (and I assume this was just the audio of the TV version so on TV as well) address use the phrase “we’re gonna do X” not once but twice in a row, instead of “we’re going to do X”. This man has pretensions (and a moderate chance) of becoming the Finance Minster of the world’s fourth largest economy within a couple of years. Is this an example of trying to “connect” with “yoof” (you know, I do that all the time without debasing my English to “street” level) or is he really incapable of delivering a speech in standard English. Accents are one thing and so long as it’s understandable I’m quite pleased to hear a variety on Radio 4 (I quite like the gentle tones of the chap with the Caribbean accent they have doing continuity announcements) but there’s a reason “standard” English is used, because it’s more easily understandable to all.

Middle-aged, middle class, Radio 4 listener, now feeling like “annoyed of Kawasaki”.

On Saturday I went to Kamakura. This is another historical power centre of Japan. Japan abounds with former major power centres. This one was particularly important in the 12th to 14th centuries when the Minamoto shoguns had it as their base (making it the military capital but not the imperial capital which was Heian-kyou (now known as Kyoto) during that period).

As with any place that was a major power centre for any length of time, it has quite a few historical sites of interest. I visited three of them, including the kotoku shrine with a Daibutsu (huge Buddha statue). (more…)

Toshiba announced today that it will pull out of producing the HD-DVD format, which leaves the way pretty much clear for Sony’s Blu-Ray to become the standard high definition physical distribution medium. This is a much quicker solution than the earlier format war (VHS v Betamax).

Some claim that physical distribution is now dead, citing declining CD sales (particularly among the young). However, even peer to peer systems struggle to compete with the simplicity and reliability of DVDs for most. So far, at least, easy playback of downloaded TV/movie content on HD home display screens mean that Blu-Ray will probably be quite successful. Only when both bandwidth and ease of display catch up to distributing the 1Gb needed for your average TV episode in HD format, and then showing it in good quality on your home LCD or plasma TV, will physical shipping of TV and Movies become truly obsolete. Video on demand has been “coming but not yet here” for so long now I’m not holding my breath for DVDs following CDs in decline any time soon.

Just had a phone call from a BT (British Telecom for my furrin readers) which was cut off about ten seconds into the call. Rather ironic that the UK’s biggest telecoms company can’t run their own outgoing call centres properly.