Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

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A taste of the Sony e-reader

October 29, 2009

We’ve had a Sony e-Reader around the office for a few months now and we’ve used it from time to time to read a few heavyweight pdf documents on long train journeys. But it is only in the last few days that I’ve really got my teeth into it and used it to read an entire book.

Firstly, on the positive side, there is no doubt that it has saved me lugging around seriously heavy chunks of paper on a number of trips. The e-ink screen is good and after years of squinting at laptop screens when I inadvertently end up in a sunny window seat on the train, this is a real joy to read in bright light. It’s also pretty readable in low light. The ability to be able to zoom in on a particular page is also excellent.

Less positively, the page refresh is on the slow side, maybe a second, and this has a noticeable affect on your reading. I also found that the inability to thumb through a book or flick easily from one chapter to another became annoying after a while. You can do these things with the device’s various buttons, but it’s just not as intuitive. I’d also like to be able to scribble notes on pages which is a feature that’s only just been added to the new version of Sony’s device. As a Mac user I was also a bit annoyed that it took several months before Sony had a Mac OS version of their eBook library software.

Sony, of course, are not alone. Indeed, the launch this month of an international version of the Amazon Kindle has generated a lot of newspaper reviews (including an unusually excoriating one by Lynne Truss in the Sunday Times). Some even think these devices will be this year’s Christmas hit. Booksellers Barnes and Noble have got in on the act with an exclusive device called The Nook, which has just launched in America.

More interestingly, Spring Design have announced a dual screen device that has an 6″ e-ink screen area for book reading and another, smaller, LCD screen for Web surfing. The idea is that as you come across hyperlinked items in the book or report you are reading you can click and be taken (on the second screen) to the item in question. This points towards making e-books a different, more interactive experience to the traditional book (which has been much discussed in publishing circles).

Looking at these devices though, I have to say, I think there’s a huge, crisp, perfectly formed piece of fruit about to drop on this market. At the moment it doesn’t officially exist. It’s the Apple tablet and I suspect that will be the Christmas hit. In 2010, that is.

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Optical computing gets European size and power breakthrough

October 16, 2009

For years there has been talk within the computer industry of optical computing being the next big thing. Replacing electronic components with light-bearing ones – think tiny fibre optic cables – promised startling breakthroughs in computational speed. But up until now there has always been a problem making the optical components small enough for computers.

A team of European researchers has just demonstrated ‘light on a wire’ technologies that could lead to computing systems that can combine electronics and optical communications in one system. They call it plasmonics and it makes use of a physical property called electron plasma oscillation to transmit both electronic and optical signals down the same wire. What’s exciting about this is that while the plasmonic technique has been demonstrated before, this team have managed to get the idea to work using existing commercial lithography chip-manufacturing techniques.

As Anatoly Zayats, a researcher who’s been working on the project on behalf of the EU, says: “For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a metre by half a metre and would consume enormous power. With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds.”

Zayats expects commercial results in five to ten years and a French chip manufacturer is drawing up plans. Looks like a good day for the European computer industry.

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Pioneering a low carbon future with Enterprise Architecture

August 8, 2009

It’s been a busy August so far, putting the finishing touches to a report on Enterprise Architecture (EA) which has just been published by JISC TechWatch.

EA is a strategic management technique which aims to align business strategies and goals with information systems. The process involves mapping out both the current situation within an organisation, what’s termed the ‘as is’ and then laying out a vision for the future, the ‘to be’.

It has been in use in the commercial world for a decade or so, although it is new to the education sector. The report synthesises the results of a year-long pilot project by a group of pioneers who looked into the day-to-day practicalities of introducing this technique into the higher education institutions. In particular they looked at the use of The Open Group’s TOGAF method for this kind of work.

The report comes to a number of conclusions, but I think the most interesting relates to the potential for the technique to be used to help the sector move to a low carbon future. As the report makes clear low carbon ICT is an area of activity that is strategically conducive to the EA approach as it needs long-term planning within, and possibly between, institutions. Work is already underway in the sector on the feasibility of shared data centres and the introduction of EA can only help these initiatives.

The report’s called Unleashing Enterprise Architecture and you can have a look at a PDF of the report on the JISC TechWatch website.

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Are e-readers too unemotional?

July 14, 2009

We’ve been experimenting with a Sony e-book reader in the office for the last couple of months. So I was interested to read a comment piece by Peter Crawshaw in the Bookseller magazine about them as they finally seem to be taking off, especially in the States, following innumerable false starts over the years.

He refers to a piece of analysis from Entertainment Media Research which looks at how emotionally engaging books are compared to e-readers. In this context, emotional engagement is the process by which we get hooked into our reading material and swept away into another world. The research shows that while people view books as one of the most emotionally engaging entertainment vehicles, e-books are seen as the least.

Crawshaw suggests two issues with e-readers. One is simply that the technology gets in the way. There is something timelessly effortless about holding a book and automatically turning pages as you read. Somehow, the clicking of little buttons on the side of your Sony or Amazon Kindle doesn’t have this automatic quality. Personally, my experience is that the tiny delay while the page of text is redrawn by the reader does interrupt the flow. Of course this may change as we become use to such devices and they become slicker.

A more important point he makes, I think, is the tendency for e-books to be interactive, with added video snippets and links to click. All this he argues may be great for certain types of content (for example learning material), but is less so for the delicate flow of good story. Crawshaw wonders whether traditional publishers will begin to alter their content to fit the expectations of a more interactive way of reading, and thereby lose what he calls “the wonder of an unhurried story.”

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Silence of the Chips

July 9, 2009

If you’re thinking deep-fried slithers of Maris Pipers and a monastic vow of silence, or a cheap re-make of the Anthony Hopkins/Jodie Foster blockbuster, then this piece is not for you.

The chips in question are RFID chips, which the EU wants to sprinkle liberally in our urban environment in order to kick-start a world-leading tech industry (a very rough summary). However, there’s been such a kafuffle over the potential for privacy invasion that the EU now wants to start a debate about whether or not people should have the right to ‘disconnect’ from this networked environment.

The problem is that in this vision of the future there will be perhaps 70 billion Internet-enabled, computer-like devices plus countless other everyday physical objects and consumables that have been tagged with RFID. In effect we will be surrounded by a kind of permanent, ‘always-on’ computational fabric woven into our physical surroundings. In a recently announced action plan, the EU poses the question of what rights we should have to be able to disconnect from this networked environment, which they call the ‘right to silence of the chips’.

The action plan is very sketchy on details of what such a right might consist of. Would it, for example, apply permanently or just for certain periods of time? How will we be reassured that we have genuinely been ‘disconnected’? When the chips are down, what do you think they’ll put first – big business or the right to privacy?

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The Open Source revolution has only just begun

June 22, 2009

A few months ago I interviewed Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense, for a piece for Oxford University’s OSS Watch service. Gianugo is an engaging fellow and clearly passionate about open source software (OSS). For him we are in the midst of a revolution, and, as he told a workshop just before I interviewed him: “revolution is hard stuff. Heads get chopped off. There is violence. There is turmoil. But in the end you get to a new order of stability in which some new things are taken for granted.”

For him OSS is much more than a debate about who owns the code and what kind of licence it has. It is a revolutionary new way of working that is about the development of an open and collaborative community centred around that code. He sees this as the profound change that OSS has brought and argues that this way of working is widening rapidly beyond code to cover other information products (such as scientific research). The term Open Development Method has been coined for this and you can read more in the article “Avoiding abandon-ware: getting to grips with the open development method”

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Googlegrams

June 1, 2009

Friday lunchtime I escaped the shackles of my desk for a rare, UK exhibition of the work of Catalonian artist Joan Fontcuberta at Nottingham’s Djanogly art gallery. According to the curator, Neil Walker, Fontcuberta’s work questions the nature of truth and, in particular, the reliability or otherwise of photographic documentary evidence. The artist’s previous works include a complete portfolio of faked photographs purporting to document a Soviet space mission that went badly wrong in which a cosmonaut was lost in space. However, that’s not the TechLunch link. What interested me was the current display: Googlegrams.

Googlegrams are large photographs (about a metre square) constructed from thousands of small photo ’tiles’ in the style of a mosaic. Each tile consists of a tiny image taken from the Web, sourced from Google’s image search engine. Fontcuberta takes an image from current affairs, for example there is one showing a number of drowned African refugees who have been washed up on a Spanish beach, and replicates it in Google-sourced tiles.

In order to make this work, Fontcuberta has doctored a piece of freeware software, used for what’s called photo mosaic-ing, which selects tiles that correspond to the colour and shading of the large image. The software works out that it needs, say, 80 tiles that overall correspond to a particular shade of light blue and when it finds a tile that fits its requirements it will fill in the image accordingly.

In order to source the tiles, the ‘artist’ has to type in search terms to query Google’s image search engine. In the case of the refugees, Fontcuberta typed in the names of the twenty-five richest men in the world. The images that Google throws up are used by the software to find the right colours and shades to use as tiles.

Walker argued that the artist is setting out to challenge the prevailing view that accurate information is available from the Web. Fontcuberta is sceptical of the idea of a universal, democratic source of truth, exemplified by the work of Wikipedia. The Googlegrams are metaphors for the inherent instability and transient nature of the information and truth on the Web.

The exhibition not only shows various examples of Googlegrams, but there’s also a live demonstration of the software that allows you to construct your own image. The gallery is also right next door to its own eatery – so a bit of tech and a spot of lunch – although I’d advise you to eat before one o’clock as the servery is pretty much stripped bare by then.

The exhibition runs until 14th June, but if you can’t get to Nottingham, the gallery has produced a YouTube video, including an interview with the artist.

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The Budget: Twitter ye not

April 21, 2009

Recently I’ve been making use of Twitterfall, a tool that helps you keep track of what’s been said on a particular subject, across the Twitter world. Basically, it allows you to monitor a particular set of hashtags (#), which twitterers use to identify the subject of a posting. The ‘fall’ part describes the way in which posts with the monitored tag arrive from Twitter – they visually drop down a window on your screen.

Yesterday there was great merriment across the blogosphere over the Telegraph’s experiment with hosting a twitterfall window within their own webpages which was set to monitor the hashtag #budget. The problem was that large numbers of people saw this as an unmoderated way to add content to the Telegraph website by posting all sorts of nonsense to Twitter and simply adding the #budget tag. The Guardian’s media blog in particular had enormous fun at their rival’s expense, and I particularly liked the spoof comment that Barclays had agreed to pay all our personal tax bills.

Unfortunately, the general consensus seems to be that Telegraph staffers are a bunch of techno-illiterates who don’t understand the world of Twitter. But wait a minute, isn’t this a bit harsh? Surely this shows they believe in the power of the crowd to pull together and perform better than any one individual? Perhaps the Telegraph deserve some respect for hoping that people would utilise some personal self-restraint and actually post something of value about the budget. All this demonstrates is that Andrew Keen is right – we’re really not ready for an ‘unedited’ future.

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Using Twitter

April 15, 2009

Regular readers will know that I have been a little sceptical about Twitter, saying, for example, that it needs some kind of killer app. in order to really take off. Recently though I have begun to mellow, as I have been making serious use of my Twitter account. There is, as you might expect, a vibrant community of users across the JISC universe that I inhabit. By following tweets I’ve been able to keep up with how enterprise architecture (EA) is shaping up across the higher education sector – particularly useful at the moment as I am in the process of preparing a synthesis report on EA.

Twitter started out as a quick way of saying ‘What I’m doing at the moment is…’. It’s still used a lot like this, but what I’ve noticed is that it also seems to be increasingly taking the same form as the earliest blog postings took i.e. very short statements along the lines of ‘Oh, have you seen this interesting thing’ followed by a link. Perhaps we are coming full circle? How long before Twitter expands to allow more than 140 characters?

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Doing Enterprise Architecture

March 23, 2009

For those of you who have noticed the dearth of blogging recently, I can now unveil all. Since Christmas I’ve had my nose to the grindstone working on a new futures project for JISC. It’s going to be formally launched at JISC’s annual conference in Edinburgh tomorrow, but I’ll give you a sneak preview now.

The project is called the Enterprise Architecture pilot programme, which is a complicated way of saying we went ‘native’ with a small group of universities for a year while they were trying out something called enterprise architecture, or EA, a strategic management technique which helps large organisations align their business processes with their ICT and data/information sources. It’s supposed to help manage business change and enable what’s sometimes called the ‘agile’ organisation.

We’ve been involved in developing something called an Early Adopter Study, where we’ve written some introductory material and overseen the production of some quite detailed case studies from the participating universities. Despite being used in the corporate world for over a decade, EA has very little in the way of ‘warts and all’ case studies, so it will be interesting to see how this goes down.

For us it’s been more about trying out a new report format – there’s a lot of quite adventurous stuff goes on in universities but people don’t often get to hear about it. So whereas we were already involved in forecasting and speculation, this is a little closer to home in that it’s looking at some of the ‘toe in the water’ stuff.

The report’s called Doing Enterprise Architecture: Enabling the agile institution and you can have a look at a PDF of the report on the JISC TechWatch Website.

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