As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini
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My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven
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May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »
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The Kindle and the Tube
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/the-kindle-and-the-tube
London’s top Underground blogger Annie Mole of Going Underground has noticed a surge in the use of e-readers in the capital’s crowded Tube carriages
This article titled “The Kindle and the Tube” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 13th April 2011 11.09 UTC This year’s London Book Fair, which ends today, held a session on Sunday called the Digital Future Is Now. A UK publishing executive spoke of the surging US e-book market and how the market had been jump-started by the Amazon Kindle. I don’t have a Kindle yet, but must get round to it. Annie Mole has noticed that there’s one in every Underground carriage these days, and who wants to be left out? Annie observes: It’ll be interesting to see how this picture will change in five years time. How long will it be before we see more people reading from iPads, Kindles or other e-readers than people reading printed books and papers on the Tube?
Not long at all, I’d say. The Tube experience is quite conducive to nourishing Kindle-use. After all, you need elbow room to turn a page. Now read on.
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April 13 2011, 6:18am | Comments »
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Talk About Local Unconference 2011 gets under way in Cardiff
Tweets and news from the first Talk About Local unconference to take place in Cardiff, Wales – looking at issues around local publishing 2011
This article titled “Talk About Local Unconference 2011 gets under way in Cardiff” was written by Hannah Waldram, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 2nd April 2011 13.53 UTC Community publishers met in Cardiff today to talk about issues surrounding promoting your local area online. The first Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Wales, roughly 80 people met at the Atrium in Adamsdown for a day of tea, coffee, tweeting and sessions on all issues which affect local bloggers. Sessions, organised ad hoc in an ‘unconference’ style, looked at hyperlocal bloggers and councils, elections, law, issues around content, making money and supporting each other in a community were all discussed throughout the day. Attendees included Twitterers, bloggers, web publishers, photographers and anyone with an interest in producing content online about a place important to them – travelling from Edinburgh, Leeds, Isle of Wight, London and across the UK. Session topics were pitched and then posted onto a day schedule to run throughout the day. Networking and chatting among hyperlocal publishers will continue into the evening at Gwdihw Cafe Bar. The event was supported by Guardian Local and Rightmove. We’ve been tweeting from the event today along with others on Twitter using the hashtag #TAL11. Scroll down this Storify to follow tweets from the beginning of the day. Also see this live blog from Talk About Local here. If you went to the unconference or have any comments about it – feel free to leave them in the comment box below.
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April 2 2011, 3:00pm | Comments »
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The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-little-voice-%E2%80%93-review
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – a theatre review
This article titled “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – review” was written by Alfred Hickling, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 20.45 UTC Jim Cartwright’s 1992 comedy has matured into an enjoyable period piece – just how much so becomes apparent in the first scene when Mari, a noisy northern housewife, is beside herself with excitement over the acquisition of a new phone. It takes two engineers to install it and plug it into the wall. It’s a minor miracle that the play has had any kind of continued production history at all, having specifically been tailored to expose Jane Horrocks’s uncanny ability to impersonate the great popular divas from Gracie Fields to Judy Garland. Yet it was successfully revived in the West End with X-Factor contestant Diana Vickers; and here it is the remarkable Rebecca Hutchinson who proves capable of switching from Bassey to Piaf and back again in a single breath. Cartwright’s drama has an archetypal quality – it’s essentially the Tale of the Ugly Duckling in reverse – and might be said to have invented its own genre of glittery northern realism. Director Amy Leach points out that it’s hard to conceive of Shameless or The Royle Family without it; though Cartwright’s language remains one of a kind. When Eithne Browne’s Mari rhapsodises over a “real pronto lip-lapping snog”, it’s hard not to picture exactly what she means. The downside of such loquacity is that it leaves little room for subtext. It’s a good job Hutchinson’s Little Voice and Sue McCormick’s amiable, roly-poly Sadie are practically mute or else the play would go on all night. Leach’s production is long enough, but the young, Bolton-born director has had an impressive run at the Dukes, suggesting that hers is another significant little voice on the rise.
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April 1 2011, 5:48pm | Comments »
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French high-speed rail on track but progress too slow on commuter lines
France’s TGV connecting with Eurostar is the envy of Europe, but the country’s commuter train services are creaking after years of under-investment
This article titled “French high-speed rail on track but progress too slow on commuter lines” was written by Dan Milmo, for The Guardian on Monday 21st March 2011 18.22 UTC If you want evidence that the French rail network isn’t all high-speed brilliance and world-class service, then pay a visit to the platforms in the bowels of Gare du Nord on a weekday morning. At only 7am commuters are vacuum-packed into carriages – it’s just like home. The most powerful person on the French railways, Guillaume Pepy, admits the system has unwanted similarities with Britain’s. Describing some of the worst pinch points around Paris, he says: “It is like Clapham Junction.” For decades France’s national rail operator, SNCF, has invested billions of euros into making its high-speed network the envy of Europe. France has 2,000km of ultra-fast track, compared with our tokenistic-looking 109km. But until recently, the country’s regional services have been neglected at the expense of their speedier cousins. Pepy, SNCF’s 52-year-old chief executive, who describes himself as an “old railway worker”, says commuters have been overlooked as a huge effort was launched to lure the long-distance traveller out of planes and cars and on to trains. “There are passenger protests every day and they are right. I would like to have mass-transit services with the same quality of service as the TGV [high-speed rail]. Let’s put all the mass transit services to the same level. If we can run 850 TGV services per day, why can we not serve millions of people at 120km per hour every day? We need more innovation, money, the best engineers. It will take five, 10 years – I don’t know. But there is no reason why we should have poor mass-transit services and brilliant TGV services.” Jean-Paul Jacquot, a vice-president at France’s rail passenger watchdog, FNAUT, tells a tale of historic under-investment that will be familiar to UK commuters. “The rail network has been neglected during the past 10 to 20 years and therefore it breaks down quite often.” Pepy talks of at least 15 “traffic jam” points around Paris – both the French and British rail networks carry more than one billion passenger journeys a year. While Pepy is turning round SNCF’s commuter arm, construction is drawing to a close on the seventh TGV line, between the eastern town of Belfort and Dijon in the centre. Despite the successful opening of the modern channel tunnel link, most of the UK’s network dates from the Victorian era. But Pepy, an alumnus of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, is too diplomatic to compare Britain’s rail network unfavourably with its continental rival. “Personally I think that sometimes you are over-criticising your own railways. You have done a lot of things. Look at what you have done in terms of rolling stock; High Speed One. It is the best [high-speed line] in terms of reliability in Europe. I have to say that it works better than in France.” Given that France and the UK are learning the same painful lesson on commuter routes – under-invest at your peril – its extensive high-speed network still makes France the example to follow in rail. Pepy takes out a “crazy but fun” map that shrinks the distance between French cities according to the speed of their TGV links. Under this form of cartography, the sprawling country resembles a clenched fist as major cities like Marseille and Strasbourg are brought within hours of the capital. “You can see that France has shrunk dramatically,” he says. “It means that the communities, business, culture, intellect, health, everything is closer than it was.” In the UK, the high-speed London-to-Birmingham route is earmarked to open in 2026 but the £17bn project has been criticised by environmentalists and business leaders as a waste of money. Pepy is sympathetic – he says France has been through the same debate “seven times” – but he is adamant that the UK will benefit from high-speed. “Everything about high-speed is related to the long-term. We build the line for 50, 70 years and the system is a long-term answer to the community’s needs. If you just consider it on a short-term basis you would not be able to find a good business case.” Looking further afield, he adds: “I am very impressed that China has the same problem. It said ten years ago are we going to develop air transportation or have a high-speed rail system? And China made the choice in favour of high-speed rail.” As agreeable as he is, surely Pepy will be drawn into a testier state by a question on fares, the great bugbear of the British rail passenger. Instead, he is sanguine. TGV fares compare favourably with airlines and up to 65% of the price of commuter fares is subsidised by local authorities. Jacquot agrees: for all the problems with non-TGV services, exorbitant cost is not one of them. Pepy adds: “It is a decision to subsidise fares instead of building new roads, which is an historical choice in France.” Recent investment in transport indicates that the UK has made the same choice, but we’re a long way from catching up with le TGV.
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Related posts:London to Frankfurt high-speed rail link back on track for Eurostar Deals to Germany Leeds to Paris in four hours – but high-speed rail plan faces protests Oystercard PAYG On Main Line Rail in London
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March 22 2011, 8:04am | Comments »
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Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/essex-reptiles-settle-into-new-wiltshire-home
24,000 adders, common lizards and other species moved from oil refinery site to reserves to make way for London Gateway container port.
This article titled “Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home” was written by Steven Morris, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st March 2011 14.23 UTC They had lived peacefully in their tens of thousands on an old refinery site in Essex. Now after what is thought to be the UK’s biggest artificial movement of animals, 24,000 adders, grass snakes, common lizards and slow worms are settling well into new homes 140 miles away. The reptiles were transported from the east of England to reserves in Wiltshire to make way for the £1.5bn London Gateway container port and logistics park. Since 1998 the creatures have been captured by hand and moved in vans – early in the morning so they did not dry out – around the M25 and down the M4 before being released into their new homes. The reserves in Wiltshire have now been declared full and this year the relatively few remaining reptiles at the Essex site will be rehoused closer to another reserve closer to home. Marcus Pearson, environmental manager for DP World, said the move seemed to have been successful. Reptiles that had been moved and then recaptured to check their wellbeing seemed healthy and doing well in their new home. Construction is under way at London Gateway, 25 miles to the east of central London. Once complete the development will allow the world’s biggest container ships to berth close to the capital. But one of the challenges the developers faced was rehousing the animals that had moved on to the site after an oil refinery ceased operating in 1999. Homes were found nearby for the carefully protected great crested newts. But no new local habitat could be found for the reptiles so the decision was taken to move them to reserves managed by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. DP World also bought a chunk of land to link areas owned by the trust. It has moved 290 adders, 400 grass snakes, 17,000 common lizards and 6,000 slow worms. Pearson said finding a new home was tricky because they could not be moved to places where they were already large populations of a particular creature. The Wiltshire reserves are now judged to be full and the remaining reptiles found on the Gateway site this year will be moved to the RSPB reserve, West Canvey Marsh.
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March 21 2011, 4:45pm | Comments »
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London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/20/london-orbit-tower-rises-at-olympic-park
Video show the construction well underway of the Orbit Tower at the London 2012 Olympic Park site in Stratford East London. Click here to view the embedded video. The 115m tall art sculpture with a public viewing platform is formally named the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, and will be 22m higher than New York’s Statue of Liberty when completed, which looks like a matter of weeks as the pr-constructed iron pieces can be seen waiting on the site ready to be welded into place. Further pictures and videos of the growing installation will be uploaded over the coming period. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park
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March 20 2011, 5:26am | Comments »
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Tsunami survivors in town that vanished search for hope and shelter
On one of the most badly hit parts of Japan‘s coast, roads have been cleared and a supply chain is being rebuilt after the deadly earthquake and tsunami
This article titled “Tsunami survivors in town that vanished search for hope and shelter” was written by Jonathan Watts in Minami Sanriku, for The Observer on Saturday 19th March 2011 19.43 UTC Yasuo Kono is digging. So are his daughter and two grandchildren. They scrape deep into the gravel beside a block of concrete that is all that remains of their former home. It is tough and, so far, unrewarding work. But just over a week after their world was turned upside down by the tsunami, Kono is pinning his hopes for the family’s recovery on what they might find in the rubble. “We’re looking for our safe. It’s got everything in it that we need to start again – a million yen, our seal, our family registration documents and our bank books,” he says. “It was very heavy, so I don’t think the tsunami can have taken it very far.” This is optimistic, given the elemental force that tossed cars and trucks around like children’s toys and ripped up the massive concrete sea wall that was supposed to protect Minami Sanriku. But Kono – a widower for two years – half-jokingly believes the spirits in the family shrine will aid his mission: “I think my old wife’s ashes are down there too. She was very careful about money and would never have let it get away from her.” It may seem premature to consider money. But for survivors of Japan’s deadliest postwar disaster, as much as for the government, there is a growing need to calculate the scale of their losses and how to fund a path to recovery. Kono and his family want to get out of the disaster zone of Minami Sanriku, which was pulverised by the tsunami. The roads are open and fuel supplies are starting to return to the area, but unless they can find money, they will be stuck at the shelters that have become home to almost half a million people. In this fishing community, the biggest shelter is the Ocean Plaza gymnasium, where more than 700 people are crammed into corridors, stairwells and offices. Some have made walls from cardboard boxes. Most mark out territory with layers of blankets and futons. It is an impressively functional instant community that appears well organised and polite. Dinner queues are scrupulously observed and people are as careful about taking their shoes off before stepping on cardboard as they are before entering a home. Doctors and nurses provide basic medical care at a makeshift clinic in the former training room. Weightlifting equipment and exercise bikes have been pushed into one corner to make space for the patients, pharmacy and office. Most of the sick are elderly patients with high blood pressure, at least one of whom has died from a combination of cold, poor nutrition and inadequate drug supplies. “We need more medicine, especially drugs to lower blood pressure and laxatives,” said Masafumi Nishizawa, a local doctor who has been running the clinic since his former hospital was destroyed. He was confident that the acute problems were over, but said the chronic problems were likely to get worse in the weeks ahead. “People here have no baths, no beds and no toilets. They will get tired and vulnerable to contagious diseases… It’s a real concern.” But, after days of survivors having to cope on just one piece of bread or ball of rice, the food situation is improving. Saturday’s dinner in the Ocean Plaza disaster shelter is a boiled egg, a helping of rice and a scoop of seaweed and vegetables. It is the third meal of the day. Minami Sanriku’s mayor, Jin Sato, says he can see hope that the worst might be over. Two roads into the town have been cleared. More supplies are flowing in. The gymnasium is now stacked with hundreds of 50kg bags of rice, piles of donated clothes, giant bundles of blankets, countless boxes of toiletries, instant noodles and nappies. Sato has started to turn his mind from short-term survival to the construction of longer-term housing. “We have food now, but I cannot say it is enough. We have to provide so many meals. We really need more petrol. Without that, we cannot transport supplies and people.” Uncertainty plagues the communities almost as much as the instability of the ground beneath their feet. As in other evacuation centres, there is a noticeboard here, where people post requests for information about loved ones and scan through registers of survivors at other evacuation centres. NTT, Japan’s giant telecoms company, has restored mobile phone signals and organised a charging point outside the shelter. Other help appears to be on its way. Petrol tankers have become far more visible on the local roads and drivers are filling up again at the pumps – albeit often after waiting for several hours. On the road into Minami Sanriku, several shops outside the disaster zone have re-opened and are offering fresh stocks on the shelves for the first time in a week. The 24-hour convenience stores – one of the symbols of modern Japan – expect to follow suit soon. “In the five years I have worked here, we have never closed for even a second. But I had to shut up shop two days ago because we ran out of things to sell,” says Toshiro Abe, manager of a local FamilyMart. “My boss is coming over today to work out how we can start business again.” The economic impact of the earthquake and tsunami has been conservatively estimated at £120bn, but in a country that now faces rolling blackouts, dozens of wrecked ports along a large stretch of coastline and a nuclear industry in crisis mode, this looks like an underestimate. Japan is unsure how many of its people were taken by the sea. The confirmed fatalities are 7,348 – easily outstripping the 1995 Kobe earthquake as the deadliest disaster in the nation’s post-war history. But the number of missing is far from clear. It could be nearly 11,000 – which is the number of reports filed to Japan’s National Police Agency – or even double or triple that figure because many people have been without communications since the earthquake so have no way of reporting a person missing. Minami Sanriku highlights the difficulties of making this grim calculation. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, it was feared that the death toll might be higher here than anywhere else because the destruction was so widespread. Initial accounts suggested 10,000 of the 17,000 population were missing, presumed dead. Yet the official casualty count is just 214 bodies. When the Observer asked mayor Sato to account for the discrepancy, he said the problem lay in the manner of counting. “At first we assumed only the 7,000 at the public shelters had survived, but we realise now that many others sought refuge with friends or left the town. That was our mistake. I still can’t tell you how many are dead. We still don’t know how to make an accurate estimate.” Yoko Saito has come to her own conclusion. Crying in front of the debris that was once her childhood home, she believes her mother is dead, though her body has never been found and she is not included on any casualty list. “She was here when it hit. We have been to all the shelters and cannot find her. I came here to look for something to remember her by. But there is nothing. Nothing at all.” When Saito was a small child, her mother carried her to safety from a tsunami. Since then, the town has built a huge sea defence, run simulations on where the next wave might hit and drilled its citizens on where to evacuate. “I think my mother would have remembered what happened last time and assumed she was safe,” sobbed Saito. The same story can be heard at several points along the coastline. This part of Japan is prone to tsunamis and has some of the world’s best precautions against them. Concrete sea defences have been erected across the mouths of harbours. Residents are instructed each year about warnings and the evacuation plans for their area. But these preparations were based on the last tsunami, 1.5 metres high, which struck 50 years ago. The one that struck last Friday was 10 times higher. The sea walls did not stand a chance. Nor did many of the people who thought they were on safe ground. Takuma Abe, a 36-year-old chiropractor, had rushed his pregnant wife and mother into the hills. They were halfway up the slope when the first surge arrived. “I didn’t think the tsunami could ever get that high, but it caught us,” he says. “We got out and tried to climb on to a rail track, but my arm got trapped and I couldn’t help them up. They were washed away.” His wife’s body was found nearby. His mother, remarkably, survived and is now in hospital. Abe has volunteered to help in the shelter’s clinic. “I have to do something to stop myself going crazy. I still don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. I can’t think of the future. My wife is gone. My home is gone. All I have in the world is my driver’s licence and 2,000 yen. But that’s normal here. Everyone has lost so much.” Yet there is hope too in the refugee centre. Takako Abe is nine months pregnant, but was able to move rapidly to safety just before the tsunami struck. “I didn’t pay much attention to the warnings until people screamed at me to evacuate. I couldn’t run very fast, but luckily my home is close to a slope. I was too scared to look back, but I could hear the tsunami behind me. It destroyed my home,” she says. She is now safely ensconced in the Ocean Plaza evacuation centre, where she is close to doctors, medicine and ambulances. The noise and germs, and the lack of sanitation and nutrition, are far from ideal for a pregnant woman. Sometimes there are just two small meals a day. But Abe is just glad that she, her baby, her husband and her parents are still alive. “We’ve lost our home, but so has everyone here. We are luckier than most,” she says. “It’s no good dwelling on things that can’t be changed. We have to look forward and think positively. Things will work out.”
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March 19 2011, 3:43pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
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March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Government ready to get agile?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/03/government-ready-to-get-agile
What are “agile development” and an “agile approach”? What do they mean by a “platform” This report doesn’t say.
This article titled “Government ready to get agile?” was written by Mark Say, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 3rd March 2011 18.04 UTC It was a feather in the cap for the Institute of Government (IoG) when Ian Watmore stood on the podium at the launch of its System Error: Fixing the flaws in government IT report. The head of the Efficiency and Reform Group gave a thumbs up to the work, saying its emphasis on platforms and agile development provide a viable way forward for IT projects. His contribution amounted to a government approval, of sorts, to the idea, although he was careful not to go along with the report wholesale. Its preamble characterises the past record as a vicious circle, while Watmore claimed that the failed projects may have got the headlines but they have been outnumbered by those that have been successful. It was enough, however, to suggest that Whitehall is beginning to think about how to ‘do IT’ differently. The report holds nothing back in declaring that the combination of platform and agile holds the key for turning the vicious circle into a virtuous one. It defines the first element as a shared, government-wide approach to simplifying elements of IT, with the aim of cutting costs, reducing duplication and establishing shared standards. This entails three changes: increasing the amount of IT, including infrastructure, that is purchased as commodity items across government; setting up common support functions and shared infrastructure; and developing common standards and promoting existing open standards where possible. The IoG says this does imply a large recentralisation, but would require effective governance and accountability, and that the centre should establish which elements of IT are part of a platform. It should also manage compliance. This is quite familiar, much of it echoing the central thrusts of government IT strategy in recent years, but the agile approach provides a more distinct department. According to the report it comprises four features: modularity – splitting up complex problems into smaller components which can be worked on individually; iteration – testing elements, using feedback and learning from mistakes; responding to changes in business needs and responding as new technology becomes available; and placing users or business champions within teams to ensure the result meets their needs. The latter can also ensure that business users become closer to developments in IT. This leads to a number of recommendations. Among the stand-outs is that the government chief information officer should decide which elements of IT fall within the platform and which should remain outside for agile development. This means staying independent of department interests. Others include the need for an arbitration procedure for disputes between departments; that agile should be included in the training for government employees working in IT and project management; and that all departments should look at ensuring their governance, project approval and legal arrangements are compatible with agile. In addition, they should include a more flexible and iterative approach within future contracts, and look to run projects using agile principles during 2011-12. Much of this is thought provoking, although it is notable that Watmore did not refer to the recommendations in his speech. In fact, it’s possible to see some sticking points with the government approach. For example, the call for the government CIO to stay clear of departmental interests is hard to square with the fact that the new man in the post, Joe Harley, combines it with the role of CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Also, it would be a big job to adapt governance and legal arrangements to agile, and including it within future contracts would take government onto new ground that could involve some pitfalls. But it has already made inroads. The report cites examples of the Home Office and Metropolitan Police using the technique in work on fraud prevention, and it is being used by the DWP in its programme to create a universal credit for benefit recipients. In addition, the leader of the Cabinet Office Skunkworks team for IT development, Mark O’Neill, also took a place on the IoG’s podium and emphasised the importance of agile in its approach to the job. At the very least, the heralding of platforms and agile development provides the opportunity for the government to declare this a turning point, and that it has broken away from an approach that too often failed to deliver the goods under its predecessor. Whether it comes to prevail throughout government, and raise the success rate of IT projects, remains to be seen. Like any methodology, it may be tempered by the cultural forces at work in departments, and run up against objections that the incremental approach could allow major projects – and some in government are large scale by their nature – to drift off track. There will also be questions about how it fits into some of Whitehall’s long term contracts with suppliers. The Cabinet Office seems willing to accept the spirit, if not the letter of the IoG report. It must hope that spirit is enough in itself to create a more positive perception of government IT. This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.
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March 3 2011, 12:13pm | Comments »
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