Nice dissection of some of the issues by Ross Anderson, here.

And in today’s FT, we read

Microsoft held back from distributing a free repair for old versions of its software that could have slowed last week’s devastating ransomware attack, instead charging some customers $1,000 a year per device for protection against such threats.

Gee, a secure version of Windows? That’s extra.

 

Alan Kay on discovery and invention: the scientists find the problems not the funders. Here. (Via Benedict Evans)

In truth, everyone knows that values are actually marketing exercises, used by organisations as slogans. They have little to do with actual behaviour in organisations. They infantilise people, reduce them to ciphers.

Donald Clark.

Wonke on the laws that govern us.

• The first law of higher education is that the future of universities is political not technical.
• The second unchanging law of higher education is that there is no situation so bad that it cannot get worse.
• The third law of higher education, as exemplified by the classic University Challenge episode of The Young Ones, is that the posh kids always win.
• The fourth and final law of higher education, that exceeds the first three, is that universities outlive ministers.

And if the is not enough food for thought, consider this:

Higher education in England is no longer a supply-led industry. English universities are now in a demand-led environment in which the regulator has the last word. The Rubicon has been crossed, and few in higher education have really begun to understand what the implications of that are for universities. They will have the next five years of Conservative government to contemplate it.

Great essay by Bruce Schneier.

In 2020 — 10 years from now — Moore’s Law predicts that computers will be 100 times more powerful. That’ll change things in ways we can’t know, but we do know that human nature never changes. Cory Doctorow rightly pointed out that all complex ecosystems have parasites. Society’s traditional parasites are criminals, but a broader definition makes more sense here. As we users lose control of those systems and IT providers gain control for their own purposes, the definition of “parasite” will shift. Whether they’re criminals trying to drain your bank account, movie watchers trying to bypass whatever copy protection studios are using to protect their profits, or Facebook users trying to use the service without giving up their privacy or being forced to watch ads, parasites will continue to try to take advantage of IT systems. They’ll exist, just as they always have existed, and — like today — security is going to have a hard time keeping up with them.
Welcome to the future. Companies will use technical security measures, backed up by legal security measures, to protect their business models. And unless you’re a model user, the parasite will be you.

Which just reminds my of my own ecological ignorance. Many years back I was moaning to William Bains about how “surely the system (insert your own bête noire) will collapse under the weight of all these people who do nothing except get in the way and stop real work being done”. He corrected me by reminding me that in many biological systems the biomass of parasites exceeds that of the non-parasites. It is now my strategy when meeting somebody or hearing some new idea to ask the simple polite question: are you a parasite? There are an awful lot of them. I expect to see more and more.

“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure”

Edsger Dijkstra EWD 1284

Spectral authors also haunt the scientific canon. One physicist, frustrated at having his paper repeatedly rejected, finally saw it published after changing the title and adding a fictitious co-author, Stronzo Bestiale. It means “total asshole” in Italian.

Seriously, if you suggested the world we have now of predatory journals and the tyranny of metrics, would any sane scientist in 1960 think it possible? Uncle Syd once remarked that people no longer read papers they just xeroxed them. Now we do not even do that: metadata is all.

FT

I thought I would have read this before, but maybe I put it to one side and foolishly forgot. It is a fitting description of Jacob Bronowksi by his wife, Rita. One thing — amongst many — caught my eye.

As a very young man he would travel miles every week to outlying villages in England to give what were called Workers’ Educational Association lectures. Quite literally he would travel through snow and fog to village halls to speak to 8 or 10 people who had equally braved the elements. I sometimes would think it a pity there were not hundreds thereto hear him. Little did I imagine that with radio and then television he would in fact finally reach millions.

And I would respond: you have to want to learn, and you have to want to educate.

But I can’t stop here. One bit of the jigsaw I didn’t know:

After receiving his Ph.D. and conducting 3 years of research, it became clear that, being a Jew, Bruno would not be made a Fellow of his college (Jesus College, Cambridge). He decided to ‘drop out’. Like so many young students (hippies, 30 years later), bearded and down-at-heel, he went to Paris to write. There he met, among others, Samuel Beckett, and they jointly edited an anthology called European Caravan..

It ends with his own words

What makes the biological machinery of man so powerful is that it modifies his actions through his imagination. It makes him able to symbolize, to project himself into the consequences of his acts, to conceptualize his plans, to weigh them, one against another, as a system of values… We, as men, are unique. We are the social solitaries … We are the creatures who have to create values in order to elucidate our own conduct, so that we learn from it and can direct it into the future (emphasis, mine)

In LEONARDO, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 223-225,1985

Excuse my senility  vanity, but I remember being taught by an ‘ancient’ GP in my first year of med school, in 1976. His name was Andrew Smith, and most of us thought him amazing in many ways. One of the stories that made a deep impression on me, was how— the day after he graduated — he was delivering a baby using forceps in the mother’s own house at 3am. I would have been 18 or so and he in his early sixties —not far from where I am now. So, he would have been a medical student in the late 1930s, and I will probably stop practising medicine in the early 2020s. When I add the two professional lifetimes together at the extremes (med student to final year of practice) I am always amazed how big the number is — a span of 80 years or so. And one of our problems in undergraduate education is that we have to be concerned with these extremes: I am teaching students who will practice for another 40 years, but I have inherited a set of code written as many years in the past.

Now the above reminisce was set off by some words from Benedict Evans. He is talking about much shorter timeframes and is concerned with the commercial world. But my question for medical students (and others) is how is medicine really going to look in a few more score years, and how do we imagine all the system wide interactions that will make the future so different? This is surely more meaningful that memorising biochemical pathways.

“Everything bad that the internet did to media is probably going to happen to retailers. The tipping point might now be approaching, particularly in the US, where the situation is worsened by the fact that there is far more retail square footage per capita than in any other developed market. And when the store closes and you turn to shopping online (or are simply forced to, if enough physical retail goes away), you don’t buy all the same things, any more than you read all the same things when you took your media consumption online. When we went from a corner store to a department store, and then from a department store to big box retail, we didn’t all buy exactly the same things but in different places – we bought different things. If you go from buying soap powder in Wal-Mart based on brand and eye-level placement to telling Alexa ‘I need more soap’, some of your buying will look different….In parallel to this, TV, which so far has not really been touched by the internet, is also starting to look unstable.”

Medicare, America’s public health scheme for the over-65s, has recently started paying doctors for in-depth conversations with terminally ill patients; other national health-care systems, and insurers, should follow.

The quote is from a reasonable article in the Economist (How to have a better death). But what screams at me that is that the very incentive systems the Economist espouses are those that have led to the status quo. We already have behavioural code(s) that are misaligned, and now we add more and more buggy patches, layer upon layer. All because nobody talks to those on either side of the front line.