The daily deluge of news stories about the use and abuse of personal data continues. Led by the US and UK governments, government-intelligence coalitions seem to have adopted the position that it’s ok to trash citizens’ rights to privacy and security because a) we shouldn’t have been surprised that they were doing this, because b) they’ve been doing it for a long time and c) and everybody else is ... »
The 1979 UK top ten hit by punk band Ian Dury and the Blockheads listed a whole raft of reasons to be cheerful: • Rock ‘n’ Roll singer Buddy Holly • The Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia • Scammell Lorries (A British company who built heavy lorries, specifically an 18-wheeler lorry) • Equal voting rights for men and women • Little Richard’s 1956 hit “Good Golly Miss Molly” • Picc... »
Anne Clwyd’s report looking at how patients’ complaints within the UK’s NHS are dealt with has just been published. The headline used by the Daily Telegraph’s for its coverage of the report caught my eye: Give hospital patients pen and paper to report bad care, report says The report argues that complaints are an “early warning system” within health care systems, and that it needs to be easier for... »
In a previous post I commented on research which seemed to suggest that consumers weren’t always acting honestly when they provided personal data to companies. Well, there’s news today of the other side of that general coin. When Google started it had a very neat proposition and a very clear position. A very clean, simple interface which presented the results of your search quickly and without obt... »
One of the obvious existing “information markets” is the world of consumer loyalty schemes. Major loyalty schemes, such as those of Boots, Tesco, and the multi-retailer Nectar scheme are explicitly exchanging points for information. Whilst few people know what a point is actually worth (and that’s because it’s not easy to know, but that’s another story) a lot of people seem to think that giving de... »
Fascinating debate in the online version of the Guardian on Saturday (2013-10-12) under the title “Spooks and secrets: what is the public’s right to know?”. In it, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of the British civil liberties advocacy organisation Liberty, and ex-MI6 officer Nigel Inkster debated the rights and wrongs of exposing the activities of the UK and US security and intelligence ser... »
Congratulations to Matthew Aiken from Devon in the UK who won the ‘2% of Handshake shares’ draw! If you’re one of our beta testers, keep checking your emails! We’re giving away 10% of Handshake in total to our beta testing community (so another 8%). »
It’s midday on Monday 14th October 2013 and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has just announced the winners of this year’s Nobel prize for Economics (but see note below). This year it’s been awarded to three economists who have a common focus on the same problem, but who have taken rather different approaches to tackling it, and come up with rather different solutions. What they all have in c... »
A friend of mine has just quit Facebook. Her last post was: “It’s not you, it’s Facebook. I tried again, but I just don’t like Facebook”. The interesting thing about this particular person was that I’d always seen her as a Facebook enthusiast, with almost daily posts of news, photos and links, and a wide circle of friends who she interacted with via Facebook. And professionally she works in PR and... »
The history of technology is fascinating. It’s not just finding out more about, say, Alexander Graham Bell and the fact that he probably shouldn’t be remembered as the man who invented the telephone (arguably it was Elisha Grey – see Wikipedia to learn more), but in truth, probably no one person did. Technologies are created by the coming together of a host of innovations, and the point at w... »
