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Month: March 2009
The Times reports that Sir James Dyson’s plans for a national engineering academy were thrown out by the government in favour of a rival scheme by a Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones saying that it would receive “more positive national publicity”.
The inventor, famous for his bagless vacuum cleaners, has separately accused John Denham, the skills secretary who announced Jones’s success, of neglecting Britain’s dire need for qualified engineers for reasons of spin.
Dyson, whose charitable foundation spent £3.5m preparing his bid for an engineering academy in Bath, was turned down last autumn for government funding in favour of Jones’s idea for an institution to teach entrepreneurship.
I agree with James Dyson’s assessment that Britain which had been at the forefront of innovation for centuries lost its way following World War II and marketing began to replace engineering as the foundation of the British economy.
It is style over substance.
That’s not to say that Peter Jones’s scheme is style over substance as entrepreneurship is a valuable skill-set to impart to young people. However we need a greater number engineers in this country and we need to value them more highly so that we have groundbreaking new inventions around which the newly minted entrepreneurs can build businesses.
I cannot wait for this movie to come out.
Shocking end to this episode of Lost in more way than one. A teenage Ben is shot by Sayid in 1977. Shocking because it is almost unheard of for a child to suffer a violent death of US network television. And if he is indeed dead what does this mean for the show? He can’t be surely as according to Daniel Faraday “whatever happened, happened” so the past cannot be changed so if Ben is alive in 2007 then he must somehow survive this.
Two thoughts/theories on this.
1. Assuming Faraday is correct and the producers of the show have said that there will be no time travel paradoxes then young Ben will survive the gunshot. Is this event the catalyst that turns a quite sweet kid into the manipulative cold hearted Benjamin Linus we’ve come to know?
Typical Lost irony would be that the man Sayid hates for turning him into a monster (or to be more precise turning him back to monstrous actions as we mustn’t forget he had been a torturer in Iraq) is a monster himself because of being betrayed and shot by Sayid in 1977.
2. However perhaps we have been misled up to this point and Daniel Faraday is wrong (or lying) and this is a course correction of a sort as we were shown with Desmond trying to prevent Charlie’s death. Perhaps Ben was never meant to become the leader of the others plus according to Christian he was never meant to turn the Frozen Donkey wheel to move the island. If Ben had died as a child then all the events we have seen so far in the series would have played out quite differently, this is probably the best argument for him surviving this incident.
Alan Travis for The Guardian writes that a report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has found that a quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and clearly breach European data protection and rights laws.
Claiming to be the most comprehensive map so far of Britain’s “database state”, the report says that 11 of the 46 biggest schemes, including the national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England, should be given a “red light” and immediately scrapped or redesigned.
The report Database State was produced by Ross Anderson and his team at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The report says that more than half of Whitehall’s 46 databases and systems have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness, and could fall foul of a legal challenge.
Professor Ross Anderson from Cambridge, who wrote the report, and Michael Wills, the minister in the Justice Department, discuss the need to have an open debate.
NY Times: Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden [via]
Back in 2008 food writer Michael Pollan made a call for there to be a White House Farmer.
Other took up the call and launched the site WhiteHouseFarmer.com/ and it seems that the Obama’s have heeded the call.
Mark Thomas explains how he managed to get removed from the police DNA database, after being arrested without charge, and how others can do the same.
Another grand IT project, another chance of fiasco
The technology needed for a national ID system may be hard to come by, says Michael Cross
The back end for the system will be divided into two contracts the larger of which is a GBP500m contract to supply basic passport systems and a separate GBP300m contract to supply the National Biometric Information Service, which will store fingerprints and facial images. The production of the card itself will be yet another contract to be contested at a later stage.
The division of the contracts this way is reportedly to reduce the likelihood of the ID card system being scrapped by a future government as the systems will be required even if only as part of the future passport service.