I especially liked his comments on setting projects for his PhD students. they have to be more advanced than what Google or Microsoft are doing but not totally science fiction stuff – A hard job these days I reckon.
Other interesting points was that 2-3% of the worlds energy is consumed by server farms. So the proposal is to put the server farms by the windmills and solar plants since data is so cheap to transmit. Servers need to get more intelligent so that they run closer to 100% utilisation (rather than current 30%) by switching themselves off etc.
He forsees the world running on simple low power terminals. Yep. bring back the Wyse50’s 🙂 But more likely to be mobile phones! Especially after his trip to Soweto to see how they are using phones there.
Also discussed the idea that every moving object would have a sensor hooked into a vast database so your phone could be measuring CO2 etc.
Digital Alternatives
A revealing chart showing global hectares available per person and current usage levels with the USA standing out as usual.
After my post bemoaning the fact that the only way I had of importing trails from the Garmin Legend HCx on the iMac was through using Parallels and the Garmin software (PC only!).
Euan pointed me in the direction of Ascent for the iMac which can take in data from the Garmin and is Mac based software. Works beautifully and very fast! However, for some weird reason Everytrail wouldn’t display the track, even though it was visible in Google Earth.
Great news from Chris at Everytrail is that he has found and fixed the bug (VRM in action) so now Ascent will display the trail in Everytrail with the photos, geotagged by Houdah, and downloaded from Flickr.
Here is an example of a walk that Sally, Ellee and I did with the Cambridge Ramblers C for codgers group last Wednesday a far cry from pounding the camino in Spain doing 25mile days in temperatures of 30 degrees. But an interesting day anyway 🙂
Today’s 13.3mile walk was with the Southern Norfolk walkers group. The 61st event led by Paul! Twenty of us joined him on this event. The weather stayed dry but overcast.
To import the trail I tried using the Ascent software as suggested by Euan, However, I can’t get it to display the imported trail in Everytrail – The folks at Everytrail are working on it – maybe 🙂 Todays pictures are all taken with the iPhone as the Olympus’s rechargeable batteries have gone all dodgy on me. NB: Chris from Everytrail reports the bug has been squashed so it should work now 🙂
Ascent does produce activity charts like this though:-
Evan Davis was first on, causing a small cry of dissent from the packed lecture theatre when he suggested that somehow economists should be treated like seismologists that is seismologists are not blamed for causing volcanoes – worryingly I think he thought it was a reasonable comparison (Maybe he should have gone to Ben Goldman’s talk on How the media promote public misunderstanding in science), then he suggested that economists are life’s reasonable people so perhaps he was joking after all.
Moving on he suggested that we all familarise ourselves with the wikipedia entries for:-
Then moving on to suggest that economics is studying the world through a prism of simplicity with currently to much emphasis on precision and forecasting & comparing economics to the stylised London Underground map simple but not geographically accurate. An excellent speaker with no powerpoint back up!
Next up was Michael Kitson who started up with the quote on economics by Thomas Carlyle -Dismal Science. He then moved into audience participation with the The Ultimatum Game, the most popular figure chosen was £50 whereas apparently economists would predict 1p. Then he moved onto protectionism arguing that it is needed quoting from Kicking away the ladder by Chang then an interesting slide showing that Wal-mart was the biggest engine for growth in the USA (not the hi-tech industry). A good speaker with good use of powerpoint.
Finishing with Willy Brown outlining the effects of the National minimum wage in the 10 years of its operation in the UK. The most amazing for me was that the gender wage gap in low paid workers has been eliminated and that two million employees have benefited directly without any measurable impact on employment levels (contrary to the doom mongers on its introduction). A nice observation in his work at the minimum wage commission is just how badly managed most workers are.
In question time Evan Davis replied to one questioner with the rather good expression “The government should be a referee not a player”
A good evening the theatre was 100% full with a good mixture of people.
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