It starts with a bass figure, then a strum, then two different views of a separation. There’s snatches of a story, echoes of pain and a question that almost sounds like a celebration.

I can see now that things would always have gone badly. When I kissed Jackie under those glowering hills I was playful. So was she. Soon after, I was focussed, fixated. Obsessive, even. Now, the emptiness is almost a delight.

Times were good for a while. We riffed together and enjoyed bars and beats. I looked up to her: she tried to cleanse me of all the things I felt were wrong with my life before I met her. She washed me in my own personal River Jordan.

Luck we had in abundance, flying all round the country to follow my rugby team in the year it won the championship. And fun, doing everything from playing I-Spy to giving each other hickeys. My desire for her increased exponentially in the months we were together.

But it could never have worked. I see that now. I don’t know how, but she must have realised that I was always thinking about someone else. She ended it, quite suddenly – none of the gradual fade that marked my other experiences. One day we were together, the next day she went away. Cut-up and broken? You bet.

And now here I am, feeding my own sense of passivity. Pretending to be pushed around by emotion. But, though I don’t understand why, I’m cheerful about the whole affair. In my heart, I’m celebrating the experience loudly and joyfully, again and again. I’m wondering what the reason is that I am so helpless in the face of affection and desire.

Or, in other words…

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. After the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

The geek within

Q: Nat Torkington used the term “geek” about himself a few weeks ago.

A: He did indeed. It’s one of those terms that was used perjoratively but is being reclaimed, with a certain amount of pride, by those it was used to insult.

Q: Where does the word come from?

A: An old Germanic word meaning to croak or to cheat, and it made its way into the US carnival and fairground circuit around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it was used to mean some kind of human freak who would exhibit himself as part of the their show.

Q: What type of person do you mean by a geek?

A: I mean someone who is capable of sustained periods of concentration on a specific, usually technical, topic. That’s what I think is the defining characteristic of a geek – it’s the desire and ability to focus on something for hours or days on the end to the exclusion of – some would say the detriment of – everything around you, from relationships to work mates. And that’s quite important to what geeks achieve – which is building pretty much all the technology we use in our day to day lives. It’s a state of what some psychologists call “flow” where the matter you are focusing on becomes the totality of your attention and you really ignore everything else. Lot’s of people and jobs do that, of course, but with geeks its combined with a deep technical knowledge of their subject, usually colouring their whole outlook on the world.

There are a few characteristics:

• Lack of conformity and respect for authority
• Respect for ability
• Music – many geeks are musicians of a high order.
• Religion
• Geeks aren’t just technologists – they appear in a range of technical disciplines such as law.
• Story about .geek.nz
• New Hacker’s Dictionary
• Different terms for geek. Nerd. In the UK: Anorak. A modern term: Technosexual

While it’s been fashionable to laugh at geeks that’s becoming less so.

Find your inner geek, also celebrate geekiness in others.

Links

Geek – a badge now worn with pride. In New Zealand, geeks have their own Internet domain.

Promo

…then our technology slot, and this week Colin Jackson to talk about the secret treaty that the government is negotiating about your rights on the Internet.

Q: Now to the treaty. Can you give us some background?

A: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement sounds like it should be doing something about the tide of fake Prada handbags and Rolex watches in our shops, doesn’t it?

Q: Is there a tide?

A: I don’t think so, presumably because we already have some reasonably effective laws against that. No, the concern that many people have about the ACTA treaty is that it apparently includes a lot of stuff about the Internet.

Q: Apparently?

A: That’s the thing. ACTA has been in negotiation for the last year and a half at least, and the text of the treaty is secret. Not just lets keep it confidential, but according to the Obama administration it’s an actual national-security grade honest to goodness secret. The kind that you can actually go to jail for leaking.

Q: Why is this treaty that secret?

A: Goodness knows. One possibility is that it’s so inimical to ordinary people’s rights that democratic governments don’t want to even discuss the provisions in public. Maybe that point of view is paranoid, but until a copy of the treaty gets published we have to guess.

Q: So what sort of things are in the treaty?

A: The only people to have seen it so far are the officials negotiating it and 42 lobbyists.

Q: Who are the lobbyists?

A: Almost all are from the big entertainment industries. These are the kind of the people who want your Internet cut off to preserve their business model. They are the same people, by the way, who told congress that the introduction of the home video recorder would be as dangerous to America as the Boston Strangler was to a woman at home alone. So they are certainly guilty of at least outrageous hyperbole.

Q: The world didn’t end when we all got video recorders

A: Of course not, in fact the studios did rather well off selling us VCR tapes, and a whole industry of video rental shops sprung up. Now those shops are under threat by movie downloads – that’s illegal and legal ones – and they are busy trying to organize petitions and make submissions in favour of cutting off people’s Internet. Funny, that.

Q: You said we don’t know what’s in ACTA – is that what this is all about?

A: Controlling the Internet is certainly what the entertainment industry has been pushing lawmakers for, for some time now. They almost got away with a ludicrously-short sighted law in this country last year, although the current government had the good sense to step back from that.

But we do know that ACTA is at least in part about exactly that – cutting off Internet on accusation of copyright infringment. That’s through an eminent Canadian law professor, Michael Geist, who’s seen a copy. He may be one of the 42 who have been allowed to see it – I’m not sure about that because they’ve been forced to sign a pretty strong non-disclosure agreement. Anyway, Geist claims that the draft includes the most ridiculous elements of the New Zealand law that got thrown out, particularly the requirement for Internet Service Providers to terminate the accounts of people or businesses accused of copyright violations.

Q: You’ve talked about this before.

A: I certainly have – it’s disproportionate, unfair and just plain wrong. If its implemented it will change everyone’s Internet experience and damage New Zealand’s competitiveness to advantage a few offshore companies.

But my real point here is not the policy but the way it is being driven in to New Zealand via a secret treaty that none of us can see. That’s deeply undemocratic. You’ll recall that the previous government drove the law to cut off people’s Internet in without bothering with any of the tedious scrutiny by Select Committees that we’ve come to expect in New Zealand. It seems the current government is going a step further by actually negotiating this thing internationally in an environment of total secrecy.

Q: You obviously don’t think that’s good enough.

A: Well, hardly. Really, I’m angry about this. How dare our elected politicians carry on negotiations behind our back designed to disenfranchise the vast majority of New Zealanders who use the Internet? Where’s the democracy in that?

Q: Is this about a free trade deal?

A: Maybe it will wind up being a condition of a trade agreement. In that case, let’s get all the conditions of any putative trade deal out on the table so we can see what is being done in our name. Maybe it’s a good deal to trade away our Internet rights to get more profits for the farming sector, maybe not. Depends on a lot of things and we should have a debate about it. But I’m really afraid the whole thing would just get negotiated in back rooms and signed quickly with no debate – it would make our politicians look good.

It’s easy to bag FTAs in general and that’s not my intention here. What I am saying, is let’s have an open debate about a specific one. The Australian FTA with the US gives their farmers almost nothing – because the Americans wouldn’t agree to anything more. It was signed by John Howard against the advice of Australian officials who realized that Austrlia would lose, but the PM would lose face politically if he couldn’t get the agreement. That’s my big worry about us signing an FTA with the US – if the terms of the deal are not subject to open debate, how do we know that we haven’t just sacrificed our Internet or our technology industry? Who gets to debate that?

Links

ACTA – the secret treaty that could take away your rights, but you aren’t allowed to see it. Michael Geist’s take on it, and a column by Colin Jackson.

You can listen in live after the 11am news, or after the broadcast you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: You wanted to talk about programming. Isn’t that a bit arcane?

A: Not really. Since computers increasingly underpin just about every aspect of our economy and our daily lives, I think we should all have at least an outline understanding of what it involves.

Q: What does it involve?

A: The chips in the hearts of computers only understand instructions that are put to them in a binary code, and the exact details of that code vary from chip to chip. That’s called machine code, and it’s supremely difficult for people to do much with. Almost no-one writes that. What does happen, is that people create so-called programming languages – these are ways to direct the computer which are much easier for people to understand, and which don’t vary from chip to chip. So, an aspiring programmer needs to learn a programming language, or more than one, but they don’t need to bother about exactly how the chip works.

Q: How do programming languages get converted into something the computer can use?

A: By, wait for it, a computer program. Someone writes a program called a compiler or an interpreter – I’ll get to the difference in a minute, but they do substantially the same thing.

Q: So does the compiler have to be written for each individual chip?

A: Not really – it’s a bit more subtle, because only a small part of the compiler is actually concerned with writing the machine code for each chip. And there are very clever tricks like writing one compiler for each chip, then using that to compile all the others.

Q: What does a program in a programming language actually look like?

A: It varies from language to language. Incidentally, although they are called computer languages, that doesn’t bear much relation to natural human languages. As far as I’m aware, almost all computer languages – the ones that expect you to use words, anyway, are based on English. There may be some that are based on other languages but I don’t know them. Anyway, there are a lot of different computer languages and fashions in them have come and gone over the decades. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are available as open source implementations, meaning you can download them and start, and others you have to pay for.

As to what they look like – some resemble a sort of structured English. Perhaps the best-known example of that is one called COBOL which was used a lot in the 1980s. BASIC and FORTRAN are other examples of languages that, even if you don’t know them well, it’s pretty clear from reading a program what it’s trying to do.

Those are all old languages. In recent years, the more popular languages have been things like C and Java.

Q: C? How do these things get named?

A: C was a follow on from a language called B, and I think that stood for something. But, when the language designer was looking for something to follow C, he didn’t go for D – its sounds too much like a fail grade – but rather, C++, which sounds like its better – which it is – and is also something you might write within a C program, so it’s witty to those who understand the language.

Q: Is that what websites are written in?

A: Mostly, no. I mentioned compilers and interpreters – a compiled language is one that you write a program in and then run through a compiler to convert to machine code. You keep the machine code and run it whenever you want the program to run. An interpreted language get translated into machine code on the fly every time you run the program. That’s a fair bit slower but it’s more flexible and easier to write. Lots of modern languages are interpreted languages, including the ones you would use to code websites. If you don’t know much programming and just want to get a job done, find an interpreted language that suits you.

Q: Such as?

A: I’ll talk briefly about four open source languages that are relevant to web programming, although that’s not all they are used for. You can get any of these for nothing and experiment with them, and teach yourself them if you like.

Perl is a language that gets used for a lot of odd jobs. It can be used to write scripts on web servers, although its of much more general use. It used to be said that a competent computer geek could write any program in two lines of Perl. Perl’s philosophy is: “there’s more than one way to do it!” and it does make it very easy to come up which interesting ways to get the computer to do things for you. But it can be hard to follow, partly because there’s not always one obvious way to do things. By the way, I should say that which is the best computer language is the subject of almost religious fervour out there in the geek community, so anything I tell you here is bound to offend someone.

The next language I’ll mention is PHP. It’s a more specialist language than Perl in that it’s for web processing only. PHP lives completely within a web server, and it makes web programming very easy. PHP joins a website to a database, which is often what you want to do. A lot of other web frameworks are written in PHP.

Ruby is an interesting language that originally came out of Japan. Ruby is a scripting language a bit like Perl, although it’s a lot more structured, but its most famous for so-called Ruby on Rails, which is a framework for web programming. Ruby on Rails is a very popular tool for building websites. One of the core rails developers, Michael Koziarski, lives in Wellington.

But my favourite of the general purpose open source languages – sorry, Michael – is Python.

Python is a scripting language like Perl or Ruby, and it has web frameworks available so you can use it for web programming. But Python is a very powerful language that can be used for a great deal of different tasks. I use it for elementary bits of automation, but lots of companies including Wellington’s Weta Digital use it for core business. The effects for Lord of the Rings and King Kong were built using Python. And Google’s new Application Engine is built in it. YouTube is built in it.

Q: Python? How did it get that name?

A: It’s not named after the snake, but rather after it’s inventor’s favourite comedy troupe. Incidentally, talking of names, the cleverest name of the lot is a tool to help you write Python code, called Boa Constructor. Let’s all have a groan!

Q: Why is Python successful?

A: It’s got a lot of power and flexibility in quite a simple and logical framework. To achieve simple things you don’t need a lot of knowledge, yet you can do some amazing things in Python. It’s a very good balance, and it’s also a very clean language. And it’s got a lot of very powerful features which are implemented in a very logical way. So, really, the language is a very good balance between power and ease of use and learning. It was voted language of the year by Linux Journal users in 2009.

Quite a few packages that are designed for other things now have Python interpreters in them. One example is OpenOffice, which allows its users to use Python to automates spreadsheets and word processor documents. Another example is Autodesk, which is high-end 3D drawing software. That’s also driving the language’s popularity.

And now, there’s a New Zealand Python conference.

Q: Where’s that?

A: Christchurch, on the weekend on 7th November. That’s a first in New Zealand for what has become a popular language and a really important part of the Web. It’s for anyone who has an interest in Python or who uses it professionally. They’ve got some interesting speakers and a lot of opportunities to meet other pythonistas. I’d recommend this to anyone who has more than a passing interest.

Links

Download Python, and learn to use it straight away.

Python’s home page, and the wonderfully-named Boa Constructor

The New Zealand Python Conference

You can read on for my speaking notes, or after about 11:30 today you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: Death of newspapers – this is being talked about a lot! Is it a real problem?

A: It’s a bit broader than just newspaper. The context here is how existing media are dealing with the arrival of the Internet. One of the things the Internet does is make it really, really, cheap to publish things. You don’t need a printing press, a radio transmitter or a TV studio to put material where it can be reached by a potentially huge audience.

Q: But what quality is most Internet content?

A: Very variable, of course. Some of it’s excellent, a lot is patchy, and large amount of it is utter drivel. But one man’s drivel is another’s perfection. PT Barnum that “no-one ever went broke underestimating the public taste” – which is pretty cynical but most of us would find it to have a ring of truth.

The Internet is a publishing medium among other things, and that is making us realize that creating quality content can be done separately from owning a printing press, or a TV station. It often isn’t done well, but sometimes it is.

Q: How do you pay the journalists if you can’t charge for newspapers?

A: The subscription price of newspapers has been only some of the income for media companies. Newspapers make a fair bit off advertising, and that has declined steeply recently. That advertising fall-off is what has put the immediate financial pressure on the newspapers.

And some media aren’t advertising funded in the first place. Public service broadcasters like Radio New Zealand or the BBC are generally funded off taxation.

Q: The BBC is funded by a TV licence fee.

A: Yes, it’s odd that an organisation with a multiple radio stations is funded by people who own TVs. In fact, the TV licence in Britain is one amount for a colour TV and a lesser amount for a black and white one. And you get a discount if you are blind. But you still support the BBC radio stations, for which you don’t pay at all if you don’t have a TV. And if you have a TV but only ever watch ITV – you still support the Beeb. It’s a curious system.

Anyway, there’s a lot of doom and gloom about the health of newspapers. And I’m not convinced that newspapers can survive in their current form. But the problem isn’t, as some media moguls would like you to believe, that people want free stuff. The problem is that printing and shipping bits of paper is much more expensive than putting stuff on the web. And, that the web is more immediate.

Q: Stories can go online as soon as they break

A: Quite. With Twitter feeds and RSS a news website can be faster even than broadcast media in getting stories out there. A well-run news website can do a lot, lot more to inform and entertain than a once-a-day delivery of paper. The challenge is to find a way to make the commercials work.

Q: Can that model pay the journalists and the editorial staff?

A: That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? But there are some encouraging signs. Here in New Zealand, Stuff – which as I’m sure everyone knows is Fairfax’s main news delivery website – is doing very nicely, thank you. It derives a lot of income from advertising revenue on the site, which has been going up in leaps and bounds just as the advertising in print media has been tanking. Are we spotting a pattern here?

Q: Is it paying for itself?

A: Apparently. More than, I think. I spoke to Stephen Smith who is head of Stuff. He told me how Fairfax has been continuing to develop Stuff as a channel in its own right. Stuff has its own editorial team, and they take material from the newsrooms around the whole country. It’s seen as very successful. It’s now got a mobile version of itself as well which looks better on iPhones, and that’s getting a lot of traffic.

Stuff and the other news websites do more than papers. They allow big documents, sound files and videos to be posted, and they also provide a platform for reader comments. That’s turning into a large part of the news sites. It’s a kind of online ‘letters to the editor’, but it’s so much more immediate.

Q: Classified ads have pretty much gone

A: Haven’t they? Trademe has pretty much wiped those out. That’s presumably why Fairfax bought Trademe a few years ago – we laughed at the time, but you can see why they would do that. APN, the company behind The Herald, was trying to start a competitor site but I’m not sure that went anywhere. Trademe has a huge first mover advantage.

Another factor is Google. We mentioned a few weeks ago that Rupert Murdoch and others were blasting Google for, as they see it, stealing their content. What Google does is put a list of stories from all kinds of media with an automatically-generated one-sentence summary. Murdoch claims that’s theft, but he knows he could stop it instantly by locking Google out of his websites. Really, Murdoch’s raging is code for: “we think Google should give us money but we don’t have a better excuse”. Stuff’s perspective is that they want to get their stories into Google because it drives traffic to their site.

When newspapers originally went online, lots of them required you to purchase a subscription to see their websites. Very people did buy the subscriptions, but then as some papers started throwing their content open, all the others were pretty much forced to. It’s only a few niche publications – like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal that can get away with a paid subscription model today. But many newspaper execs overseas are grumbling and threatening to re-impose a subscription model. Frankly, I’d like to see them try – I expect it would dry up traffic to their site, and the associated advertising revenue, immediately. The other thing it would is prevent people linking to their stories – some papers think they should be paid for that as well, but that’s just not how the web works.

There’s another interesting angle to Stuff. It was originally put together using a commercial content management system. It outgrew that a few years ago, and it’s been rebuilt using open source software by a local New Zealand company, Catalyst IT. That’s the same approach as Radio New Zealand has taken for its own website and web publishing system. It’s cheap and flexible.

Links

Why newspapers shouldn’t lock down Internet stories.

Time Magazine asks whether computer nerds can save journalism

You can read on for my speaking notes, or after the broadcast you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Clip: Also Sprach Zarathustra, from 2001 Soundtrack

Q: The rapture of the nerds? What do you mean by that?

A: There’s a concept called the ‘singularity’. It’s just a notion at this stage. It’s based on some smart people saying – computers are increasing in power at an ever-increasing rate. What happens when they are smarter than us?

Q: What does happen?

A: The singularity happens when the computers take over building more computers in successive generations more and more rapidly and we humans either get sidelined, hugely empowered, or exterminated.

Q: There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all – why is it called a singularity?

A: The concept was popularised by science fiction author Vernor Vinge, and he christened it. The term singularity originally comes from mathematics – it means a place where some part of mathematics breaks down and you lose information. Dividing anything by zero is an example – you get an undefined result, and its no longer possible to reconstruct what you started with. Then, the term became used of black holes. The singularity is the heart of the black hole, the point at which density becomes infinite, and we lose all information about what’s been thrown in. More recent black hole theory says that black holes do have entropy – information about what’s inside, but the name singularity has stuck to mean the place we can’t look into.

Q: So what did Vinge mean by singularity?

A: He was referring to a kind of technological singularity. Incidentally, I found when researching this, that the concept was originated by a man named Irving John Good, who was one of the Bletchley Park wartime cryptanalysts who worked with Alan Turing. Good wrote this in 1965, when he was at Oxford:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

Vernor Vinge posits that this would lead to a rapid and radical transformation in society, like the agrarian revolution when humankind started cultivating its food instead of hunting and gathering, or like the industrial revolution, but a lot faster in its effects. Vinge writes: When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress that progress will be much more rapid. He sees a kind of positive feedback loop, a virtuous cycle. One economist has suggested that we could see amazing economic growth with the global economy doubling every few weeks.

Q: So what if the computers thought they could do better without us?

A: Like this guy?

Clip: I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that (2001: A Space Odyssey)

That’s the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey which has realized that humans are a threat to its mission and kills them off. As a fascinating aside, I.J. Good I mentioned earlier worked as a consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick when he was making that film. Good may well have invented the HAL 9000.

More modern concerns about all-powerful machines are in The Matrix, where everyone lives in some kind of artificial reality to keep us quiet, and Skynet in the Terminator series. There’s an institute that exists to try to produce a friendly artificial intelligence as a way to forestall the rise of hostile ones.

Another strand in thinking about the technological singularity is the notion that we might one day be able to upload our consciousness into a machine.

Q: Why would you want to do that?

A: I can think of lots of reasons: immortality, freedom from a decaying body, ability to be in many places at once, ability to think much faster. That’s where the tagline “Rapture of the Nerds” comes from – it was coined by author Ken MacLeod, I think to lampoon the rather breathless enthusiasm for uploading into a machine. The rapture is a piece of Christian eschatology, in which the faithful are taken bodily up into heaven at the start of the tribulation. And I can’t help feeling that there’s a rather self-satisfied and smug thread running through the whole notion of the technological singularity.

Q: You don’t think it will happen?

A: I really don’t know. But I think there are grounds for concern at least as great as there are grounds for adoration. A final comment from HAL:

Clip: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me

Links

Meet Irving John Good of Bletchley Park and 2001 A Space Odyssey. He invented the concept of technological singularity.

A paper by Vernor Vinge who named and popularized the singularity.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist, and his book The Singularity is Near.

Accelerando, a novel by Charles Stross about life in the singularity – available online

The Singularity University

Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3.Q: Now to mobile phones…

A: Yes. I want to talk today, not about the phones themselves but about the networks they use. This is a piece of raw human drama disguised as a technical problem.

Q: How so?

A: Well, it’s all about competition again. Until now, New Zealand has had two mobile phone networks that wouldn’t run each other’s telephones. You buy a phone to run on Vodafone; it’s totally different to the phone you need for Telecom. The two mobile phone networks in this country use fundamentally different technology. That’s not how things are in most of the world where all mobile phone networks are basically the same. So, you buy a phone to run on one network in Europe and, unless the phone is locked to one network, you can run it on any other network. This has the effect of increasing competition among the networks and keeping the network providers honest.

All the European networks and most of the networks in the rest of the world use a technology called GSM. That’s the one Vodafone uses. And as the GSM mobile networks have moved to 3G they’ve all moved to another technology called WCDMA, which is not the same as the original GSM technology but most people just think of it as 3G GSM.

Q: What is 3G again?

A: Stands for third generation. The first generation was the original analogue telephone the size and shape of a brick, and only the yuppies had them. Call quality was terrible, and they didn’t do text messages. The next generation was digital telephone with far clearer calling as well as text messaging, and the size and price rapidly came down to where they are today. 3G was launched a few years ago – it effectively gives your phone a much higher data rate which means you can do cool Internet-based things like Google Maps or surfing the web, and you can do Star Trek stuff like video calling. Effectively 3G is a digital mobile network that does more than just phone calls and text.

Now, both Vodafone and Telecom have 3G networks already. Under ideal conditions they can both do you a fairly decent data rate so you can surf the Internet from your mobile, or from your laptop if you have one of their mobile data modems. But Telecom’s network uses a technology which no-one else does in the world. The rest of the world has gone to GSM and its successor, WCDMA. There are two problems with that – one is that most Telecom phones won’t roam to other countries. The other is that Telecom has a much more restricted set of actual telephone models to sell to its customers. It’s no accident that the iPhone, for instance, works on Vodafone not Telecom. Same with the Google phone that Vodafone has announced its selling as well.

Those two problems – roaming and access to handsets – have forced Telecom to build a new mobile network that uses the same technology as the rest of the world. That’s the context for the announcements we’ve been seeing on TV with Richard Hammond.

Q: So what are we to make of the court challenge by Vodafone?

A: Well, Vodafone claimed that Telecom’s new network was interfering with Vodafone’s established network, leading to dropped calls and the like. They use different but neighbouring frequency bands. Mobile phone networks bid for frequency bands, then they have to stay within the band they get allocated. If Vodafone is right and Telecom were interfering with their band, then that’s entirely wrong of Telecom and they should indeed solve the problem.

Q: Wasn’t that the outcome?

A: Well, yes. Neither side is admitting they were wrong, of course, and Paul Reynolds of Telecom came out pretty robustly in the paper saying that Telecom had done nothing wrong. But it was the kind of nothing wrong that caused them to install filters on more of their cellsites and delay their much-ballyhooed launch by two weeks. Telecom’s putting a brave face on that, thanking Vodafone for the free publicity, but I incline more to Bernard Hickey’s view that it’s a PR disaster for Telecom that they couldn’t get their engineering right first time and had to publicly slip an announced launch date. According to an article the NBR, Telecom knew about the interference right back in November, but pressed ahead with launch plans before they had fixed it.

Q: And there’s a new mobile network.

A: There certainly is. NZ Communications has had a long history of being about to launch a new network, and heaven knows New Zealand needs the competition. NZ Comms, formerly Econet Wireless, has been doing a dance of the seven veils about its new network, and this week another veil came off. We know what its going to be called – Two Degrees. That’s a 2 with a little degree sign after it. Someone has already pointed out that it’s remarkably similar to the O2 logo – O2 is a mobile network in the UK and its logo adorns the chests of the English rugby team.

Q: Why Two Degrees?

A: Apparently its based on the notion that everyone is separated socially from everyone else by at most six degrees of separation – you know, I know someone who has met Michelle Obama who knows the US president rather well, that kind of thing. But New Zealand’s society is so small and interconnected that they think two degrees is more appropriate here.

Q: What will the phone numbers be on the new network?

A: 022, although they are encouraging you to change from your existing provider and bring your existing 021 or 027 number with you. Vodafone phones should work just fine on the new network, so you won’t need to buy a new phone. All three of the mobile networks have said that they won’t be locking mobile phone to their networks, which means they will have to compete on price and service. That’s a good thing. That’s why Vodafone are doing some good deals at the moment offering quite decent phones for nothing if you’ll commit for two years.

And both Vodafone and Telecom have announced a Twitter connection for the mobiles on their network. People with smartphones like iPhones and Blackberries have been using Twitter from them for a while, but both the existing networks have done a deal to provide Twitter access from ordinary mobile phones.

Q: How does that work?

A: You send your tweets as text messages to a specific address and Vodafone or Telecom passes them to Twitter for you. And you can set up a list of people on Twitter whose tweets you want to receive as text messages on your mobile.

Q: Are you signing up?

A: I can’t think of anything worse! To me, Twitter is a river of information I dip in and out of. I don’t worry if I miss things, and I certainly don’t want to be texted every time someone tweets.

Links

New Telecom network launch put off after Vodafone court action. Is this free publicity or a PR disaster? One man’s take on the winners and the losers. And, according to NBR, Telecom knew about the interference in November last year.

New Zealand’s third mobile network is closer to launch.

Q: Your main item today – how does technology affect the language we speak?

A: Quite deeply, over the years. The arrival of written language, and particularly the printing press, meant that people had much wider access to how other spoke. In the UK, we got the phenomenon of BBC English – I’ll just explain that a little. There is a wide range of accents and dialects within the UK, to the extent that people from some parts of the country have difficulty being understood in London, say. But your accent, as well as locating you geographically, also says something about your social class and your ethnicity, which are both very British concerns. When the BBC first started broadcasting, it was decreed that all announcers would use a version of the language that was called ‘received pronunciation’, but rapidly became known as ‘BBC English’. That’s what generations were told was ‘proper’ English, and regional accents were bad.

Q: Is that like the Queen’s English?

A: Not to my ears – I find Her Majesty’s way of speaking very artificial and unlike anyone I know. That’s probably a class thing as well. Anyway, the BBC has relented rather is recent years and you now hear quite a variation in accents on its radio and its TV stations. So, the radio played its part in molding people’s speech – it probably did in New Zealand as well.

But it’s not just public radio. There are other networks where language gets changed and adjusted to suit the technology. There were – and still are – radio amateurs, for instance, who use a lot of their own jargon, but they were never a high proportion of the population Then you staretd to get the Internet and the various conventions on what you say on email and instant messaging. But to me, the test of whether this is influencing the language is: does the way some new medium encourages people to speak extend outside that medium?

Q: Like txt speak?

A: Yes, that is rather the current moral panic on language, isn’t it? Because of the limitations of the medium and on the phone keyboards people tend to abbreviate very hard, in fairly standard ways. I don’t know if that will change as more and more phone have full keyboards and they silently break big messages into multiple texts.

Also, because mobile phones and the Internet are global, people tend to borrow terms more from other languages in text speak. There’s a BBC item in the links today which wistfully observes that the plain old ‘greeting hello’ is under threat due to texting.

Then there’s computer spell and grammar checking. We all know the problems with just accepting the computer’s changes to our spelling for instance can lead to all kinds of problems. Just last week, the student newspaper of Brigham Young University had to be recalled, after it went to press with a front page photo of twelve leaders of the Mormon church captioned ‘the twelve apostates’. Someone just clicked the wrong option on the spell checker. Oops.

But there’s also a problem with blindly accepting grammatical changes. The most popular word processor out there uses a grammar checker based on a style guide called “Strunk and White”. But many of Strunk and White’s rules are, frankly, arbitrary. One its always dining me for, for instance, is introducing a relative clause with ‘which’ – the grammar checker thinks I should be writing ‘that’. I don’t agree, and neither do some people with a rather better claim to be grammarians than Strunk and White. White, incidentally was an author – he wrote the Sword in the Stone, and most of what people dislike about the style guide was added by him to a work which Strunk had written a long time previously. I’ve included a link to an article about this today, by the head of linguistics at Edinburgh University.

But periodically there’s an outbreak of arguments that amount to ‘text speak will rot young minds’. You know – will examiners accept answers written in text speak? That one surfaces every year or two.

Q: Will they?

A: Generally they say – unless its an English language test, the most important thing is that we can read what the candidate wrote and that he or she is demonstrating that they understand the subject.

But we’ve heard arguments like this before – rock and roll was a symptom of moral decay, wasn’t it?

Q: So you see language change as a generational thing?

A: Very much so. We know languages evolve over time. Shakespeare takes some practice to read, and you need a dictionary or glossary to catch all of it. He’s about 400 years old. Chaucer from about 200 years before that, is very hard for us to follow. And Old English – say 1000 years ago – is really impenetrable unless you have specialist skills. So, the English language has gone through periods of change and its interesting to figure out what has caused the changes. If you look at the changes since Shakespeare, a lot of them relate to changing technology, and our changing understanding of the world – science in other words. Language changes over time and it’s not particularly helpful to try to freeze it.

Q: I take it you aren’t concerned about people using txt speak in everyday life, then?

A: Far from it.

Links

Spelling problems – apostates are not apostles. English grammar – debunking Strunk and White.

The BBC on the impact of txtspeak on language. Using text speak in exams may be OK

Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3.Technology slot with Colin Jackson for Thursday 26th February 2009

But what I really want to talk about today is part of the history of computers. Last week I was broadcasting from Webstock and I was talking about the future; this week I’d to talk about the past and where a lot of the stuff we take for granted had its roots. It’s not long ago at all.

The first computer built that was anything like a modern computer was built at Bletchley Park in England as part of the World War II decoding effort. That’s the place where Alan Turing and others worked on cracking the German Enigma codes, and we’ve talked about him before. The short summary is that he was a brilliant and unconventional man whose work probably did more to win the war for the Allies than any other single person’s contribution, and that after the war he was hounded to suicide because he was gay. He has only really been recognized in the last twenty years or so.

And all this code breaking effort took place in the ground of a country house at a place called Bletchley Park, which is near Milton Keynes in the south of England. I was lucky enough to get there just before Christmas, and I saw a slightly tumble down house with some low prefab buildings around it. And an RAF Harrier jump jet parked nearby, but I’m not quite sure why. During the war there were 10,000 people working at the Government Codes and Cipher School as it was called, all in the strictest secrecy. Nobody outside the hierarchy knew this thing existed!

Q: How did they keep something that size secret?

A: I asked that. Attitudes were very different during the war. Britain was fighting for its life and people understood the value of keeping quiet about things. Loose lips sink ships and so forth. So Bletchley Park continued its work and made a huge difference to the war by decrypting German communications so the allies knew where they would be at what time.

Q: Why didn’t the Germans guess?

A: Because the allies were really careful give the German High Command other reasons for why the allies knew what was going on. They’d send up a spotter plane to where their decrypts them the Germans would be, so the spotter plane would get seen and the Germans wouldn’t be surprised. Probably the best known deception operation like that, by the way, was the so-called “Man who never was” – a corpse who had died of pneumonia, carrying documents for a synthetic identity, and purportedly top secret invasion plans, was pushed into the Mediterranean where the Germans would find it. That wasn’t anything to do with code breaking, but it was quite audacious.

Anyway, the most famous code breaking at Blethcley Park was the Enigma. But, later in the war, the Germans stated using another kind of machine as well, which they called the Lorenz machine. The British called it “fish” and they set to to break it.

Q: How?

A: They captured a lot of fish traffic over the radio, and punched it to paper tape. And they built a machine called the Colossus which they could program to look for patterns in the messages.

Now the Colossus was, well, colossal, and it had a lot of radio valves. This was in the days before transistors, so radio valves were all they had as switching elements. The first version of the Colossus add 1,500 valves, but the MkII which was the main one in use had 2,500. These things generated a lot of heat! But, then so does modern equipment.

Q: What did they look like?

A: They look strangely like racks of modern computer servers. The radio valves are all on the back so, from the front, it looks a bit like five or six computer racks bolted together. Where it differs, though, is the great paper tape loop running though pulleys at one end. That’s a long loop of paper tape running at thirty miles per hour, which is pretty quick.

Q: Did they work?

A: Oh yes. The allies were reading all the German fish traffic right through the run up to the Normandy landings and for the rest of the war. But this was held in the closest secrecy well after the war. Churchill realized that there was going to be significant tension with Russia after the war, as indeed there was. In the war’s aftermath, he told the Russians about the allies having broken the Enigma. He probably though they would have guessed anyway. But Churchill wanted the Russians never to know that the allies had broken the Lorenz machine. Perhaps he hoped that the Russians would go on using it themselves. So, Churchill ordered that all the Colossus machines be utterly destroyed – reduced to fragments no bigger than a fist. And this was done at the war’s end. Most of the buildings at Bletchley Park were taken away and it was as though the Government Codes and Cipher School had never existed.

Q: How have you seen one of these machines, then?

A: There is a reconstructed one at Bletchley Park, part of what is called the National Museum of Computing. You can go and see it. They made it out of old telephone exchange parts. Its well worth a look if you are planning a trip to the UK.

Links

Bletchley Park, home of the British WWII code-breakers.

The National Museum of Computing, home to a reconstructed Colossus computer.