Prev Next
From the News:

Google hit with £44m GDPR fine over ads

from BBC
Google has been fined 50 million euros (£44m) by the French data regulator CNIL, for a breach of the EU’s data protection rules. CNIL said it had levied the record fine for “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation”. The regulator said it judged that people were “not sufficiently informed” about how Google collected…
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Torn

by
Regular readers of this blog will know three key things about me, if they have given any thought about the threads that run through these posts. Firstly, I like the technology. Of course, it has to be used well and beneficially rather than just being something interesting for its own sake. But there are so many examples where that is […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Keep Calm and Carry On

by
The title of this blog originates from the popular, but now perhaps somewhat tired slogan, which originated in the war but surprisingly wasn’t used in that era. It has enjoyed sing in vogue relatively recently appearing on mugs, cards and even cushions. It is frequently followed by the phrase “it’s only [fill in event of choice]”. I might suggest we […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Knocking on Evan’s door

by
I’d like to say something positive about the BBC. No, really. Having written blogs recently about the rapidly diminishing ability to ask questions and even more importantly the need to listen to the answers before asking a follow up question, it’s time to give credit where credit is due. The BBC has brought Evan Davis back to Radio 4 as […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Not up to date – and that is okay

by
For the first time since I don’t know when, none of my Apple hardware is the latest version. My iMac is the 5k model, Mac mini is late 2012 (although only 18 months old), my iPad Pro is the 10.5” version, my MacBook the late 2014 version and my phone is an iPhone 6S. My Apple Pencil is now just […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Complexity

by
An old boss of mine, Marjorie Scardino, when she was at Pearson used to say “make things simple. It’s not always easy but it’s usually right”. I’ve quoted her before and I think she’s right – it isn’t easy. There is a lot of discussion about Universal Credit at the moment. Partly because the budget is coming, and vested interests […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Good Question

by
A couple of blogs ago I was berating the Today Programme for, amongst other perceived sins, asking the wrong sort of questions to get people to open up and actually say something interesting rather than, robot like, stick to the party line. I didn’t name any good questioners. Yet, almost in front of my eyes was a journalist who does […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Positive Feelings

by
I read an article in New Scientist recently – it is a recent addition to the magazines at my barber. I don’t need to get my hair cur very often these days, but having free access to New Scientist may make me go more frequently. In the latest edition Dr. Alia Crum who heads up the Mind and Body Lab […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Any Questions?

by
I wake up to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 most mornings. My internet radio gently increases volume to reach the desired point and it’s a pretty painless experience. But nothing can prepare me for the hectoring approach many of the presenters adopt. The Today programme has come in for criticism recently. It appears listeners are leaving in quite […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Predicting Failure

by
Just this week, we’ve been told that the world is about to burn up because of man-made global warming – as exemplified by this glorious summer, and (yet again) that Brexit will be an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. There is a long and inglorious list of predictions which turned out to be nonsense. From Thomas Watson’s perspective that […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Digital Diversity

by
CIO Connect ran the final workshop before the summer break a couple of weeks ago on the topic of diversity. We invited our largely male membership to bring a female colleague with them. Although this was slightly awkwardly done – it’s hard to word such an invitation effectively – we had, probably for the first time, an audience roughly split […]
RSS From the Nick's Notes:

Not Normal

by
As the late, great Douglas Adams said “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” Whenever the world seems a […]