Found this article in the Times, thought it was quite relevent to the semina today. Shows kinda where we are in terms of online services...
The Treasury is to review spending on government IT projects in an effort to halt a series of scandals as Gordon Brown’s ambitions to computerise public services were dealt another blow yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of people were given an extra 24 hours to file their returns online after the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) computer filing system crashed hours before the annual deadline. The website failed to work for nearly six hours on the biggest day of the tax year, denting Mr Brown’s plans to make all taxpayers file online within four years.
A major review of public spending will seek to draw lessons from recent IT disasters, which have cost the tax billions, The Times has learn. The review, to be conducted by Yvette Cooper, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will look at IT procurement in several areas.
A Treasury source said that the review, across a dozen areas of government spending, would seek to “ensure better value for money” for future IT projects. A recent survey revealed that the cost to the taxpayer of abandoned Whitehall computer projects since 2000 had reached £2 billion.
This comes days after the Prime Minister asked Paul Murphy, the Welsh Secretary, to chair a new cabinet committee on IT and information security, suggesting renewed interest from No 10 in the area. This includes the Child Support Agency’s £486 million computer up-grade – which failed, causing a £1 billion claims write-off – and an adult learning programme subject to major fraud.
Yesterday’s tax crash happened two months after HMRC lost two computer disks containing the details of 25 million child benefit claimants and follows other serious lapses, further undermining government claims that it can handle major IT projects.
About 100,000 people were unable to access the HMRC system after it collapsed shortly after 9am. It was out of service until the afternoon, leaving many unable to file by the midnight deadline and facing fines. HMRC was forced to issue an apology and cancel all fines for nonsubmission, postponing the deadline until midnight tonight.
Politicians and IT experts questioned why the Government had failed to run the system efficiently at a crucial period of the financial year and cast doubts on its ability to introduce an online system for all self-assessment taxpayers by 2012.It is thought that HMRC saves about £5 for each return filed online rather than on paper. It plans to save more than £450 million by 2014 by moving more of its tax collection online. However, the Treasury’s own plans for online filing are based on the proviso that HMRC’s systems can cope.
Yesterday frustrated readers contacted The Times furious that they were spending hours trying to file. One said: “It just shows incompetence about a technical issue and causes unneccesary pressure. If they want people to file online, this system should be bullet-proof and it blatantly is not.”
A Revenue spokesman said: “HMRC takes any disruption of service very seriously and to reflect this no one who files electronically or by paper by midnight Friday 1 February will face a penalty.”
About four million of the nine million people who pay tax via self-assessment are expected to file their return online this year, up from 2.9 million last year. Last night, 3.6 million people had already filed online, but hundreds of thousands are expected to have missed the initial deadline. About 900,000 missed it last year.
Philip Hammond, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: “When will Alistair Darling get a grip? He’s happy to threaten taxpayers with £100 fines if they don’t send in their tax returns on time, but he can’t even provide them with the basic tools to do the job.”
Private firms were baffled about how the Revenue’s website was unable to withstand a surge of visitors. Rob Steggles, of NTT Europe Online, a web hosting company, said: “If an organisation’s web presence fails to perform at a critical time, both reputation and revenue suffer.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s in the private or public sector – a secure, reliable website is of crucial importance to an organisation’s ability to serve its customers and protect its revenues.”
Last week HMRC admitted that its system was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family, and that thousands of “high-profile” people had been secretly told not to use it.
Website weaknesses
—Potential problems include band width – the size of the pipe that connects a website to the internet. There is typically a peak amount of information that can be communicated. The site owner can, however, call upon its service provider to increase its width
—Another is the web server – the box that stores information on the site and fetches pages when a visitor requests them – which can only handle a limited amount of requests at once
—The could be a fault with the site’s app servers – like web servers but performing more complicated tasks
—A site aware that demand is about to increase can rent more servers or use a hosting company such as IBM to run its servers – known as on-demand computing
—Using a technique called content distribution, sites with global audiences can also store information around the world to ease pressure on the main server
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3285628.ece
Friday 1 February 2008
Tuesday 29 January 2008
Fennville: example of a creative class region
This is the article I had in my presentation last week, might be useful if anyone wants to do their essay on this.
On its face, Fennville looks like a typical Mayberry-style rural town – no stoplights, a one-block business district along Main Street, a few mom-and-pop stores. But this city of around 1,500 between Saugatuck and Douglas is in the midst of a cultural renaissance that is helping transform it from a sagging agricultural berg into a bohemian center.
Art galleries are springing up around town, and earlier this year the Allegan County Children's Museum opened its doors. The Journeyman Café restaurant and bakery is quickly becoming regarded as one of West Michigan's true culinary jewels."You're just surrounded by really great stuff, and I think a lot of young people who have a lot of really great ideas have decided to live here and are starting their own thing," says Kristin Gebben, co-owner of Gebben/Gray Gallery. "It's really exciting."
Suddenly Fennville is a hotspot. It's a development that could be called a triumph of the so-called "creative class." The creative class concept is a product of the work of social scientist Richard Florida, who posits that certain types of workers in creative pursuits – artists, architects, gallery owners, etc. – are harbingers of urban redevelopment.
That concept underpins much of Michigan's Cool Cities initiative.What most of the new businesses have in common is a commitment to low-volume, high quality offerings. "We're all striving for something that's real," says Dawn Stafford, owner of the Peachbelt Studio and Gallery on the outskirts of town.
Many credit the pioneering work of Journeyman Café with helping nurture this growth. From its launch in 2003, what began as a simple coffee shop, has become an exemplar of the slow foods movement, with an emphasis on organic, locally grown and artisan foods. "I don't want to take credit for it here, but I think the restaurant did have something to do with shining a light on things," says Journeyman co-owner and executive chef Matthew Millar. "We have this kind of broken down old town here that hasn't had the greatest of reputations for a long time, and we just stumbled on this piece of real estate. We decided to take a chance on it and when we did, we started to see a little more clearly that there were a lot of people in the area who were doing a lot of cool things. We've got this weird little collection of misfits who have just been fantastic."
Millar and his wife Amy Cook had been informally looking for a location to start a restaurant in Saugatuck or Douglas when they found the storefront at 114 E. Main St. The couple stumbled on the restaurant's location one morning after eating breakfast at the Blue Goose Café down the street. It had previously been "a really bad coffee house," Millar says. Because the concept was to make the restaurant a destination they were willing to take a chance on Fennville.
"We didn't want to fill up with 400 fudge-seeking tourists every Saturday afternoon being in downtown Douglas or Saugatuck," Millar says. "And downtown Saugatuck is going to be just as dead as we are in the wintertime. So what's the point of this 10-week season where we're feeding people we don't want to feed in the first place?"Millar says the rent on the building was far cheaper than anything they could have found in Saugatuck or Douglas. And, by being located away from the center of the tourist trade, Journeyman was able to grow at a more leisurely pace."We were able to grow into this in a way that I think that we wouldn't have been able to do in a community where we would have been busy right off the bat," Millar says.Journeyman's presence was a draw for Gebben and partner Theresa Gray. The pair worked together in a gallery in Saugatuck before opening the Gebben/Gray Gallery next door to Journeyman two years ago, and she says the restaurant had a lot to do with their choice of location.Gebben says business in Fennville has been "surprisingly good."
"For us, with the type of market we have selling art, it really is a destination-type business. I think Theresa and I both believe if you do something well and believe in what you're doing, people will find you. And people have," Gebben says.Neighboring gallery owner Bruce Cutean wasn't planning on opening a new location when he sold the original ThirdStone Gallery& Art Works building in Laketown Township between Holland and Saugatuck last year after 11 years in business. His apartment above Journeyman and the Gebben/Gray Gallery became ThirdStone's new home out of necessity last year when the space he was planning to use for his lucrative annual holiday show didn't pan out. Someone suggested using his apartment, and before he knew it, he was back in the gallery business, doing as well as he ever has. "This thing has a life of its own, apparently. It's not following my basic plan. But something tells me I need to go with that natural evolution, because it's happening for a reason," Cutean says.
Fennville is ethnically diverse – with nearly a third of the city Latino – and that diversity is one of the things credited for helping Fennville's rise. Locals describe Fennville as more like a big city on a small scale, rather than a typical small town."You just wander through the grocery store, you'll talk to a dozen people from all walks of life. You'll have cottage people from the Lakeshore; you'll have Hispanics who don't even speak English to ones who have lived in this community for a long time. You've got farmers. You've got artists. It's a genuine little melting pot, which is what I like about it," Cutean says.The mix of people reminds Cutean of his hometown of Chicago, he says, adding: "In a small town to have that big of a mix, it's unusual."Millar agreed that Fennville's ethnic blend is a contributing factor to its success."There's a cultural diversity here that is akin to what you would see in a big city," Millar says. "I think you're foolish if you think the Latino population hasn't had a huge impact on what the city is today."
What makes the current culturally rich business climate so remarkable is that it seems to be a grassroots thing – it's not a result of tax incentives or grants or other government assistance."I found that the city government and the Chamber of Commerce and the (Downtown Development Authority) board were as mystified as everybody else, but were liking it," Cutean says.Cutean now sits on the Downtown Development Authority board, and things are being done to capitalize on Fennville's rising profile. For example, the DDA has decided to fund the removal of some city-owned buildings downtown in the hopes of attracting some much-needed retail space."The thing is, everybody functions as community, as friends," Cutean says. "There is a good local community energy here now, and everybody seems to be supportive of everybody else," Cutean says.
For Millar, the joy of being part of the community comes from discovering a hidden gem and pitching in to help make it better. "One of my favorite things about being down here the last couple of years was discovering what was really in this community and how many unique things were just kind of bubbling under the surface," says Millar."There's something to be says for being in on the ground floor, something to be says for coming into a town when you can help define how the community is going to grow, rather than coming into a community that's already got a personality and trying to fit in," Millar says.
On its face, Fennville looks like a typical Mayberry-style rural town – no stoplights, a one-block business district along Main Street, a few mom-and-pop stores. But this city of around 1,500 between Saugatuck and Douglas is in the midst of a cultural renaissance that is helping transform it from a sagging agricultural berg into a bohemian center.
Art galleries are springing up around town, and earlier this year the Allegan County Children's Museum opened its doors. The Journeyman Café restaurant and bakery is quickly becoming regarded as one of West Michigan's true culinary jewels."You're just surrounded by really great stuff, and I think a lot of young people who have a lot of really great ideas have decided to live here and are starting their own thing," says Kristin Gebben, co-owner of Gebben/Gray Gallery. "It's really exciting."
Suddenly Fennville is a hotspot. It's a development that could be called a triumph of the so-called "creative class." The creative class concept is a product of the work of social scientist Richard Florida, who posits that certain types of workers in creative pursuits – artists, architects, gallery owners, etc. – are harbingers of urban redevelopment.
That concept underpins much of Michigan's Cool Cities initiative.What most of the new businesses have in common is a commitment to low-volume, high quality offerings. "We're all striving for something that's real," says Dawn Stafford, owner of the Peachbelt Studio and Gallery on the outskirts of town.
Many credit the pioneering work of Journeyman Café with helping nurture this growth. From its launch in 2003, what began as a simple coffee shop, has become an exemplar of the slow foods movement, with an emphasis on organic, locally grown and artisan foods. "I don't want to take credit for it here, but I think the restaurant did have something to do with shining a light on things," says Journeyman co-owner and executive chef Matthew Millar. "We have this kind of broken down old town here that hasn't had the greatest of reputations for a long time, and we just stumbled on this piece of real estate. We decided to take a chance on it and when we did, we started to see a little more clearly that there were a lot of people in the area who were doing a lot of cool things. We've got this weird little collection of misfits who have just been fantastic."
Millar and his wife Amy Cook had been informally looking for a location to start a restaurant in Saugatuck or Douglas when they found the storefront at 114 E. Main St. The couple stumbled on the restaurant's location one morning after eating breakfast at the Blue Goose Café down the street. It had previously been "a really bad coffee house," Millar says. Because the concept was to make the restaurant a destination they were willing to take a chance on Fennville.
"We didn't want to fill up with 400 fudge-seeking tourists every Saturday afternoon being in downtown Douglas or Saugatuck," Millar says. "And downtown Saugatuck is going to be just as dead as we are in the wintertime. So what's the point of this 10-week season where we're feeding people we don't want to feed in the first place?"Millar says the rent on the building was far cheaper than anything they could have found in Saugatuck or Douglas. And, by being located away from the center of the tourist trade, Journeyman was able to grow at a more leisurely pace."We were able to grow into this in a way that I think that we wouldn't have been able to do in a community where we would have been busy right off the bat," Millar says.Journeyman's presence was a draw for Gebben and partner Theresa Gray. The pair worked together in a gallery in Saugatuck before opening the Gebben/Gray Gallery next door to Journeyman two years ago, and she says the restaurant had a lot to do with their choice of location.Gebben says business in Fennville has been "surprisingly good."
"For us, with the type of market we have selling art, it really is a destination-type business. I think Theresa and I both believe if you do something well and believe in what you're doing, people will find you. And people have," Gebben says.Neighboring gallery owner Bruce Cutean wasn't planning on opening a new location when he sold the original ThirdStone Gallery& Art Works building in Laketown Township between Holland and Saugatuck last year after 11 years in business. His apartment above Journeyman and the Gebben/Gray Gallery became ThirdStone's new home out of necessity last year when the space he was planning to use for his lucrative annual holiday show didn't pan out. Someone suggested using his apartment, and before he knew it, he was back in the gallery business, doing as well as he ever has. "This thing has a life of its own, apparently. It's not following my basic plan. But something tells me I need to go with that natural evolution, because it's happening for a reason," Cutean says.
Fennville is ethnically diverse – with nearly a third of the city Latino – and that diversity is one of the things credited for helping Fennville's rise. Locals describe Fennville as more like a big city on a small scale, rather than a typical small town."You just wander through the grocery store, you'll talk to a dozen people from all walks of life. You'll have cottage people from the Lakeshore; you'll have Hispanics who don't even speak English to ones who have lived in this community for a long time. You've got farmers. You've got artists. It's a genuine little melting pot, which is what I like about it," Cutean says.The mix of people reminds Cutean of his hometown of Chicago, he says, adding: "In a small town to have that big of a mix, it's unusual."Millar agreed that Fennville's ethnic blend is a contributing factor to its success."There's a cultural diversity here that is akin to what you would see in a big city," Millar says. "I think you're foolish if you think the Latino population hasn't had a huge impact on what the city is today."
What makes the current culturally rich business climate so remarkable is that it seems to be a grassroots thing – it's not a result of tax incentives or grants or other government assistance."I found that the city government and the Chamber of Commerce and the (Downtown Development Authority) board were as mystified as everybody else, but were liking it," Cutean says.Cutean now sits on the Downtown Development Authority board, and things are being done to capitalize on Fennville's rising profile. For example, the DDA has decided to fund the removal of some city-owned buildings downtown in the hopes of attracting some much-needed retail space."The thing is, everybody functions as community, as friends," Cutean says. "There is a good local community energy here now, and everybody seems to be supportive of everybody else," Cutean says.
For Millar, the joy of being part of the community comes from discovering a hidden gem and pitching in to help make it better. "One of my favorite things about being down here the last couple of years was discovering what was really in this community and how many unique things were just kind of bubbling under the surface," says Millar."There's something to be says for being in on the ground floor, something to be says for coming into a town when you can help define how the community is going to grow, rather than coming into a community that's already got a personality and trying to fit in," Millar says.
Sunday 27 January 2008
Searching for the truth online
The world wide web is a modern miracle - a source of boundless information; a publishing place for budding authors, musicians, movie makers and opiners.
The problem is that when any old Joe can contribute to the global information bank, how can we trust what we find?
It was one of the topics under discussion at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Rio.
Some people are saying that the web has been dreadfully oversold, and that user generated content, rather than being interesting and insightful comment about the times we live in, is instead an unbroken stream of unmediated and opinionated chatter.
Wisdom of the many
The publishing and broadcasting revolution that has seen the rise of sites such as Flickr and YouTube is seeing a new blog created every second and the people previously known as the audience now produce the content.
Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has written a book, The Cult of the Amateur, asking if we are being sold a line here, all for someone else to pocket the profits.
"There are people making a fortune out of the web 2.0 revolution, whether they're from Google, YouTube or Wikipedia," he says. "They've convinced all of us to become authors and they're making a fortune out of us.
"We're giving our content away for free, most of it has no value, and much of it is unreliable and embarrassing for us.
"Meanwhile culture, broadly, is the victim because there's more and more of this user-generated dross out there and professional, high-quality culture, whether it's film, television, music or journalism, is in crisis."
As a charity, Wikipedia does not make money but relies on free labour for its very existence.
Criticised for its lack of authority and vulnerability to vandalism, bias and inaccuracy, the site is also seen as pushing a myth that there is a democracy of talent and that the wisdom of the crowd is equal to that of a hard-working expert.
Andrew Keen calls it the "great seduction". In response, he has been accused of under-estimating how the internet has freed people from the passive acceptance of someone else's information.
Democracy of access
"The internet, for the first time ever, has democratised access to information," says Mark Kelly from the Council of Europe.
"But more than that, social network sites are allowing freedom of assembly and association between people in ways that would have been inconceivable even a few years ago.
"I greatly welcome the diversity of communication that there is on the internet and I don't think quality has suffered."
During last year's demonstrations and government clampdowns in Burma, the internet helped those on the ground get pictures out.
Yes the production values were low but it was journalistically invaluable, especially when government censorship stymied standard reporting.
But can such compelling pictures and reports - the first draft of history, as they say - be trusted?
They may not, for instance, be subject to the same sort of journalistic rigour associated with delivering largely reliable information. This is an issue for the mainstream media that is often itching to use the stuff.
Fact checking
"A lot of people e-mail their pictures, video and e-mail reports of things they've seen [to the BBC]," explains Richard Sambrook, the director of BBC Global News.
"But we don't broadcast any of it until we've gone back to them, talked to them, and checked out the veracity of what they've sent in.
"I think for professional news organisations like the BBC, and others, that kind of fact checking is at its core. You don't get that on social networking sites, blogs and so on. That's really one of the key distinctions that I think Andrew Keen is making."
The internet is disrupting the business models that once supported news, culture and knowledge.
We download for free; let the public report; leave knowledge creation in the hands of the crowd. But is this numbing our tastes and lowering our standards for truth?
In short, is the cost of having more for free that when it comes to quality we are satisfied with less?
"We're undermining culture to such an extent that it's harder and harder to sell the thing," says Mr Keen.
"We're giving it away for free, which means that no-one's buying anything, which you see, for example, in the record business - the collapse of a whole industry, the recorded music business.
"It's not an ideal business, I acknowledge that; it was run by some very short-sighted and sometimes self-interested people. But nonetheless I prefer a world where there are lots of CDs rather than none at all."
The means of production and dissemination are shifting, and the cacophony of internet voices means we all feel lost in the woods.
Perhaps then there is still a role for established and trusted media brands to help people find a way through the muddle and get a clear picture on the other side?
The problem is that when any old Joe can contribute to the global information bank, how can we trust what we find?
It was one of the topics under discussion at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Rio.
Some people are saying that the web has been dreadfully oversold, and that user generated content, rather than being interesting and insightful comment about the times we live in, is instead an unbroken stream of unmediated and opinionated chatter.
Wisdom of the many
The publishing and broadcasting revolution that has seen the rise of sites such as Flickr and YouTube is seeing a new blog created every second and the people previously known as the audience now produce the content.
Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has written a book, The Cult of the Amateur, asking if we are being sold a line here, all for someone else to pocket the profits.
"There are people making a fortune out of the web 2.0 revolution, whether they're from Google, YouTube or Wikipedia," he says. "They've convinced all of us to become authors and they're making a fortune out of us.
"We're giving our content away for free, most of it has no value, and much of it is unreliable and embarrassing for us.
"Meanwhile culture, broadly, is the victim because there's more and more of this user-generated dross out there and professional, high-quality culture, whether it's film, television, music or journalism, is in crisis."
As a charity, Wikipedia does not make money but relies on free labour for its very existence.
Criticised for its lack of authority and vulnerability to vandalism, bias and inaccuracy, the site is also seen as pushing a myth that there is a democracy of talent and that the wisdom of the crowd is equal to that of a hard-working expert.
Andrew Keen calls it the "great seduction". In response, he has been accused of under-estimating how the internet has freed people from the passive acceptance of someone else's information.
Democracy of access
"The internet, for the first time ever, has democratised access to information," says Mark Kelly from the Council of Europe.
"But more than that, social network sites are allowing freedom of assembly and association between people in ways that would have been inconceivable even a few years ago.
"I greatly welcome the diversity of communication that there is on the internet and I don't think quality has suffered."
During last year's demonstrations and government clampdowns in Burma, the internet helped those on the ground get pictures out.
Yes the production values were low but it was journalistically invaluable, especially when government censorship stymied standard reporting.
But can such compelling pictures and reports - the first draft of history, as they say - be trusted?
They may not, for instance, be subject to the same sort of journalistic rigour associated with delivering largely reliable information. This is an issue for the mainstream media that is often itching to use the stuff.
Fact checking
"A lot of people e-mail their pictures, video and e-mail reports of things they've seen [to the BBC]," explains Richard Sambrook, the director of BBC Global News.
"But we don't broadcast any of it until we've gone back to them, talked to them, and checked out the veracity of what they've sent in.
"I think for professional news organisations like the BBC, and others, that kind of fact checking is at its core. You don't get that on social networking sites, blogs and so on. That's really one of the key distinctions that I think Andrew Keen is making."
The internet is disrupting the business models that once supported news, culture and knowledge.
We download for free; let the public report; leave knowledge creation in the hands of the crowd. But is this numbing our tastes and lowering our standards for truth?
In short, is the cost of having more for free that when it comes to quality we are satisfied with less?
"We're undermining culture to such an extent that it's harder and harder to sell the thing," says Mr Keen.
"We're giving it away for free, which means that no-one's buying anything, which you see, for example, in the record business - the collapse of a whole industry, the recorded music business.
"It's not an ideal business, I acknowledge that; it was run by some very short-sighted and sometimes self-interested people. But nonetheless I prefer a world where there are lots of CDs rather than none at all."
The means of production and dissemination are shifting, and the cacophony of internet voices means we all feel lost in the woods.
Perhaps then there is still a role for established and trusted media brands to help people find a way through the muddle and get a clear picture on the other side?
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