Month: April 2020

Why won’t the UK save more lives?

This article by Ben Lovejoy highlights the bad judgement employed by the UK NHS in choosing to create its own contact tracing app for monitoring CoVid-19.

Comment: It’s no exaggeration to say UK rejection of Apple API will cost lives

Sometimes big business makes really great decisions on behalf of the community it services. Not all decisions are about making money.

The UK approach will not be accepted by all. Certainly not by me for all my usual privacy reasons.

I still don’t fully trust Google, but if they’re working in conjunction with Apple, I am happier that they are both working in our best interests.

The UK government has, like others, made some “interesting” decisions during the pandemic. This one feels like it has been politically motivated.

I will use any app that uses the Apple/Google API. That means I won’t use the NHS one.

Watch and enjoy football?

I work for a small technology company some folk might have heard about before – IBM. Yes, International Business Machines – that IBM. (That might mean I’m biased, but when you read and watch the stuff below, you might understand that!)

I’m not the world’s biggest football fan (soccer for those Americans out there). But I like the odd match. When I read something on our internal news system about IBM’s Watson technology helping Leatherhead FC, this sounded both strange and amazing at the same time.

Watch this video and see if you’re equally impressed:

Do you speak to Siri/Alexa/Google?

I often ask Siri to switch on, or off, lights around the house – yes I am that geek.

But I also find I reply back to Siri when a confirmation is made, like when I ask for a piece of music or playlist to be played, Siri will confirm, and I say thank you.

So this new idea, just sounds right up my street. And when you watch the video, you might also be thinking, “what else can this do for me”?

Apple/CMU researchers show dumb devices made smart by HomePod listening

To me, this just feels like a natural next step, and I sort of wonder why no one has done this yet anyway. Then I remember, it’s amazingly tough to make some of the things that we take for granted as natural for us, happen within or by a computer system.

I really want to see this happen sooner than later.