Atoms, Bytes and Genes by Martin W. Bauer

Author:Martin W. Bauer [Martin W. Bauer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Notes

1. I recall my language proficiency dilemma as an ambitious psychology student at University of Bern in the early 1980s: learning PASCAL or Spanish. I opted for Spanish and never regretted it.

2. The press recently reported the rise and change in privacy actions of British courts. Privacy actions are rising, and they are no longer predominantly protecting high-profile celebrities from mass media attention, but a more varied public from abuse and widespread misuse of personal data. The courts are getting more concerned with ‘Big Brother’ databases (source; Independent, 22 July, 2013, 10).

3. In early June 2013, 30-year-old Edward J. Snowden, an employee of a US computer consultancy firm, blew the whistle on secret programmes of total surveillance of cyberspace communication. The US NSA programme PRISM and the British equivalent at GCHQ TEMPORA had signed up the collaboration of all major Internet platform providers. Snowden chose Hong Kong as safe haven to make his revelations to the world media and Wikipedia represents his interests. Snowden now lives in Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum, to avoid a US criminal court. The particular scandal of these revelations lies in the fact that these secret surveillance activities have been ongoing since 2007, that secret services of one country use the services of other countries to overcome legal constraints of spying on their own citizens and major Internet platforms providers are fully implicated. The new euphemism for this kind of surveillance activity is ‘big data’ and ‘meta-data’, the making use of transaction traces for other purposes (see Wikipedia ‘Edward Snowden’; accessed 11 April 2014).

4. Steven Jobs dropped this famous line in an interview for Business Week On-Line, published on 12 May 1998. Correspondent Andy Reinhardt asked him: did you do consumer research on the iMac when you were developing it?, Answer: No . . . ..

5. Ironically, my own university, the LSE, has apparently never received a free computer from any of its providers; some people were outraged at that missed opportunity when other institutions continuously modernised their IT services with donations.

6. I got my first paid post-graduate job with NCR Switzerland where I joined a small team that was bundling standard software and some organisational ideas into a product package called ‘NCR office automation’. That was back in summer 1987.

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