Probably Random

10 Days to Faster Reading

I’ve just finished reading ‘10 days to faster reading‘ and to be honest I was a little disappointed.   There were some really useful techniques and tips on improving your reading, and the fact it suggests many techniques to try and you can pick the ones that help you.

The book uses the metaphor of a car race throughout which becomes tedious and does seem to leak in places, especially in a UK market where most people don’t drive automatics, and the endorsement for drinking coffee and using your mobile whilst driving probably isn’t the greatest idea.

There was one particular ‘day’, Day 5 I think, which really just made no sense and did nothing to improve my confidence in reading it.

I would suggest that How To Read (pdf) would probably be a better place to start.

Lighting

I’ve always known lighting is important to a picture, I mean lighting is the picture, without light it wouldn’t exist.  But it dawned on my a little harder the other day, I’d been looking at the pictures on Greyscale Gorilla which he’d taken for Digital Kitchen and whilst the pictures were great it was the lighting which struck me.  So I had lighting in my head when I was having a shower and a bulb went (usually with an idea its a light coming on but this was one going out) but it struck me how different the room looked now it was lit from a single point (rather than two). The room instead of looking, I don’t know Mediterranean? looked more sinister edgier and harsher.

In my photography I usually take what I see, there is an argument there that I’m not being creative, I’m merely a technician capturing a scene but that’s another story.  But now I think I need to go and do some more experimentation with lighting, I haven’t actually set up studio lighting (properly) for 10 years now and back then it was more for functional rather than aesthetic reasons.

Gossip – erosion of privacy

Perhaps it should be called e-rosion

At the moment I’m more likely to trust a corporation with my data, than any Government agency Lost Data Disks (other breaches) in fact I have; Amazon. They have my login details, home and work addresses, they know what products I have bought, others I own, what I’m interested and not interested in. Amazon already make recommendations and I don’t mind this, it’s automated and well with a bit of coaxing isn’t too bad, even if sometimes it appears to have an excellent memory but be slightly dumb – ’3 years ago you bought a book on knitting do you want another one…’. But there is more Amazon could find out from my buying patterns, are there any particular religious festivals when my purchasing increases, do I buy a lot of self help books, how many addresses to I get books sent to, how often does that change. These are all bits of information which when agregated could provide clues to my personality.

Why as a privacy advocate don’t I mind? Because it’s their competitive advantage to keep that information to themselves, and I trust them, as soon as I loose trust I will go elsewhere. It’s like the village shops I know the shopkeepers they know what I like to buy, it’s not a problem, it can be useful. But if they were to gossip that would be a breach of trust which would ultimately lead to me going elsewhere. Unfortunately there is much more data in the amazon database than my village shopkeeper could remember accurately which makes it valuable to others.

This ‘Gossip’ the little bits of information which can be glued together into a mosaic of a person can be damaging, the pieces don’t fit properly, the information isn’t always correct, the loudest or fastest voice is the one that gets heard, even if it might not be true. As happened at SXSW, the twitters got the message they wanted out fastest, everyone else seems to have commented based on those reports.

Gossip is around us everywhere, blogs are gossip! They give you information about the writer even if they are writing about something else, what they do what they are interested in, and we choose to do it. Its just life, a balancing act of being an introverted security maniac and an open book.

I’ll probably look at Gossip and E-rosion again, looking at social networking and it’s impact too.

Hackers

Tim O’Reilly on Hackers.

Transparent Society – Privacy in the modern age

I’ve been reading the comments posted between Bruce Schneier and David Brin about the Transparent Society (the comments direct specifically at Brins book, not at Gianni Vattimo’s earlier book).

Now I’m a firm believer in privacy… with caveats, as always. There is information I don’t want to be collected and aggregated for security and privacy. I mean most Banks ‘Secure’ logons ask for details you could get from someones CV, the Nazi’s used information collected by the previous government to round people up for the concentration camps. Why should I be happy for people to start aggregating this data, even if I can watch them? I suppose it’s also an issue of trust, who has the information how competent are they, who may get it.

As long as society doesn’t become so transparent that it becomes invisible, perhaps the opaque society would be better? Then let the opacity fluctuate between 5% and 95%, its the same old argument where sides argue their black and white issues, which are actually grey to the rest of the world.

Who’s responsible for cleaning the windows of the transparent society?