Today it has been revealed the data of 80,000 prisoners has been “misplaced” by a contractor working for the Ministry of Justice. It seems not a month goes by in the halls of power where some rather sensitive does not go missing.

What amazes me is the slapdash nature of data handling practise. If the data was simply encrypted before burning to CD or memory stick this wouldn’t be an issue. It would take but a few minutes. Then, the conversation on the Today Program would go:

I saw a sign today in the bathrooms which neatly illustrates the problem a computer may have understanding a sentence. It said:

Please don’t put paper towels down the toilet as it causes them to become blocked.

If one were to go solely by the rules of grammar, one would be forced to conclude the paper towels would become blocked: “them” is a plural pronoun, meaning it must apply to the plural towels rather than the singular toilet when the sentence is considered in isolation.

Though only 24 years and without an ’elite education’, it was with a distressing sense of familiarity I read the first paragraph of The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries […] but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

I started to use the god process monitoring tool to lighten the load of managing some tiny Ruby on Rails services I’ve written at work. Prior to this rebooting a server or, god forbid, an application error would result in a downtime until I manually checked each service, invariably being several hours post error. God has proved a solution to this problem, aside from a small problem I had involving RubyInline.

I came across an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review. It refutes some aspects of the Long Tail theory, providing some good data to support the author’s view. I found it interesting in view of the unquestioning acceptance I’ve witnessed about the Long Tail theory.

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?

It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.