EVGENY MOROZOV says that China's tech industry is going quietly global, and asks when Congress will start holding hearings on the Chinese internet takeover.

Jan Chipchase wonders when we'll start designing credit cards to physically deteriorate as they approach their expiration dates.

Via Filip Stojanovski of Global Voices, Igor Mihajlovski, a blogger, has analysed Macedonian pop videos on YouTube and discovered that the best-performing songs tend to be hip hop or duets with foreign artists. Nothing, however, beat Tose Preski's (actually strangely moving) interpretation of the folk song "Zajdi zajdi."

My bureau chief suggested I translate the song title. Does anyone speak Macedonian?

Today is Ada Lovelace day, on which bloggers -- for the last two years, at least -- have pledged to write about women in science and technology. Ms Lovelace is often described with a wink and a nod as Lord Byron's only legitimate child. Judging from her letters, she certainly inherited her father's infinite capacity for self-regard. Encouraged by her mother, she took to mathematics at a young age, at a time when women were considered too frail for it. She became enchanted with Charles Babbage and his unbuilt analytical engine (about which more soon on this blog), and he with her. She appreciated him, a middle-aged man badly in need of appreciation after the rest of England had dismissed his first unbuilt invention, the difference engine, as an expensive mistake.  They collaborated on her annotated translation of a French article on his work. She recognised that his engine could be used to address algebraic equations and manipulate symbols as well as numbers; this is the rough concept of what we know today as a computer program.

Why Ada Lovelace? She was beautiful and possessed quite literally of byronic passion, tempered by a mind that truly understood higher maths. She died young, which is important if you want to be canonised. She, with Babbage, saw what a computer could become, knowledge that was lost with the two of them and wouldn't be resurrected until the next century. Doron Swade, who actually built one of Babbage's difference engines in the late 1980s, credits her with the best contemporary explanation of Babbage's ideas, but not much more. In his excellent book The Difference Engine, Mr Swade quotes another Babbage biographer, Bruce Collier, who is less kind.

It is not exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine ... To me, this familiar material [Ada's correspondence with Babbage] seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the "Notes" than trouble ... I will retain an open mind on whether Ada was crazy because of her substance abuse ... or despite it. I hope nobody feels compelled to write another book on the subject. But, then, I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.

Historical figures can be rescued and reinvented. We might remember the historical Ada Lovelace for the programming language, Ada, which the American department of defence used in the 1980s and 1990s. Even Charles Babbage had his renaissance when Doron Swade finally built a difference engine that worked. In any case, we celebrate the day on this blog, and offer a link to an unambiguously great woman of science: Jane Goodall.

I'm at a meeting for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, where government delegates are voting on whether to protect endangered species from excessive international trade. These happen every two or three years. In the good old days, delegates' votes were collected on little pieces of paper and counted. It was time-consuming, as delegates might be called upon to vote on many issues a day for a two-week meeting. Technology, thankfully, has intervened, in the form of a nifty electronic voting system. Each member country inserts its voting card into the machine and presses "2" for yes, "3" for no and "4" to abstain. In thirty seconds the job is done.

What could be simpler?

A lot, it seems. This year, about 137 countries are represented. Yesterday, during a vote on protection for a shark called the porbeagle (Lamna nasus) the electronic voting system seized up, and two nations complained the voting machine had just "flashed red". So the chair ordered the technicians to reset the system. Before a new vote on the porbeagle, a test was ordered. "Could everyone please vote 'Yes' now?" he said. After thirty seconds the chair said he had received votes from everyone in the room, and that the system was working. He then observed dryly that of the 137 nations that had been supposed to vote 'Yes', seven had voted 'No' and two had voted to abstain.

The technology may work perfectly. Humans, it appears, do not. But the imperfect "Yes" vote gave us some idea of the error level with the voting system at these meetings. When a species such as the hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini) fails to by a handful of votes to reach protection from trade, might this be down to fumble fingers?

Today another test was conducted and this time the delegates did a little better. They were asked to answer a question. "Is Doha the capital of Qatar?" asked the chair. All nations except Cameroon, Croatia and China managed to vote "Yes". One voted "No", and two abstained. The slightly frustrated chair decided a third test was necessary, and everyone was just ordered to vote "Yes". This time Nigeria and Azerbaijan managed to abstain. After some kerfuffle a technician confirmed that both countries had simply pressed the wrong button.

The lesson from all this is that electronic voting systems can only be as accurate as the humans that operate them. Often, at two-week international conferences, these humans are bored, full or hung over. That means it is important to have a good idea of the voting error, which may need to be tested on several occasions . If one cannot design an idiot-proof system, then counting the number of idiots using the system is surely the next best thing.

(The photograph of a rather unprotected porbeagle is from pfig on Flickr.)

IT'S OBVIOUS who the early buyers of the iPad will be: the fanboys and early adopters who just have to have the latest Apple toy. Pre-orders for the iPad have been open for a week, and already people are trying to work out how many have been sold so far. Daniel Tello, for example, has analysed order-tracking numbers from the Apple store and concluded that around 190,000 iPads were pre-ordered in the first week. But that doesn't reveal anything about who will buy the iPad later on, or how they will use it. Indeed, it seems Apple itself is unsure of the answer, and is hedging its bets.

Is the iPad aimed at road warriors, who will use it in place of a MacBook or other laptop? That's the implication of the iWork suite, which positions the iPad as a device you can do useful work on and consists of fully functional apps, not cut-down companion apps. But road warriors also want grown-up features like multitasking and cameras for videoconferencing, neither of which are present. Perhaps that is to keep the price down to make the iPad more attractive to a broader audience, who might just want a media-playback device with the ability to do a bit of e-mail, browsing and Facebook -- a bigger iPod touch, in other words.

A third, more ambitious possibility is that the iPad is Apple's latest version of a "computer for the rest of us" just as the Macintosh was 26 years ago. The iPad's simple, touch-based interface could appeal to people who find existing computers too complex, or people buying a computer for the first time in the developing world. As an interesting post on Ultimi Barbarorum observes, Apple's plan to open lots of shops in China points in this direction.

Continue reading "Even Apple doesn't know who its iPad is for" >>