Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• Schneier on Security: Consumerization and Corporate IT Security So why can’t work keep up? Why are you forced to use an unfamiliar, and sometimes outdated, operating system? Why do you need a second laptop, maybe an older and clunkier one? Why do you need a second cell phone with a new interface, or a BlackBerry, when your phone already does e-mail? Or a second BlackBerry tied to corporate e-mail? Why can’t you use the cool stuff you already have?
• A Morose and Downbeat Woman is My Co-Pilot – Boing Boing In over one hundred experiments, research emerging from my lab has shown that social behaviors and responses appear in full force when people interact with technology. That is, people treat computers as if they were real people.
• Paul Rubin: Ten Fallacies About Web Privacy – WSJ.com This notion is counterintuitive; we are not used to the concept that something can be known and at the same time no person knows it. But this is true of much online information.
• The End of Management – WSJ.com Other management icons of recent decades earned their reputations by attacking entrenched corporate cultures, bypassing corporate hierarchies, undermining corporate structures, and otherwise using the tactics of revolution in a desperate effort to make the elephants dance. The best corporate managers have become, in a sense, enemies of the corporation. The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.
• Stop the Panic on Air Security I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of “news” is “something that hardly ever happens.” It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that you should start worrying.
• Multi-tasking media consumption on rise among Britons, says Ofcom study | Media | The Guardian The gap between the way different generations use old and new media is closing fast. For the first time, more than 50% of over-55s have broadband at home, and a third are sending and reading emails each day
• Global Village Governance: Is Open Government absolute? I personally support deliberative privacy with transparency of participation – publication of who is part of the early stage discussions. The results should be disclosed early enough that positions are not fully formed (and we find ourselves in faux consultation), while allowing enough time to develop ideas so that the subsequent dialogue is effective. In many ways, public officials are caught either way: when ideas are first floated they are criticised for being short on detail, and if they present detailed proposals they are criticised for not consulting widely enough.