The Weekly Round-Up: 13.03.09

One sign (in case you needed any more) that we are wading through the murky depths of recession is that we stop upgrading and start making do with the stinky old things we've been meaning to replace for ages.

By which the Round-Up is referring to hardware and software and the like (rather than - say - husbands and wives, although there is probably a bit of that too).

Economists would disagree and cite falls in borrowing and spending and what not and that's just fine, they can go and disagree in their own weekly columns and not this one. Bye.

Luckily for the Round-Up, the theory about letting ourselves go was supported whole-heartedly by a very nice lady called Claire Burke, from Keep IT Clean, a hardware cleaning business who spoke to silicon.com this week.

"If you get IT having to work on other people's computers, it's not fair if you have to scrape something off the keyboard," she said, which is a sentiment most people would probably share, unless they have some pretty permissive attitudes towards 'personal' computing (although this is one way to keep things clean).

She said the credit crunch is having a significant impact on attitudes towards cleaning and replacing kit, providing a neat link between the intro and the real meat of the column.

"The attitude is they would throw the keyboard away and get a new one but you can't do that now." Oh Claire, what happened to those halcyon days? Gleaming new keyboards, virgin mice - ahh the memories.

But forget those maudlin ramblings, in times of recession we're forced to endure the filth of our hardware and, if you are lucky enough to work in a hotdesking office environment, your colleagues' filth too.

Nail clippings, crisps, pastry crumbs, chewing gum and beard hair are some of the detritus that lurks within the average office keyboard. And just last year, researchers found that some keyboards in a 'normal' London office harboured levels of bacteria that could put their user at high risk of becoming ill.

In one case, a determined microbiologist proposed the removal of a keyboard from an office as it had 150 times the recommended limit of bacteria - five times filthier than a toilet seat that was swabbed in the same test. Basically, the kind of thing you could wave casually at a charging bull elephant to stop it dead in its tracks.

Burke added: "You can always tell if they eat salt and vinegar crisps because you can smell it." Everyone present gagged slightly and moved on.

Welcome to the recession...

Still, in an attempt to stop you thinking about the strange whiffs coming from your keyboard, let's talk about the future. It strikes the Round-Up that the job of futurologist is a cushy one, particularly if you specialise in predictions that won't come to bear during your tenure in the job or even your lifetime.

"In 70 years time we'll all live in cities made of cheese."
"Really, professor?"
"Oh yes, I'm quite sure of it."
"Gosh!"

This week, the British Computer Society laid out the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues facing the world that it feels could be solved with technology within the next two decades. Give or take a decade.

Some of the challenges are perfectly sensible like knowing everything there is about how plants grow in order to avoid mass crop failures and vastly improve the chances of your delphiniums thriving next to the greenhouse.

Other issues are more fantastical.

Take, the Memories for Life project. This is aimed at organising, managing and exploiting a lifetime of human experience and is inspired by the idea that the whole waking life of an individual will be able to fit on a single computer disc in 20 years' time. Given that HMRC managed to squeeze details of 25 million people onto a CD a couple of years ago (and then lose it) takes the shine off that aspiration somewhat.

Still, the work could lead to breakthroughs in AI and VR and lots of other very exciting acronyms and lead to the development of a 'nomenclator' - a device that can provide people with information about others when they meet for the first time.

Quite aside from the healthcare benefits, such a device could lead to a lot of efficiency gains in our social and love lives.

Imagine the following exchange at a party as mediated by the nomenclator.

Boy meets girl: "Hi."
Girl meets boy: "Hello."

Boy's nomenclator: "Pete is a 35-year-old underachieving, low-ranking civil servant who still lives with his parents and spends an inordinate amount of time playing fantasy role-play games as a scantily clad female warrior. Right now he's desperately holding in his 38-inch stomach."

Girl's nomenlator: "Sarah is a driven marketing professional who can't bear people who just drift along. She's a fitness fanatic and theatre lover."

Boy: "I think I'll just get another drink."
Girl: "Is that my phone? Excuse me."

Yet another project is Bringing the Past to Life for the Citizen, which is aimed at virtually recreating past events to understand circumstances and the motivation of the leading figures in history. One use of this would be to allow people to visit historical locations without having to travel to them.

So a bit like using Google Earth, then...

This May, the Google mastery over web search could be over. British scientist Stephen Wolfram is the rather clever fellow behind mathematical software Mathematica and in a couple of months will be unleashing a new type of web search.

Wolfram Online differs from standard search engines in as much that users can pose questions in natural language. The search engine employs algorithmic "knowledge models" to deliver the correct answer.

"I think it's going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!" he said in a blog post. See what the Round-Up meant about futurologists?

We'll know if it's any good because if it is Microsoft will probably try to buy it and rebrand it as Live Search or something equally drab.

In other news this week:

Comic Relief is here again and it's banking on cloud computing to deliver millions of silver linings for some of the world's most disadvantaged people.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants your views on everything to do with government.

Windows 7 is the 'anti-Vista'.

Electronic riffs, bytes, beeps and Bletchley Park.

And don't forget the caption competition.