Here’s an interesting idea for preventing phones from being a distracting nuisance during a meal, the phone stack:

It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table. (If you’re feeling theatrical, you can go for a stack like this one, but it’s not required.) As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack.

Whoever picks up their phone is footing the bill.

I’m really torn on the subject of using or not using a cell phone in a social setting. On the one hand I really want to agree with the sentiment of this suggestion, that either the people you are with are worth your full attention or you shouldn’t be with them. As Scott Simpson put it in his classic tweet, “My new standard of cool: when I’m hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever”. On the other hand there are things that I always want to use my phone for when I’m out, and I want to be able to do that in a way that’s not going to bother the people I’m with.

My main interest in my phone when I’m out is to check in on Foursquare wherever I go. Not supermarkets or friends’ houses, but bars, restaurants and venues. It’s the best way that I know of to keep a personal record of the things I do; it saves me from having to keep a journal, because a look at my check-in history is usually enough to jog my memory of events. Badges and points and mayorships I can take or leave; it’s that history of my travels that makes me not want to leave any place out.

Checking in on Foursquare (or Google Latitude or whatever other location service is your bag) is OK when you’re in the company of other people who are also doing it, or if you can surreptitiously check in just before you arrive when you’re still by yourself. Where it becomes quite awkward is when you’ve gone to an upmarket restaurant and you’ve already got your phone out before the waiter has had time to put the napkin on your lap (Why do they insist on doing that in some restaurants? I’s like it’s meant to imply that wealth correlates with an inability to do practical things for oneself. Oh, I see.)

I feel like there should be some sort of amnesty on phone use for the first minute or so at any location. You wouldn’t stand up and drag chairs around or faff about with your coat in the middle of a meal, but that’s totally OK when you’re just getting yourself and your table in order as you arrive. Similarly I think it should be normal to spend a minute after you sit down doing whatever it is you need to do with your phone—let other members of your group know that you’ve arrived, look up recommendations of what to eat, check in, feed your virtual sheep. Then it’s phones away for everyone and you can get on with the business of awkwardly failing to make conversation.

Microsoft has a new ad campaign promoting Internet Explorer as the browser you loved to hate. It’s amusing to see them play off the fact that so many geeks have spent so much time trying to convince friends and family to move onto better browsers over the years. I was certainly among them when this blog was young.

Internet Explorer’s problem is no longer that it sucks. I’m happy to admit that it probably doesn’t anymore. Its problem now is that it requires you to be running Windows, and that’s decreasingly likely to be the case these days. It’s not IE on Windows versus Firefox on Windows anymore. Now it’s IE on Windows versus Chrome on Windows, Mac and Android versus Firefox on Windows and Mac versus Safari on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Next week I’ll be starting a six-week course on game theory, provided by Stanford University. Thanks to the wonders of the modern age it won’t cost me a penny and I won’t have to travel to California to take part. (Even though I’ve never considered travelling to California to be particularly onerous, I do have a few commitments on this side of the ocean.) You can do it too, if you want.

The course is part of a collaboration called Coursera, which is offering free courses from the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

It works much like a regular university course, only online. There are short (eight to 15 minute) video lectures, ungraded review quizzes, as well as graded problem sets and a final exam. Because it’s online it’s necessarily a bit more asynchronous than an in-person course would be, so you can watch the lectures and do the coursework largely to your own schedule.

The full list of available and upcoming courses is at www.coursera.org. Among the more interesting sounding subjects are natural language processing, computer vision and cryptography. There are other courses in development, including computer science 101 if you find you haven’t got the background for the more advanced subjects.

It’s not all computer science and mathematics. Two of the upcoming courses are anatomy and making green buildings.

Enrollment looks to still be open for just about all of the courses and, like I said, they’re free.

I chose game theory because I’ve had it at or near the top of my mental “must learn about these subjects” list for a while. It’s a branch of mathematics that deals with strategic interactions. It’s not just what you would usually think of as games, like chess and blackjack, although those are certainly part of the subject. It also deals with lots of interactions in politics and business, which can be thought of as “games” with their own (bizarre) rules and strategies. Also, as memorably relayed by Russell Crowe, it deals with the subject of how to pick up women in bars.

The most famous topic in game theory is probably the prisoners’ dilemma, which poses the question, “How can I successfully screw over my friend in order to get away with a crime?” So obviously the practical applications of the subject are appealing.

While I wait for the new version of iPhoto for iPad (and, apparently, iPhone) to show up in the UK App Store, I want to revisit my predictions post from Monday and see what came true.

Yes, of course, there is a new iPad with a retina display. Interestingly, it doesn’t appear to have a name. It’s not iPad 3. It’s just iPad. As Sam Vermette pointed out on Twitter, new iterations of Mac products don’t carry version numbers either. You don’t look forward to the MacBook Pro 6; it’s just the new MacBook Pro. It makes some sense to treat non-Mac devices in the same way.

The new iPad is not thinner and lighter than iPad 2, as I said it would be. In fact it’s very slightly bigger. The price remains the same though, and iPad 2 remains available at a reduced price as I think everyone expected it would.

There is now a version of iPhoto for iOS. Or at least there will be once it arrives at your local App Store. It’s an App Store app rather than a built in, so it won’t be replacing the existing Photos app. But it looks great. I expect the Mac iPhoto app will be seeing some updates in the near future to catch up with this iOS version.

There was no mention of any change to Maps. That’s what I expected. Like I said, I’m pretty confident this will come with the next iPhone.

I said that Apple TV wouldn’t see an update, or that if it did it would only be a small change. I think that was correct. The updated Apple TV is evolutionary. This was never going to be the event where Apple shows us the future of television. Whether or not that event ever happens is still up for debate.

It’s TED season again so we’re being treated to a new round of videos from the conference. This one, sent to me by my friend and colleague Jack Chant, actually dates back to October. It’s from TEDxMidAtlantic, one of the many TEDx franchise conferences.

In it, Avi Rubin from Johns Hopkins University talks about the security implications of the increasing ubiquity of computerized and networked devices. He has a great collection of examples of attacks that computer security researchers have been able to apply to everything from car brake systems to pacemakers.

It’s a pretty entertaining tour through the world of things you really wouldn’t want to have hacked.

Many of the attacks Rubin talks about are based on the general field of machine learning. Though I’m far from an expert in the field, it was the topic of my masters thesis so I have a passing familiarity with it.

Rubin didn’t mention my favourite example of a machine learning hack: acoustic keylogging. That’s fancy words for figuring out what someone is typing by listening to their keyboard. It relies on the fact that the different keys on a keyboard will make subtly different sounds, and with enough data you can teach a computer to distinguish them.

In 2005, researchers in Berkeley created a system which analysed a 10 minute recording of someone typing English text, and formed a model that could figure out from the sound of a single keystroke which key was most likely to have created the sound. The system didn’t even need to be told what the original text was. It could figure that out on its own.

With just that 10 minutes of recording forming the basis of the model, their system was able to make reasonable guesses about random (non-English) typing, including passwords. It could identify 80% of 10 character passwords in fewer than 75 guesses. Maybe 75 sounds like a lot to you, but consider this: even assuming all of the passwords were composed entirely of lowercase letters (reducing the space of possible passwords as much as possible) it would take on average 50 trillion guesses to get one right without help.

Now imagine how well it would work if that mysterious flower delivery van that’s been across the street for over week had a directional microphone pointed at your computer the whole time. Time for a quieter keyboard maybe.

If you’re interested in the details, the paper that introduced me to this kind of attack was called Keyboard Acoustic Emanations Revisited (pdf), by Zhuang et al and it’s available in its entirety online for free.

I’ve seen this Lockergnome article about what it’s “really” like to work at Google linked to from a lot of places, most recently by Marco Arment. The article, apparently based on an interview with current and former Google employees, describes the supposed pressure on Googlers to work unhealthy long hours at the expense of family and personal life. The most damning snippet, the one that Marco highlighted in his own commentary, is the following:

While he says there is no direct pressure to conform to “crazy hours,” he hints at the reason he lives a Google-centric life: His pay is directly related to the amount of time he spends with Google. For those who can’t keep up with the demand, they simply have no choice but to leave, as previous (and notably older) Google employees have done when they must make the choice between raising a family or getting a raise. (I personally know at least one former Seattle-area Googler who quit under similar circumstances after being forced to either choose seeing his newborn less, or receive a demotion if he didn’t travel more.)

I can’t claim that this description is untrue—it apparently came from someone’s direct experience, and I have to assume that they were telling the truth—but what I can say is that it doesn’t resemble in any way my experience of working for Google at any point in the last five years. Not only that, but everyone I’ve spoken to about it is as surprised as I am to see this kind of picture painted of our workplace. If that paragraph is true of some Googlers, it certainly isn’t true of most of us.

Certainly there are times when I’m in the office until late in the evening, sometimes as late as 10PM. But my impression, without having any data to back this claim up, is that these long evenings are at least made up for by corresponding late mornings, early evenings, and flexibility to leave the office during the day to do things that can’t be done (or can’t as easily be done) outside of normal office hours.

Many of the people I work with are married, and a decent number have children. They have just as much freedom to work a regular 9–5 day as I have to work wildly irregular times. It’s whatever suits the individual. If your life is set up such that regularity and structure are beneficial to you, because you have commitments to your spouse or because you want to see your kids before their bedtime, you should have no problems living by those hours in all but exceptional circumstances. And if you like to be able to leave early one day to go to an event and stay late the next to make up the time (not that anyone’s counting the hours, but you need to get something done some time) then that’s an option too.

In a company the size of Google, there are bound to be some people who don’t get on as well as they’d hoped to, or teams that aren’t as forgiving or as welcoming as the rest of the organization is. But it’s important to me for people to realize that that’s not the majority experience. It’s certainly not my experience.

In the spirit of the new year and the acquisition of new skills, and in the unlikely event that my last post inspired anyone to take a look at learning to code, have a look at Code Year. This site aims to teach people how to code, in weekly installments over the course of the year.