Search Engines

Many of the students I meet these days were born after 1992 or so (that is, after I began teaching). A lot of them seem to think that Google is a 'search engine', or that the various other 'key something in and get something back' websites are 'search engines'.

Actually, they're not. Or at least, not what I would call 'search engines'.

They're the front end of a group of search algorithms that link back to a carefully-cultivated database of information about the Internet. They're like the cutting edge of a knife, or the point of a screw — definitely the business end, but unable to exist usefully unless the rest of the machine is wielded correctly.

A true search engine is one that generates searches, just as an internal combustion engine is one that generates internal combustion, and a calculating engine is one that generates calculations. Similarly, those searches can be used to power other tasks through clever linkages and channels. This is true of internal combustion and calculation as well.

An engine, therefore, is a producer of power that is the result of processing basic material. It is still useless unless the output is connected to something that can make use of the output.

So what is Google then, if not a search engine?

You, dear reader, are the search engine. Or at least, the meat casing around the search engine that is your brain and nervous system. You generate the searches. You sift the findings. You use the search results by interfacing with the real world. Google is only the carburettor, the feed that you control as you search.

The consequences of not knowing this are dire. I have many students who don't know how to use Google and its huge Swiss-Army-Knife-style adjunct collection of tools. They think you just key something in, without taking time to think about what makes the best query, and get results.

Well, yes, you do. But not often the most useful or the best in quality. You get advertisements and awkward pieces of irrelevant stuff, unless you know how to refine your search. If you can do a search that yields fewer than 400 hits, this is extremely useful, since you won't have to trawl through so much junk.

Doing a properly designed query is like filtering the fuel and air input before combustion. It makes for smoother performance. So too does using the right mixture of fuel and air, in the right doses.

This is what I have to teach the students of today. I suspect that the majority of students these days are extremely test-savvy and terribly information-dumb. Information, to them, is connected to 'technology', but not to 'brain' or 'cognition'. How sad.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) — Coda to the 20th Century

Historian Eric Hobsbawm insisted that the period 1789-1914 be called the 'long 19th century', spanning the era between the French Revolution and the Great War. It's a Eurocentric perspective; I would have included the American Revolution and made it 1776-1914. Perhaps he felt a 40-year extension to be too much.

Hobsbawm then went on to compound his assertion by saying that the period 1914-1991 should be called the 'short 20th century', spanning the era between the start of the Great War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He thus cleverly made two centuries out of the period 1789-1991, evening things out a bit.

I think he was wrong, though. The 20th century perhaps indeed began with the machine gun and the mass slaughters of the Great War. It certainly could have begun with the death of Victoria, the Queen and Empress who had presided over the greatest empire of modern times and the greatest advances in human enterprise and technology in history at that time. The antagonistic royals of the Great War were all her offspring (see this article).

But the breaking-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (how many still remember that dread acronym?) was a comparatively bloodless end-of-history that proved not to be any such end. Instead, the growing chaos just continued to grow. The one thing that held humanity together was increasing communication capacity, and the increasing ubiquity of widespread and speedy data transmission.

Steve Jobs was a prophet of this change. In a 1985 Playboy interview, he said, "The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone."

He was right. And he spent his life ramming this vision artistically into the established wisdom of the world. Of all those who made and lost computer fortunes and established computer legacies, his was the most important: he was the Doctor Strangelove who taught us how to stop worrying and learn to love computers. He made them accessible, not just cheap plastic tools of high utility in the workplace, but companions and associates for the burgeoning chaos of the new millennium.

(I am quite certain that those who show their disdain for Apple's pretty machines as opposed to more robust and powerful systems are subconsciously working out their misplaced anger that so much power could be given to people who don't know anything about computer programming or have not 'earned' such power. These angry people might be Linux users, for example. Or those who assemble their own machines. The same people will probably vilify and/or disparage Jobs after his death.)

Steve Jobs's last 20 years, from 1991 to 2011, were the missing coda of Hobsbawm's 'short 20th century'. In those years, he spawned the new Apple way that forced competitors and colleagues to dance to his rhythm. For many, it was hard to decide if that rhythm was more like Chesterton's drumming "...in the hills half-heard, where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred" or the ominous thrill of Auden's drumming. But it was an unmistakable sound.

It was the sound of one aspect of the future. Not for us the flying cars and colonisation of space, but the future which meant tricorders and thinking machines. Jobs made us give names to our electronic aides, much as Asimov did for his positronic androids. Jobs did more than any other lord of the electronic realm to put power in our pockets and data in our hands.

That is why 2011 is a good year for the dying tail of the 20th century. Steven Paul Jobs is dead, and the way ahead transits with him into uncertainty.

Helpdesks

The problem all began when people made things too complex for other people to understand. In the bureaucratic mazes, it was already difficult to locate the object of one's quest. Then the bureaucracies went online and many of the members of such organizations suddenly found that they themselves could not understand the new paradigm.

Hence, the rise of the helpdesks.

But these helpdesks, manned by eager but quickly tiring servitors, proved to be yet another layer in the rapidly evolving wall of inadvertent obfuscation. Sometimes they did not understand either the people trying to get things done through the bureaucracy or the bureaucracy that was supposed to get things done.

For example:

1. Please enter your account with your username and password and click 'Login'.
2. Access your services by clicking 'Services'.
3. Select 'Invoices' to see if you need to pay any fees.
4. If you have difficulties, contact helpdesk at [redacted] or email us at [redacted].
5. You cannot access your email unless you have logged on.
6. Your access will be withdrawn if you have not paid any fees.

And after all that, yes, you may contact the bureaucracy.

This is the kind of situation for which you contact the helpdesk. But the helpdesk may not understand you. For a start, they will assume you have a username, provided by the bureaucracy which you must contact in order to obtain a username.

I feel sorry for the people who man the helpdesks of the world. Nobody understands them, and I wonder how often they ask themselves what they are doing there anyway.

Delete

What is the difference between 'Backspace' and 'Delete'? Clearly, 'Backspace' merely shifts the cursor one space backwards, whereas 'Delete' erases what it backspaces over.

So what is the difference between 'Option' and 'Alternate'? Ah, this is fun. 'Option' means you have something else to look at; 'Alternate' means you only have two options.

Sometimes, the verities of the keyboard jump up and strike. Or at least, they used to do so in the days when a key really was a long piece of metal with shaped protrusions and indentations at the other end.

Those days are gone now, and backspacing does not backtime.

Soft in the Head

I think students need to be taught to access information the hard way. Somehow, teaching them to access information through easy ways like hitting the internet doesn't seem to work well.

Perhaps, the journey is indeed more important than the destination. Hunting for information through a nearly impenetrable thicket of bookshelves and librarians, without easy cheats and aids, trains the mind to the questing paradigm.

In the questing paradigm, the quester knows that a number of trials (three is common, but the number may be as high as twelve) must be completed successfully before the objective is achieved. Then the quester gets to access the next level of the game, whatever the game is.

The problem with students these days is that hugely superior access to information makes most information-finding problems too easy-looking. Students think that information is as easy to obtain as dirt, and hence don't bother.

If you confront modern students with this, they will raise all kinds of examples to prove this isn't so. Two main possibilities then emerge.

The first is that they are indeed self-aware and it is true that they are able to work through the quest paradigm, finding value in what they find, keeping useful stuff for later use, and so on. They use this paradigm all the time.

The second is that they don't know what they're talking about. They can't tell you how to evaluate information yield from data, or information value. But they are good at telling stories about information which may or may not be true.

Sometimes, the old practices of index card searching, manual note-taking, and document collection through physical curation, are more useful than this. Physical arrangements challenge the brain better than purely abstract formulations; hard copy is better than soft, as far as the mind is concerned.

Perhaps, people need to be more hard-headed about information processing.

The Gonville Joke

I've come to realise that much of my life for the last thirty years has been dominated by that modern child of Gutenberg, Turing and Christopher Latham Sholes — the computer keyboard. We have come a long way, from mechanical typewriters with their jamming type levers, to the electrical 'golfball' machines, to tape punchers and teletext, and now, in this age, to holographic or membrane keyboards that occupy little or no physical space.

In my head, the keyboards come and go; and if they talk, it is not of Michelangelo.

I remember thinking that the extra keys on a keyboard were a lot like life, each with a rich history behind them which has since been forgotten. The ESC key really did let you escape from an otherwise unproductive sequence of events; the CTRL key really did allow you to take control of processes. There used to be a difference between ENTER (as in data entry) and RETURN (as in CR, or carriage return) and LF (as in line feed, adding a line).

A TAB was the little metal marker you put on a mechanical keyboard to force the machine to stop at a particular point. CAPS LOCK used to be SHIFT LOCK, giving the upper set of characters for levers with two characters at their tips. You could feel the SHIFT when you held the SHIFT key down; the whole keyboard mechanism was shifted.

There were no function keys until software came along. I remember using a dedicated word processor which you could program so that each code would print an entire paragraph or document. There were no COMMAND keys until Apple put them there, and for decades, Windows machines continued using CTRL for that, and sometimes ALT.

The space bar was a lovely thing, in the old days. You depressed it, and the entire carriage moved one space. If you kept pressing it, the carriage would sound like a little lawnmower, chugging one space at a time to the left so that your next key would print one more space to the right.

Nowadays, the idea of a mechanical typewriter would be labelled 'steampunk' or 'retro'. But I will miss the nights I was lulled to sleep by my insomniac father's two-fingered typing, his long, strong fingers jabbing down at the keys as they clacked away on the paper mounted in front of him.

The Gonville Joke, he once referred to it as. That too is part of my past.

A Phalanx of Dreams

The Greek word phalanx means 'battle array' or 'battle line'. The joints of the fingers in our hands are called 'phalanges' because they are like lines of soldiers all facing one direction in parallel.

I had a long line of dreams last night. Most noteworthy were two semi-related ones.

In the first, I dreamt I was moving into a big new office. The Hierophant Librarian was showing me the library. Lots of people were helping to move my stuff in.

In the second, I dreamt I was using diskettes to transfer a lot of data. Except that they were the old rare 230 Mb magneto-optical floppy diskettes. Ho ho. I had a huge array of MO drives, for some reason.

There were other dreams. They all involved espionage, data transfer, and the toppling of faceless (and/or brainless authorities). It was all very 'comic-book'.

Cargo Cults

I have been somewhat amused in recent weeks to discover that some of my old material has been recycled with patchy amendments and other stuff tacked on. Appropriate somewhat-related ritual pronouncements are then made and the desired results fervently hoped for. It is all very much like a cargo cult.

As I've mentioned before, the three technical components of my educational delivery are notes, visuals, and activities (lectures, odd games, interactive sessions). In every case, I deliberately make them complementary; that is, the notes go with the visuals but they do not directly echo each other.

An ignorant barbarian who saw my notes and the slides that accompany them (or vice versa) would think the two were not linked. However, they are very much linked — by the living agency of the activity conducted by me. It is the live lecture or interaction that binds the two, and is not replaceable without some thought and foreknowledge of the role that the mediating intelligence must play.

This was why the cargo cults were developed: people using the paradigms of their old faiths and beliefs were trying to gain the fruits of new technology and thinking by constructing models of the more visible aspects, like wooden aircraft and wicker observation towers. A sort of intellectual voodoo, so to speak.

I laugh to myself, and continue teaching. The wealth of a student's development is not in the things — notes, slides, stuff — but in the active interaction with an intelligent facilitator and fellow-traveller.

To Mill a Cockingbird

I cannot help it, and so I must apologize for my weakness in advance. I have a terrible weakness, a sin that appalls. I am a mocker, and a scoffer. The problem as I see it is that I don't mind being mocked, I cannot find it in me to mock God (which is foolish no matter how you look at it), but I have this indecent urge to mock some people.

It all has to do with blogging and other aspects of the information age which we are still negotiating. If this age were a blue ocean, some of us would be navigators, some would be commanders, some would be engineers, and some passengers. But there is this large number of people who attempt to sail the blue ocean while saying, 'Ships are dangerous. Signals from ship to ship are worse. Is that an oar or a semaphore flag?' and other such nonsense.

I've mentioned this in previous posts, and I'll mention it again. CEO of a certain service institution:

• "Apple is a failed company, why buy Apple?"
• "Apple, you don't know if it will still be around next year, we must get all students to buy tablet PCs!"
• "Blog is like a diary, why do you want to show your diary to everyone? If you have bad things to say, keep it to yourself! Right-minded people will never blog!"

One would think that the chagrin of being wrong repeatedly would send the offender down to the bilge. But this person is still pretending to be a blue ocean strategist. And he has accomplices too, people who say things like:

• "Blogging is evil!"
• "Your teachers know better than this Wikipedia nonsense!"
• "How can you believe what you read on the Internet and not what is in the newspapers?"

It is all very amusing.

I remember working in a place where if you used the Internet in your work, a few odd things happened. Firstly, you'd be given bonus points for 'IT Usage', which you had to report for every month. Secondly, people would blame you for any manifestation of 'Bad IT'. Thirdly, you would have to fight morons who would claim that showing a Word document on a projector was 'Good IT' while using MSN to communicate with students was 'Bad IT'.

At this point, most people born after 1980 (and some born before that) must be wondering if this is satire, unless they know whereof I am 'making mock'. No, sadly, it is all true. I remember that Word and PowerPoint were classified as 'IT Usage' and Excel and Outlook were not. Haha!

Guess what, dear readers? The SAME CREW is still sailing their ship out into the blue ocean. The SAME CREW that once told me, "It is a far better investment to cable up the whole place than to go wireless. Wireless is too risky an investment, the technology is untested." That was in 2000, many years after the invention of the radio.

How not to mock? And therefore, I have sinned.

Defeasible Reasoning

For the last twenty-five years or so, students and colleagues (and colleagues who are fellow students, or students-turned-colleagues) have been asking me questions and which I've gamely tried to answer. We trade questions, mostly with civility, sometimes with a slightly jagged or sharp edge; it can get heated at times, but we learn a lot from each other.

There is one particular problem I've identified, which I personally call the 'textbook problem'. This is best stated as a subconscious tendency to adhere to 'textbook knowledge', which is not reprehensible or to be considered less lacking in authority simply because it is from a textbook, but is problematic because textbooks are always out of date. By the time a textbook is edited and published, it is often a year or two out of date. In some cases, because it is indeed a good textbook, serious revisions do not occur for longer periods of time.

One would think that the quicker publishing that online modes afford should eliminate or reduce the problem. This is not always the case. However, it does bring the horizon closer to the sailor, as it were.

The second part of the problem, however, is that this enhanced access to knowledge doesn't seem to be utilised by a lot of the people I encounter. This is not meant as an insult or belittlement, but is a fact based on my own perceptions. I interact with many people, and in my interactions, find that they haven't used something simple like Google or Wikipedia to find out more about whatever they are supposed to know.

The third part of the problem is that people assume that other people know how to use Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful iterations of the information age as manifest in the works of the internet. But because of the second part of the problem, these expectations are sometimes dangerously unfounded and may lead to awkward disappointment.

This is the case with the many people I encounter whose epistemology seems to be based on a stilted sort of hybrid of Plato and logical positivism. Or some vague spirituality. Or other ideas which they got from other people — and strangely enough, didn't bother to evaluate further using internet-based tools. I'm not saying that these tools are better, but they are certainly faster than the ones I grew up with, in most cases. In a pinch, speed has to be a substitute for depth, and often is.

Let's try an experiment. All you TOK students out there, looking for answers to your 2010-2011 TOK Essay Topics and suchlike, why don't you try working your way through this article from the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy first? I am very certain that it will yield dividends in the days ahead. I mean, just imagine what the following sentence might mean for the fate of your TOK essay:

"With the collapse of logical positivism in the mid twentieth century (and the abandonment of attempts to treat the physical world as a logical construction from facts about sense data), new attention was given to the relationship between sense perception and the external world."

Now imagine that I was setting the 2011-2012 TOK Essay Topics, and I used that quote, followed by, "Discuss the nature of this relationship, with respect to two different areas of knowledge." Are we having fun yet?

The Power of Number

I came home yesterday and promptly fell asleep. It's been a gruelling three days or so, at the Temple of the Red Queen's Race. Let me digress a bit before I continue.

=====

I don't know why people give such awful names to places. I have in mind two specific names: 'Cineleisure' and 'Leisuredrome'. I shall now enlarge on this digression etymologically.

'Cineleisure' is a sort of reverse-portmanteau-abomination-construct. It is a contraction, I think, of 'cinema' + 'leisure'. 'Cinema' comes from the Greek kinema ('movement') and hence 'cine' comes from Greek kinein ('to move'), while 'leisure' is related to 'lease', 'license', and other words which imply a relaxation of control. 'Cineleisure' means something like 'a loss of control over one's movement', and even in modern English, it should mean something like 'moving while not really bothering to move'.

'Leisuredrome' is just as bad. The Greek dromos means 'a running track' or 'a race course'. This of course is something like a reversed version of 'Cineleisure'. It probably means 'a place to run around recklessly'. I seem to remember that it had a skating rink in it, so I suppose that might have been part of the idea.

The Red Queen's Race is, of course, a concept taken from Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen had to keep running just to stay in the same place; it's somewhat related to the concept of Red Tape, which is created to keep people in the same place despite running around a lot.

=====

Digression over, let me just say why I was so sleepy when I got home. I've had to use my brain a lot, and the food supplied was simple and extremely good. I had a sublime pastrami-on-onion-rye sandwich, a wonderfully thin apple tart with fresh vanilla ice-cream, and a host of other treats, all washed down with delicious caffeine sources. All this makes one sleepy in a pleasant sort of way.

The upshot of the whole experience was that I am now a certified provider of 'digital literacy' and 'technology infused learning'. This amuses me a lot, although I am happy to have obtained the certification; I've always felt that 'digital literacy' should mean 'the ability to talk by using one's fingers'.

But what really hit me in the head this afternoon was the thought that if not for an accident (or incident) of number, we would be ten years faster in adopting many good practices. What I'm referring to is the phenomenon known as 'Y2K' or 'the year 2000'.

The year 2000 AD was the last year of the second millennium (which ran from 1001 to 2000, just as the first one ran from 1 to 1000). A lot of people had invested into the memetic package known as 'the 21st century', in which all things were supposed to be different and the future was supposed to have arrived.

Simply because of this cultural illusion fostered by the calendar, people waited till the year 2000 (when the first digit of the year designation changed) or 2001 (especially after Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) to do new stuff. A lot of the new stuff came out in the late 1980s or the 1990s, but many people didn't bother with it, because they were subconsciously awaiting the new millennium. That is why a former superior of mine claimed Apple was dead and refused to do anything useful with IT until 2001, for example.

Because of the power of number (or at least, the terrible illusion this calendar case engendered), we wasted a decade or more.

National Education(al Technology Standards)

No, this is not about National Education.

Today as part of our course, we're being asked to take a look at the 2007 ISTE NETS.S — the National Educational Technology Standards for Students. (Link here.) I think these standards make perfect sense in a world where the primary information technologies are essentially digital and which are now a part of daily life.

We were asked to respond to the question, "What surprises you most about these standards? Why?"

I don't think much surprises me anymore. Looking at these standards, I am instead struck by a sense of how inevitable every one of them is. They are not just core ethical principles, but rather principles of a core ethic: the world in which we live has to be handled this way, or all will be chaos. Actually, the chaos bit is inevitable too, come to think of it; it's the management of the chaos which is important. As in the older Greek myths, and before that the Babylonian, power and will mould chaos into substance—and from substance comes the promise of better things.

We look towards a better age, it seems. The way we look at this age, however, is rather interesting. By the sheer fact of calendar change, the start of the 21st century is seen as some sort of incredible watershed in human progress. Organisations like the Partnership for 21st Century Skills seem to believe that human nature has changed so much that the kind of skills that would have been important in any century have been appropriated entirely by the 21st. Just look at this!

No Clue

We live in a world that is full of information. That is nothing new. What is new is that there are three factors that have increased so quickly over the last 8 years that they are on the verge of precipitous descent into uncontrolled states. The three factors are pretty obvious:

• increasingly free access to information
• increasing complexity of information items
• increasing complexity of relationships between information items

A note here: the first is often taken as a good thing; this is not true for the simple reason that the free access is not equal, ubiquitous, instantaneous or rational.

We've been fed a mantra that the information age is good for you. This is true only by comparison to what can happen with insufficient information. The problem is an old one and has two components: 1) we are happy when we have enough information to solve existing problems or answer existing questions; 2) we are happier when we can find new problems to solve and new questions to answer. The two form a cycle, although the viciousness or virtuousity of the cycle is debatable, depending on the kind of problems. There is therefore never enough information, we always want more, and hence an age of increasing access to information is a Good Thing.

The sticking point perhaps is that there is a point at which we can no longer be our own data specialists. In the not-too-recent past, it was possible essentially to have restricted information access (or to restrict information access) and still be expert enough to get the job done. But people have incentives to stand out and hence earn greater rewards. So they recast the roles of professional, expert, master of a discipline, until they stand out. It is a question of whether your information brokerage level (whether it's a skill, a talent, a knowledge base, a database, a process, a capacity for synthesis etc) is outstanding enough.

It never will be, and that will eventually be because the human mind, no matter how complex or augmented, will never know enough. To address this based on my first three points, let's begin with access.

Access to information is a good thing when the information requirement is known in advance. For example, I need to know the best place for beer and pork knuckles in town. I ask people, search websites, do other information-gathering activities, until I have an answer I am satisfied with. Then I go and try out my search results physically. At the end of the experience, I will have updated my own database and am now qualified to offer my own opinion.

However, the questions of "What shall I eat?" (which according to Douglas Adams, is a relatively sophisticated question) and "Where shall I eat?" (which according to Adams is the most sophisticated question in this domain) are a lot more complex if I have no idea at all – or if I have too many ideas, brought on by a vastly greater access to information and travel capability than my ancestors had. With this, and the fact of human variability in opinion, I might face the centipede problem. That's often described as asking a centipede, "Which foot do you first move when you start to move?" and watching it attempt an answer, fail, and never walk again.

Access to information is inherently unfair, as it leverages off information sources and technology in depth, scale, range and speed. We keep talking about free markets, free speech and ideas, things like that; we fail to realise that unless information is ubiquitous, instantaneous, immediately processed, appropriately processed, and acted upon at once, all this is a very shady approximation to anything that could possibly be considered realistic. And yet we persist, perhaps beyond the limit of humanity's ability to make sense of it.

Which leads me to the second point. The information packages and 'chunks' we are presented with are sometimes far too complex. They cannot be evaluated fully or sometimes even usefully by us, our expert systems, or any other information processing tool we have. When the education system was a master teaching five apprentices in a workshop, the possible interactions and processes were far more limited that when the education system became a teacher teaching 25 students in a modern chemistry lab with internet access.

Where in the past, a sound-bite (like 'atoms are indivisible particles which our material universe is made of') could essentially be a workable fragment of reality, the present nature of education and information demands much more (like 'atoms are social constructs which can be considered to be statistical models of...') and sometimes too much more.

The modern sound-bite is of course not just a fragment of text encapsulating a key idea. Watching viral videos on YouTube or looking at campaign slogans and advertising literature, you will see that the entire semiotic domain is exploited at deeper and deeper levels. This is intended to affect us in ways that increasingly complicated analysis say might just be useful as the psychological leverage to push us into buying (into) things. We can no longer evaluate any of this easily; what's interesting is that neither can the merchants of materialism, the nabobs of nationalism, or the emirs of entertainmentism.

My third point is that as information chunks become more complex and more accessible, the number, kind and usefulness level of all their possible relationships spirals way out of control. Who is to know what might possibly be tangentially useful or critically useful? Only in very well-defined domains is this possible; domains such as a deliberately-limited math textbook or an intentionally-limited chemistry lab. With people inventing derivatives of data (information), second derivatives of data (information chunks and packages), third derivatives of data (knowledge packages and information systems), and fourth derivatives of data (information networks and dynamic knowledge bases), we are seeing an approach to the (we think) final level of the true artificial intelligence.

The likelihood is that this 'final' level will probably be centipeded after a while. Yes, it will be like us but smarter in some ways (mostly by more coherent and more rapid processing and access); yes, it will be like us in not knowing what questions to profitably ask for the unknown future.

And so, the correct thing to say is that unless one looks for some other standard by which to look at life, the universe and everything, the answer might as well be '42'. Information doesn't provide us, on its own, with answers to some questions. You might say, "I'm sorry, but I haven't a clue," to the question of what life is all about. Then, I would direct you to try some useful games.

Insecurities

I've said it before and I will say it again... network security is a losing game in any large organisation. Some more evidence here. And I will never forget the time a CEO told me that Apple was a dead company and that wireless would never work anyway. So much for IT strategy.