Some neuroscience techniques have made big strides into the courtroom recently. fMRI monitors blood flow and oxygen levels to create a picture of brain activity in real time – the theory goes that if we know which thoughts or emotions are represented by certain patterns of activity, we can ‘see’ these in a defendant’s brain.

Kent Kiehl at the University of New Mexico has scanned the brains of over 1000 psychopaths and identified abnormalities that characterise the disorder. He has now taken this evidence onto the stand for the first time, and testified that the brain of serial killer Brian Dugan fits this mould. His lawyer hopes this will convince jurors that he could feel no remorse for his crimes, helping him avoid the death penalty. ‘Brain Fingerprinting’ uses a headband with sensors to detect the P300 brain wave, which occurs when we recognise something. This has also been admitted in US courts, sometimes as evidence of whether suspects have seen specific details of a crime scene before.

These recent advances hint at the massive potential for neuroscience in law, and are fuelling discussion of its potential uses, raising some uncomfortable issues. If you’ve seen your share of cop dramas, you know a suspect always gets ‘the right to remain silent,’ but the use of brain scanning or an infallible lie detector could compromise this right. Diminished capacity defences often attempt to blame actions on brain differences, but the point at which an abnormal brain activity takes away personal responsibility may become harder to define. Of course in reality, all behaviours from tooth brushing to terrorist plotting ultimately stem from brain signals. You can get in trouble now for building a bomb, even if you don’t get the chance to set it off. If we could ‘see’ an intention to kill, would that really constitute a crime?

These are fascinating but far-fetched possibilities; a sci-fi writer may send a shiver with tales of thought crime, free will and rights abuses, but a sceptical neuroscientist or a lawyer would be more likely to highlight the painstakingly slow process of research verification and admissibility of evidence. The path to the courthouse for neuroscience is likely to be paved with technical, bureaucratic and moral obstacles.

In criminal cases, decisions are black and white, with little room for revision. There are processes for admitting scientific evidence in court, but these need development to accommodate new types of evidence. Firstly, to establish what level of confidence in a technique is enough, and secondly to educate lawyers, judges and jurors about what this evidence can and cannot tell them. No prosecution lawyer will be parading a catalogue of your ill intentions any time soon, but it is certainly worth keeping a close eye on development in this area (as the lawyers surely will be). Just in case.

All this has only added credence to the increasingly popular notion that, as a company, Microsoft has become unwieldy and slow to react to industry shifts. Although it remains one of the most profitable businesses in the world (largely thanks to a 10-year-old operating system consumers and businesses remain wary of ditching), its association with ‘me-too’ business strategies and uninspired products has left it lagging when it comes to popular mindshare. But the Xbox 360, and to a lesser extent the Zune, have been successful (if unprofitable) experiments into using smaller, manoeuvrable, more focused teams to drive the direction of the company. Both the 360’s online service Live and the recent Zune HD are industry leading in terms of innovation and, in stark contrast to Microsoft’s current mobile offerings, represent thoughtful, consumer-focused products.

The announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona therefore represented a pivotal moment not just in Microsoft’s mobile strategy, but in their direction as a company. Like the Zune and Xbox 360, this new operating system marks an explicit move from the software-only focus that has brought them so much success in the PC space, and onto a trajectory that encompasses the kind of holistic control most readily associated with Apple. Gone is the loose and broad licensing of 6.x, replaced by strict hardware spec minimums, a consistent look and feel, and prerequisite button layouts. Microsoft also delared partnerships with a whole plethora of manufacturers including Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG and Samsung. Most significantly though, like Google’s recent move to play a more centralised role in the design and distribution of their Android-toting Nexus One handset, there is a distinct sense that Microsoft is for the first time positioning itself firmly at the centre of the mobile Windows experience.

This strategy is a pretty big gamble for Microsoft. As a business that has made the lion’s share of its cash through a hands-off attitude to development and licensing, Win Phone 7 is an ideological change that puts the company in the firing line for all aspects of the customer experience. It is also a clear statement of intent that Microsoft is ready to go toe-to-toe with Apple and Google at a game those companies have, over the last year particularly, made their own.

Refreshingly, the aesthetic and functionality of Microsoft’s new software seems to reflect the bold nature of this gamble. Windows Phone 7 Series is a canvas of Tron-like block colour and lines. Riffing on its contentious Zune HD operating system, the look Microsoft has chosen is startling, slick and entirely their own. The design undeniably stands out in a market otherwise saturated by iPhone-cloning visual tropes and utilitarian icon lists. There’s a lot of large text, gestural input and consistent interface metaphors which will initially be unfamiliar to most users. But at the very least, the new mobile division seems to have its philosophy right – as Joe Belfiore repeated several times during Microsoft’s MWC press event, ‘the phone is not a PC.’

But time will tell whether Microsoft are simply too late to this heavily populated and ruthless game. With users increasingly entreched within ecosystems that offer apps galore, there is now a financial concern in a phone beyond merely the remaining months left on a carrier contract. One thing is clear though, Windows Phone 7 Series represents the work of a new Microsoft, a Microsoft that is finally as relevant and interesting as its upstart competition.

University researchers who have identified genetic mutations linked to a disease typically form partnerships with industry to develop screening tests for doctors. For the researchers, this gets their findings out in the field, and for biopharmaceutical companies it’s an appealing opportunity to own the rights to run all diagnostic tests for a disease. These exclusivity deals include patenting the genes in question, but in May last year the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit against Myriad, who co-own several patents on the two genes responsible for most inherited cases of breast cancer. They claim that it is unconstitutional to patent a natural gene, a charge which, if it is upheld, could cause major problems for a lot of other diagnostic testing monopolies too. A fortnight ago the judge postponed making a decision in the case, claiming the issues involved are too serious and complicated.

It’s hard to see how our genetic material can be patented by a corporation, as the defence attorney last week plainly put it: “Patenting human genes is like patenting E=mc², blood, or air.” But aside from grappling with near-philosophical ideas of whether big pharma can or should ever own your genes, the practical effects of this system are just as worrying.

The genes co-owned by Myriad were identified at the University of Utah, as the result of publicly funded research programs. But since Myriad were granted an exclusive licence, it’ll now set you back around $3,000 dollars to find out if you’re predisposed to breast cancer – a lucrative monopoly which they are obviously keen to protect. Owning the gene patent has allowed Myriad to shut down research at other labs, handily keeping a lid on the development of any alternative tests and keeping prices high. Some US insurance companies do cover the tests, something that Myriad have worked to ensure is the case. Realistically though, inside and outside the US, the patents being challenged restrict the availability and affordability of access to information in our own genes.

Myriad argue that the patent system encourages research – without exclusive rights there would be no incentive for companies to invest in studies and broker deals with insurance companies. However, the majority of the developmental research which identifies relevant mutations happens before the biopharmaceutical companies get involved, leaving them to show up just in time to enjoy the fruits of federally-funded labour.

Better understanding of gene functions in disease is obviously beneficial for all, making it crucial that developments are properly handled as they shift from academia to industry. The Myriad case will have major implications for gene patenting and diagnostics, and whatever the outcome of this particular legal wrangle, it raises questions about what can be legitimately owned and sold in this arena. In denying access to the information written in our own DNA, information that taxpayer money has helped discover, the private pharmaceutical sector is taking on a decidedly dystopian hue.

The real news here is nicely summed up by Google’s snappy new store URL (www.google.com/phone). For the first time in its brief history, the company synonymous with web-software has suddenly started making hardware. Although Taiwan’s HTC actually manufactured the handset, Android’s Head Product Manager Erick Tseng has reiterated on a number of occasions that Google had a guiding hand in the phone’s look and specification. This is – to all intents and purposes – the Google Phone.

Yet, while there are promises that more phones will be added to Google’s store as time progresses, the company’s overall mobile strategy remains a little confused. Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and several other heavy hitters of the mobile world are all part of Google’s ‘Open Handset Alliance’, yet they sell their phones through their own stores and through subsidised deals with cellular carriers across the world. Google’s store apparently sits alongside this and attempts to consolidate a set of iconic, ‘halo’ phones in the face of Android’s comparatively disparate image.

Because let there be no bones about this, this decision is at least partially motivated by Apple’s centralised and increasingly aggressive position within the consumer electronics and web space. The iPhone’s success was further confirmed on Monday in an earnings call that boasted a 100% year-on-year sales increase. On Wednesday, Apple announced the iPad, another piece of hardware that has realigned our expectations of what a mobile device can be. Whether the iPad can deliver on its promises is yet to be seen, but Apple’s brazen creation of an entirely new category is proof of the company’s irrepressible confidence when it comes to all things mobile.

Less widely reported but perhaps even more important, last month Apple purchased the prominent mobile advertising company Quattro and were quoted (during Monday’s earnings call) as stating ‘we expect to offer developers a great opportunity for mobile advertising.’ With the rise and rise of mobile technology, mobile advertising is pretty much set to emerge as the next major battleground, as handsets become ever more versatile and ubiquitous. And with the iPhone, the iPad and an explicit statement of intent related to advertising roll-out, Apple are poised to attack both Google’s most lucrative revenue stream and its new-found love for hardware. This after they denied Google’s free phone call service Voice a place in the App Store.

Google have since created a Google Voice Web App and browser access to the service, thus enabling, presumably to Apple’s fury, a service that appears to be optimised for iPhone use. If Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s conspicuous resignation from the Apple board of directors wasn’t enough of a hint, these companies are readying themselves for all-out war.

The Nexus One therefore represents a counter-attack on Google’s part. Both brands have heavy “mindshare” amongst consumers and both are increasingly plunging multiple fingers into one another’s pies. All this marks good times for the consumer. More competition inevitably means a better user experience somewhere down the road. But if Google fully position themselves behind smart phones, as their high profile store appears to suggest they will, 2010 could be the year when battle truly commences.

In my short lifetime I can remember certain other moments when a piece of tech has been so obviously the next step – joining slack-jawed peers in playing and watching Wipeout on a Playstation in the corner of HMV; the first sighting of an iPod and its beautiful backlit screen. But these things appeared in a very traditional way – at a launch and on a short wave of proto-viral marketing, with oblique, interest-piquing advertising quickly backed up by the majesty of the thing itself.

Over a decade on, the launch events are still en vogue, and allow Apple their crucial blend of Mount Sinai didacticism and inclusive cosy-speak. But they don’t need a costly ad campaign to trail before the launch – instead they’re constantly getting to cash in on the capital they’ve built up since the iMac launched, an ever-germinating seed of lust planted in the heart of a populace newly aware of the power of great design. The weight of expectation behind this thing (Apple having already “changed the game” so many times before), boosted by a now full-tilt social networking environment, is wondrous, almost scary proof that Apple have manoeuvred themselves into unique position. Their cycle of lust, beginning with secrecy and ending in beautiful products, only to renew itself again, ruthlessly exploits the unquenchable desires of its fanbase; it also generates its own marketing power through the delirious speculation from that fanbase.

Back in June last year, I spoke to Cult of Mac writer Leigh McMullen, who said that “we’re due for something game changing”, before mooting Apple developing “a color e-ink that draws nearly no power and is capable of full motion video”. Meanwhile Leander Kahney, the site’s editor, told me a tablet device would be “like a big wireless iPod touch, an entertainment center and communication device in one. It’ll have a nice big screen for watching high-definition video in bed, but it’ll also do wireless videoconferencing.” Since then the rumours have grown to accomodate entire sections of tech sites, and have generated a cottage industry of Photoshopped fakes and industrial designers knocking together their own tablets in their shed on the weekend; the rumour mill is still going now just hours before. This is years-long, completely free marketing for Apple. Of course there have been similar speculations ahead of each iPod and iPhone release, with po-faced debate surrounding pics of clearly doctored iPod “upgrades” with cameras and the like, but nothing on the scale of the fevered wonderings around the tablet.

This is a bizarre new development: the Apple pre-fan. Overly ardent fans have always existed, the “Avatard” meme the latest example, but they always wait until the object of their fandom is made manifest before attaching themselves to it. Apple have built up such a compelling series of objects that their legacy is drawing a new kind of worship out of their fans, the desire to spend hours of time speculating on something they know they won’t be able to second-guess. They’re like a train set enthusiast building a future high-speed west coast line, or a philatelist designing their own range of stamps.

The tablet rumour mill is a new, truly pointless hobby – without the comforting nostalgia at the heart of so many hobbies, the desire to muse on Apple’s unknowable objects emptily retools nostalgia as anticipation. Where the train set owner reaches towards a past they can’t reach but are at least certain of, the pre-fan reaches towards an inevitably unsatisfying future. And where the Avatar fan dreams themselves into and often extends a pre-existing world, the pre-fan pours their love into the void. There’s no doubt that the tablet can be game-changing, but can’t we just wait until we see it in the corner of HMV, real and surrounded by excited people?

The reviewer opts to use the application’s ‘famous people finder’, a service that purports to plot the known position of celebrities on a video feed of the surrounding area. The reviewer stares at the world through his phone screen, led by the circular icons that fill the emulated field of vision. After a number of failed location attempts in the city of Amsterdam, the camera zooms towards a window. We are presented with the unmistakable face of Brad Pitt wearing a pair of sunglasses and an exasperated expression. As he shakes his head and makes a retreat up some stairs, the reviewer and cameraman whoop and laugh. It’s an infectious and unexpected moment, but it also hints at the unforeseen social impact of this kind of technology. The amazement lies not in the fact that hunting down Brad Pitt is possible, but that it exists as a feature in a mobile phone application that is easy to use and cheap to obtain.

Despite sounding like the product of a sci-fi author’s spiralling imagination, ‘augmented reality’, or AR, is a fairly straightforward technology that has been around for a while; the name refers to the merging of a live video feed with computer generated imagery. This process might not seem so revolutionary: it has taken place for many years in televised football matches, where a graphic of the game’s score overlays a feed of the action. However, modern augmented reality takes this to another level of saturation, and operates on the premise that computer-generated graphics enhance a camera’s version of what we can see, providing us with a more useful, data-rich picture of the world around us. 

Despite many mobile phones having the technical capacity to run augmented reality applications, it is the sheer ubiquity of the iPhone and the unprecedented popularity of Apple’s App Store that have made such innovation in the field of AR apps possible, and pushed it to the top of tech newsfeeds. With the release of the iPhone 3GS, AR could be on the cusp of mainstream popularity, and could soon become as everyday a technology as touch screens and GPS.

Recent implementations of AR, from the Brad Pitt-chasing Layar to the amenity-review service Yelp, represent the latest in tangible, useful convergences of the real world and the Internet. Many of these applications run with the ‘Google in 3D’ idea, offering local information but negating the need to search by presenting location-specific data that changes as the user moves, pivots and rotates.

One of the most interesting and startling application concepts to appear in recent weeks has been Augmented ID by The Astonishing Tribe.  In the promo YouTube video released by the company, we see augmented reality technology used to create a kind of visual profile of people. As the phone points at an individual, their face is circled by a group of icons, mainly social network widgets and contact information, which realign along with their movements.

The service proposes to offer an immediate, one-click exchange of information by identifying the individual and then presenting their personal details as orbiting graphics. Developer Dan Gärdenfors sees a strong future for implementations of this kind of technology: “we believe that AR will become widely adopted when it works smoothly and allows ‘real life search’ without introducing layers of abstractions. By this we mean that information should be presented in a ‘zero click’ UI [user interface] where one does not have to switch applications or type URLs to access information about things one encounters in real life.”

Although Gärdenfors’ work revolves around the construction of this uniquely fluid user interface architecture, the ‘people search’ concept his company presents is one that has caught the collective imagination of the Internet community.

This seamless convergence of reality and social network information appears to be the next logical step forward for a world of access-anywhere Facebook and Twitter clients: placing virtual spaces amongst the artifacts and objects of real life, and giving them the illusion of physicality.

Within the processes of AR, our virtual and physical projections of personal identity are bound together: our Facebook Statuses or LastFM profiles become badges that we ‘wear’, gateways by which online persona meets real-life exterior. In Gärdenfors’ words: ‘What is very important in Augmented ID is the idea of taking control over the way other people can look at you.  You “dress up” virtually, showing the information that you think is suitable for the context you are in.’

Of course, as with the incident of celebrity stalking made possible by Layar, the growth of augmented reality brings with it concerns related to both privacy and malicious use. But, as with social networking tools already in existence, Augmented ID’s concept revolves around user control. Being immediately identified and associated with our passions and interests is compelling on a human level: put simply, most of us want to be seen as we want to present ourselves and found by those that know us.

Check back for more blogs by Phil on the rapidly developing smartphone app scene. 

When you open Wave for the first time, even the most hardened don’t-read-the-instructions tech head will be running for the safety of the introduction video; this is a complex interface that requires the same amount of neural dot-joining that the iPhone’s touchscreen does when you use it for the first time. And Google doesn’t make it easy on you – while their low key video tutors organise decidedly un-rock’n'roll barbecues and chuck U-rated Sudoku banter around, they still expect you to know what a UI is. The message from Wave is clear – this is for the big boys of 21st-century online interaction, and if you don’t like it, you can go play on Twitter with the other babies.                                

As most of your pals are likely not on Wave yet, or have been scared away by its learning curve, the simple things – interacting on a private wave with a handful of acquaintances – aren’t being done on a broad scale. Instead, for most people it’s straight into the deep end, interacting with anyone who happens to be knocking around on a “public wave” (one that anyone can contribute to). The charming tone you get when you enter a public wave is of excited, chattering children, rather than wary and polite adults.

So what are they talking about? As noted by Bad Idea contributor Chris Baraniuk on his Stuff Happening Now blog, text-based role-playing games are an inevitable early presence when you consider the average profile of those desperate for a Google Wave invite; but there’s everything here, from dubstep mixtapes to cigar appreciation to “beautiful men” (read: disturbing pics of Arnie with his shirt off).

Despite – or perhaps because of – the sophisticated and intricate interface, people are coming up with decidedly primitive games that involve simple clickers and counters; meanwhile my favourite wave is ‘CRAZY PARTY WAVE Y’ALL’, which is a giant gangshow of nonsense performed by people becoming aware of the awesome (but as yet only somewhat fathomable) power of Wave. It’s a joyful, timesucking mess of rainbow fonts, Daft Punk videos and stoned slang that gives a glimpse of what Wave will probably descend into on a massive scale.

You can bet that Google has many serious developers beavering away at expanding the functionality of Wave, which is currently only in ‘preview’. But for the moment, basement-bound nerds are filling the gaps, making ‘bots’ that do certain things as you work within a wave. These range from the useful to the purely LOL-worthy – a Swedish Chef that writes ‘bork’ everywhere, or the Kanye West bot that interrupts each new post with an “Imma let you finish”, or a reminder of how George Bush doesn’t like black people. Again: where Google imagined barbecue organisation, the world responded with an endlessly self-publishing Rick Astley video.

But while the amateurs are honing the details, there are wider functionalities that one would hope are going to crop up in the final version, but which haven’t been announced yet. URLs for public waves to help the sharing of discussions? One-click tweeting? Plus or minus recommendations on individual posts?

And yet: isn’t there enough to take in already? Twitter’s beauty lies in its brevity feeding back into its search function, providing brief results; search the Wave for a single term and it’s lost in the haystack of everyone’s untethered ranting.

Indeed, on first glance Wave is the sort of technological tipping point that could feasibly send a whole generation into asceticism or monastic purity – a nightmare of cacophonous, meaningless chatter, rendered with Byzantine intricacy, and topped off with a nauseating Silicon Valley cuteness. If Twitter turned the dial of informational white noise up a notch, Wave whacks it to 11; similarly, if any technology was guaranteed to shock the elderly with their apparent redundancy, this is it.

Wave may yet change the way we interact, and seems especially ready for the next generation of touchscreens, but Google clearly has an optimistic view of people’s ability to adapt to new technology. It took a lot people years to get their heads round email; expect many, many more for Wave to truly make a difference to our daily lives.

Samsung are (probably wisely) steering clear of Apple and going after the low to mid-range smartphone market along with Nokia. Though they’re late to the smartphone game, Samsung could be well placed to mop up market share across the whole sector – the bottom end with their own phones, the top end with the chips they provide to Apple for the iPhone. They’ve also announced that as well as their own operating system, they’re going to be using Android a lot more and Windows a lot less – it’s the latest blow to Windows, who have been looking very sorry in the mobile sector for some time.

The other big mobile news today is that Google is acknowledging the sector all the more – their latest purchase is AdMob, whose network for delivering ads on web pages seems like a good fit for Google’s ever-heftier cash cow. As is now the norm, AdMob uses information about your ethnicity, gender and age to target appropriate advertising your way – though the privacy advocate that the FT spoke to didn’t seem too concerned about the company. 

The Wall Street Journal has a blog post about AdMob’s founder Omar Hamoui, who only started the company while still at business school in 2006. Some of the wisdom of his head of European operations, Russell Buckley, syncs rather nicely with this whole shift towards openness that iPhone and Android are predicating: “Far too many entrepreneurs get paranoid about protecting their idea to the point of paralysis. The value of most ideas is in the execution, not in what the concept actually is. To make it reality, you need to share it – actually, with as many people as possible, counter-intuitive though this might seem.” Meanwhile Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital who first invested in AdMob, says Hamoui succeeded because “he kept a maniacal focus on the independent developer… He ignored the carriers, he ignored the ‘walled garden.’” Proof that in the digital age, the loosened-up businessperson is likely to be the most successful.

Photo: Jeff Kubina

Their platform, called Paypal X, is an API that will allow developers to tailor Paypal’s infrastructure for their own sites. Paypal themselves are highlighting the potential for micropayments that the platform might allow – Osama Bedier, the vice president of platform, told the FT: “I can pay 10 cents for something in real life. I can’t do that online”. The key with micropayments is to make them a) fast and b) not feel like you’re actually paying money; logging into Paypal and using one-click purchasing fills both of those criteria. Plus the traction Paypal already has with web users means that many won’t even have to bother signing up to a new service – it looks well placed to expand into the micropayment sector, as long as its API isn’t a total ballache to work with.

Paypal is looking ever more likely to be eBay’s saviour. Unlike Skype, Stumbleupon and others, Paypal is one of the only acquisitions the cash-drunk eBay made that actually dovetailed with its core business; the cash it’s generating is now accelerating eBay’s revenues even while the auctions business struggles to grow. Developers do have various beefs with Paypal in its current form, from seller protection to simplicity of use for customers. Paypal X is presumably designed to iron these out, and carry on growing eBay’s revenues – we’ll find out when it gets announced later today in San Francisco.

It comes as Amazon is expanding its payment platform, with PayPhrase. It’s a simple text field that you enter a special phrase into, something teeth-grindingly “funky” like “feisty mango”, rather than your email and password; along with a four-digit PIN it links to a set of specified billing and shipping info, and you can set up different phrases for different addresses, credit cards etc. The WSJ reports on some of the suggested phrases generated by Amazon (“Ingrained Abhorrance”, anyone?), while the Business Insider notes that the web stores currently partnered with Amazon for the scheme aren’t exactly chasing Paypal’s numbers. Still, early days yet.

Then of course there’s Facebook’s nascent attempt at internet domination, with Facebook Connect and Facebook Credits. Currently accepted by basically no-one, the credits are getting talked up today in the WSJ by interactive gaming developers Playfish – because they act as virtual currency, cross-border payment problems are solved. If you’re a developer wanting to start your own payment platform, think on – it’s not looking like there’s going to be much more market room outside of these three players.

Windows 7 is grabbing headlines for being Amazon’s most pre-ordered product ever, but the cynic in me thinks that this is more an indictment on the awfulness of Vista than it is the greatness of Windows 7 – I can see hordes of people frantically jabbing the pre-order button before a dialogue box comes up reading “A website wants to open content on this computer” as if to confirm their purchase. Maybe it’s all a giant marketing wheeze: create a product so awful that it makes your next product look amazing?

Wired have given Windows 7 an overall thumbs-up, even if they say it’s expensive and still can’t intuit what you want it to do when you pop in a USB stick (i.e. just open the damn folder). CNET pitted it against Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, and Windows is marginally less good according to their reviewers, losing on value and unique features, but getting big love for its reliability. The Telegraph just wants to find a legal way of marrying this thing. And Yobie Benjamin of the San Francisco Chronicle files the most breathless, punctuation-happy appreciation of all: “In a phrase, Windows 7 is darn good… very good. A huge congratulations to the dev team in Redmond — Well done! In fact… very well done!” But Reuters point out that the reviews for Vista were good when it launched, with the former editor of PC World magazine particularly repentant. 

This new Windows has clearly been created with an eye on both touch-screen and cloud computing technologies. Using Aero Shake, a window can be shaken to clear away all other extraneous windows, and shaken again to bring them back – a recipe for RSI if using a mouse, pure Minority Report if using a touch-screen. Meanwhile CEO Steve Ballmer has described the four panes of the Windows logo as now being “three windows and a cloud”, and Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK MD, said yesterday that Windows 7 “was a key strategic part of [Microsoft's] cloud vision”. The computing industry is also hoping that the launch will be the catalyst for renewed sales.

But as Jack Schofield notes in the Guardian, a recent survey showed that of 600 companies in the US, over three quarters of them were still using Windows XP – it’s still deeply embedded in business, and given the ballache that is upgrading from XP to 7, requiring a complete backup of files and a complete reinstallation of Windows, it’s going to be hard to persuade corporate to make the jump. Which? is meanwhile saying you should hold off anyway, given the number of patches that will be created over the coming year – but considering Microsoft was providing extensive new service packs for Vista just weeks ago, it’s clear that constant upgrades are now just a part of computing life.

I imagine that during the Windows 7 launch there have been a few Microsoft staffers wishing that Bill Gates was still on board. He was a great advert for Microsoft, always appearing like the reliable nerd who had already finished his computer class work so he could help you with yours, and thus instantly undoing Apple’s multicoloured minimal too-cool-for-schoolism and taunting adverts. Steve Ballmer on the other hand has been a bit of a nightmare over the last month, lumbering around like a giant genetically-modified sour grape, ungallantly gritting his teeth at the failure of Vista and lamely slagging off the competition. First he said “Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone”; then regarding e-readers, he scoffed: “We have a device for reading. It’s the most popular device in the world. It’s the PC”. He also recently grabbed an iPhone off a staff member at a company meeting, and pretended to stamp on it (OK, that’s quite funny).

But the best thing about Windows 7 so far is still this. Filthy:

Yes, you cracked the code – it’s about science and technology, which is obviously a pretty broad church. So to specify, we’ll be looking at computing, nanotech, biotech, telecoms, neuroscience, manufacturing, video games, pharmaceuticals, munitions, social networking, and the internet. But rather than be a) a gadget blog, b) a dry science journal, we’re going to focus on the social impact of science and technology. On their own terms they’re impressive but distant – we’ll be looking at their application in the real world of work and leisure.

There’ll be a regular column looking at genuinely game-changing smartphone apps, at their potential uses rather than merely their specifications. And as with all our new sections, there’ll be opinion from Bad Idea writers and professionals on the machinations of the sci-tech industries. And we’ll try and restrict our geeky excitement at new shiny touch-screen, augmented reality toys just to our Twitter feed…

The problem for Netflix was that the existing algorithm had plateaued in terms of insight into each of our viewing choices – if you’d rented Bride Wars and The Ugly Truth, then you’d get other morally redundant empty-calorie romcoms recommended to you, but the algorithm couldn’t get beyond that. When the various teams of programmers gunning for the prize set to work on the problem, they made some quick breakthroughs, but then hit a wall. The problem was films like Lost In Translation and Napoleon Dynamite, that proved to be Marmite for Netflix users – people loved it and hated them in equal measure, but there was no parity between the types of people who loved it and hated it. Accursed human caprice!

But the maddening complexity of free will was nevertheless somewhat ironed out, and two teams, BellKor and Ensemble, managed to crack to 10% barrier in July. BellKor managed to file their successful model ten minutes earlier though, so they get the money. Among BellKor’s innovations was the idea of looking at whether users rated movies at all rather than how highly, as an indicator of worth, and only at reviews that were made shortly after the film was watched, which are seen as more accurate than those made later.

BellKor go away with more than just the cash though, as their team originally included members from US telecoms giant AT&T and Yahoo; AT&T are planning to use what they learned during the race in their own video-recommendation engines. In the slightly unfortunate words of BellKor’s team manager: “You need to think outside the box, and the only way to do that is find someone else’s box” – collaboration with as many people as possible was key to pushing the results home, and past the many off-duty mathematicians working alone into the night in their garages. They combined with two other leading teams, from Graz University in Austria and Canadian software developers Broadsoft, to pool resources; the team only met in the flesh for the first time when picking up the prize yesterday. Ah, the real world – only useful for photo-ops with outsized cheques.

The prize-as-solution-stimulant model has grown in popularity recently, with the X Prize prompting the development of the spaceship that has become Virgin Galactic’s vehicle of choice, and currently poking people into developing gene sequencing, fuel efficient cars and a lunar lander. Netflix meanwhile is so chuffed with the idea of other people clubbing together and solving their problems that they’ve launched their next prize. Players will be furnished with 100m bits of data, with which they’ll have to model “taste profiles” of users.

The whole thing oscillates between fascinating and obnoxious. On the one hand, more accurate recommendations lock customers into a more trustworthy relationshop with Netflix, while providing a service that’s ever more sympathetic to one’s personal taste – everybody wins. On the other hand, I want to start giving simultaneous 5 stars to Step Up 2 The Streets and Werckmeister Harmonies just to freak out an algorithm whose sole purpose is to reduce and distil the mad, perverse chaos of human choice. Irony, the glory of genuine awfulness, the blindness to style that genuine good taste signifies – these are all things beyond the ability of maths today.

The data from the first contest also throws up some interesting ideas about the subjectivity of art, and what we like about movies. While there were the aforementioned Marmite movies, which highlight the infinitely variegated shades of human taste, there are some movies that are so universally derided that it’s tempting to see them as truly awful, that some art is inherently bad rather than an objective lump filtered through human taste. The Stepford Wives, Gigli, Sky Captain, Battlefield Earth – the world chimes as one like never before: “these are terrible movies”.

But you get the feeling that others on the hate list – Birth, Solaris, Full Frontal, In The Cut – are despised, and drive people to vent their hate in a feedback forum on Netflix, because they’re not what was expected. These are films where established, establishment stars (Kidman, Clooney, Soderbergh and Meg Ryan) do weird uncomfortable things; for viewers, there’s nothing worse than being unexpectedly driven out of your comfort zone. Surely this is the factor that algorithms need to search for – acknowledging a film not as good or bad, but as formulaic or abrasive.