Quicksilva thoughts...

In our hectic lifestyles where technology, work and family commitments take over our lives we sometimes forget to go back to nature and remember that our brains have their own natural rhythm.

Recent research carried out in Toronto has shown that you can optimise your work performance and burn more calories during exercise if you tune into these "brain power hours".

So in future, I think I’ll be creative in the morning, team building in the afternoon and come the evening... well that would be telling!

And with the constant focus on keeping our brains ticking over with the introduction of the Nintendo DS and other brain teasing computer games its worth drawing on those natural rhythms – when challenged to a brain teasing game from a younger member of the family remember that after a certain age your score is likely to be better in the morning than in the afternoon!

Quicksilva thoughts...

The security of data and its sharing never seems to be out of the headlines these days. This interesting report requested by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown last October outlined; almost 20 recommendations that organisations should ‘overhaul their corporate governance requirements on handling and storing personal information and improve training for staff. It also says they should publish clear privacy statements, improve their consent documentation and publish a list of all the bodies with whom they share information’. It highlighted the use of ‘Implied consent’ was not satisfactory without considerable transparency and that the NHS should continue to build on their efforts so far to give people greater sight of how various bodies handle and use data. It also noted there was a need to make future uses of their information more visible.

The report also highlighted that the government should participate in European moves to update data protection legislation and take other measures to make it easier to amend UK law, particularly as it relates to data sharing between public bodies.

It will be very interesting to see what the future holds for the implementation of this report's recommendation on both systems and business processes.

Quicksilva thoughts...

A new government iniative promises to provide value and insight from the masses of data collected by various government institutions. The competition to find new and innovative ways of using the data constitutes a huge challenge in the areas of data security, migration and systems integration and could go along way to convince the general public of the benefits of storing data and records centrally. In particular, sophisticated data analysis of medical data and trends can offer huge and wide reaching benefits in areas as far afield as financial budgeting, cures for diseases and drug discovery. Additionally, methods to provide insight in to crime statistics to help shape future crime prevention policies could help everyone in the country.

None of this is possible without the aggregation of data from many sources, as well as solving the issue of systems integration within the myriad of disparate government computing sytems across all its departments. Furthermore a carefully thought out approach to the secure access and transfer of any data is essential. Although this competition will only scratch the surface of the huge potential, hopefully it will provide impetus, open discussion and much needed positive publicity in this politically sensitive area.

Quicksilva thoughts...

In 2007 the total number of mobile phone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion, which is around half of the worlds population and 950 million mobile phones were sold last year alone. So it was not that surprising that Mitchell Baker the chair of Firefox developer Mozilla put out a rallying call for more development of mobile phone applications to occur. Mobile phone network provider 3 are currently pushing their mobile broadband service and does the consumer really want to carry around a bulky laptop to surf the web and message their friends in the park when they could use a mobile phone instead? With 3G allowing faster access to the web and mobile phones becoming more advanced, PC-like features can be ported over to mobile phones which could push the mobile phone down the same path that led to the PC becoming a staple for the home and office.