Reading an article in the trade journal Computing prompted me to double check that our Data Protection policies, particularly now that the company I work for is rapidly expanding into a global operation.  Reviewing legislation for one country is heavy going, and I’m pleased to say that for UK our policies are still more than satisfactory.  However looking at the dealing with cross boarder issues, things get a lot trickier.  With the requirements laid down by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which includes the UK, national legislation for other EU countries and OECD members. Plus the fact that the US has a different approach to data protection compared to other OECD members as a result they’ve setup something called Safe Harbour to address the OECD restrictions.  Upstanding all this differing positions is enough to make someone’s brain ache.  Fortunately we don’t yet have to contend with specific requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley.

A number of Universities, particularly from the US are starting to video record lectures and posting them on YouTube.  The problem is that YouTube is also the home for a lot of personal material with a limited potential viewer-ship, resulting in trying to find some interesting and educational material can be crowded out by a lot of videos of little or no interest.  However I came across Ted Talks.  The site has a great library of videos talking about a wide spread of subjects from Music Video development through to Open Source Economics and onto String Theory.  Each video is accompanied by a brief bio of the presenter, and the videos can be downloaded for example David Pogue (New York Times Tech Columnist) on the Internet Music Wars at the other end of the spectrum is a presentation by the architect Frank Gehry on his work.

Overall a fascinating site and worth having a browse through.

Jeff Skoll talking about his production company trying to make films with a view to produce films that get people to stop and think about issues such as the environment.