UK MPs expenses was one of the biggest stories of 2009 that has continued to be felt well into 2010. It was at its heart a story of detail, data and piecing information together and is just one example of how developers and journalists are working together.

What does this mean for the future of journalism and news gathering? ONA UK invites you to an evening exploring Hacks & Hacking [...]

…or, in short, it was Rufus Pollock talking about how Governments are (hopefully) going to start publishing all their data in accessible, documented, timely, nearly semantic formats; Chris Thorpe talking about how the Grauniad is reaching out to meet this, and Becky Hogge stitching it together with some perspective.

Inevitably the discussion came around to Wikileaks and related matters, which were being discussed by various grandees and educating-the-next-generation-type journalists. It was at that point I asked a question of the journos and I flubbed it, because although geeks like Rufus were nodding along and apparently following what I was trying to ask, the journos glazed over, their soundbite-sized attention spans having overrun.

What I was trying to ask was:

In a world where both the Guardian (left wing) and the Daily Mail (right wing) would hypothetically be able to download the same complete spreadsheet of MP’s expenses, and analyse it for themselves, and then spin a story upon it… given that, how would either paper be able to differentiate their story in order to pander to the supposed prejudices of their readership, and thereby retain readers, especially when the data underlying it can also be checked by any reader?

I based this question on my experience of once being hauled through the press, leading to a long public debate with the selfsame journalist, and which taught me that the primary goal of journalism was/is not to seek truth but instead sell newspapers; and that this is achieved by not challenging your readership’s expectations.

Anyway I got blown off, and so I was thrilled yesterday to see Jay Rosen note almost exactly the same thing in a form (and forum) that journalists might understand and care about – because he is one.

Jay wrote:

5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com:

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.

The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

For “blind spot”, read also “prejudice”.

Read “anything based on biased interpretation”.

Read “falsehoods”.

Regrettably a single instance of this will not change everything overnight; but there’s certainly a business opportunity in proactive damage control available for those who understand the both the goals of WikiLeaks and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and what it is that really motivates newspaper sales journalistic website revenue generation.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Online News, Ubiquitous Information, Shared Perspective, Slim Journalism

About 9 months ago I decided that the stairwell wall was effectively dead space, and what it really needed to be was bookshelving[1] – taking a forthright approach to the problem I decided “hang the height of it, I have a blank wall to fill, reach is a good problem to have” so measured the size and worked out a design with my builder – built from scratch in American white oak to take the load and distribute it into the walls and stair joists. We had some problems getting decent wood, but finally it arrived on friday, and the carcass went in today while I was out.

So I got home, turned on the light, swung around, and there:

… 3m high, 1.8m wide in 3x 60cm columns, 20cm deep.

For my American friends that’s 9’9″ by 6′ by 8″

My first words? Well, yes, that’s the title of this posting. Should get finished off tomorrow.

–
[1] I was thinking of something Jim Finnis once quoted at me, about how good it would be to live in a family where the term “home decorating” meant “where shall we put more bookshelves?”

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

“F*ck me, now that’s a bookcase…”

http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/event.php?eid=183

Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar:
Net neutrality in the UK
Date: 28th September 2010
Venue: Central London

As Ofcom consults on whether to end net neutrality, this seminar will examine internet traffic management, whether it’s necessary in the UK, the possible economic benefits, and what the unintended consequences may be for users and the network operators.

Discussions will also look ahead to how traffic management may work in practice and the options to ensure transparency for users, and consider whether consumers need to be protected with a minimum level of service guarantee.

http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/agenda/Net-Neutrality-Agenda.pdf

Registration

Chairman’s opening remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Traffic management and ‘net neutrality’
Alex Blowers, Director of International, Ofcom
Questions and comments from the floor

The effects and consequences of ending net neutrality
Themes: Is net congestion a short?term issue created by current online usage trends? How are different networks and players being affected? Would ending net neutrality lead to ‘unfair’ traffic discrimination? What are the economic benefits of traffic management? What will be the effect on quality of service of traffic management? What effect, if any, would traffic management have on innovation? Would ending net neutrality encourage investment in NGA (next generation access)?

Andrew Heaney, Executive Director, Strategy and Regulation, TalkTalk
Senior representative, network operator
Senior representative, website
Senior representative, high bandwidth website
Analyst
Question and comments from the floor

Chairman’s closing remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Coffee

Chairman’s opening remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Consumers and traffic management
Themes: To what extent is ending net neutrality in the consumer’s best interests? What can be done to ensure traffic management is transparent to consumers? How can information on traffic management be presented so that it is accessible and meaningful to consumers, both in understanding any restrictions on their existing services, and in choosing between rival offerings? Should a minimum level of service be introduced to ensure broadband access is not determined by economic circumstance?

Senior representative, network operator
Senior representative, high bandwidth website
Consumer representative
Senior representative, ISP
Question and comments from the floor

Final thoughts from Ofcom
Alex Blowers, Director of International, Ofcom

Chairman’s and Westminster eForum closing remarks
Senior Parliamentarian
Thomas Raynsford, Senior Producer, Westminster eForum

It costs money to attend and although I had a decent experience the one time I attended, I am not sure how much this really influences “people of influence”.

I would be interested to know who the “Consumer representative” will be, and what weight might be given to their opinion…

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar: [Ofcom Discuss Ending] Net neutrality in the UK

I have no truck with this recruitment exercise – not least because the coursework talks about singular rather than plural “meanings of life”, stacking the deck towards a one-shot-definite-baptise endgame.

However it did inspire me to wonder what my own Alpha Course would look like; I suspect it would go something like this:

You should know:

• some day, you will die
• some day, everyone you know and love will also die
• some day, the sun will burn the earth and render it into cinders so that no life will exist on it at all
• there are probably no god/gods
• and so everyone you know and love (or hate) who professes religious belief of any kind, is probably deluding themselves
• you probably have no immortal soul
• and so there is probably no slot for you in any god’s “greater plan’ – because (to repeat) there are probably no gods
• and your life is probably without a meaning above and beyond what you define it to have
• and your life is probably without a purpose above and beyond what you define it to have
• there is probably no heaven
• and the righteous and the good probably receive no reward after death
• and there is probably no hell
• and the unrighteous, the bad, and the evil probably receive no punishment after death
• and – however regrettable it might seem – there is probably no valid concept of “good” or “evil” beyond our biological impulses and our history of collective choice in this regard

Yet:

• like every other life there has ever been on earth, you are utterly unique
• like every other life there has ever been on earth, you are precious
• like every other life there has ever been on earth, you are irreplacable
• and everyone you know and love (or hate) is also utterly unique, precious and irreplacable
• like every conscious being there has ever been on earth, you have the choice to imbue your life with meaning and purpose
• and this awesome opportunity includes the freedom to adopt (or ignore) prefabricated meaning and purpose provided by one or more religions, philosophies and belief systems
• however belief in some particular deity is probably not incumbent upon you
• and all of the above observations still apply

My advice:

• treasure your life, if not for itself then for its uniqueness, and for the opportunity of sharing with others
• treasure everyone you know and love
• live in defiance of the nothingness which fills most of the universe
• and die only in your own good time

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

My Own Personal Alpha Course

A few years ago at a rare party, my friend Jim got drunk and espoused to me a theory, viz: that I am Captain Carrot; not in some existential do-gooder sense, but instead he suggested that I might have been the (literal?) inspiration for the character as physically described in the Discworld books.

Personally I suspect that Jim might have been mixing the story up with yet another, older meme from my social circle[1] – however his idea has got legs, and has a plausible backplot: in 1987 I was working for my university magazine and on the back of the release of Mort in hardback, through his publisher I wangled an interview with Pterry and so was sent early one morning to rendezvous with him at Waterloo station, to ride in a limo for the best part of a couple of hours to (IIRC) Bromley in Kent, to a book signing that I could observe – and then trot back to UCL to write-up.

The resulting article got spiked in favour of student union politics, and I haven’t the notes – something I regret to this day – but merely two weeks later I got on a train at Paddington and there Terry was again, in the same carriage. We politely exchanged nods, him sat at a table, me standing, while a pleasant lady asked him what he did for a living, thrilled at him being a writer, and “[had he] had anything published yet”?

Terry was very kind to her.

Anyway: Jim’s point was that I tend to leave an impression on people and that since I loom tall, am roughly triangular, have a voice that can saw through concrete and have/had a shock of orange hair[2], Jim wondered if my shape might have lodged in Terry’s brain and served as a template for the description of Carrot.

Since “Mort!” predates “Guards! Guards!” only slightly in time – if not in volumes – it’s not impossible, though in my heart of hearts I might wish it were true more than I believe it likely. The L-space wiki itself suggests otherwise.

But I do remember a few things from the interview:

• one was Terry’s insistence that he didn’t like tape recorders, he thought they were not good tools for proper journalists who ought to use notepads; this led to a discussion of journalism as training for being a disciplined writer.
• two was that apparently I was the first interviewer ever to be asking him about his work with BNFL as inspiration for “magic” in the early Rincewind books, with overspills of magic causing “walking trees” and “shoals of invisible fish” and so forth, compared to the contemporary woes at Sellafield. I was right, it was an influence, but he wasn’t seeking to make any political point – merely to juxtapose “magic” in one world and “physics” in another.
• thirdly (and this is where I’m racking my brains to draw detail) – he wanted to write a book under a pseudonym; I don’t think it was fantasy exactly, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the plot was, even though he outlined it. It was something “more serious” but not related to Discworld in any way. It was standalone.

That’s about as much as I remember; interviews I’ve seen from the past decade suggest that the idea behind “Nation” is quite recent, else I would think that that was a candidate. People reading this should bear in mind this was 1987, when book #5 of the Discworld series was just out, manuscripts for a few others might have been ready to go, and Terry was not the world famous crusading bazillionaire and national institution that he now is.

So now I’m wondering whether – 23 years later – perhaps somewhere in the Amazon catalogue there might be a Terry Pratchett book written under a pseudonym?

Does the internet have an answer? A suspicion?

I’d love to know.

–
[1] …viz: that someone from the UK net.community whom most of us had met at one point or another – Tanaqui Weaver – both knew Neil Gaiman and was a partial inspiration for Delirium in the Sandman series, although Tori Amos has since been wrongly anointed and the credit given yet elsewhere, with Tanaqui expunged from the public record.

[2] apologies for the mullet, I didn’t know any better, or rather I just never got it cut – I hacked the front off so that I could see, but the back was heading towards Unix-Guru ponytail proportions, but never quite worked. The picture’s from circa 1993 but’s not too far off the mark for my university look. It certainly wasn’t intentional – that would require me to follow fashion and I didn’t even know what a “mullet” was… or rather I thought it was a kind of fish.

Update: better picture, 1989-ish. Shows the height differential.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Me, Captain Carrot, Terry Pratchett and his pseudonyms?

See Also.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Alternatives to beebPlayer / BBC iPlayer for Android

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/beebplayer#incoming-99637
Tom Adams
12 July 2010

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like a copy of the following documents:

1. All correspondence with Dave Johnson in relation to beebPlayer, an Android application for accessing iPlayer content.
2. All correspondence with any other parties in relation to beebPlayer.
3. All internal correspondence relating to beebPlayer.

Yours faithfully,
Tom Adams

[BBC response elided]

Where are the reporters who would take an interest in the BBC trying to close-down open access to its content?

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

NEWS: BBC served with FOIA request re: killing Beebplayer, iPlayer anticompetitiveness

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/07/is-time-disappearing-from-the-universe-radical-theory-says-yes.html

The team’s proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion,” he explains. “What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion – that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate.”

If time gradually slows “but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of ‘a standard flow of time’, then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an “effective accelerated rate of the expansion” takes place.”

I like Terry Pratchett’s “Troll” theory of time: when you walk down the street you can see where you’re going, but not where you’ve been… but with time we know where we’ve been but not where we’re going. Ergo: either we’re facing the wrong direction, or everything is going backwards.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Reflections on Time

tl;dr: The BBC have provided ultra-minimal flash-based iPlayer with reduced functionality on the latest Android 2.2 upwards, whilst simultaneously killing “beebPlayer” – a free app that provided (better) functionality on Android versions 1.5 upwards. All folk stuck on older (2.1 and below) Android systems will never have iPlayer again.

My context

I love the BBC – I must love the BBC because I still pay the license fee even though for the past 18 months I have lacked a functional TV, stopped watching television entirely, and will likely soon not possess a TV in any form. In these circumstances my love for the BBC expresses itself in two ways: I watch Top Gear via iPlayer, and I am a Radio 4 addict; the former is seasonal and therefore uninteresting, but the latter is far more notable because it’s long-term behaviour.

At 6am my clock-radio goes off to the pips and the Today programme. It stays on for the next three hours – reinforced by the ones in the kitchen and the bathroom while I am having coffee and a shave – and comes on again repeatedly for the News, “In Our Time”, the “Food Programme”, and “Great Lives”; it accompanies me driving back and forth to London listening to PM, the 6:30 Comedy Slot, or “Thinking Allowed”, and my reflexes are honed to a fine point for switching-off whenever “The Archers” or “Something Understood” comes on.

And yes, the Shipping Forecast lulls me off to sleep towards 1am.

My problem

My problem was that I never used to carry a radio with me, so visiting London overnight could not indulge my OCD listening behaviour and would become stressed and nervous as a result. And then – hallelujah – I bought an Android phone and discovered a little app called “beebplayer” by Dave Johnson – it didn’t matter in which dank city basement I was ensconced – where no signal of analogue or vile DAB could penetrate – so long as someone had set up WiFi and I could connect to it, I could listen to live Radio4… until today.

Today I rebuilt my Android system, performing a factory reset in the process; I went to reinstall beebplayer and found it missing, and then followed the trail to Dave’s terse statement:

I’m sorry to announce that I have removed beebPlayer from the Android Market and ceased all further development of this application.

At this point my heart sank. I cast around the web to locate a raw APK file (and found one, rather out of date) and then I did some more digging; when as if by magic David Madden of the BBC posted on their blog, admitting that they shut “beebplayer” down, and some of their rationale:

Tiggs questioned why the BBC took down the beebPlayer which worked on older Android devices and did not rely on Flash, and why we have replaced it with something that only works on newer devices and requires Flash.

The BBC’s syndication policy, which governs how the BBC makes its services available through other parties, clearly outlines the criteria for using BBC content. BeebPlayer was not a licensed distributor of BBC content online or on mobile. The BBC routinely looks for unauthorised usage of our brand and our content across all platforms and when we encounter it we work to resolve the issue. If on investigation we find that a company’s service proposition does not adhere to our standard licence terms and conditions, we will take steps to remedy the issue.

My Perspective

Let’s break that down into bullets:

1. BeebPlayer was not a licensed distributor of BBC content online or on mobile
2. The BBC routinely looks for unauthorised usage of our brand
3. when we encounter it we work to resolve the issue
4. If on investigation we find that a company’s service proposition [...] we will take steps to remedy the issue

And responding to them quickly:

1. Beebplayer wasn’t a distributor, it was an end-user client; so is iPlayer going to get pissy if I use a non-standard browser to launch Flash in future? Or a non-standard Flash player?
2. OK, yes, the BBC may have copyright on “beeb”, but that’s unrelated to the above, and addressable by renaming the software.
3. So a “branding” issue is resolved by killing the software and pretending was a “distribution” issue
4. But it wasn’t a company, it was free software produced by an individual and given away for free, to enable me to hear more BBC content. How precisely is this harming the BBC and the services for which I pay?

But what really grates with me is the Q&A in the next paragraph:

Why has the BBC replaced beebPlayer with something that only works on newer devices and requires Flash?

Using Adobe Flash 10.1 streaming on mobile delivers significant infrastructure efficiencies for the BBC, as we use our existing video and audio encoding plant to create the streams. We don’t need to install any new kit or set up any new servers. We just use what we already have to offer a higher quality BBC iPlayer on mobile experience.

Enabling Flash on Android 2.2 devices also means that all current and new devices that support Android 2.2 can get BBC iPlayer. These devices all use the same standard Flash player which means we can offer a consistently high quality playback across all of them. Previously we had to review and test BBC iPlayer on a device-by-device basis to ensure the right high quality experience. Now we can offer BBC iPlayer on mobile to a whole group of devices at once, which is clearly much more efficient.

…my emphasis on the latter.

Now here’s the thing: when my shower radio detunes while I am washing my hair, a little man from the BBC doesn’t magically pop out of the broom cupboard and retune it for me; when wet leaves used to block my Sky satellite signal, hordes of BBC lumberjacks utterly failed to wage war upon my neighbours damson trees in response; and when I use iPlayer through my laptop no BBC engineer arrives to replace the shite little speakers with which it is supplied, with some audiophile THX setup.

In short: it’s not the BBC’s problem to determine whether my radio-listening or tv-watching platform is up to some arbitrary metric of quality. Listening quality is my problem, and any argument predicated on the concept that the BBC should have veto over my platform is bullshit. The BBC should not be able to tell me what make of TV or Radio I must use, and likewise they should not be able to force me to use one functional software client over another, nor should they work to destroy other functional clients in order to enhance their lock-in.

Dave himself is actually pretty cool about the whole issue, but that’s OK because he’s allowed to be, plus he’s contributed, plus it’s not incumbent for me to agree with him.

I think this is shit, and I fear that this is the thin end of the wedge where iPlayer starts trying to lock people into using particular platforms to consume what ought to be open (and publicly funded) content. I think the next stop will be DRM (see the buzz about Project Canvas) and mandatory viewer registration – incidentally, have you noticed the new iPlayer “Sign In” button?

Maybe the counterargument is that the BBC would have to encode in more-than-Flash to support the older streams that beebPlayer uses; in which case beebplayer should die when they entirely pull the plug on those streams, and not before.

The State Of (Live) Play

If you have Android 2.2 or above, you can hand-type URLs into your browser that permit you to listen to live radio; the URLs are of the form:

What you get for typing-in the URL is a black screen with no information about what you’re hearing – not even a station name – and the pause and slider buttons which come up when you tap don’t actually achieve anything. Rob H of the BBC has documented this horrible hack in the comments on this page, but I only know about it because Dave mentioned it. I can only compare this to the arrant nonsense regarding the BBC’s desire to “ensure the right high quality experience”.

And if like most people you’re on Android 1.5, 1.6, or 2.0/2.1?

If so, the BBC have just taken away your content from you. Digital switchoff. Get used to it.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

beebPlayer, iPlayer and Android: or why I am epically, fumingly angry at the BBC

I remember the scene quite distinctly, because it was unusual for Whit to ask my opinion of a paper, and I so wondered if it might be something interesting like crypto, network security, or time travel – Whit being an avid classic SciFi nut. I skimmed the first 4 or 5 pages or so, dredging up old physics and the horrors of classic QM from (then) a decade previous — when I hit something, stopped reading, and dropped the paper on the table.

“It smells like bullshit”, said I.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well he’s saying that the laws of physics are relative not merely to your frame of reference, but also to your perception; relativity doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, there may be something in it…” said Whit — but with his standard-issue twinkle in his eyes, making me wonder if I was having my leg pulled.

We changed topic; back then I was not connected enough to know about Sokal Affair, and I had no access to NPR so I didn’t know that on the day of its publication in some Post-Learnist journal the paper had been splashed by its author as a complete fabrication designed to wind-up the postmodernist establishment.

The Wikipedia article on the Sokal Affair led me however to a further article on the Science Wars of which I was equally ignorant — I was busy fighting a different war at the time.[1]

Quote:

Until the mid-20th century, the philosophy of science had concentrated on the viability of scientific method and knowledge, proposing justifications for the truth of scientific theories and observations and attempting to discover on a philosophical level why science worked. Already Karl Popper had begun to attack this view. He denied outright that justification existed for such concepts as truth, probability or even belief in scientific theories, thereby laying fertile foundations for the growth of postmodernist attitudes.

I know people who fête Popper, thus this surprised me because the only thing I know about Popper is the Doctrine of Falsifiability, which prima facie appears to be a useful tool for science:

Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment. The term “testability” is related but more specific; it means that an assertion can be falsified through experimentation alone.

For example, “all men are mortal” is unfalsifiable, since no finite amount of observation could ever demonstrate its falsehood: that one or more men can live forever. “All men are immortal,” by contrast, is falsifiable, by the presentation of just one dead man.

This (to me) echoes the right approach to science:

• We have a theory of Gravity: it works, it can be demonstrated to work, really well, and if somebody eventually discovers Cavorite then several hundred years of work will require “substantial modification”.
• We have a theory of Evolution: it works, it can be demonstrated to work, really well, and it has been extrapolated plausibly that all life on Earth has sprung from this mechanism; nobody has yet found a plausible counterexample to evolution, so until someone finds a bunch of architectural diagrams from God in a coal seam, I’m happy to go with the Evolutionists.
• We have a theory of God: however the existence of a God is not falsifiable; you cannot prove that there is no God since he may be hiding under a pebble, or behind a leaf, or in a sunbeam or something – and because you cannot prove a negative, not to mention the highly debatable question about what being a “God” entails — all Atheists are stuck with being 99.999999…% agnostics, what Dawkins calls a “Tooth Fairy Agnostic”.

Returning to that Popper assertion: a little digging into the citations and I found myself seething about people playing word games. It’s the sort of thing you have to understand in order to cope with spin-doctors, but when it’s applied to well-understood scientific theories it can upset me. One minute they appear to be explaining “proof by induction” and the next minute they appear to be deriding, er, “proof by induction” — and I’m not sure that they know the difference between the two; although I side with Hume that that inductive can be risky, hence why I am a “Tooth Fairy Agnostic” Atheist.

I have no axe to grind pro-Popper or anti, and no particular reason to defend him, but I have the impression that the above “The Science Wars are Popper’s fault” citation is yet more wilfully misapprehended bullshit. I presently don’t wish to research the matter further because if you follow the train of clicks too far you end up on pages covered in pictures of Australian Black Swans, somehow declaring them to be both cosmically meaningful and unobvious, when I instead think of them in their reality as an agricultural pest.

However there’s another aspect left out of my “theory of Gods” bulletpoint above: demonstrability, which I’d like to return to for a moment.

Gravity is easily and repeatedly demonstrable. Evolution is easily and repeatedly demonstrable. In general, scientific theories which are very strong are easily and repeatedly demonstrable.

So now to the present day, and we have a bunch of people at the Climate Research Unit, who have some data that has been severely hacked-about, who work in an academic echo chamber, and whose data got released, I suspect by dint of Murphy’s Law rather than “hacking”.

That we are experiencing a period of pretty wild climate variation is demonstrable fact, and anthropogenic (ie: fossil-fuel-burning) climate change may or may not be the cause; but for reasons above I am not going to inductively try to link the two, because the Earth’s climate is a huge and chaotic system that almost defies measurement, and certainly defies long-term prediction in much the same way that evolution defies prediction.

And that a bunch of scientists make money by trying to predict long-term trends in the behaviour of a chaotic system?

Mmmm…

–
[1] Incidentally, the Crypto Wars really deserve a Wikipedia page

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Science is the Art of the Demonstrable

Nowadays I’m going to the gym 4 times a week and doing up the house.

Thank you everyone, I appreciate everything you’ve done to help.

Being alive is great.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

So…

• (From instant messenger)
• I’m just talking to one of [my team of] editors.
• Her daughter (Bridget!!), has just been to sports day.
• Apparently none of them win these days – they all get a sticker for taking part!
• Isn’t that odd?

Odd? Oh yes.

What really surprises me is that examinations haven’t been banned, similarly.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

My friend Bridget discovers the new, anti-competitive approach to schooling

So the cache for the iPod – which I am not using – takes up an extra 31% of storage?

Some mistake…

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

iPod Photo Cache boosts disk usage by 31%

More than 3 weeks ago my builder placed an order through Travis Perkins, for seasoned, planed and finished oak to build into a fitted bookcase in my stairwell. The idea was to get it sawn, leave it three weeks for shrinkage to take place, and then have it finished for interior planking.

He rejected the order which turned up this morning – photos above – which look more like fencing timber than finished wood.

Somewhere the ball got severely dropped; but given that the planks are of uneven sizes and are not cut straight, our bet is that Herriards made rather a large and expensive (£550) mistake.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

(Badly) Sawed and Planed Oak Timber from Herriard Sawmills, near Basingstoke

Yesterday, however, I received my latest electricity bill. It stated that my account was £110 in debit, and that therefore my payments were to be increased from £40 to £58 a month in future to make up for this. I was puzzled by this, as my previous bill had shown the account at approximately zero and I had spent a significant time out of the UK during that period with all my electrical devices turned off. It was thus barely credible that I was using 70% more electricity than last year. Therefore, I examined the bill more carefully.

The bill was not based on a recent meter reading, but instead was based on an “estimate”. I went and read the meter myself, and actual usage was a good deal less than the estimate. As far as I can tell, lacking an actual reading Scottish and Southern simply made something up on the assumption that I was using more electricity than I had done previously. Having done that, they used this entirely made up number to justify increasing my monthly payments.

…which is exactly what happened to me some time ago, and has now led to my abandonment of Southern Electric.

Has anyone else instances of Scottish and Southern Energy doing this?

D’ya think that a FOIA request would get the information as to how much they hold in credit?

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Yet more on the #SouthernElectric Direct-Debit Racket

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Catch the bylines that fly past in the first 5 minutes:

• [the] ability to create information has exceeded our ability to manage it
• [we are] drowning in our richness
• [there is] no way to help you deal with it
• [the web has] massive amount of potential, but not any real tools to harness it
• [the new web] is gonna be billions … trillions of pages … Google doesn’t scale to that
• people are overwhelmed … [they are] less likely to buy something … less likely to be happy with what they buy
• we have too many e-mails … labels … soon we’ll have “labels for labels”
• …you need some structure…
• how do i find the right file?
• how do i keep up with all of these new sources of information?

All relentlessly negative, as a setup for the Semantic Web debate; undoubtedly the best line is from that section is:

“That [value] is what the semantic web could eventually promise to do!”

- a glorious example of what Wikipedia calls [weasel words] – it COULD EVENTUALLY PROMISE. Would you loan someone money on the basis that they could eventually promise to pay you back?

Thankfully the documentary moves midsection of criticism with which I largely agree; Shirkey’s “Witness Protection Program for AI Researchers” rings true to me, I’ve always felt that making people meet the machines halfway was a mistake — not to mention boring for the poor person who has to look up how to tag their blogpost using centrally-approved Dewey2.0 XML.

Then onto some schismists at a semantic web conference, one of whom dares to voice the proposition that the semantic web “does not need ontologies” to the horror of the panel participants; for those of you who’ve never encountered the word before, the pro-ontology people essentially propose that there needs to be a unified standard for annotating every bit of data on the web; this quote from Tom Gruber puts it nicely:

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume.

For instance, my example of this would be:

“This Blog Post is about my Mum. My Mum is the primary Person entity who has both a Female attribute, and a Parental attribute with respect to me, and the Parental attribute has sub-attributes of Biological and Social which may or may not refer to the same Person”

… if you supply such information alongside your blog posts then it will make life much easier for semantic search engines to determine that the blog post is about your Mum, as opposed to more mundanely and fuzzily searching your blog for the strings Mum / Mom / Mater / Mere / Mutter / Moeder / Matka / Parental / Crumbly Old Bat / That Bitch … in whatever textual encoding your blog is written-in.

I’m all for ontologies, just so long as every single person on the planet gets to use at least one of their own design, or none at all; but since that position is essentially the same as not wanting ontologies at all, I suppose I fall into the latter camp.

Regrettably it’s around that point that the video ends. I don’t understand why, I don’t know what Kate’s trying to say – if anything? Having ripped-open a key question at the heart of the semantic web, it’s left hanging and we segue: a piano plays, TBL speaks, some people talk about future coolness, but there is no resolution and frankly little-enough clarity unless you already have an understanding of that about which they’re talking; plus there’s that the first three minutes don’t match the middle critique/schism sections.

However: if you watch the whole thing, and mentally chop off the beginning and the end, I think it provides a platform for some very interesting thoughts.

this posting is syndicated from dropsafe

Review: Kate Ray’s Web3.0 video on #SemanticWeb, interesting, but needs work