Vaz blames ‘racist shooting’ on video game
In a story you may not have picked up on over the weekend, Police in the Swedish city of Malmo have confirmed that an as yet unnamed 38 year old man has been arrested in connection with a series of gun attacks on people with ethnic minority backgrounds.
Prior to the arrest, local police had suspected that more than a dozen unsolved shootings over the last year, in which one person died and eight more were wounded, may have been the work of lone gunman. The man arrested at the weekend has now been charged with one count of murder and seven attempted murders.
Make of that story what you will, but what has piqued my interest here is not the story itself but an Early Day Motion (EDM 907) put down a couple of weeks ago by Labour MP, Keith Vaz, in relation to these shootings.
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Nuclear power is more unpopular than we’re led to believe
contribution by Leo
New polling sheds some light both on where the public stand in terms of different power options, and on the impact of arguments that make nuclear seem more attractive.
The polls are useful for understanding public attitudes towards nuclear power in two ways: they indicate how people regard nuclear at the moment, and they also help show the impact of arguments for nuclear power.
At a basic level, nuclear power is currently pretty much the least popular form of power generation in the UK.
continue reading… »
Here comes that Digital Election we have been waiting for
Last week, Anthony Painter launched a Digital Election Analysis he wrote for Orange.
A key conclusion was the that the eager awaited ‘Digital Election’ we had all been expecting (after the fantastic Obama ’08 campaign) simply failed to materialise, and it was TV wot hung it.
My thoughts on the events were blogged elsewhere.
However, since Sunny has just posted his provisonal Blog Nation programme, I will offer a quick addendum to my earlier thoughts here, which is simply that it is the Labour Leadership Election which will prove to be the Digital Election we have all been waiting for.
continue reading… »
Ebenezer and The Case of the Election Night Tweeter
Its is not often that you see one of the country’s top opinion-formers picking his nose. As I rounded the corner opposite the pub, I was greeted by the sight of Ebenezer, the celebrated blogger, raising his stubby finger towards his nostril. As it entered the nose, he gave his whole hand an expert twist, as if he were operating a corkscrew. He grimaced as something was levered loose, which he pulled out and began rolling between his thumb and his forefinger.
Meanwhile, his other hand was perched over the keyboard of his laptop, his fingers furiously typing.
His eyes were distracted from the screen as I approached, which put an end to his trowelling. He let his non-keyboard hand flop down below his thigh, and I percieved him flick something out onto the pavement by his tiny table. Then he stood up, and offered the hand in greeting.
I may have paused for a spit-second before I shook it, but I don’t think he noticed.
Ebenezer sighed in mock exasperation. “At last!”
I smiled, and protested. “Not my fault, I left the flat an hour ago. They’re working on the Northern line so I had to get a bus.”
He played along. “Well, you should have known. There’s an app for that, yeah?” He waved his nose-picking hand at the metal chair opposite his, and sat down.
There was half a free-sheet newspaper splayed across the seat. Upside down, the new Prime Minister’s gurning face looked back at me. I picked it up and chucked it onto the ground, somewhere near where the bogey had probably landed.
Then I sat down and placed my iPhone carefully on the table. Ebenezer rolled his eyes at me. “What are you drinking?” he said. I could see he had a half-finished pint of some kind of dark ale on the go, leaned up against his laptop.
“I’ll probably just have a coffee for the moment,” I said. I stood up with the idea of ordering, but a waitress had clocked me and was already striding over. She was bursting out of a tight white shirt and had one of those black ties with a huge knot sitting over the centre of her chest.
When I ordered my a decaf latte, Ebenezer let out an audible snort, and shook his head. The girl bit her lip to suppress a smile, then disappeared inside.
“That knot must have been, like, a quadruple windsor or something” he said when she was out of view.
I decided to change the subject. “What are you working on?”
“Just a blog. But not for the main blog, though. Just my blog. Its about Dave.”
I nodded solemnly. Dave was dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to write something too. He was one of the first blogs I read when I started. Loads have people have been doing it. Its a good tribute I reckon.”
Dave Carswell was an old-school socialist, trapped in the second decade of the twenty-first century. He had worked in social care sector, but not front-line, and had been active in the unions for many years. He had also been a councillor too, in somewhere like Lewisham, but I think that had been a pretty short-lived experience. Whenever he wrote about that kind of local politics, his words would drip with condescension.
I just knew him as an Angry Old Blogger. He was good for a laugh if you desired some good old fashioned anti-Tory prejudice, the kind of craic you could really only find on the sites of the older guys. Whenever the younger generation attempted the same sort of stuff, it felt a bit false, as if they were desperate to live-up to some retro-ideal. But when Dave mentioned Mrs Thatcher and the milk, you knew it was authentic. His was a very real and very verbose passion.
“So, did you know him well then?” I asked. “I saw him at a couple of the meet-ups, but I knew him mostly from the blogs.”
Ebenezer shrugged. “Its not really an obituary” he said. “More of a review of his last few posts and tweets.”
I understood. Dave Carswell had scored a couple of big hits during the election campaign. “That’s great,” I said. “You could talk about the #LiberalDemoCrap hashtag, that was him. And that review of the first debate where he compared Brown to Michael Foot, that was awesome. Did you read that one?”
“Yeah, the first couple of thousand words, but…” Ebenezer’s voice trailed off for a moment, as if someone had pulled the plug on his inner motor. I could see he was choosing carefully what to say next.
“It’s about the run-up to his death. There was something not quite right about it.”
“You mean, it wasn’t a heart attack?”
He shook his head. “No no, it was definitely a heart attack. But there’s more…”
I cut him off in mid-sentence. “Hey look, if you’re going to write something about burn-out, about him blogging too much, its already been done. One of the obituaries was all about that, I re-tweeted it this morning.”
It was true. Dave had definitely blogged too much in those final days. He had fisked dozens of Cameron’s speeches, and written lengthy ripostes to most of the Telegraph’s front pages. He had played every spoof poster photoshopping game, and would forward links from elsewhere quite relentlessly. I was ashamed to admit it, but I had actually stopped following him on twitter about 10 days before polling, because he had been clogging my stream with RTs. He had dedicated resources to this election that only the unemployed or the retired could spare, though I was never clear whether Dave actually fell into either of these categories, or whether he was just self-employed.
“Well that’s part of it, yeah,” said Ebenezer. “He totally wiped himself out. The amount he was doing, staring at all those screens all day, it was bound to do some damage eventually.”
I was astonished at Ebenezer’s complete lack of self-awareness of his own life-style. He had about six computers set-up in his flat. And a man who posted exegesis on sock-puppetry in local government at 3am had no business casting aspersions over people like Dave, who at least kept to blogging inside normal social hours, 8am to midnight.
But I bit my tongue, for it seemed he was about to say something interesting.
“The thing is, he died at the wrong time.”
I was quick to score a cheap point. “No disrespect or anything, but to die on the first day of this new government may not be the worst thing to happen.”
Ebenezer ignored my attempt at humour. Instead, he messed about with his laptop for a moment. I looked beyond him and noticed the ‘free wi-fi’ logo on the glass pane of the pub door, below the Mastercard symbol. With a maestro like flourish, he clicked the laptop for a final time, and then spun it around to face me. It was Dave’s twitter page.
“Have a look at that!” said Ebenezer, triumphantly.
I was lost. “Its Dave’s tweets, right?”
“Right, but look at the last one.”
I read it aloud off the screen. It was just a short tweet about the new Prime Minister’s and the political fudge that had finally earned him his invitation to the Palace.
“Why so special?” I asked. “I tweeted the same thing. We all did, probably.”
“Yes. But this tweet was posted after Dave died.”
I bent forward in my chair and looked at Ebenezer. What game was he playing?
Eventually I thought of something to say. “Seriously dude, that’s bullshit. You don’t even know when he died.”
Ebenezer snapped shut the lid of his laptop, hard. It made a loud clap, that could have been a crack, and I winced.
“But I do! I do!” he whispered. “I have a contact in the police, who told me that Dave died around 3am on Friday morning.”
I leant back in my chair in disgust. “Get. To. Fuck. You. Twat. You don’t have any contacts in the Met…”
“Yes I do actually” said Ebenezer, suddenly no more than a schoolboy. “There’s this guy, right. He runs a forum where they review giant glass dildos and foreskin clamps and shit like that. Anyway, I traced his IP address back to a policestation in Brent. And but so now he does stuff for me. Nothing major or anything, he just confirms official reports that aren’t public yet. It gives me an edge.”
“What on earth were you doing tracing back IPs from a dildo site?” This revelation made me genuinely angry, because usually Ebenezer was militantly in favour of Internet privacy.
He blanked the question.
“So Dave had his heart attack at 3am, the police surgeon said.” He looked at me for acknowledgement, and I nodded my assent, conceding the point.
“And that figures, because it was at about 3am that it became clear who was going to get the most seats. After the results came in from Southampton and the recount up in Kettering, we could see which way the farts were blowing.”
I smiled. “So Dave had a heart attack because of the election result?”
“Right. He’d invested so much time working against it, he must have been livid. Pushed him over the edge.” His voice was almost breaking up.
I joined the dots that Ebenezer had sketched out for me, and asked the question he wanted me to ask. “So how did he send a tweet at 2pm? Someone must have hacked into his account, right?”
Ebenezer gave me a wry smile, as if to say, now who’s bullshitting. Why on earth would someone spend so much effort hacking into a twitter account, just to post something asinine about the election.
“No one hacked the account” he said, as if in conclusion.
I put my hands over my face and forced a muffled scream through them. “You cannot seriously be thinking what I think your thinking.”
He flipped open the laptop, and woke the screen from sleep. Dave’s tweets flickered back onto the screen. His nose picking finger pressed up against the LCD. “Look at the time stamp of the last tweet.”
I read off the screen. “2:05pm. Yes, I know, after Dave died, so you say.”
“Yes. After Dave died. But before our new Prime Minister announced his coalition. He didn’t make the announcement until at least a quarter to three. I know because I tweeted it when it happened, and Dave had already beaten us to it. I remember thinking it was odd because he never had any inside information before.”
I was speechless. Irritated at Ebenezer behaving like a hypocrite, annoyed that he was wishing ghosts into twitter.
“So that’s the gist of my obituary,” he said. “A guy obsessed with politics right up until the grave… and beyond!” He made a butterfly with his hands and fluttered it towards my face. I pushed him away.
“Seriously man, that’s really cruel. He had a wife, didn’t he?”
“Divorced.”
“Yeah, but still. Thousands of people read your blog every day. Its a really shitty thing to do.”
The mention of his blog statistics seemed to rip Ebenezer back into reality. He sheepishly slumped forward on his bulky frame, losing a couple of inches of height.
Just then, the waitress returned with my coffee. I thanked her, and she smiled. I didn’t smile back, and Ebenezer was much less interested in the knot in her tie than he had been before. She shuffled off.
The chime of a birdsong broke the silence. I was glad of new messages, so I leant forward and picked up my iPhone, to see what was new. It was a slight surprise to see that my screen was blank. The noise had not come from my phone.
Ebenezer nodded towards the floor. A little brown bird was hopping over the discarded free-sheet, twittering away.
I avoided Ebenezer’s gaze and reached for my coffee, and we sat drinking in silence, waiting for something new to happen.
Why it’s important to just Tweet and be damned!
The furore around @BevaniteEllie has got me thinking. Twitter isn’t really understood very well by a lot of people.
Ellie Gellard is now a public enemy as far as the Mail is concerned and Stuart MacLennan has lost his parliamentary candidacy because of twitter.
Twitter is fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of people.To the Old Media it is something through which to trudge, to dig up filth to smear on those it pleases. Others think that because nothing on twitter matters that twitter doesn’t matter. I think both views of twitter are wrong.
For example, Paul Sagar argues that Twitter is treated as something really important, and that really annoys him.
Twitter is little more than a bunch of idiots expressing half-baked thoughts, joining herds of other stampeding #idiots, and at very best linking their “followers” to other place that aren’t Twitter, where things of substance are actually going on.
There seems little better description of 90% of the human condition, the boring, mildly entertaining, benign, hilarious, passionate, confused, occasionally dull, and almost entirely inconsequential content of most of most of our lives.
I don’t say this to belittle human life – I agree with Brian Cox, human life is the wonder of the solar system – but I want to say that a lot of it, fun though it is, is unimportant. I think that’s an fairly uncontroversial position so long as you are not so self-absorbed that you consider any moment not worthy of record as not worthy of yourself.
99% of the time nothing on Twitter really matters, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for something important, or that the links built on it can’t be transformed into something more. Inconsequential doesn’t mean not worthwhile.
The second way that twitter is “misused” is less of a misunderstanding and more of a clash of formats.
Twitter is in my view an extension of conversation. In a bar you can’t stop someone from talking to you or overhearing your conversation, likewise on twitter you can’t stop someone seeing your tweets. The difference however is important. Tweets are immemorial whereas speech is transitory.
Those who think it is unimportant because it is inconsequential should take another look at how important their day to day conversations are to them – and how important they might be if recorded for all time.
Likewise, those cynically exploiting Twitter for cheap dirt should reconsider how much credence they give to throw away comments when they would be inconsequential in everyday conversation – sooner or later they will end up looking like gossip mongers not investigative journalists.
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A longer version is at Left Outside
The Digital Economy Bill: who did what
The public whip tells us that the parties voted the following ways on the Digital Economy Bill. Astonishing that just nine Tory MPs (less than one in twenty) bothered to vote on such controversial legislation.
Well done to those Lib Dems who turned up for their unanimous opposition, although due to their low turnout they were outnumbered by the rebel Labour MPs.
continue reading… »
Gullible press taken in by CSI Woo York claim
In the last few days we’ve seen a couple of classic pieces of lousy and wholly uncritical technology churnalism in the media.
One, the spurious claim that ‘Facebook cause syphilis’ was quickly taken apart by Ben Goldacre despite the somewhat worrying refusal of NHS Tees to provide Ben with access to the data on which the ridiculous claim, which, rather alarmingly, was made by the trust’s Director of Public Health.
That leaves me to tackle this story, which emerged as wire copy from the Press Association and rapidly found its way into both the Daily Mail and The Sun before, worryingly, creeping into the industry press as well:
Typing technology ‘pervert trap’
Paedophiles using the internet to target youngsters could be tracked down – by the way they use a keyboard.
Researchers are investigating ways to use technology that can determine a typist’s age, sex and culture within 10 keystrokes by monitoring their speed and rhythm.
Former Northumbria Police detective chief inspector Phil Butler believes the technology could be useful in tracking down online fraudsters and paedophiles.
Professor Roy Maxion, associate professor at Newcastle University, has been carrying out the research in the US.
This is industrial-grade bullshit piece of advertorial from start to finish but, for reasons that will shortly become clear, still well worth picking to pieces.
Let’s start by telling you the truth about Dr Roy Maxion’s background and his actual research. continue reading… »
April 6th: The day British democracy dies?
There are many problems with British democracy, and also many upsides, but the one thing about UK government is certain; every MP, elected by their constituents, has the option to vote on laws that are being put to parliament and to scrutinse their contents. On April 6th this basic element of our democracy will be undermined for party political expediency and corporate interests as the Digital Economy Bill is attempted to be shoehorned in to a session on the same day Gordon Brown is expected to call the next General Election.
The Digital Economy Bill has many problems, it is poorly worded, it is detrimental to our liberties in a way that would not be tolerated if the liberties being thrown to the wind were ones we exercised in the streets rather than virtual highways, and furthermore it is in part drafted by corporate lobbyists in the form of the BPI.
There was some hope earlier this month when Harriet Harman “promised” that there would be debate on the bill, however those words have turned (predictably) in to shallow and hollow shadows of themselves. Harriet Harman has given the House of Commons less than one day to debate a bill than similar sized bills of the past (Harman’s own Equality Bill had a good 12 days worth of parliamentary time for scrutiny). Labour (through Harman) have effectively said today that the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for our laws matters less than their own authoritarian decision that the law must pass before the next election. The BPI come before the concerns of the people.
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Vote Pirate Party
This originally appeared on Hagley Road to Ladywood’s pre-election series.
I voted for Labour in the last three General Elections. In ’97 I did it with conviction and hope. Four years later, before the War on Terror and all that jazz, I voted Labour with quiet content. At the last election, despite my better judgement and deep anger at the party, I did so again.
I will not be voting Labour in the coming General Election.
The fact remains that some of my closest political friends are still deeply wedded to the party. They don’t have much love for Brown, and they’re not defenders of the Iraq War, but their loyalty is to the party, not the personalities of the current car-wreck of a government. I’ve always been a pragmatist, not a tribalist.
I toyed with voting, and campaigning for, the Lib Dems. But having ‘enjoyed’ many run-ins with leading Lib Dem bloggers, I found many of them to be insufferably self-righteous. I know Lib Dem bloggers who are great, but others seem to believe they have a monopoly on liberalism and a fabulous sense of their own importance.
So, I find myself without a natural home.
Recently I wrote encouraging voters to ignore the largely indistinguishable major parties and vote for the single issue that’s closest to their heart. For me, it is individual rights and the increasing illiberalism of our lawmakers. Following my own advice I’m inclined to vote for the Pirate Party UK. continue reading… »
Would the actions of the Digital Economy Bill be tolerated “offline”?
There’s a race on, and no it’s not the Cheltenham festival. Should the election be held on the 6th of May as is expected then parliament will be duly dissolved around the 6th of April, which leaves only 10 days of parliamentary time to debate all the remaining laws trying to be passed. It is this reason that when the Lords finally passed the Digital Economy Bill on the 15th of March they spent a significant portion of time discussing the issue of the “wash-up”, or a (relatively) clandestine period of legislative discussion that occurs in the twilight between an announcement of an election being made, and parliament being closed down for the impending election.
The Government here has one hope and one set of plans, get the Digital Economy Bill through to the “wash-up” in such a way that they can add bits and pieces to an already illiberal piece of legislation without the proper scrutiny of parliament. Instead of our elected representatives ensuring that we are protected from bad law, it would come down to the front benches and the party political whims of the main parties. In short, representation takes the back foot in place of backroom dealing to pass the bills, even if they are slightly watered down in the process. It’s for this reason that we have to stand our ground and ask our MPs to ensure this controversial bill receives proper scrutiny. If they do not provide that scrutiny, if the law goes through on the nod, then the government will have every power to do what they wish, opposed only by the minority Lib Dem party and the Tory party who are surely not the best example of a party beholden to public democracy over business interests.
For those that are writing to your MPs, specifically point them to the areas of the bill that are problematic (and do so in your own words, it has more impact!):
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Give Your Vote!
I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don’t want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.
But if you’re stil parrotting the line that voting doesn’t make a difference and politicians are all the same – implying that you’ve never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain’s policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn’t have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one.
The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. continue reading… »
Tweeting to improve the NHS
Ed Miliband, or at least his tweetmeister, has been asking for suggestions on what should be in Labour’s health manifesto for the coming election.
Now in principle, I’m against this sort of thing. Policy should be developed in branches, in CLPs, in unions and debated on the conference floor.
Even so, I have to admit there’s something quite attractive about being able to bung an idea into 140 characters and send it direct to someone given ministerial authority to pretend to be a minister online.
I think it’s a good way of picking up the odd good, practical idea for change that fits within the broad manifesto statement and brings it a bit more to life than it might otherwise.
So an experienced but now ex-nurse, as an ex-Director of a Primary Care Trust, as an experience developer of social enterprises, and as a Labour leader on a small council, I tweeted six quick ideas, all of which I think would make a decent positive difference to the NHS’s work, and all of which have the virtue of not costing that much.
Here they are, in unadulterated tweet form:
@EdMilibandMP #health Set up local social enterprises to conduct local needs and opportunities research with funds top-sliced from GP commissioning budget
@EdMilibandMP #health Re-democratize PCTs, especially if Adult Social Care functions are moved to the NHS, by creating real veto power in Overview & Scrutiny
#health @EdMilibandMP Reinforce valuable role of walk-in centres by secondment of A&E staff and provision of further emergency capacity.
@EdMilibandMP #health Provide seed corn funding for replication in medical wards of brilliant acute psychiatry www.starwards.org.uk/ idea
@EdMilibandMP #health Reintegrate fully the career development path for care workers/nurses so that nursing degree becomes possible for all
@EdMilibandMP #health Provide ‘guidance’ on minimum nursing staff levels in acute medical/elderly wards & ensure this is priority over all else
*
Don Paskini adds: Those are Paul’s ideas – now over to you. In 140 characters or fewer, which ideas do you think would improve the NHS (or any other area of policy) ?
Digital Economy Bill: Why Amendment 120a isn’t our enemy
There has been a lot of fuss about the Digital Economy Bill online for months, rightfully so. However the current topic that is particularly concerning to opponents of the bill is the latest amendment, 120a, tabled by Lib Dem and Tory peers to replace the vastly more dangerous Clause 17. Clause 17 was the one which it’s argued could give dark Lord Peter Mandelson – or any future Secretary of State – unwarrantable powers to change British copyright law.
If you can’t remember the problems with Clause 17 then you should take another look and be thankful that due to yesterday’s controversial amendment getting through such measures are being weeded out.
I am certainly not saying the bill is good, or even adequate, in either it’s original or it’s amended state; indeed once the bill is passed to the commons I intend to go through it on Liberal Conspiracy in detail. There is a lot more that is bad about the bill than just the file sharing aspects, areas that will unlikely be debated properly in the commons as they have barely been touched in the Lords, and unfortunately barely touched in public opposition. But there are some things that need to be understood about where we are now.
1) Things like this amendment (120a) are not fundamentally bad, certainly not so much that we should spend all of our efforts on them compared to the much greater risks to personal freedom present in the bill.
2) We need to be careful not to over-react because we are ourselves making assumptions about the language used.
3) There has to be a distinction between the law and the practicing of law, and a realisation that no legislation on an issue like this can cover every eventuality.
So, why isn’t this amendment quite as bad as people are saying? continue reading… »
Make yourself heard on the Digital Economy bill
The government are refusing to back down. They are pressing ahead with plans which even they admit could punish innocent people: by disconnecting whole families and companies where one individual may have infringed copyright.
The music and film lobbies have portrayed copyright infringers as thieves endangering their entire industries.
They have pressed for harsh and indiscriminate punishments and persuaded Peter Mandelson that any appeals should be narrow, and focus purely on legal technicalities.
‘I didn’t do it’ will be no defence: if somebody else seems to have shared copyright content on your account, that will be your problem. You will be punished.
continue reading… »
The new PCC chair will let journalism down too
“Let me make sure you know exactly who I am and what I am going to do at the PCC” – so said Baroness Buscombe, the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), at the annual conference of the Society of Editors.
Having read her speech in full, I fear I do know what she is going to do at the PCC – and that I’m not going to like it.
It’s a curious speech in several ways. She started off by recounting in some detail her Conservative Party roots. Leading off with the fact that she’s a Conservative, added to the jibes at Labour and the silence about other parties (even though her reference to civil liberties gave an obvious opportunity to mention the Liberal Democrats, for example), leaves an obvious question about what her motives were.
I’m sure she’s a smart person and can’t have been unaware that the message many people will take from her speech is, “I’m a Conservative”. Is that really the right message for the chair of the PCC – which has to deal with complaints about political stories all in an equitable manner – to send? Is it the best way to reassure the public about how self-regulation will work on her watch?
There were also some rather astringent comments about Google and news aggregators:
continue reading… »
We need to make our voice heard on file-sharing
Today’s Sunday Times published a thoughtful contribution to the filesharing debate from Peter Mandelson. In it, he not only displays his understanding that the Internet, when used well, is about dialogue but also shows his stoicism at the route one style of conversation that takes place in the blogosphere 
To those who have raised their voices about the proposed changes this week, let me say that I hear their concerns. I have read their blogs and can live with the abuse (I’ve had worse)
I see the article as a positive step and should be seen by digital rights campaigners and concerned ISPs that the door is still open. Now is the time to firmly make their case in the consultation on P2P.
I hope that the officials and special advisers to Lord Mandelson who may be reading blogs and briefing him might remember that the music industry have got past form at trying to pretend that technological advance isn’t happening.
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Pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice
Anyone who’s passionate about science, as I am, cannot help but be seriously concerned by the growing extent to which anti-scientific ideas, and the groups and organisations that promote them, are increasingly creeping into public life and attracting mainstream political support.
While it’s easy to ridicule the purveyors of anti-scientific ideas when they’re to be found at the lunatic fringes of mainstream politics, and one thinks immediately of Nadine Dorries’s ridiculous claim that ‘Tridents aren’t weapons of mass destruction’ and David Tredinnick’s expenses claim for astrology software, the kidding around has to stop when one finds sizeable sums of public money are being routed to organisations that promote pseudoscience as a matter of public policy.
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#MichaelJacksonRIP vs #IranElection
Evenin’ all. I wanted to make a quick point about certain global news stories, and the relative amount of news coverage given to each.
Its fashionable, yet incredibly easy to complain that the Michael Jackson death has crowded out news of other more pressing matters. Shawn Micallef sounded an early word of warning about this attitude:
There is no need to compare MJ & Iran – completely dif, just intersect on same medium, not a social/moral lesson to be learned.
Then (again via Twitter, though the link is now lost in the maelstrom) I came across this MJ/Election mash-up, and it occurred to me that coverage (be it on Twitter, blogs or the international MSM) is not a zero-sum game, and that coverage of one piece of news could promote awareness of another.
continue reading… »
Nadine Dorries: an enemy of science?
Recently, Nadine Dorries is emerging as a prominent figure in Tory politics, and since Conservatives are almost certain to be in power by this time next year that’s bad for people who support evidence-based policy, because her relationship with science and rational thinking has been rather fraught.
Dorries’ influence in the party was demonstrated in Prime Minister’s Questions on April 22nd, when dozens of other Conservative MPs sacrificed their opportunity to ask a question in order to allow Dorries to demand a personal apology from Gordon Brown over smeargate. This backfired so badly that Dorries achieved what no amount of Labour spin has been able to in recent months – she made Gordon Brown look good as he brushed her aside.
continue reading… »
Libel, Google and a cause worth supporting
There are many things that are very wrong with English libel law but, arguably, the one issue that should most concern bloggers is the chilling effect of the High Court’s despicable ruling in Godfrey vs Demon Internet Services, under which ISPs and other providers of online services are treated as a publisher, for the purposes of litigation, irrespective of whether or not they had any kind of involvement in publishing the allegedly libellous material.
The problem this creates for bloggers is simply that this makes UK-based ISPs and online services, in particular, a stupidly easy target for any crook, quack or and shyster with an interest in suppressing information about their dubious and, in some cases, unlawful activities. A mere threat of litigation is too often all it takes to propel a service provider into removing content from a blog or forum, regardless of whether the complaint has any kind of merit at all and, as Craig Murray, Tim Ireland, bob Piper and Boris Johnson found, it can even lead to the termination of an entire hosting account, resulting in sites being taken down which had nothing whatsoever to do with the complaint that the ISP received.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Google’s Webmaster Tools and came across a rather curious stream of messages from Google, which appear to have started last November:
continue reading… »
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» Support and solidarity for the jailed victim of rape
» How the Daily Mail is using cancer drugs to attack the NHS
» The difference between a bad joke and a death threat
» Phil Woolas and Lutfur Rahman: compare and contrast
» The violence at student protests misrepresented the vast majority of us
» The Occupation of Milbank: what the press missed
» The Elephant in IDS’s Room
» The trouble with student vanguardism
» Remembrance Day and pacifism
» The student protests were only the beginning of a tidal wave
» #demo2010 – open thread
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