LearningPoetryTechnology

Policy-informed evidence or evidence informed policy - and the rest

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:39:37 GMT

I just wrote to my MP, Andrew Smith to express disappointment at two recent government reactions to expert advice:

the dismissal of David Nutt, head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by Alan Johnson (many stories, but this will do as a reference)
the rejection of the findings of Robin Alexander's excellent Cambridge Review of Primary Education by Ed Balls (also many stories, but this is a place to start)

Though different policy areas, the common theme appears to be that evidence must be informed by policy; policy will not be informed by evidence.

There are other instances. I could go on. The Government's cloth ear doesn't stop with matters of policy. The reaction to the Parliamentary expenses issue, the bail-out of the banks to the tune of £3,000 from each household in Britain; they just don't get it.

If a mob were to show up outside Parliament and drag every member out onto the street and tar and feather them, I reckon the mob would have the support of the people. The people certainly don't have the support of their so-called representatives. Time for them all to go.

Blogging here and there: who am I?

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:30:05 GMT

It has been too long since I tended this site. I have been blogging a lot on my rWorld2 sites (BrookesBlogs and Posterous) as well as on my current R&D support project (JISC-ssbr), but those are mostly to do with my professional geekery: learning and teaching with Internet technologies, higher education, community education, and so on. I don't like to compartmentalise, but when the Internet is a big part of my profession as well as my person it makes some sense to go to different places on it to do and say different things.

The question of identity is a confusing one. I am prompted by commenting on Simon Collery's excellent Kwasababu blog. Blogger (or BlogSpot) offers the commenter the opportunity to "Comment as"... a Google identity (yes, I have several), a WordPress identity (I use local installations of WordPress, not the big public one), TypePad (yes, I have a TypeKey), AIM (nope), OpenID (yes, via all the above) and, of course LJ.

Over the years my identity has fragmented and then re-cohered. There is not much I hide from anyone these days. The Internet is too public for me to indulge in identity play. My work place is reasonably tolerant of (not too) radical politics. But, there are things I want to respond to not as an academic and a higher education professional. So, I guess LJ is the repository of that part of me that survives unprofessionalised.

Whisky note - Teaninich 23yo cask strength

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:00:13 GMT

Wow! At £5.70 a dram it should be good, and blimy, it is. Just had a wee Talisker to start. Nice iodine, golden syrup and black pepper accents, but it gets knocked into a cocked hat by this complex beauty. I don't know where to begin. It speaks in full sentences. The first nose is like the essence of a seaside hayfield distilled through a full silver moon. The first touch on the tongue is astringent and warming as cloves, nutmeg and allspice. Throughout the high alcohol note would remind even a meths drinker that there is something to life. In the background, Seumas' bar is selling cullen skink and the smoked haddock backdrop makes a hard stage for any whisky to work. The colour is very pale straw. The whisky rolls on the back of the tongue like pearls fresh out of an oyster and there is a hint of Tobasco that fades into a warm cedar glow.I know it must be oak, but there is nothing cheap retzina or Aussie Chardo about this. You couldn't imagine a better potpourri for a country house. Seems a shame to tip water into it, but, needs must. The tap water isn't great. The whisky reveals the chlorine and metals that you wouldn't otherwise notice. But the water does release the sweetness, knocking the alcohol spirit down and bringing up the golden sugar and grassy, gentler notes with a hint of wintergreen wafting down the path.

Wish I had paid as close attention to last night's Springbank.

Women in SET

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:02:41 GMT

Sometimes things just get to me. Media Planet published a supplement in the Guardian back on 30 October 2008 titled Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: the Problems and the Solutions. The supplement appears to have been commissioned by the Institute of Physics, who are prominent on the cover proclaiming, "Good practice benefits all". The cover is a mess of a design, but I will focus on the 3x3 grid of pictures which makes up about three quarters of the page. In this there are only two photographs of women: one a pair of smiling Asian graduates in mortarboards and gowns holding scrolls (who knows what discipline, or even if they are anything other than models in a PR stock photo). Now, where else have I seen this picture? Oh yes: http://buyessay.org/how-it-works/ That'll get quality graduates into SET.

Another pic is of a young blonde amongst skyscrapers interrogating a mobile phone or similar portable device. There is a picture of three very young girls each of a different racial type marveling at a hand pipetting a substance into test tubes. There is a photo of people of indeterminate gender in full white cleanroom or decontamination coveralls. There are two abstract images, one of molecules and the other of a glowing green binary bitstream. And, there are three pictures of military hardware: an ICBM labelled "United States", a jet fighter displaying the white star in blue roundel of the US Air Force, and what looks like a filthy great flamethrower, or a static rocket test, or a gas-air burst weapon; anyway, an exhibition of hideously inefficient combustion with billowing clouds of black smoke above a torrid fire stream.

Inside the supplement, big (very big) engineering, military technology and physics are conflated. The adverts tell the story: Atomic Weapons Establishment (full page) with a cubist abstraction of a woman's face made of various arty-techy mini images, Defence Engineering and Science Group (full page) with a besuited babe beside a Eurofighter loaded for bear, BAE Systems: Submarine Solutions, with a wireframe submarine (double half-page spread); Halcrow (full page) boasting what can only be described as terraforming megalomaniacal projects.

Sad, really.

Reasoned argument

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:16:57 GMT

As I do when riding to work or pushing Johnny in his buggy, I exercise debates.

It is often said that we do not have a drugs problem, we have problem because drugs are illegal. I was wondering if aesthetics could help. I hypothesised that there might be an aesthetic of opiates. That there might be a connoisseurship of heroin that would analyse the experience and recognise from sensual nuance the provenance, the makers hand, and so on. I hypothesised that if there were such an aesthetic, it would help to mitigate the social ills brought about by heroin use. Users would strive to become more sophisticated, would shun the bad stuff, and generally use would go down. It became quickly clear to me that even though there is an elaborate aesthetic of alcohol: malt whiskies, champagne, bordeaux, CamRA, etc, this doesn't stop people drinking paint thinner and lamp fuel until they are blind and killing each other.

So, is there a place for aesthetics in addressing social ills?

Consider the much commented upon recent phenomenon of obesity. It suggested itself to me that the food to which connoisseurs are drawn: largely fresh, local, free-range, organic and slow, stands in contrast to the foods implicated in obesity: pre-prepared, of no certain provenance, factory farmed, hydrogenated, transfatted, sweet, fizzy and fast. But, as with alcohol, all the aesthetics of food do not stop parents shoving burgers through school fences at their kids who would otherwise have to survive on fresh veg.

With food, even if it is ignored, there seems to be a link between conoisseurship and healthy eating (in spite of possiblecounter examples such as Antonio Carluccio or fois gras).

So I was left in a more complicated space. On the one hand aesthetics and health - physical and social - appear to be linked. But on the other there is a widespread and dominant antipathy in Britain to developing aesthetics. It is associated with snobbery, class division and the national myth of modest self effacement.

One problem of food aesthetics is that what was tacit and common-sense has been turned into propositional and sophistic. Instead of recognising a fresh vegetable we are expected to apply critical theory to food labeling: understanding a red/amber/green code of saturated fats; understanding what saturation means, in terms of fat chemistry, and then extrapolating from there to recognise what hydrogenated fats and transfats are. And that isn't all, labels just remind us of how stupid or clever we were in school. You didn't used to have to go to school to know about food.

Technorati Tags: food

Licensed activity

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:36:15 GMT

The car, the house, the job, the phone, the telly, the bank and the supermarket or mall are our architecture of recordation and social control. Each gives us an illusion of freedom and individuality. Each serves, rather, to individuate, identify, monitor, track and regulate our behaviour. This is why I value my bicycles so highly.

The automobile is usually thought of and experienced as an instrument of individual freedom. However it is at least arguably an important instrument of state control. Each automobile is registered, regularly re-registered, taxed and insured. Its location in governed space triangulated. If it is taken out of use, it is subject to a statutory off-road notice (SORN).

Each driver of a car is licensed and through the insurance system the number of cars that any one person can operate is, to a great extent controlled: most cars are insured for only one or a few drivers. Put in GPS and the car knows where it is. Tie that to a location-aware information service: pizza just around the corner, and anyone can know where that car is. The agents of the state (the police) can be reasonably confident that by far the majority of people moving about in cars are recorded, their identity checked and double checked, their behaviour regulated: their location in governed space triangulated

The home is one's "castle"? Well, except for the liens upon it: mortgage or rental contract recorded, bank details shared; insurance, council tax, energy and phone bills paid, credit agencies informed.

The job, or our employment status, again, is one of the principal garments of out habitus. What are you? I am a lecturer, plumber, chef, nurse, doctor. Whatever, our trade or our profession is felt to be the easiest and most ready to hand identifier of our selves. But again, as much as identifying and individualising us, our job regulates us, schedules us, entitles us and governs us.

The phone, especially the mobile phone, again triangulates its user both in governed and in physical space. It is experienced as in instrument of liberation from the tyranny of distance: I can call my sister 7,000 miles away at will, but like the car, the house, the job, far more than liberating us it has come to be one further anchor into the architecture of our control.

The television: increasingly promising us the freedom to watch what we want when we want. But, first of all the set is licensed and those vans just might sniff out your unlicensed status. And, even more, as the supposed freedom to watch what we want when we want grows so, too, does the two-way communication technology that records what we are watching and when.

The bank, and especially the debit/credit card gives is freedom to spend: with retailers who take plastic. You can't buy dodgy videos at a car boot sale with a debit card. The bank triangulates our home with our job and manages the funnelling of balances between various regulatory agencies, ensuring most of us hover around the zero point, most of the time.

The supermarkets and shopping malls complete the architecture of control and recordation. The illusion of choice is shattered as we go from town to town seeing the same high streets. We have the freedom to consume, as long as we dress appropriately (no hoodies in Bluewater). And, everything we buy and when we bought it and what we bought at near the same time is known.

To this sad list I should add my beloved Internet.

The preferred mode of activity for the regulation of society has a person either at home preferably watching a digital channel on telly, at work, on the phone (or Web), or in the car travelling between the home and the job or the shops, or shopping at a supermarket or a mall using an electronic payment instrument. Step outside that mode of activity and you are a potential dangerous deviant, who needs to be "manually" monitored.

The bicycle allows us, briefly to step out of the architecture of control and to travel along side it, not in it. Especially if we leave our phone at home and trade with cash.

Turkeys do vote for Christmas

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:55:51 GMT

I accept that Mancunians wouldn't want to be lectured at by London. But, I am sorry that the congestion charge was overturned - and by such a majority. It does seem extraordinarily short sighted and selfish. The problem is that the "Christmas" they have voted for: no charge now, will lead to worse congestion, poorer public transport and will do nothing to help anyone reach any sustainable level of emissions.

Police fundamentalism and Earth First!

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:13:03 GMT

The Observer published a "warning" by the police on Sunday 9 November under the headline, "Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists". In the article, the writers Mark Townsend and Nick Denning, appear to serve as mouthpieces for a simian authoritarianism. They provide little balance to counter the assertion by a "senior source" in the The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) that, "... eco-activists are researching a list of target companies which they believe are major polluters or are exacerbating the threat of climate change." Something wrong with that?

The article goes on to suggest there is a "... network of UK climate camps and radical environmental movements under the umbrella of Earth First!, which has claimed responsibility for a series of criminal acts in recent months." As far as I understood it, the umbrella works as much the other way. Climate Camp provides the umbrella and Earth First! sympathisers - and environmentalists of all stripes, including such radical membership organisations as the WI and the National Trust - may from time to time come under it. This is not just dreadful journalism in the manner of the Daily Mail, this is an attempt to shape a national debate in ideological terms with, I suggest, the aim of demonising dissent, driving a wedge into the environmental movement. Why?

NETCU hardly covered themselves in glory during last summer's climate camp. They managed to drop a copy of their Pocket Legislation Guide to Policing Protest, which has been made available by UK IndyMedia. NETCU describes itself as "... not a public authority as defined by Schedule 1 [of the Freedom of Information Act] and therefore there are no obligations on NETCU to disclose information under the Act. Police Forces are advised NOT to release this guide following freedom of information requests." So, is NETCU cross with environmentalists who blew the wind up their skirts?

I have been thinking about the Earth First! (international site) ethos. On the one hand it could be seen as an expression of humility before the greater world and responsibility to it, no different than a religious person might, with humility, put god first. But, just as god-first can lead to fundamentalist intolerance, so, too, might earth-first. However, not all Christians are fundamentalists and neither are environmentalists or Earth First! And, not all fundamentalists, of any denomination, are violent. But, the "senior source" at NETCU, abetted by toady journos, weaves a web of violent environmental fundamentalism from a set of only loosely, thematically related activities: researching polluting companies, environmental activism, Climate Camp, and Earth First!.

Given one may see one's own reflection in the mirror of our enemies, I wonder whether we might understand NETCU as an expression of police fundamentalism, the extreme end of the order and authority-first movement? I research, from time to time, the behaviours of people and society that appear to me to be damaging to the the earth and other people in it. I read the research of others on the web and in print and I occasionally blog about it. Though I did not make it to Climate Camp last summer that was because our baby son was ill, not because I did not support many of the the aims of the Camp and its organisers. I occasionally assert that over population puts pressure on the carrying capacity of ecological niches, including that of humans. Having made those statements I am also able to assert that violence of all sorts only breeds violence; that power and domination are the problem; that the solution to power and domination lies in the rejection of power and domination, not their transfer from state fundamentalists to any other fundamentalism, religious or environmental. I occasionally welcome a police presence in my community and have met officers who serve out of a desire to make the world a better place. I am not, generally, of the authority-first persuasion, nor am I particularly religious. I try to live gently on the earth and to put the earth and all its inhabitants first.

Putting the earth first is a counter to the me-first ethos that finds expression in human behaviours, which, arguably, have led us into the current banking collapse and to the edge of anthropogenic ecological collapse. Continuous growth is not possible. Systems have carrying capacities. The goods of this earth are unevenly distributed. These are both facts and challenges. NETCU, no thanks to the Observer, appears to be actively attempting to suppress the discovery and publication of facts and to impede resposes to the challenges.

Whisky notes

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:17:22 GMT

Three lovely malts this weekend in Rydal with Ali, Johnny, John, Aileen, Iain and Mhoraig:

Glen Moray (no age, guessing 7 or 8 years) lovely, honey and black pepper
Glen Morangie, Maderia wood finish, sweet, as you would expect, and slightly cloying
Teaninich 10 yo black pepper, lemon and oak.

Technorati Tags: Whisky

The BBC: sanctioning ignorance?

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:30:55 GMT

I know the Today Programme is not Schnews or MediaLens, but compared to the Sunday Breakfast Show on BBC1 with Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, it is a beacon of critical thinking. This morning, the presenters sabotaged a brief piece on Web2.0, the aim of which was to make a complex, specialist topic intelligible to a general audience.

A 15 second video trailer was played as Bill Turnbull said something to the effect: "If you want to bring your old website up to date you do it with what is coming to be called Web2.0 technologies. Here is Spenser Kelly to tell us all about Web2,0." Then just before cutting to the piece, with the camera back on him, Bill said with a deprecatingly snide tone, "I almost said: what ever that is?" Thereby, almost not saying it. To which Sian replied, "I don't know anything about web sites."

The short Click piece then played. It following a website owner wanting to bring his site up to date using new social networking technologies. We were introduced to widgets for importing user content and placing community features on old-style websites. For a specialist it was extremely simplistic, but it did try to make a complex topic interesting to people who are not specialists in the field.

Then, as the piece ended the camera cut to the weather presenter (I did not get her name: blonde, floral print skirt) who simpered and giggled about how she did not know anything about the Internet, either. A good effort was thereby framed into irrelevance by three presenters, whose job is to forge a bond of trust with the audience, saying that it was alright to be stupid about this topic.

But consider the hypocrisy. All three work for one of the most complex organisations in the world, using advanced internet technologies as a matter of course: visualisations, virtualisation, live data feeds; the BBC has embraced many aspects of Web2,0 technologies. These presenters DO know a lot more about the internet than their audience. They must have been pretending to be stupid for some rhetorical effect. I can only assume this is an intentional sanctioning of an anti-intellectual, uncritical approach to complexity.

I say intentional because it would be in the power of the producers to slap down such pseudo-populist, unthinking rhetoric. The fact that it was the social internet which was so framed, I believe is not particularly relevant. The same sort of framing could be applied to any complex topic: is it OK to be stupid about, say, the economy, immigration, the causes of war, or anything else you do not want to think about? Or better, just react with the reactionary herd.

Equally the same piece could have been framed by the presenters positively: "I wonder what web2.0 means?" "My kids all use YouTube." "That was interesting. I learned a lot." Why wasn't it?

Why sanction popular, anti-critical, reactionary attitudes to anything?

Bad behaviour for a public service broadcaster.

Where are the alt voices?

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:55:39 GMT

Over the past weeks as the financial services industry has unravelled and politicians of most mainstream ilks have rushed to reassure the bloatocrats that they will be able to get back to exercising their accustomed power while illegal immigrants clean their offices, I have been listening for articulate alternative voices, for any suggestion that, as the current system wobbles, there are clear options to simply re-establishing confidence in the powers that were and carrying on as before spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need.

As Schnews puts it, "Bigger monopolies and mergers are concentrating power into fewer hands" but, the opposition is not there. As I have been suggesting recently to my beleaguered partner, "...anti-capitalist direct action, [has] declined in the west in recent years; with more energy being put into the war on Iraq and the recent resurgence of eco-action around oil use and climate change." As neoliberalism totters, where are the people to give it the push we need?

I have been looking around the web and finding some interesting social networking technology developments from Rise Up (crabgrass) and the World Social Forum (OpenFSM), but no clear calls for an alternative politics. Oliver James on the Today Programme this morning said:

In only three weeks neoliberal, Blatcherite [Blair/Thatcher], selfish capitalism has been completely discredited in its own terms: proven conclusively not to work... The claim that private enterprise is good, public service incompetent can never again be made with a straight face.

We need more than more of the same, and we need it now. We cannot continue to shore up the chimera economy of continuous growth and the apparatus of the value extracting, unregulated finance industry.

Chomsky continues to point out what is wrong, in a good an analysis of the current collapse (Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed):

predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions. Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual.

But as ever, his programme for action is left to others:

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

Monbiot puts the bail out in the wider context of government support for powerful industry lobbies (Congress confronts its contradictions) and asks, " ... why the hell should we be supporting them?"

Why, indeed. So where is the political campaign addressing these fundamental issues?

Unsustainable practices at Stansted Airport

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:43:55 GMT

Somehow it all hangs together or maybe better said: it all falls apart together. How many more warnings do we need that just about everything we are doing is unsustainable?

I write in response to today’s announcement that Stansted Airport is going to be expanded to handle something like 30% to 40% more traffic over the next couple of years. The numbers are ambiguous. The report says an increase of 10% in flights but and increase from 25M to 35M passengers (10/25 = 40%) Strikes me this announcement is rushed out just when the PM has to be seen to be "optimistic" about the future. Of course there will be more people flying in and out of Britain over the next 5 years, he has to say. To say otherwise would be a sign of lack of confidence in the economy.

Travel will continue to grow, people will continue to take more holidays, food will be flown in from Berserkistan while water is extracted from deep aquifers in desertifying Sahel to drive dwindling oil production. The only thing flying besides accusations is pigs. And, I mean that in all the ways you might take it.

We blame the bankers, the bond traders, the short sellers and so on, but the values of the pinnacle are also the values at the base. Yes, we are anaesthetised by advertising, co-opted by politicians, dependent on supermarkets but, basically we all have to bite a big bullet or the least of our worries will be whether the grey squirrel overtakes the red. We will have eaten them all and be wishing there were more vermin to feed our starving children with.

The Child Trust Fund really makes me cross

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:39:09 GMT

I have come over all childish. As a new Father of Johnny, age nearly 4 months as I write this, I want to stamp my feet and have a tantrum. In fact I nearly did to an unsuspecting friend on the street. I was so wound up I didn't even say hello (sorry Paul).

We have received our Child Trust Fund voucher. How nice. Johnny gets £250 at birth and another £250 when he turns seven. These can be invested in a limited selection of approved funds.

But, I suggest that there are ulterior motives.

The Child Trust Fund's aim seems to be to inculcate in us a set of values that I do not hold; to turn us from tax-paying citizens to share owning customers. And, to do this in part by blackmailing us through our children. Who wants to be standing there when their kid turns 18 and his/her mates are cashing £20,000 cheques and you say, "Sorry, Johnny. I tore up your flipping voucher on principle"? He'd be a better kid than I was if he forgave me, coz that sure would have pissed me off. Even though my parents were on the left of liberal, I had hardly any political awareness at 18 and would have been very easily bought by a system that gave me twenty grand.

The Child Trust Fund strikes me as the most effective attack on the principle of public provision of health, education and welfare for all ever launched. That this was done by a Labour government is the last straw for me.

In 2006, 669,000 births were registered in England and Wales (nearly half 291,000 outside marriage, but that is another story: boom, boom!). The total value of Child Trust Fund vouchers issued in 2006 would have been about £167 million. When the payments to seven-year-olds kick in in 2009 this will double to something like £334 million a year. You may think this is a nice thing for your kids, but from another perspective this is taxpayers' money being bunged to the financial services industry for 18 years before they have to pay anything out. As much as supporting children this amounts to about £4.3 billion in state aid to the people who brought us Enron, Northern Rock, the credit crunch, rail privatisation, the complete mystery that is consumer energy pricing, GATS and the whole architecture of global, corporate capitalism. This seems to me like an unprecedented transfer of wealth not to children or the poor but to stockbrokers.

And the Child Trust Fund is supposed to stimulate us all to pay more each month into our children's accounts, so we can become a nation of savers. Just like granny used to give us premium bonds? No, because this is not a national savings scheme but a private, corporate scheme. The stated aim is to give all children some wealth behind them when they turn 18. It is expected that this will be used to fund education and training. Presuming, thereby to lock in an increasingly privatised fee-paying tertiary education system.

Maybe John Prescott wasn't actually bulemic: everything his government was doing just made him sick.

The middle class, to the detriment of the excluded, happily privatise services such as security (private security guards, alarms and CCTV services), health (BUPA etc) and education instead of funding the common-wealth through taxation. Another product of the Children's Mutual, one of the leading providers of CTF services is private health care.

So, what to do? We are considering putting the vouchers into the approved fund run by the Methodists and then opening an ISA-type account with the Co-op Bank. That way Johnny gets a small cash payout at 18 to spend on whatever he wants and we have a fund for him over which we have some say. Boy would I rather we all paid that as tax into public provision of education and health care.

Thanks very much New Labour. I'll be tidying up this rant and would welcome any comments.

Horsepower as a proxy measure for (un)sustainability

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:58:46 GMT

Twenty-five billion horsepower. To argue the detail would be futile. But, as a proxy for sustainability it is very useful, because it does relate to a real beast that we know and understand. A horse in good condition can produce about 14Hp in bursts and sustains slightly less than 1Hp at a good working plod. In order to do this the beast eats, drinks and excretes. A horse, compared to a car is a reasonable converter of fuel to useful energy. You may argue that the average car only runs for 20 percent of the time. Yes, and horses sleep. If you want to tinker at the edges of this vision with energy conversion factors and life-cycle analyses from manufacturing to disposal you may, but remember a horse works for about 15 years and a car for less than that. And, pace vegetarians, at the end of its life you can eat the horse. You could cut the numbers in half and the vision is still apocalyptic.

An ordinary domestic car engine produces between 80Hp and 200Hp Some produce more, like the 350Hp 6 litre V8 in a Cadillac Sliverado. Some produce less, like the 61Hp Smart car. But if you were to stick a wet finger in the wind and say the average car has about 100 horses you wouldn't be far wrong.

You see where I am going? Can you fodder 100 horses in your garden? Horses, like cars, like us consume hydrocarbons and produce energy, water and oxides of carbon (carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide).

In 2006, according to UK DfT statistics there were 27,830,000 registered cars (not taxis, not light goods, not HGVs or buses, just cars). 2,410,000 were company cars. So, call it 25 million private cars in the UK (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands are similar, fyi, and the USA has over 100 million).

Then, that makes 25 million cars times 100 horses each, is two and a half billion horses: just to power Britain's private car fleet, not even buses, trains, trucks, industry or heating. The fodder for those horses approximates very closely to the debt we are incurring to to the earth by driving. And, as it happens, is a reasonable way to envisage our biofuels requirements if we were to convert from petroleum. The private transport energy demand of the UK, France and the Netherlands alone would require us to grow enough to feed more horses than there are humans on the earth (six billion ish).

The next thing? Protecting the digital commons

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:01:31 GMT

What you have to imagine is a world where small personal computing devices are connected not to central services but to one another in a vast peer-to-peer network, as fast as anything we now have, carrying all kinds of data: audio (music, phone calls, etc), video, text, graphics, etc but bypassing wires, telcos and ISPs - everyone routing for everyone else.

I wrote here and here about wireless mesh networks such as implemented by the XO in the "one laptop per child" programme (details) partly inspired by the Cybiko (see).

The network - how you connect - is only part of the story. There are at least three key parts to the digital commons: the network technology, data, and access to the "air": radio spectrum.

Why do you connect? To communicate, entertain, learn, teach, inform, in other words to exchange data. The essential partner to peer-to-peer networking is widely distributed data storage and file transfer. For now, BitTorrent is the model: "The key to scaleable and robust distribution is cooperation."

There is no essential need for big centralised services - government or corporate - to run the Web. Arguably central services exist primarily for ulterior purposes: security, commerce, power, control - providing the minimum to customers necessary to keep benefits/profits rolling in for key stakeholders.

Putting aside the it-will-never-work mind set, there are challenges: power, speed, maliciousness. These are not technically insurmountable. But, to develop a Web based on massive peer to peer "meshworks" and widely distributed databases will need R&D funding. But, who will fund a model that essentially overturns the corporate/state applecart?

A third key part is access to radio spectrum. I wrote about this in 2002 (republished here)

Timeslice

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:58:25 GMT

(Originally posted on 26 February 2002 and here republished from my currently unserviced personal website, "The Last Post".)

The digital communication revolution requires individual users of the internet to attach themselves to the dominant economic order and, effectively, to "rent" their digital existence in timeslices. The gatekeepers of the global economy have, it would appear, a strategy whose aim is the commodification of everything. Like "selling air", the internet has provided the means by which we might be sold our life by the fractional second. These may be pre-paid or billed monthly, bulk-purchased or metered, but to have a digital existence we are required to have an account with, at the very least, a telco and an ISP. This is nearly impossible without also an account with a bank. To transact business on-line we need an account with a credit card company. All these accounts, of course, come with their shoals of attendant marketing plays: everything from Omaha Steaks to travel insurance to double glazing.

The wired terrestrial infrastructure represents a large capital investment. So, too, does the satellite infrastructure. While, it is not unreasonable that those who made this investment should recover the cost and profit from their investment, the requirement to repay the investment and the desire to profit from it from do ensure that most users of the networks are selected from those who are already hooked into regularly serviced accounts. This effectively denies many people access to a digital existence. In addition, some networks impose such unpleasant conditions (cable television, persistent financial services sales, etc.) that many are choosing not to participate. However, generally, acceptance of the principle of commidifying everything and the ability to consume a commodified existence, either as an individual or through a proxy (usually the employer), is, these days, the price of admission to the online, "wired" world.

The terrestrial wireless (radio) infrastructure, while regulated, remains a commons, regulated and licensed by the state for the public good (in theory). There are many segments of the spectrum that are licensed to many different organisations: broadcasters, telcos, the military, etc. But, some are reserved for "Citizens' Band (CB) Radio" and similar activity. Securing and expanding the RF commons against corporate enclosure is perhaps the main issues facing civil society at the start of the 21st century.

On February 7 [2001], 37 leading US economists signed a joint letter asking the federal communications commission (FCC) to allow broadcasters to lease spectrum they currently license from the government in secondary markets. The letter, which went virtually unnoticed by the general public, is the opening salvo in a radical plan to wrest control of the entire spectrum from governments around the world, and make the radio frequencies a private preserve of global media giants. If they succeed, the nation state will have lost one of its last remaining vestiges of real power - the ability to regulate access to broadcast communications within its own geographic borders. (Jeremy Rifkin The Guardian, 28/04/01, accessed 29/04/2001)

There is much discussion of peer-to-peer information sharing over the public networks (Napster, Gnutella). These still require one to be connected to the internet, and thus to have accounts and to rent a digital existence. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), sometimes also called the Next Generation Internet Protocol or IPng, (see http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/ipng-main.html) will enable, among many things, many billions of internet addresses. Statements are made such as every button on every person's every article of clothing could have a unique IP address for the next thousand years. Practically speaking this means that instead of telephone numbers for mobile devices, each device will eventually have a unique IP address.

So what? With each device having an absolute address, each device can act as an IP router. This can, in turn, enable an infinite number of private peer-to-peer wireless networks, or, effectively, one single global network made up of everyone, powered by everyone and free for all (assuming the batteries are charged off the grid). There would be no need for a telephone company. But, there will be a need for free radio spectrum: free "air". If all the useful RF spectrum is owned by "global media giants", true peer-to-peer networking cannot happen and one of the greatest benefits of IPv6 will be lost to us.

Media companies will still own, create and sell content. We will still access websites but, we won't pay for the phone call, any more than we pay to walk down the street to get to the movie theatre. We will not pay to speak to friends any more than we would if they were sat beside us.

It will of course be necessary to buy a device, but there is no need for that device to be "attached" to the purchaser. Even if one buys a device using a credit card that device might later change hands several time outside the regulated economy, anonymising its IP address as far as the human operator is concerned.

Cybiko already makes and sells a wireless "intertainment" toy (not an IPv6 device) with a limited range and capbable of "hopping" a daisy-chain of up to 10 devices. In areas of high population and user density this already creates an nascent alternative to other communications infrastructures. Cybiko claims complete coverage of Manhattan, for example, using devices with an individual range of no more than 300 metres.

This could be the next generation of mobile telephony. The truly mobile Internet. But this is also the black hole into which the telcos are staring. This is no way to recover a multi billion dollar investment in 3G spectrum licensing. This is why the media corporations and the telcos are eager to force governments to give them control of the whole spectrum. And this is why people must ensure that a significant range of the spectrum is preserved as a commons: regulated but free.

Fathers

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:57:43 GMT

For George Roberts and John Chisholm

Did you see the endings in your father’s eyes
as he cast you out of heaven unconcerned;
did you hear him ask himself if he could fly
and realise in a moment it was not too late to learn

as you went sailing in the ether on a rush of gas and air
from breaking wind to breaking windows overnight
he came diving after you on that long maker’s fall
the crippled half-blind shaper of your imperfect life.

Drunk on milk and honey, surfing waves of arms,
passed from face to face, from hand to hand to heart,
drifting in the space of everybody’s dreams
could you hear your father praying: do no harm?

Wishing every kiss would produce a thousand sparks
and every spark a universe of stars
always out in front of you and racing to keep up
dropping every baton and lowering all the bars

as you went sailing in the ether on a rush of gas and air
from breaking wind to breaking windows overnight
he came diving after you on that long maker’s fall.
The crippled half-blind shaper of your imperfect life

hands you an empty pentagram, a black star
and an anarchist’s hat with a wink and a rose and a key
that won’t quite fit until it’s rusted, lost and found
and polished up quickly on your ragged sleeve

handed on in the heat of a moment’s mistake
again and again and again returned to the lame
creator embarassed to say where it’s been
could you hear your father saying: there’s no shame?

As you went sailing in the ether on a rush of gas and air
from breaking wind to breaking windows overnight
he came diving after you on that long maker’s fall
the crippled half-blind shaper of your imperfect life.

George Roberts
5 January 2008

Literacy is access. Give freely

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:29:16 GMT

A perceptive article by the man who founded Project Gutenberg, invented the "e-book" and is a leading light in the open source and open content movement, Michael Hart (via Stephen Downes). Read it and simultaneously weep and rejoice. Rejoice at 12 gig data sticks for £60, hard disks at $1.00/a gigabyte (half-a-terabyte for half-a-monkey). But, weep at the fact that access to all this is more about minds (the closed kind) than money. The protection of privilege is practised by all of us who are privileged. But, we can work to - in the old phrase - raise our consciousness (split our infinitives) and start to take action, not in the pinch-beck spirit of the hairshirt but in the joy of giving. You can give a laptop here, or donate to almost anything at justgiving.com; become a social entrepreneur through unLtd world, or in a million other ways on and off line. But however you do it, do it copy-left, join the free software foundation, or with a creative commons licence.

Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:49:24 GMT

Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre

The Brookes Poetry Centre reaches out, inviting anyone interested in contemporary poetry to attend their seminars and readings and to sign up for the weekly poem. I often find there to be a division between the practice of poetry and the academic study of poetry, with there being a closed and self-sustaining circle of "academic" poets who study poetry and are in turn studied by those who study poetry. While I wouldn't want to deny poets the opportunity of earning a living, the practice appointing poets to academic positions might eracinate the poet and their poetry. The close tie-in between the Contemporary Poetry Centre and the Poetry Society might suggest leanings in this direction. But I sound a bit dog-in-a-manger. The weekly poem service is good. Use it as a way to get a flavour of its sponsors tastes:

This initiative has been set up in collaboration with eight UK presses specialising in the publication of contemporary poetry. The participating presses range from the smaller and newer to the larger and more established, giving us access to a range of new poetry and voices: Anvil Press, Bloodaxe Books, Cinnamon Press, Enitharmon, Heaventree Press, Landfill, Peterloo Poets, and Salt Publishing.

FaceBook, the intelligence community and right-wing PACs

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:12:59 GMT

Further to a lot of discussion about FaceBook and comments (here and here for example) regarding Microsoft's possible investment in the company...

In a podcast lecture from UC Berkley: "Introduction to the human", Greg Niemeyer, cited this article. He asserted there was a chain of connections linking FaceBook with the CIA and DARPA's discredited Office of Information Awareness (OIA).

Mad conspiracy theory? I wonder (see). Anita Jones, James Breyer and Peter Thiel may be the glue that holds it together: .

Anita Jones was head of R&D for the US Dept of Defence at the time that the Information Awareness Office (IAO) was being established.

Accel invested $13 million in Facebook. Note who is on the committee deciding the "grants": Breyer and Thiel; here's Breyer. (btw, this is not me!) BBN, what do they do? And, check out the Board. There's Breyer and Jones.

In-q-tel? Now it gets interesting. Jones is on the board of the CIA's investment arm after serving as Head of R&D for the Defence Dept. In-q-tel is a "government contractor operating as an independent nonprofit corporation, In-Q-Tel receives regular oversight from the CIA, which keeps Congress informed of the company's activities." I feel so reassured. Look at this. BBN is one of In-q-tel's big investments. They are not a technology start-up, they've been a very big information technology contractor to the government for years. Indeed they built ARPAET many years ago. Another one of Anita's outfits - she's on the board of SAIC. Of course they're linked with In-q-tel.

Peter Thiel: we met him briefly on the group with Breyer, managing FaceBook's platform development "grants". See him here. Note his literary endeavours. Thiel founded PayPal. He believes money should be issued privately and commerce transacted without interference (or democratic oversight?) from states (listen here).

In a way I am unimpressed, unsurprised that DARPA and the CIA are involved.

But here is what pisses me off, and scares me a little: Thiel's colleague Rod Martin founded Vanguard Political Action Committee (Vanguard PAC) and Thiel served on the board of advisers of the PAC: "Founded by some of Silicon Valley's most successful conservatives, TheVanguard.Org is here to take the battle to the enemy." And who is the enemy? Not those who would overthrow the constitution, but MoveOn and " ...the same liberal media and ageing hippies who torpedoed us in Vietnam..." (source). They want to "take back the Internet". Like it was theirs in the first place. (Oh, maybe it was?) These people categorise me as the enemy and regard the Internet as theirs. (See articles in the Valley Wag here and here for corroboration of Thiel's associations.)

Rod Martin, Head of the Vanguard and Co-founder, with Pete, of PayPal co-authored a book with Jeb Bush: Thank You, President Bush: Reflections on the War on Terror, Defense of the Family, and Revival of the Economy (find it on Amazon if you can be bothered).

So what else interests Thiel? The "singularity". Here's his bio, again sharing a platform with Nick Bostrom Where have we heard that name before (FHI and Transhumanism)? The current manifestation of the eugenics movement (but that's a digression I explored here.

Breyer and Jones are on the Boards of BBN. Breyer and Jones headed the American Venture Capital Association. Breyer and Theil are on the FaceBook board.

Charlene Croft wonders if she is sounding like a "conspiraloon". More from others here and here.

Or is this just me with my tin-foil hat screwed on too tight?

Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:07:41 GMT

Spiritual Midwifery (1975), by Ina May Gaskin, a collection of birth stories, wisdom and medical advice never got quite as wide a circulation as Our Bodies Ourselves, but is probably as fundamental a text in the history of the counter-culture and women's movement in the USA.

"This book is a spiritual book, and at the same time it is a revolutionary book. It is spiritual because it is concerned with the sacrament of birth... The book is revolutionary because it is our basic belief that the sacrament of birth belongs to the people and that it should not be usurped by a profit-oriented... system."

Ina May Gaskin with her husband Stephen were among a group of several hundred hippies in several dozen converted buses who drove across America in the late '60s before settling on the Farm in Tennessee. In the late '60s midwives had ceased to to exist as a recognised profession in the US, childbirth was entirely medicalised and medicine was (and still is) a private, corporate enterprise. Not having much money, not having "jobs" and not taking charity meant the travelling community couldn't afford hospitals and had to learn to diy childbirth. To make a long story short, from those beginnings Ina May led a revolution in antenatal and childbirth care in the US and was instrumental in getting midwifery recognised as a profession in its own right as a founding member of the Midwives Association of North America (MANA), its president from 1996 - 2002, an author of the professional qualification Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) and a founder of the qualifying authority North American Registry of Midwives (NARM). She was a visiting fellow at Yale University in 2003. In an article in Salon in 1999, she is described as, "...brilliant, politically savvy and aware -- a postmodern hippie who holds a very strong space for her alternative knowledge system yet moves with fluidity and ease in the professional, political and medical realms."

The Farm

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:07:29 GMT

Been too long since I've been on these pages. I want to celebrate the Farm. It was in college back in '75 or '76 that I heard about Ina May Gaskin and her seminal text Spiritual Midwifery. This, together with the Whole Earth Catalog, might be taken one of the first books of the hippie bible. Bear with me. I keep expecting crystalline pixies to hop off the screen but they don't: just solid, well researched pacifist and environmental activism. Makes me feel good about the world. Go there. Spend some time. Return refreshed.

Well done, that Jury! B52 two not guilty

Tue, 22 May 2007 19:01:44 GMT

B52 two not guilty! Who'd have thought! The mainstream news has picked the story up on their websites: Guardian and BBC. And you can "listen again" to Phil on the Today Programme at 0742 23 May 2007.

From the B52 two blog:

"This afternoon, Tuesday 22 May, at Bristol Crown Court, the trial of two Oxford peace activists Philip Pritchard and Toby Olditch (known as the 'B52 Two') concluded with the jury returning a unanimous verdict of not-guilty- in less than three hours. The two were charged with conspiring to cause criminal damage at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on 18 March 2003 when they tried to safely disable US B52 bombers to prevent them from bombing Iraq."

Poetry is difficult

Sun, 20 May 2007 09:49:32 GMT

Todd Swift's excellent Eyewear, is a culture blog focussing on poetry. In one of his recent posts, "Poetry is difficult" he writes: "I still believe poetry is the highest art form, maybe even the finest intellectual, if not spiritual, pursuit, alongside philosophy. I am no longer sure poetry is widely sustainable, unless the mainstream public, the media, and the poetry world itself, try harder to work together. There needs to be a moving away from marketing, from reducing everything to sound-bites. The attempt to sell poetry as a "story" the media can "use" means its truer values have been distorted, and the public no longer understands or cares about the art's richer, subtler worth."

Well, I don't know. We have chosen an art form with more practitioners than audience. Everyone thinks they can write a poem, even though most, manifestly, can't. Most don't even consider that they might write a novel, cast a bronze or play a guitar - despite the Sex Pistols - let alone compose a symphony. Our art form produces no scarce commodities like painting and rarely makes enough noise for others to jump around and shout to. Poetry CDs sell in their, oh, 10s, as long as your mum buys 3 for the grand kids and then listens and realises the content is unsuitable. I reckon that Todd's comparison with philosophy is apposite. Just as everyone thinks they can write a poem every pub bore has a "philosophy". Some poets and some philosophers find a living in the academy. I'd venture these are rarely the best. A few poets and a few philosphers may be genuinely "popular" and earn a living through their practice; I'd venture again that these are rarely the best. Maybe a few genuinely talented poets and philosophers reach an audience beyond their fellow practitioners in their lifetime; Peter Reading, maybe and Robert Pirsig. But as soon as they become popular/successful the critical apparatus and their peers turn around and bite them on the arse. It is an unfair world. That as much as anything else is what motivates me to write poetry. Do I expect media tarts to throw me a bone? No way.

Cycling minoritarians

Tue, 01 May 2007 14:30:22 GMT

One of the best things about cycling to work is the opportunity to think and reflect on the state of the world. Much of this reflection is on the state of transport and the relationship between cycling and other road uses. Cycling is a decidedly minoritarian activity. Cyclists are both relatively few in number and forced into the margins of transport corridors. But minoritarianism is not a numbers game. Two thirds or more of the world lives a minoritarian existence, marginalised by a dominant culture, cast as "the other".

For cyclists the Thatcherist aphorism, "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of thirty may count himself a failure in life", forms a significant part of the antagonistic relationship with the dominant culture. Thatcher did not mean cycling as an alternative to public transport. She meant driving a car.

New Labour came to power painting a smiley face on the disco glitterball of solopsistic self-centred Thatcherism, where rights and responsibilities are inverted. Despite a rhetoric of human rights, which asserts that ruling elites have responsibilities and others have rights, for Thatcherism and New Labour rights are what the self-centred, dominant, colonising, wealthy, elites have while responsibilities belong to the other: the colonised, subordinated, impoverished minority. Western capital, goods and services can move freely. African goods and services and, more importantly, people cannot. In the west, we have the right to both universal health care and cheap coffee. The minoritarian world cannot move to a place where daily wages are even the price of a cappuccino and health care is anything other than a privilege of the wealthy.

Similarly, it is the responsibility of the unemployed to find work, however demeaning; it is the responsibility of the employee to serve unquestioningly. Trades unions are a distortion of the market. In Ghana import tariffs distort free trade, but heaven forbid that Algerian tomatoes should be sold in Europe.

In health, education and social care we can read "responsibility" as "fault" or "blame". It is the teachers responsibility to ensure their students achieve quantifiable success in terms of certain narrow categories of attainment. This culture cascades down the food chain, reinforcing the dominant order. Failure passes down: the government blames the teachers, the teachers blame the students. It is learners responsibility to learn what the government wants the teachers to teach.

Often one minority is pitted against another. Learners are co-opted into an alliance with the government through the manufactured simulacrum of a market mechanism: higher education fees, induced to become consumers and to demand their "rights" as such before the teachers. The same mechanism induces teachers to become increasingly "efficient" and performance-managed.

Rights pass upward. The inscribing, dominant "I" is there by right and the inscribed other is responsible for their own minoritarian, subjugated existence.

So what's this got to do with cycling? Similarly, it is to the powerful that the roads belong by right and it is to the powerless upon whom the responsibility to get out of the way is inscribed. This inscription is sometimes marked in paint as dead-end cycle paths terminate whenever the road narrows. When road repairs are needed the "men working" signs are stood in the cycle lane. When lorries are loading or delivery drivers are haggling outside the late night takeaways they do so in the cycle lanes. One minority, pedestrians, is turned against another, cyclists through the poorly appropriated pavement, while the powerful: cars park on the pavement by right.