Generalising

Here’s a nice little piece of software: dynamic travel-time maps for the Tube, redrawn to show the system, adjusted for time, splayed out around your preferred location.

So, for example, we can see that Brixton, Ealing and Hampstead are all equidistant (20min) from Paddington. Clicking around a little also tells us the longest single journey, not counting interchange times – Upminster to Chesham, 108 minutes – and the temporal centre of the network, which is approximately in the Oxford Circus-Baker Street area, 55 minutes from the edges.

Earlier this year, I finally bit the bullet and bought a smartphone. (Thanks to a bit of fiddling, and an up-front purchase, it is costing me less over a two-year period than my old phone contract was. No, I don’t understand that either.)

It is marginally more powerful, computationally speaking, than my old laptop was. Given it seems to be able to tell me where I am as well as what time it is and what meeting I forgot to go to this morning, it may indeed be smarter than I am as well.*

* I actually went back to work a day early this year because I misread the calendar. I did wonder why it seemed so quiet. Er.

Oh, well. I for one welcome our new robot overlords, etc. It has so far usurped the roles of my phone, mp3 player (at which it is showing surprising competence), portable radio, compact camera and calendar; a little hackery with gmail and it absorbed my address book. It’s also surprisingly useful for shopping lists. A couple of quick notes:

The feature which did faintly surprise me – but worked well – was using it as an ebook reader; whilst iterating around Europe I managed to read a novel on it, using WordPlayer, without any particular discomfort or inconvenience. The screen is small for this, but not ludicrously so. For entering text rather than reading it, the internal keyboard (and predictive text) is excellent under normal conditions – I was expecting to hate it – but sometimes a bit tricky to use when in a moving vehicle, because it’s very easy to slip to adjacent keys.

Google Maps is a useful navigational tool, but relies on an internet connection – abroad, this is an expensive habit to have – and so an offline map program is an excellent thing to have. In this case, MapDroyd, which is a simple map display – no navigation – but runs off preloaded caches of OpenStreetMap data, so there’s no connectivity issues and no delays in displaying different areas. The only problem here is the size of that lump of data – as the phone has a decent onboard memory, it doesn’t limit things too much, but actually getting it on there can be tricky. (Thank goodness for wifi.)

Now, the downsides. Three months in, and a couple of problems are becoming apparent:

• SD storage issues

• Battery life
• Phone network connection

…in approximately ascending order of irritation.

The SD card – supplied with the phone, in an internal mount – regularly (every few days, at least once a week) fails to be recognised by the phone. (Usually, this manifests as the MP3 player getting confused and skipping over all its tracks claiming it can’t find them.) I have not yet figured out the cause of this, but so far it’s always been solved by a reboot; it may perhaps have something to do with prolonged uptime? I originally pegged it as a side-effect of having connected the phone to the PC (which mounts the card as a drive), but this doesn’t seem to be the case; it can turn up without it.

So far, it’s not a problem at all – it just means I need to remember to reboot the phone every couple of days to avoid it. We shall see if it turns into something worse. A cursory search suggests it’s a widespread problem, but with no obvious origins – “dodgy SD cards” is a popular theory, but it doesn’t really make sense when it’s reported as occurring with other cards as well.

The battery life is low – charging in the evening, leaving overnight, then moderate usage tends to be running quite dry after 24 hours. I was used to going three days before – but then, the old phone did much less to use up power.

The real problem, though, is that since at least early June (I got the phone at the end of April) it’s been rejecting calls for no apparent reason; the phone remains connected to the network, and will happily receive text messages – usually the ones saying “I tried to call you but your phone was off, will try tomorrow”. This is, to say the least, exceptionally annoying – I’ve usually no record they’ve tried to call, and no obvious reason the call couldn’t be connected. Earlier in the month it briefly developed a different issue with text messages; any outbound text would stall unsent, continually reporting failed transmission; some actually got through, whilst some didn’t.

(The two combined, at one point, just after I arrived in Copenhagen. We had the marvellously convoluted situation where Iona could text me to say she was stuck in Munich airport, and I could call her back, but she couldn’t call me and I couldn’t text her…)

I suspect this might be a network problem rather than phone-specific; I’m tempted to switch the sim card out into the old phone and work with that for a few days to see what happens. Either way, it’s not good; I’ll be talking to them about it, I think.

On the whole, though – connection issues aside – I’m quite pleased with it. For daily internet use (reading mail, etc) it’s excellent; less functional than a laptop, but far more useful than carrying a netbook around and hoping for a wireless connection.

From the Guardian yesterday, a letter from Kettering:

As chair of Kettering’s Muslim Association and incumbent of the largest Anglican parish in the town centre, we were struck by the irony of our MP’s plans to refuse to meet any of his constituents who wear a veil. Such a form of dress is not, to our knowledge, worn by anyone in the local community. Not a single Muslim female has visited Mr Hollobone, veiled or unveiled, since he was elected. Our town has its share of social challenges, but it is plain to us that none of them relate to problems that can be linked to any religious issues. In the past Mr Hollobone has expended great energy on issues that genuinely affect his constituents. It is our hope that he might refocus his priorities to the benefit of those whom he has been elected to serve.

Dominic Barrington Priest-in-charge, Ss Peter & Paul, Kettering
Inam Khan Chair, Muslim Community Association, Kettering

This article in the Guardian, on Obama’s firing of McChrystal in Afghanistan, mentions past firings of military officials by US presidents, including MacArthur in 1951. That case was a pretty close match to this one – a field commander had publicly criticised the political direction of an ongoing war. and after a bit of back-and-forth he eventually got sacked.

It seems a good moment to drag out one of my favourite comments by Truman, his retrospective summary of that situation:

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

(Incidentally, the comment at the bottom of the page is interesting – one of Truman’s last acts as President was to destroy embarrassing material in Eisenhower’s personnel file. Would you get that now, you wonder?)

So, in under an hour, flagged revisions will go live on the English Wikipedia. Wait – flagged protection. No, that’s it, pending changes. It seems to change its name once a week at the moment – my small victory was getting rid of the word “revisions” in its current form. (We take our lasting moments when we can)

What is it? Surprisingly little, all told, for all the ink that has been spilled. I feel the need to write something simply because of all the misinformation I’ve seen floating around over the last week or so…

It’s a tool which will see a small number of pages – at the moment, hard-limited to a cap of 2,000, and in practice not more than a few dozen for the first few days – placed under a new form of editing protection. They’ll be either pages which were already protected or already liable for protection under the general rules for that – high levels of vandalism, repeated fights over content, or just ludicrously tempting targets.

(A quick recap – pages subject to protection are either “full protected” – only users with administrator privileges, about 1,500 people, can edit them – or “semi protected” – most logged-in users can edit them, but new users or passing contributors can’t.)

The new system works by allowing anyone to edit, but adding a simple form of pre-screening – at any given moment, the version of the article displayed to readers will not always be the same as the most recent version of the article. Any qualified user will be able to look at the edits and flag the most recent as “acceptable” – “not terrible” might be a more pragmatic standard, I suppose – making it the version displayed by default, until a few more edits down the line a new one is approved, etc. The aim is that there will be a few thousand of such qualified “reviewers”, certainly enough to scale to the likely task.

It’s important to remember that all edits are sequential and not parallel; it’s not a matter of allowing several versions of an article to develop and then picking one, but rather an edit not approved will still be incorporated into subsequent edits, unless it’s independently edited back out.

The net result will primarily be to

• a) make these pages more open to editing, not less; whilst
• b) reducing the amount of vandalism and malicious content visible to readers

a) comes from allowing anyone to edit, rather than turning them away by locking the page; b) comes from adding the post-edit sanity-check screening.

The counterarguments are that it will:

• a) act as a form of censorship;
• b) increase the workload for “reviewing” editors;
• c) reduce the involvement of casual users

I honestly don’t think any of these are likely to be the case unless the implementation is fouled up. Let’s look at the simplest one first: c). The system will allow people to contribute – in a limited way – where previously they could not contribute at all. It’s possible that the existence of limited or conditional contributions will prove to be something of a deterrent over “normal” contributions, but will it really be a deterrent over a complete pre-emptive rejection? We have some evidence from the rollout of a much broader version of this on the German wikipedia that implementing it did decrease the proportion of edits by IPs – people other than logged-in users – but it’s clearly part of an overall long-term trend:

b) implies that by having these edits, people will have to spend time looking at them and deciding whether to validate or reject. But we have that already – every edit that is made, in theory, gets glanced over by someone who decides whether or not to remove it. The problem is that whilst removal is obvious, there is no way to say “I have looked at this edit and choose to validate it”; every valid-but-potentially-dubious edit will thus be looked at by a number of people who – effectively – have no way of signalling to each other that the work’s been done. Allowing it to be marked as “acceptable” thus should tend to reduce the overall effort – the first person needs to make slightly more effort than they would otherwise have done, but ten others are saved assessing it.

a) is the most complicated. To a degree, this is a pretty visceral thing; I’ve debated this two or three times over the past few days and never seen anyone alter their position (either way) on it. But fundamentally, it’s a variant on c) – more people get to edit, there is more chance of more voices being heard. Yes, people can be “screened” by not having their edits prominently shown to passing readers – but if their edits were viewed as undesirable for whatever reason, under the old system they would have been reverted pretty quickly anyway. A page that is put under protection should not be there in order to ensure that one perspective is presented and another legitimate perspective is locked out; if that is the case, the fundamental problem lies with the decision to protect, not the mechanism used to protect. I’m firmly of the opinion that “conventional” protection is a mechanism with fundamentally more potential for censorship and suppression than this approach.

On the whole, I’m pretty positive about it. It’s not a panacea; it won’t solve everything, and it probably won’t have an overwhelmingly drastic effect on the areas it’s dealing with. But it will make some things better, it probably won’t have noticeable knock-on effects, and… well, we never pretended the old way was perfect. Why be afraid to experiment?

(For those of you wanting to read more: the help page; the official announcement; and a 2009 article on the long history of the proposal.)

I have been ludicrously busy over the past month or so. In lieu of anything original, have a scattering of links:

• The UKIP is going to the supreme court in an attempt to avoid relinquishing illegally donated money. (As a fan of unfortunate consequences, I am now wondering if it is possible to get this case referred to Strasbourg? That would be marvellous…)
• Mapping the Demographics of American English with Twitter (LanguageLog)
• The Speaker’s plans to reform Commons procedure (the Guardian)
• The “zero rupee note” – an interesting psychological anti-corruption technique.
• The first recorded air raid? Venice, 1849.
• Deaccessioning by copyright – conceptualising the ways that museums (etc) use copyright and quasi-copyright limitations as, effectively, a method of removing things from their accessible collection.
• Five boys: the story of a photograph – the history of a particularly recognisable photograph.
• Linguists Marvel at Audacity of Yugoslav Swear Words. (…yeah, it’s old.)
• Diseased, demented, depressed: serious illness in Heads of State – David Owen applies his medical training to political contexts. (The second part – should it be possible to make a head of state step down due to illness? – is an interesting debate; the first part, Diseases Of World Leaders I Have Known, feels like an exam topic. “Is this paper ethical, and why?”)

Actual content hopefully to follow sometime this week. Aha. Yeah, I’ve been an optomist for years.

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s biggest building society issued a veiled warning to the coalition government that its plans to raise capital gains tax (CGT) may put the partial recovery in house prices at risk.

Buy to let and other landlords now own more than one in seven British homes or 15 per cent of the property in the private sector, according to Nationwide. Government plans to double the CGT landlords pay from its current fixed rate of 18 per cent to “closer” to 40 per cent, could cause many to sell and force prices down.

You know, in a more sensible world we’d be reading that as a two-for-one bonus, not as a terrible death-knell side effect. Buy-to-let speculative investment is distorting the housing market; anything which calms it down is all to the good.

We don’t expect government policies to make the price of used cars depreciate less drastically. We don’t expect government intervention to stabilise the antiques market, or tax policies carefully tailored to make unit trusts continue to burgeon. We are happy to see industrial or commercial property firms humbled by the shifting economic vagaries of the market. But put your money in residential property, and it seems the safety of your investment is the concern of every economist in the country.

There’s something a bit weird there.

A recent post in Charlie Stross’s series on misconceptions about publishing (more on which anon, hopefully), has an interesting side-note:

Interestingly, the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors’ incomes … The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74.

I felt you could make a dramatic comparison from that, so I went to check the figures. The surprising thing is, though, Gini coefficients that high just don’t usually exist on a national level – there’s only one or two countries where we have the data to reasonably conclude it’s as high as 0.7. (Namibia, if you’re wondering). The reason for this is that rural hinterlands tend to reduce the effect of the inequalities of the cities (which are, obviously, where you find both the urban shantytowns and the wealthy metropolitan elite).

Are there, then, specific cities where it’s this bad? Yes. Again, just. The worst cities in the world, by inequality, are the major metropolises of South Africa; even there, it peaks at about 0.75. So, visualise it that way for a second: the population of people in the UK who are paid to write, full-time or part-time, has a level of economic inequality on a par with that of the population of Johannesburg.

It’s quite a staggering image, really. You realise it’s a very sharp differential, but you don’t realise it’s that steep!

I don’t normally take umbrage with the tone of BBC News stories – at least, I usually only get annoyed when they’re actually wrong, not just a bit confused. But this is pretty bad even if unintentional:

The memorial, which should be built by 2012, will commemorate the 55,573 crew of Bomber Command, with an average age of 22, who were killed in World War II.

Its role was to attack Germany’s airbases, troops, shipping and industries connected to the war effort.

During the war the command ensured the damage caused to London’s squares, streets and parks from German bombs was not as extensive as it could have been.

I am all for the memorial. We should remember and honour these men; they died because we asked them to, and in terms of sacrifice for a limited return, the strategic bombing campaign was only a few notches below the Somme; we as a nation kept hammering at a brick wall for the desire to do something, and lost an awful lot of lives unnecessarily.

But… if we are to memorialise it, we should remember the full context, not just cherry-pick the nicer bits. We should remember that when we sent these men out to die, we were, at the same time, asking them to do something that we would now consider beyond the pale.

The description the BBC give is at best misleading. What did we use Bomber Command for? We used it, almost without exception, for strategic bombing of Germany; what that meant was massed bomber raids of urban areas with the aim of destroying industry, infrastructure, and residential areas in equal proportion. To quote Arthur Harris, the man responsible for carrying out the policy:

The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive … should be unambiguously stated. That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.

You don’t get much blunter than that, really.

It’s sixty-five years since the end of the war, almost to the day. Surely we have enough distance, enough perspective, that we don’t need to ignore our history, or to cast it in the one-sided mould of wartime propaganda. We really don’t need journalism which – even unintentionally – suggests the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of entire districts of cities were merely attacks on military infrastructure or, somehow, a way of protecting our own cities from suffering a much lighter version of the same.

That way lies a very worrying relationship with the past.

When quizzed on a range of local issues before the election, our candidates – well, most of them, at least – were strongly in favour of the idea that “food recycling should be rolled out to the whole of Oxford as soon as possible”.

I say “most”. The candidates for the Socialist Equality Party and the Conservative Party, perhaps accepting that their campaigns weren’t going to get very far anyway, didn’t reply. (The former’s grasp of local issues was, in any case, made a little more difficult by living in London). The candidate for the Equal Parenting Alliance was a little vague on the topic:

I’m not sure what food recycling is – sounds pretty dubious. If it means waste food going to animals or to help others, I’m all for it.

whilst the UKIP candidate disagreed on principle:

I don’t throw food away. Only people who manage their household badly do so. You should buy and cook only what you need.

I think that was cribbed from the financial section of their manifesto, come to think of it.

Anyway, the Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates were all for it. We duly returned one of them on Thursday. And, as I was leaving for work on Monday, the council came around distributing food recycling bins.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Either a) Andrew Smith is an astonishingly influential local MP, whose word is law one working day after being returned to office, or b) …none of them had realised it was already planned to be rolled out across the city by the end of the year.

(I have to say: on the basis of one day’s use so far, I’m all for the system. Let’s see how well it works out in the long run.)