Furthermore: June 2004

June 22, 2004

Access and Representation - NotCon Thoughts

Before the whole event fades completely from my mind, I thought I’d write about an aspect of NotCon that I’ve not seen much other comment on, which is the theme of access and representation. I followed most of the political panels during the day, and different aspects of this theme emerged in several talks. In particular:

• Will Davies (of MySociety I think) — spoke (in the Politics of the Net session) from a sociological perspective about the way that power and access are structured on the internet. The point that came across to me
  was that we tend to accept as inevitable facts that e.g. blog readership follows a power-law distribution or the geek-celebrity status of people like Linus Torvalds rather than face up to the enormous complexity of the forces that make things the way they are. Will thought that these structures would, in some cases, act to exclude newcomers or the uninitiated from some of the inner circles of access or power. My immediate defeatist thought is that maybe the structures are inevitable facts, but it was a valuable perspective that we shouldn’t just always say, “that’s just the way it is” when we look at the sociology of internet users.


• Richard Sargeant from the No.10 Policy Unit (I think) — spoke (in the Politics on the Net session) interestingly about the fact that as voting is declining, other forms of political activism - single issue politics for instance - are increasing. He pointed out though that the newer forms of engagement tend to favour the people who are already more politically active, so that the voice of the people in society already least engaged with mainstream politics - the poor, ethnic minorities etc - is weakened further by the more strident voice of educated geeks. For that reason, he also thought that services such as faxyourmp etc tended to be viewed by MPs as in effect the voice of a special interest group, rather than as broadening access to democracy.

This also connected in my mind with Tim Ireland’s talk on blogging your MP as a form of political activism. I can see that idea has somewhat wider uses too - you could blog the doings of pretty much any public figure as a way of increasing the public scrutiny they are under - although you are dependent on there being publicly accessible sources of information on what they do and say. I think that’s largely a good thing - I would quite like to be able to type in my MPs name to Google and see (ideally) her own blog and also two or three blogs that follow her activities. Blogging seems a good way to pursue this kind of micro-journalism. However, coming back to Richard Sargeant, I can also see that the kinds of people who are able to do this sort of thing (essentially as a hobby I guess) need a certain amount of technical knowledge, or access to people who have it. They need leisure time. They need a bit of social confidence dealing with authority - Tim said you should get information on your MPs diary from their office. Basically, this is largely a middle class hobby. That’s not to denigrate it as dilettantism, but I think as this kind of “private” political activism grows, we need to be aware of the biases that it brings with it.

June 16, 2004

Sudan

A couple of depressing links on Darfour. For what it’s worth, I may write to my MP again, and use the G word, and see what she says about that. Probably should give some money to someone too - I may get a bit of cash soon, so in that case I shall definitely make a donation.

• BBC - literally a million people at risk.


• CSM - a bit more hopeful that the US may do something.

Links

• EFF - notes from the WIPO broadcast treaty meeting. So many things to complain about, so little time!


• via Crooked Timber - terrific Grauniad piece about the Soviet offensive that took place at the same time as D-Day. Sobering quote: Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 “Ivans” died for every “Private Ryan”. Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.


• via Ongoing - text of Greg Chaitin’s fantastic book about mathematical incompleteness. It’s a bit puppy-dog enthusiastic, but it’s top class stuff from a brilliant mathematician. I’m reading it now.

June 14, 2004

Derivative Pricing

Nice little piece someone pointed me to at work: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Ten Pounds. Also seems like as good a time as any to recall An Equation and Its Worlds which is an interesting sociological analysis of the Black Scholes equation from D-squared’s site before he joined the Crooked Timber borg.

NotCon

I was hoping to write a longer piece on NotCon, which I went to a week ago, but I’m not sure I shall get round to it now. Anyway, I had a great time and I heard some really interesting talks - particularly Brewster Kahle’s inspiring talk on Universal Access to Human Knowledge, and the launch of TheyWorkForYou.com - scraping Hansard into an accessible House of Commons LiveJournal.

After the con, I had dinner with a group of London bloggers, and Joi Ito. I won’t link to everyone individually - Joi has a meetup page here with links to most people and also post meetup reports. Anyway, I had a great time, and I was sorry to have to leave a bit early in order to get back to Cambridge.

Torture Memo links

Apologies for not posting for a while - I’ve not been able to dial in from home, as I switched phone service to NTL, who lost my phone connection, and haven’t been able to fix it for 5 days or so now.

Anyway, the blogosphere seems to be buzzing with comment on the torture memo, which is certainly one of the more shocking things I’ve seen from the Bush administration. A few links on the subject:

• Crooked Timber - good summary piece.


• Michael Froomkin - very detailed legal analysis of the memo. The comments section in here is interesting - scroll down to the comments by Jason about the idea that the leaks are being drip fed to the press via State and the Pentagon trying to get the press to put the pieces together for itself and alert the US public to what is going on. Once I would have said that was a bit conspiracy-theoryish, but now I’m not so sure.


• Brad deLong - scary summary of a Seymour Hersh talk. The suggestion being that there’s more and worse to come from Abu Ghraib.



• Whiskey Bar economics - on a slightly different topic, even if Bush and co can be got rid of, this is a pretty sobering view of the US economy. Winning the next election could be a bit of a poison chalice for the Democrats, but probably nothing scares me enough to wish for four more years of Bush.

June 4, 2004

Links Round Up

I seem to be accumulating links at the moment, so here’s a bit of a brain dump:

• Economist via Crooked Timber - article on the results of the Copenhagen Consensus project to evaluate where governments should be putting their development money for best effect. I haven’t had time to look at whether climate change really is such a (relatively) low priority, but the top projects suggest really impressive things could be done to reduce the spread of AIDS (for example) with relatively little money (only 20 billion or so) and an enormous benefit for the investment made.


• Public-Domain.org - sign up to lobby the BBC to make good on its project to release a substantial part of its archives into the public domain under Creative Commons type licenses. This is a fantastic idea - there are lots of links to background under the Public Domain page.


• NotCon - I hope to be there on Sunday, and afterwards maybe go to Joi Ito’s meetup (depending on various factors out of my control.



• BoingBoing - on an adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s Master of Space and Time. I hope this happens - it’s my favourite Rucker fiction book, although my absolute favourite is Infinity and the Mind - really mind-breakingly weird stuff.

June 2, 2004

What I did on my holidays, part two

(part 1 is in the previous month's archive post)

We stayed in Cromer on Wednesday - went for a walk on the cliffs. Found a nice cafe called Breakers in the town.

Thursday we went to Houghton Hall, which was excellent. The hall was owned by Robert Walpole and it has some fantastic rooms - particularly the stone gallery, and the trompe l’oeil effects of the Hell staircase. Even better were the gardens (this was a nice day) which included a croquet lawn - first time I’ve been able to have a go at it since I was at college.

Lizzie surprised me twice in the afternoon - firstly by going on a huge (to her - maybe 10 feet tall) slide in the playground at Cromer, and also when I discovered she knows her left and right. I’m sure I didn’t learn this till I was at school, and we’ve not consciously taught her, but she can consistently tell her right hand, foot etc.

Friday we went on the North Norfolk Railway from Sheringham to Holt. Bit expensive, but it was good fun to go on a steam train. Unfortunately the Holt end is not really in the town itself - you have to walk a mile or more to get there. We ate at the Kings Head which had good beer and food, and a nice garden to sit out in.

On Saturday we drove up to York to go to the wedding of Vicky, a friend of my wife’s. The drive took longer than we thought, and we ended up arriving at our guest house at about 2.45, with the wedding starting at 3. Fortunately, we were quite near, and a helpful taxi driver got us to the church about 2 minutes before the bride.

I liked York a lot, we didn’t do much more than potter round really - saw the Minster, some of the walls, and visited another of my wife’s friends. One good place to eat we found (21, High Petergate, right near the Minster) was Cafe Concerto. Food was great, although a bit pricey (but then, it’s in a tourist hotspot). I also liked the Three Legged Mare (named for a type of gallows), a bit further down Petergate - they have beer from the local York Brewery and a nice little conservatory and garden at the back.

I ought to also just mention our guesthouse, Warrens (30 Scarcroft Road, York, 01904 643139). Good location for getting into town, everything was clean and comfortable. My only gripes would be that our family room was very hot, and that the cooked breakfast was very bland - Wall’s type sausage, plastic bacon, that sort of thing. Another thing on the plus side though is that it has a little carpark, which means you are guaranteed somewhere to park (if you can manoeuvre into it - access is a bit tight).

All in all, a very enjoyable trip. I hope some of this information is useful to anyone else travelling to Cromer or York.

June 1, 2004

European Elections

Very useful summary page for the Euro elections. Even better (I’ve just discovered it today) is Chris Lightfoot’s blog entry on the subject. Chris appears to be writing the blog I would write if I were more organised and had more time to read stuff. I may give up blogging now.