Bollocks to AJAX

Bollocks to AJAX, nuts to rounded corners, the growth of mashups is the exciting thing about the web today, how can I visualise this data better:
For me this is Web 2.0.

Don't get me wrong all of those other things have their place, but think about what you need and why, don't just play buzzword bingo with your specification.

Is it really sleaze though.

From what I have seen of the Hain campaign finance issues there is very little wrong with the donations apart from the lack of declaration (for the record he was right to quit, he isn't fit to run a department if he can't run his campaign). The Conway story is worse, but not again I am not sure it is real sleaze, especially given how many members are employing family members and the fact that the piss-poor excuse for a Speaker is blocking release of details about this kind of employment.
Solutions to the Hain (and all the other donations scandals) problem have been mentioned by many. As for Conway et al, there are some very easy solutions, firstly we could nationalise the administrative support for MPs, it has issues, it would mean these particular civil servants having to cross the old divide into the political arena. The benefits are obvious, not just a transparent recruitment process and safeguards that the public purse is getting value for money. It would also provide huge benefits to the people working for MPs. This wouldn't stop an MP employing their spouse, but they would have to prove they could do the job. On the other hand we could just take all the money that supports an individual MP, give it to them and them them sort it out, they could keep more of it themselves, but that would mean not having the support there. This would rely on the electorate maintaining the checks and balances and being willing to vote out someone they thought wasn't giving value for money. What I suspect we will get is a waste of money commission that will try and look after the system, but not have all the powers they need so horribly and publicly fail until they try and get their first conviction.

New animated politics roundup.

Lee Griffin explores the use of fast paced animation to present the political news.

Politalks - Episode 1: Peter Hain versus the media

Heaven forfend that these people are allowed to learn.

I am sickened this morning by the shear amount of bile coming from "the popular press"^[1] about the McDonalds "A-Level". Yes the quotes are required, as it isn't one, it is a diploma that is run to a standard set by the QCA, but to be honest I wouldn't see it as a problem if it was, with UCCA points and all. I will admit that I am on occasion cynical about qualifications, but then I work in IT where there are a million vendor based competencies and the introduction of this kind of formality would let people judge the relative merits of such things as, MCSA, CNNA, OCP etc.
It is also very telling that to a paper they all lead with the burger company (which has a comprehensive system of vocational training in the USA, very little of the fast food content in Snow Crash was Science fiction), rather than any of the other companies such as Network Rail and Flybe who will also be offering them.
It obviously offends all of these people that the "lower orders" be allowed to learn things.
^[1]This includes some bloggers.

Books that make you dumb

One of the things I love most about the web is that if you have a wacky idea it is so easy to get it out there to a potentially huge audience. If it is particularly cool then you will ratchet up the numbers on bookmark sharing sites and maybe even hit the heights of geek cool and get a story on slashdot.
The subgenre I like most is amusing and interesting ways of supplying information, ether useful or facile, in a graphical manner. Today I found these:
Booksthatmakeyoudumb which uses facebook data on book preferences, linked through college attendance to average SAT scores. Given one of the data sources, I wouldn't cite this in any serious way but it is quite amusing, especially given the book that makes it to No.1.
Data Mining in Politics which uses more robust data (the voting patterns of Congress).
Yesterday's gems were the mySociety travel-time maps which I hop can eventually be rolled out for much of the rest of the country and the Telegraph's dynamic political map.

P.S. For a look at similar things down the ages, take a look at strange maps

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it

In the dying days of an unpopular government a Cabinet minister resigns pledging to clear his name. Jonathan Aitken ended up serving time in prison, I wonder how far Peter Hain is willing to take the parallels?
Dizzy's suggestion of specific bank accounts is looking more and more sensible by the day. I also think the Electoral Commission should take complete control over donation registration (the register of members interests can just point at the data for each member) and be given teeth to apply immediate financial penalties and bring their own charges to the the DPP.

Highly charged debate

There is a lot of hot air being expelled about how councils are raising money through charging for things like parking and other services. The headlines are all about the statistic that "One in four town halls now get more income from charges" rather than the overall figure that such charges raise half as much as council tax (£11 billion a year as opposed to £22 billion). The generally moderate news sources are mostly reporting on how the charging varies wildly across the country and the Audit Commission's recommendation for transparency in the methodologies by which the charges are calculated. Of course the radically right wing rags are shouting about them being stealth taxes, they are of course the exact opposite, as if someone could be fooled into not noticing the money they put in the parking meter or that the price of a child swim has gone up 50p and how variable charging for services based on income and assets is a heinous, iniquitous punishment for having acquired money.
Of course Council Tax only pays for a tiny amount of council services and all this money has to come from somewhere doesn't it, whether it is charges, indirect or direct taxation. Time for a proper look at local taxation and how much central government has control over spending priorities, I think; as it seems no one is happy with the status quo.

How the other half think

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers has released the results of surveying its members on instances of plagiarism.
More than half believed internet plagiarism is a serious problem. I can only assume that the rest either work in subject areas that don't suffer readily from plagiarism, CDT or PE for example, or don't care enough, as I can't believe they have never had any pupil submit anything containing internet content.
That or there is a more optimistic explanation, the other respondents don't see the internet as a plagiarism problem because they have taught their students to use it as a research tool. These kids know about primary, secondary and tertiary sources and how to evaluate their quality, they can distinguish between reporting, comment and reportage. They understand the power of citation and digest while undertaking research and how to apply it in presenting a thesis.
Another statistic was that 90% of the sample were concerned about the impact of plagiarism on their students' long-term prospects. 100% of this author would like to re-iterate the position that it would appear to be an issue more about teaching the students the right way to use the internet rather than that are using it at all. I use the internet to find a great deal of information and content for things I write at work and this is considered a good thing^tm in the most part. Some educators see the internet in a different light, Martha Groom of the University of Washington, Bothell hit the headlines last year when she set students an assignment to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles relevant to their course.

Ten years is a long time in...

We are in the first few days of a shiny new year so naturally all of the media, both old and new, people are looking at what anniversaries fall this year, in technology ten years ago the iMac was released, Compaq bought DEC oh and a little company called Google, was incorporated.
In the UK one of the most significant and subsequently maligned pieces of legislation was introduced, the Human Rights Act (and the companion clauses in the Scotland Act) on the face of it just brought the rights that we already had into play earlier in the judicial process, but it provided for so much more, mainly an easy target for the right to throw stones at. It also of course brought about the final formal abolishing of the death penalty.
Over in America the floodgates for the sort of citizen journalism, that a fair proportion of those of you with blogs, practice were opened by Matt Drudge. He broke a story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and probably more importantly he broke that Newsweek were sitting on it.

Much offal

Justin McKeating at Liberal Conspiracy has posted a quite rude and generalised riposte to the many outraged posts in response to the announcement that the Government is planning on reversing the consent relationship for organ donation. He has one interesting point about making pâté with your entrails instead of donating them, if I thought that a) my liver would be in a fit condition and b) anyone would actually eat it I would suggest this in my will, if I wasn't planning on being a donor (perhaps if there is a halfway house, liver too damaged for transplant but still good enough for making a nice Ardennes I still will).
Instead of just being rude at those opposing this, we should take on their arguments. Most of them are thumping the table and shouting about their rights, now "I'm not a lawyer"^[1] but I have read both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and cannot find anything giving your corpse rights. You don't even have a right to be buried although in this country there is probably some clause in one of the Environment Protection acts that makes your local authority do something with otherwise undealtwith bodies, to stop them making to much of a mess.
While the old legal position boiled down to the old quote

By the common law of England a corpse is not the subject of property nor capable of holding property. It is not therefore larceny to steal a corpse

much was changed in the aftermath of Alder Hey with the Human Tissue Act 2004, but given the list of people who can consent to chopping you up is 14 relations long with a "friend of longstanding" tacked on the end it probably isn't really that difficult to get on with the scalpel. As with much modern legislation built in is the concept that everything is governed by code of practice enacted by the Secretary of State so there may not even need to be primary legislation to bring about the change in the consent methodology.
As an aside, while reading the act, I noted that breaking the law on live organ donation is only subject to a maximum of 51 weeks in prison!

^[1] Although I would like to be, probably not practising, but if I did have 10 grand knocking about and more free time and OU law degree is very tempting.

Some good news from the 10th Kremlin.

In an 'interesting coincidence' at the same time as the The Observer launch their "Donor for Life campaign" Gordon Brown uses a piece in the Sunday Telegraph to launch a debate on the organ donation system in this country.
Regular readers will know that this is an issue I feel strongly about and I broadly support the proposals it remains to be see whether First Secretary of the Labour Party Bean has the balls to propose to change the other problem with the system. Under the current system, which requires you to make a positive commitment of consent to donate, if the members of your family with you when you die don't like the idea, they have a veto. Even if you have your donor card tattooed on your chest it may still see viable organs going to waste and I can see them using the family veto to assuage the naysayers who can't see this reform as a good thing, but think it is the state interfering despite the right to opt-out.

Rebutting the rebuttal

The British Retail Consortium has a section on their website called "Retail Myths" which is supposed to set the record strait. This is the content from the page in that section called "Price cutting by supermarkets is a major cause of binge drinking."

• Supermarkets sell alcohol as part of a wider grocery offer, alcohol sales make up less than 10% of turnover in a typical store.
• Supermarkets are not the typical store for those consuming alcohol immediately. Only around 1% of all transactions are of only alcohol and alcohol sales are not aimed at immediate consumption, for example drinks are not generally chilled.
• Promotions are not encouraging excessive consumption, simply offering value for customers alongside the other groceries they buy. Promotional activity tends to be on larger volume purchases which are typically consumed with friends and family at parties and barbecues or over an extended period of time.
• Supermarkets have been at the forefront of the drive to tackle under age sales. They have introduced a number of new policies including the challenge 21 principle, where all customers who appear under 21 are challenged and have to provide ID to purchase alcohol. This has resulted in a significant improvement in their performance, well ahead of pubs.
• Supermarkets have strict policies on self scan tills and home deliveries to ensure alcohol is only sold to legitimate customers.
• Supermarkets have fully supported labelling information for consumers through units of alcohol labelling and promotion of the Drink Aware educational website.

1. Firstly, percentage of turnover isn't a very good defence against accusations of over discounting to get sales, since if you increase the discount then until volume catches up percentage of turnover will go down. Secondly, and this is just supposition based on a back of the envelope measurement of a couple of my local supermarkets, 10% of turnover isn't bad for a department that takes up about 5% of the floor space in a store.
2. What does 'immediately' have to do with the price of fish? On street drinking is a different problem from binge drinking and a lot of supermarkets, especially the "convenience" sub brands, do have chill cabinets these days.
3. I would like to see the research that shows that when Joe Bloggs buys a 24 can box of [insert name of premium lager brand of choice here] instead of an 18 can box because it is cheaper he going to a BBQ rather than just putting it in the fridge and quaffing it. I would very much like to see the way the survey was designed to ensure that people wern't just giving that sort of answer to look less like a binge drinker.
4. Again under age sales is a different problem to binge drinking. Also most of the policies they have put in place are about mindlessly asking everyone if they are over 21 to see if they have to produce ID rather than training staff on how to spot under age drinkers.
5. Woop-de-do self scan tills are no worse than staffed tills at letting people buy booze. Still not sure how this is relevant to the accusation that binge drinkers are buying the slabs of cans that are in supermarket discount offers.
6. Finally something that could be considered relevant to the problem...

because a far better page would be one arguing that while supermarkets are a source of supply to the binge drinker the problem itself is so rooted into our society that it would take price rises of truly epic proportions, if that was the only factor, to stop it. Whereas there is a possibility of using education, information and labelling as part of a programme to persuade the marginal cases to not spend every evening necking bad brewed under licence copies of foreign beers. Of course we won't make any true progress until we start looking at the reasons why people are self medicating in this way...

It just doesn't add up, well subtract anyway...

On the face of it, if you can trust their figures at all, the Tories have a point about the deactivated gun laws that are proposed. If reactivated guns are only responsible for 0.04% of crime then going after them is putting a small elastic plaster on a decapitation injury. However as since don't seem to be able to subtract 0.04 from 100 I am not sure how we should take their point.
Of course points are also deducted from every media outlet that hasn't spotted the error.

Tickets? I love tickets!

The Culture, Media and Sport select committee has been looking into the issue of ticket touting. The Entertainment industry has asked them to deal with the huge profiteering going on, not of course because it is unfair to the punters, but because they aren't seeing the money.
As you would expect all of the industry suggestions take very little of what is best for the public into account. What would we like? To buy tickets, preferably without huge booking fees, while also having ability to dispose of any tickets that turn out to be spare!
Prominent dairy farmers such as Michael Eavis would of course like the whole practice banned entirely so they can issue their photo ID tickets in comfort.

A mixed bag

I am going to continue not making much comment on the US elections, all the professionals are making a lot of mistakes calling these elections, I can't imagine I am going to do much better. The two things I will say are, 1) personally I think it is good for the process if the primaries remain an open field for as long as possible and 2) in the same way that Gordon's messing up of the stop and go play in October brought forward a campaign for fixed term Parliaments this presidential election is getting lots of talk going about the electoral college system.
A brief warning that with the Six Nations starting, the resumption of of the IRB Sevens and a full menu of cricket kicking off all in February there will probably be a lot more talk of sport in this blog.
I am sure all of us would like to control how we are remembered when we are gone. Major Andrew Olmsted was a blogger, both on his own site and for the Rocky Mountain News decided to leave his own final post as part of the preparation all soldiers make for when their time comes.
Lastly it surprised me that even independent school pupils are as much part of the mélange of mannerless savages and need to be taught how to behave at table.

The right to copy

The consultation has kicked off to discuss the copyright law changes put forward by the Gowers Review. ORG has coverage of the launch. Worryingly there still seems to be a heavy resistance to allowing us the consumers the right to move music from one format to another.
There is currently no right under the intellectual property laws of the uk for someone to move music from the form they have bought it on to another. If you buy a CD you have to listen to it off that CD, rather than rip the tracks to an electronic format for use on your portable music player or vice versa. I think that this is one of the easiest points in the review to argue in favour of change on, if I buy a piece of music, I should be allowed to listen to it wherever I want, I should be allowed to capture my VHS videos to DVD video so I don't have to

If it wasn't so sick I would laugh.

Amidst the coverage of the forthcoming US Supreme Court challenge to execution by lethal injection this fabulous quote was nestling:

Kentucky seeks to execute in a relatively humane manner and has worked hard to adopt such a procedure — Kentucky Attorney General Gregory Stumbo

If I wasn't suffering so much with ManFlu I would laugh out loud. How can ending someone's life against their will be done in a "humane manner"? Or should we just ignore the whole thing as he said "relatively" and it is therefore meaningless? "I was relative nice to Mr Smith, I just kicked him out of a first floor window, when I could have beaten him to a pulp and thrown him off the roof." You can argue the possibility of humane killing if you are practising euthanasia but whether you believe in it as a punishment or deterrent, or as in my case not, an execution is never anything other than a brutal and callous slaying of another human being.
Of course for some they can only dream of a chemical death, China for example is updating its methods to use lethal injection instead of shooting people in the back of the head.

Weekend round up

1. Electronic Voting
   Bruce Schneier points out this article in the New York Times Magazine about the failings of electronic voting machines across America. Obviously with them having a presidential election this year it is of great concern to them. For us the horror is the fact that Brown's government still don't seem convinced of the dangers of these machines.


2. Hi Def media
   With Warner having switched to releasing exclusively in blu-ray it is looking like Sony may well win a format war for once. I don't claim to be a technical expert on the differences, but my reading is that as far as the consumers are concerned both standards support about the same set of codecs and formats. On one hand blu-ray stores more but HD DVD is not region restricted. There has been much reporting based on the premise that Microsoft is only supporting HD DVD to keep the format war alive in order to precipitate the move away from physical media.


3. Georgia
   Yet another election mired with accusations of vote rigging, this time however the OSCE is suggesting they are broadly happy that the people's will is being respected.

Wether or not spoon

The story being run about a branch of JD Wetherspoon in Wallasey limiting parents' drinks has me in two minds. Not about the whys and wherefores of pubs and pub chains setting their own rules about children being allowed in (especially now you don't need to apply for a separate children's certificate to go with your licence). I think that they should be allowed to make whatever rule they want to (as long as it is explained properly, without fibbing or hiding behind laws that are irrelevant).
No my doubt is about what JD Wetherspoon think their chain is about, when I first started using them, they were no children allowed, no TVs etc, just about the beer and food. Then a while back they switched to getting children's certificates and fitting TVs showing Sky Sports news and big matches. Now they are trying to dissuade parents with children staying. What will be next: timing people having a quite pint with the paper to ensure they don't use up a table for too long? Having restaurant like "at least one main course per person" rules?
They are already sliding down the quality list as far as beer is concerned and commit the cardinal sin of putting pump clips up for beers they don't have on, maybe this mucking about will put another nail in their popularity.

And they're off...

With today being the Iowa Caucus and therefore the first real hurdle in the race to the white house, all eyes are on....

Kenya, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka and everywhere else there is political violence in the work today instead?

Or as I suspect, not; not that the US presidential election isn't important, but this is a small piece of the puzzle at this stage and there is plenty of time to get worked up.
I mean later on there is the important question of where will Barack Obama be on February the 5th the day of the California Presidential Primary. Luckily Jack Bauer will be out of prison in time.

I am a security consultant, you are a hacker, he has been charged under Section 3A of the Computer Misuse Act

In April of this year it is likely that the government will bring into force amendments to the CMA that criminalise "Making, supplying or obtaining articles" that assist someone in breaching other parts of the act.
What is wrong with this you ask? Well the net they are casting is very wide and although there are guidelines on how to avoid prosecuting those who are doing good works, it does rely on the legal profession understanding what exactly is going up in a very technical sphere that historically that have failed to grasp.
There are tests for the prosecution to use when trying to decide, but they don't completely reflect the state of the industry, with the idea that having to pay for software makes it more legitimate. Another problem is that having a lot of people using your tools in a legal way lends it credence so if you create a useful tool that people work out how to use in a bad way very quickly after release, you may well have to work at convincing the authorities that you didn't mean it to do so.
Richard Clayton has further comment on the subject.

The Holidays

Looking back over what has happened over this years holiday period around the world is as depressing as ever, Java in Indonesia provided the traditional natural disaster with floods and landslides, Pakistan and Gaza had the appalling although not shocking political violence while the nomination races in the US presidential election predictably turned to mud slinging (I suppose given the Iowan weather that should be muddy ice ball slinging).
Of course back home the news was mostly about the exciting ways people had to kill their children. Firstly we had the story of the Quad Bike accident in Essex which got worse with every update. Firstly we heard a child had died on a Quad bike, tragic, then we heard she was on the public highway, stupid, the next additional fact was that she was riding behind her father's car, idiotic, lastly we were told it was seven o'clock at night! I was at this point apoplectic with incredulity, given how dark it is at that time during the English Winter.
Then a couple of days later an old favourite, the dangerous dog attack on a small child; this time not a pit bull but a rottweiler (I know they don't fall under the terms of the Dangerous Dogs Act, but they are dogs that are dangerous). I really do think that if you have a dog that is considered not suitable to be in the house, it is not suitable to have children anywhere near. Some people have suggested that the 16 year old aunt was too young to be looking after those children, I don't automatically agree, she may well be responsible enough for the job, but there is no doubt that a viciously beteethed guard dog doesn't play well with others. Perhaps it is time for another look at the Dangerous Dogs Act.