… as Walter Cronkite used to say when signing off the nightly news.

Iconic anchorman Walter Cronkite, a pioneer in television broadcasting once dubbed The Most Trusted Man in America, died Friday, his family said. He was 92.

As anchorman of ‘CBS Evening News’ from 1962 to 1981, Mr. Cronkite elevated the role of television news presenter from a script reader to that arbiter of truth called an anchorman.

Noted broadcaster Walter Cronkite died Friday at the age of 92. Known as “Uncle Walter” and sometimes as the conscience of America, Cronkite covered World War II, Nuremberg, the moon landing, Vietnam and scores of other major historical events during his long and storied career.

The term originally signified his role as tether to a far-flung news crew, but Mr. Cronkite imbued it with new gravitas. His Middle-American warmth — he once likened himself to “a comfortable old shoe” — led to an equally popular nickname, Uncle Walter. He became famous for his nightly sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”

[Source.]

Needless to say, his Wikipedia entry has already been updated.

… in 1946 was a Thursday. How do I know this? Why, I asked WolframAlpha. It’s the kind of thing it knows.

It was also the day in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began as General Franco led an uprising of army troops based in North Africa.

Regular readers will know that I’m more concerned about Cyberwarfare than most of the mass media (see e.g. here). It seems that Mark Anderson shares that concern. Extract from an interesting post on his blog about reports that North Korea has been playing games in Cyberspace:

Cyber attack has moved from nuisance, to the first, and often the decisive, act of war. Can a country afford to ignore or belittle a major cyber attack? No. There is too much likelihood it is the first step in a cascade that will lead to missiles, tanks and soldiers.

I don’t mean to imply that the current attacks on the U.S., if as amateurish as we are told, are cause for going to war. But if you switch the perspectives, you see the problem: if this is NK doing its best, launched simultaneously with seven missiles pointed at the U.S., they are not just being devilishly cute. They are risking our interpretation of their mischief as a real act of war.

Indeed, I would submit that the world community is now at that stage in its development of, and dependence upon, computer systems and nets, that a well-documented and clearly sourced cyber attack would be adequate grounds, in the Security Council of the U.N., for going to war…

Informative and useful review by DianeC of Africa:altered states, ordinary miracles by Richard Dowden.

There are lots of things about this book that I liked. One was learning something new on every page. It’s a great read, combining vivid reportage with intelligent analysis. Another was the author’s refusal to generalize. Almost every chapter is about a specific country, or sub-national region, or ethnic group, or village. The stories are used to illustrate wider points, but no reader could emerge from this making bland generalizations. Any of the chapters makes a great, concise introduction to an individual country’s history and political landscape.

However, there are two quite powerful generalizations that emerge, not from being chapter subjects, but from the way they crop up in every specific example throughout the book. One is the utterly corrosive and pervasive corruption. Like Martin Meredith in The State of Africa, Dowden thinks this has its origins in colonialism, in the expectation formed by colonial rule that the state steals from the people. Between two and fourteen times the amount paid to African countries in official aid has been sent overseas to private bank accounts in London and Switzerland, he suggests. (And here’s another charge to lay at the door of the financial services industry, the bankers for whom all money is welcome, no matter what its provenance.) But unlike Meredith, he firmly blames current political leaders in Africa for betraying the hopes and promise of liberation with every bribe they take or profit they skim. In this he is in harmony with a growing chorus of critics of everyday politics in so many Africa countries – including, of course, Barack Obama.

A second theme which emerges unannounced is the damage being caused by the aid industry – and here too Dowden is adding his authoritative voice to other aid critics. This ranges from his critique of the way the agencies feed the image of helpless, starving Africa to ensure they can raise funds to pay themselves and ensure their activities continue (p7) to drawing attention to their perverse role in supporting those who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 (p248)…

Here’s a quote from today’s Sunday Times story about the News of the World phone hacking activities.

On Friday, Tom Watson, the former Labour minister, reflected the mood, bowling up to a journalist from a national newspaper and tugging at the reporter’s House of Commons pass. “You won’t be needing this much longer,” he grinned.

And here’s Tom Watson’s tweet on the subject:

So… whom do we believe?

My eye was caught by this story in today’s Irish Times.

The Government lost a vote in the Seanad [i.e. the second chamber of the Irish parliament] yesterday on the Defamation Bill but managed to salvage the legislation by calling for a walk-through vote which gave enough time for two missing Senators to be found.

The Government defeat came on an amendment to the Bill proposed by Senator Eugene Regan of Fine Gael proposing to delete the provision in the legislation making blasphemy a crime.

In an electronic vote whereby Senators press a button, the Government was defeated by 22 votes to 21 in the 60-member upper house.

However, Fianna Fáil whip Diarmuid Wilson immediately requested a walk-through vote which takes about 10 minutes to complete. In that period two Senators, Geraldine Feeney of Fianna Fáil and Deirdre De Búrca of the Green Party, had time to get to the chamber and the amendment was defeated by 23 votes to 22. The Bill itself was then passed by the same margin.

A Green Party spokesman said Ms De Búrca was initially absent through “a misunderstanding” while showing a trade union delegation from Colombia around Leinster House. Ms Feeney was at the dentist.

What, one wondered, was all that about? Deeper in the paper there was a rather good OpEd piece by Michael Nugent, which explained some of the background.

The Constitution says that blasphemy is an offence that shall be punishable by law. That law currently resides in the 1961 Defamation Act. Because he was repealing this Act, Ahern [Minister for Justice] said he had to pass a new blasphemy law to avoid leaving “a void”.

But this “void” was already there. In 1999, the Supreme Court found that the 1961 law was unenforceable because it did not define blasphemy. In effect, we have never had an enforceable blasphemy law under the 1937 Constitution.

After several retreats, Ahern claimed both that he had to propose this law in order to respect the Constitution, and also that he was amending it to “make it virtually impossible to get a successful prosecution”. How is that respecting the Constitution?

This type of “nod and wink” politics brings our laws, and our legislature, into disrepute. In practice, we cannot be certain how our courts will interpret unnecessary laws, as we discovered after the abortion referendum.

Also, the matter might be taken out of our hands. In 2005, the Greek courts found a book of cartoons to be blasphemous, and issued a European arrest warrant for the Austrian cartoonist who drew them. This can be done if the same crime exists in both jurisdictions.

Instead, we should remove the blasphemy reference from the Constitution by referendum. Many independent bodies have advised this, including the Council of Europe in a report last year co-written by the director general of the Irish Attorney General.

We could do this on October 2nd, the same day as the Lisbon referendum. It could be the first step towards gradually building an ethical and secular Ireland. We should be removing all of the 1930s religious references from the Constitution, not legislating to enforce them.

Hmmm… It’s a long time since I read the said Constitution, so I dug it out. Here’s an extract from the preamble:

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,…

Article 6 states:

All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.

Article 40 states, in part:

The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter
is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.

Article 41 is even wierder:

1° The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

2° The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

3. 1° The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

Article 44 states:

The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.

It’s enough to make one feel sympathetic towards the ‘Reverend’ Ian Paisley. This isn’t the constitution of a modern, pluralist, secular state, but of a priest-ridden, superstitious, misogynistic and backward statelet.

… in 1940 the Blitz began. The Luftwaffe began bombing London and other British cities. By late October, the ‘Battle of Britain’ was over. The Germans were unable to sustain the losses because of RAF fighter opposition. I was reminded of this today as I was passing the Duxford war museum earlier on the M11 and suddenly three WW2 fighters flying in close formation appeared and looped the loop. Magical.

In the mid-1980s I learned everything one needs to know in order to understand large organisations. I was in Aldershot, Britain’s biggest army town, having a pee in the toilet of a large pub patronised mainly by army squaddies. As I stood there relieving myself I noticed a graffito at eye level. “AT THIS MOMENT”, it read, “YOU ARE THE ONLY MAN IN THE BRITISH ARMY WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING.”

The ‘Peter Principle’ expresses this in slightly less charged language. In the late 1960s the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced the principle that “Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence”.

Now three physicists have found a way of simulating this effect using agent-based simulation methods. “Despite its apparent unreasonableness”, they write, “such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other”. Their simulations show that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle ununavoidable, but it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.

So how to avoid it? The simulations suggest that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are (a) either to promote each time an agent at random or (b) to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

Hooray! At last I understand what’s been going on.

Robin Mason, who was one of my best academic colleagues, and one of the nicest mavericks I’ve known, died recently. There’s a nice obit in today’s Guardian.

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Mason completed her first degree at Toronto University and her master’s at Madison, Wisconsin. She was a free spirit, best exemplified by stories recounted by colleagues. One remembers her swimming across a very chilly Norwegian lake during a break in an international conference programme. Her colleagues sat anxiously on the shore, wrapped in warm jackets, while Mason swam into the distance and, so her colleagues thought, into mortal danger of hypothermia. They were greatly relieved when she emerged again, dripping and smiling.

Much loved by her colleagues, she was known as a maverick who didn’t give much regard to what she saw as unnecessary administration. But she struck the right balance between scholarly activity, practical application, and having fun with new ideas. Her legacy will continue to inform educational technologists in the future.