The evolving story of the attack on Ian Tomlinson illustrates lots of things, many of them disturbing. For example, when did police officers on public duty start wearing balaclavas — as the guy who attacked Mr Tomlinson was? On the face of it, just about the only upside is the fact that citizens now have tools (cameraphones, small digital cameras and camcorders) which enable us to monitor and record the behaviour of police officers and other officials. If we’d had the same tools thirty years ago, the police officer who murdered Blair Peach, and the colleagues who covered up for him, might have been identified and maybe prosecuted.

So three cheers for the tools of citizen journalism? Celebrations might be premature. I suspect that the ‘system’ will not take this lying down. Since 9/11 we’ve seen extraordinary official repressiveness towards amateur photographers (see e.g. this post) trying to take photographs in what are clearly public places.

So here’s a prediction. We will see an adaptation of the time-honoured practice of stopping coaches bound for London-based demonstrations and searching everyone on board for ‘offensive’ weapons like bottles, marbles, ball-bearings, pepper, etc., all of which are then arbitrarily confiscated. The definition of ‘offensive’ will be extended to any electronic device capable of recording events. No doubt there is already a clause in the Public Order Acts which can be used to justify this. And if there isn’t, then I’m sure the Minister of the Interior, Jacqui Smith, can provide a Ministerial Order that will do the trick. After all, for a UK government with a big majority to get intrusive measures through Parliament is almost as straightforward as ordering ‘adult’ videos from Virgin.

Following my post about the assault on Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations, I had an email from a reader pointing me to a remarkable photograph on Flickr. Since it has an “All Rights Reserved” licence I can’t reproduce it, but you can find it here. Note the wording on the back of the cop’s jacket.

Brooding on the shocking attack on the two kids in Edlington, I came on this characteristically wise article by Nicci Gerrard, who has done more than her fair share of thinking about evil and savagery (she sat through — and wrote about — the West trial, and, later, the Soham murder case). Here’s part of what she writes today in the Telegraph about the Edlington case:

This distressing story follows an intense scrutiny of childhood; it seems like an apt and ghastly demonstration of the anxiety that has been expressed by think-tanks, children’s charities, teacher associations and cultural commentators. The teenage gangs in inner cities; the increasing knife culture; the angry 19-year-old who lashed out and killed the boy in a bakery; the shocking case of an 18-year-old youth who, when in foster care, raped the two-year-old in the family and abused the nine-year-old; the extensive survey earlier this year that expressed a widespread anxiety about the state of the nation's children and the fact that childhood ends too quickly; the finding that a teacher suffers a violent attack almost every school day; the growth in childhood obesity, in teenage and pre-teenage binge drinking, in under-age sex and under-age pregnancies – there is a sense of a growing crisis in childhood, certainly a crisis in the way that we think of children.

On the one hand, we sentimentalise them, on the other we are scared of them. We idolise them and scapegoat them. We want them to be young and innocent, unblemished by hard and mucky life for as long as possible, and we want them to grow up, flooding them with adult expectations and media images, encouraging them to be sexualised way before their own desires, pushing them through the hoops of exams, forcing them out into the harsh realities of adult life. The way that the attack in South Yorkshire has already been characterised in the media is a neat example of this cultural dichotomy: the so-called “devil brothers” versus the “regular” boys and “pals” who were out on a harmless fishing trip; the unnatural versus the natural, and indeed, in a wider context, evil versus good.

But evil is too easy, too comforting. Children are products of their environments and monsters are not born but made. It is no surprise at all that the two boys in Edlington were in care. Such cases almost always happen on the fringes, the extreme edges of a society. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-olds who led the two-year-old James Bulger down to the railway embankment by the hand, kicked him, then battered him to death with bricks and an iron bar, came from deprived families. So, too, did Mary Bell who strangled Martin Brown the day before her eleventh birthday, in May 1968, and then two months later, strangled the three-year-old Martin Howe to death (her mother was a prostitute and often absent; Mary was forced to engage in anal and oral sex with men from the age of five)…

In my Observer column last Sunday I wrote that “It’s said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly.” My friend Sean French (who is very hot on urban legends and memes generally) picked up on this and emailed me this link, which restates the theory that when you take in consideration the bee’s wingspan along with its weight it is aerodynamically impossible for it to generate enough lift. But it seems that

in 2005 with the assistance of high-speed cinematography and mechanical models of the bee’s wings, scientists were able to put this perplexing mystery to rest. As it turns out the bee flap its wings an amazing 230 times per second, much faster than smaller insects. Their analysis revealed sufficient lift was generated by unconventional combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, along with a very fast wing-beat frequency.

The site also included a link to this video, which shows a bee doing its stuff as captured by a high-speed camera:

… in 1973, Picasso died at his home near Mougins at age the ripe old age of 91.

We ain’t seen nothing yet, if this analysis by a former IMF economic adviser and a TCD economics professor is to be believed.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

The historical comparison with stock markets is also interesting:

From Gawker.

If you apply for expensive training in a dying profession, why should anyone trust your abilities to collect and analyze information?

Newspapers are closing and laying people off; magazines are firing people left and right; even online publishers are gloomy. So naturally writers are flocking to journalism schools: Enrollment is up 38 percent, 20 percent and 6 percent at Columbia, Stanford and NYU, respectively, Forbes.com reports.

The average annual cost to attend is $31,000. The average journalist with a graduate degree earned $40,000 per year — before the financial meltdown began in the fall…

Somebody (I think it was Robert Darnton) made the point at the JISC ‘Libraries of the Future’ event in Oxford last week that the economic downturn is leading to a noticeable increase in the number of people using public libraries in the US. Here’s a blog post tot he same effect.

Lines around the building, bodies asleep on their bags, staff looking frazzled and dazed. No, this is not the local Greyhound station, it’s the most recent iteration of your neighborhood temple of wisdom, the public library.

With resources that could prove key in getting back to work, public libraries are seeing a significant uptick in patronage at the same time they are facing funding cuts. In the last year, the New York City system has experienced a 12 percent increase in patronage and a 17 percent increase in circulation that has spiked to 30 percent in areas like the Bronx.

Herb Scher, Director of Public Relations for New York Public Libraries, said the influx in patrons can be attributed to many downturn-related factors. Some new patrons are seeking resume help. Other are borrowing DVDs because renting them has become prohibitive. “We are looking to preserve as much service as we can,” Scher said in a telephone conversation.

Meanwhile, the city’s system is facing a $23.3 million cutback in June. If the measure passes, Scher says a 20 percent reduction in hours would follow.

Where ‘e’ stands for embarrassment. Further to my post about the ingenious Eye-Fi card, Bill Thompson (whom God Preserve) emailed me with this lovely story:

I was at a conference in Florida last year chatting to someone from [company] who had an eye-fi card in his digital camera and loved it. But he pointed out a potential problem… a friend of his had asked to borrow his camera, and he had forgotten to mention the wifi link, only to be somewhat surprised later that day to find pornographic images of the friend’s partner appearing on his laptop as the card had found an open wireless network and was doing its job…

Am still grinning at this. First tweet: “Wrecked the boat. Totaled. Everyone dead. FAIL”. And the last one? Why, isn’t it obvious? “Back Home! Who R all these random dudes?”