My Prius has a playmate. Giles Smith writes about the new (to the UK, anyway) Honda Civic Hybrid 1.4. Thanks to Kevin for the link.
Category Archives: Asides
Bush’s hydrogen fantasies: “forever far off”
From a Technology Review interview with Ernest J. Moniz, an MIT physicist and former Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy…
Tech Review: President Bush has been talking a lot about hydrogen. Is the hydrogen economy the answer?
Moniz: There are many here on campus who have written about it — John Deutch had a Science paper about it and John Heywood has testified to the Congress about it and has written several reports with colleagues. The hydrogen transportation economy looks to us to be very, very challenging, very far off. And “very far off” could mean: forever far off. Given the cost barriers that must be overcome with fuel cells, the challenges for storing hydrogen onboard, and the infrastructure problems for delivering hydrogen — it makes one wonder whether alternative technologies, which require far less disruption to the infrastructure and are far less of a cost challenge, but are highly efficient, don’t essentially accomplish the same goal…
The World Cup script
The current hysteria about the broken metatarsal of Wayne Rooney (see helpful illustration above) reminds one that world cup hysteria in the British media is running true to form. It goes like this:
The one thing missing from the time-honoured script is likely to be English football hooligans, who were once world champions at their sport, but are now apparently eclipsed by Polish thugs. Sigh. And to think that this country once had an Empire on which the sun never set.
I think you turn left after Afghanistan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Most American young people can’t find Iraq on a map, even though U.S. troops have been there for more than three years, according to a new geographic literacy study released on Tuesday.
Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans aged 18-24 in a survey could place Iraq on an unlabeled map of the Middle East, a study conducted for National Geographic found. Only about one-quarter of respondents could find Iran and Israel on the same map.
Sixty-nine percent of young people picked out China on a map of Asia, but only about half could find India and Japan and only 12 percent correctly located Afghanistan.
[Link] via Truthdig.
Who fought the law?
My oblique reference to the Grateful Dead spurred a flood of erudite emails from readers questioning the accuracy of linking the band with the song I fought the law but the law won. In fact the song has a very interesting history — see the excellent Wikepedia entry about it. It’s been recorded by numerous bands, including the Clash and Green Day. But my favourite rendition is the Grateful Dead’s, because they sing it as though they had indeed fought losing battles with law enforcement agencies, possibly in relation to narcotic substances. Apple cheekily used the Green Day version in their SuperBowl ad for iTunes.
So who’s making the money out of Web 2.0?
Bandwidth providers, says Nicholas Carr…
The way the Web 1.0 dot-com pioneers used pricey computer gear, the Web 2.0 digital-media pioneers use bandwidth. They devour huge gobs of it. YouTube, Forbes’s Dan Frommer writes, is probably burning through a million bucks a month in bandwidth costs, a number that’s going up as rapidly as its traffic. Follow the money. In this case, as Frommer reports, the trail will lead you to Limelight Networks, which YouTube uses to stream all that user-generated content – like 200 terabytes a day – back to us users. Once again, it looks like it’s the suppliers – in this case, the content delivery networks – that are positioned to be the most reliable money-makers as more and more investment pours into the creation of our vaster, user-generated wasteland.
John Kenneth Galbraith…
… has died, at the ripe old age of 97.
He was the person who first awakened my interest in economics. I read The Affluent Society as a teenager and drew from it the idea that economics might actually be an interesting and relevant subject. (Later acquaintanceship with professional economists cured me of that illusion.) He had a wonderful, elegant, laconic style — he wrote the way Macaulay would have written if he had been tall (JKG was 6’8″ and drew an innate sense of superiority from the fact that he always found himself looking down on people — even the President of the US whom he served as Ambassador to India.) My guess is that most professional economists loathed him. I met him once — when he was a Visiting Professor in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity. I never go to Ireland without thinking of his phrase “private affluence, public squalor”. Mixed obits in the NYT, the Guardian and The Times.
Limbaugh Arrested on Prescription Drug Charges
From an AP report carried on Truthdig…
The Palm Beach County, Florida, sheriff’s Office says Rush Limbaugh has been arrested on prescription fraud charges.
Limbaugh turned himself into authorities on a warrant issued by the state attorney’s office, said agency spokesperson Teri Barbera.
The conservative radio commentator came into the jail about 4 p.m with his attorney, Roy Black, and was released an hour later on $3,000 bail.
The warrant was for fraud to conceal information to obtain prescription. Barbera said.
Leopards don’t change their spots. Limbaugh was investigated in 2003 for a similar offence.
That managerial job
You’d have to be crazy to want to manage the England football team. Luiz Felipe Scolari clearly isn’t.
It took Sven Goran Eriksson five years to tire of the English media’s obsession with the incumbent of the impossible job. Luiz Felipe Scolari, his nemesis and the FA’s chosen successor, took less than 48 hours to decide that the radioactive tracksuit would not fit.
Scolari, a World Cup winner with Brazil and the man singled out by the FA’s tortuous appointments process as best candidate for England, yesterday announced that he would not be putting his name on the £2.5m-a-year contract offered to him on Wednesday.
After waking on Thursday morning to find 20 reporters on his doorstep in Lisbon and numerous others poring over his background, Big Phil decided to withdraw his name from the process…
Smart lad, that Luiz.
‘Systemic failure’…
… is a phrase much in vogue this week, as the British government struggles to cope with a week of disasters. Systemic means “of, or pertaining to, a system”, and it is quite clear that the failures in the prison/deportation arrangements which allowed over a thousand convicted foreigners to escape deportation were indeed systemic in this sense. As a matter of fact, most large-scale failures are.
This point is intelligently made by Martin Kettle in his Guardian column this morning when he writes:
Leaving John Prescott’s extramarital affair to one side (although, ironically, the deputy prime minister may be the biggest political loser of the week), it is foolish to pretend that the prisons and health crises are not symptomatic of something larger. It was not mere coincidence that two big departments found themselves under fire this week. Away from the front pages and the TV news bulletins, plenty of other departments are also undergoing similar heavy pounding: the Treasury for the lost billions of the tax credit system; the Ministry of Defence for persistent cost overruns; Defra for the bungled introduction of the new system of farm subsidies; the Department of Constitutional Affairs for an overspend on legal aid that will lead to the loss of hundreds of jobs in the court service.
These are not personal failures on the part of ministers, though not all ministers are as brave as Charles Clarke in fessing up to their failures. The fact that Clarke and Hewitt have both had a horrid week is down to something more than the former’s combative brusqueness or the latter’s unfortunate schoolmarmish manner. Both, by any reasonable account, are talented and competent. What is wrong is clearly “systemic”, as Clarke put it about the prisoner releases, or even institutional. This week’s events have exposed some of the wider limitations of Labour’s way of managing public-service reform, as well as Labour’s way of governing more generally – and perhaps even some of the limitations of the modern state itself.
The problem is that the logic of the “systemic failure” analysis is never followed up. What’s needed is systemic management of these very large and complex programmes, that is to say, an approach to design and management that is informed by systems thinking. Until we get that kind of approach, we are always going to have systemic failures, because we are blind to the interactions (or lack thereof) which cause them.
When one of my former OU colleagues, Professor Jake Chapman, went to work part-time for the Cabinet Office, he spotted immediately that the absence of systemic thinking was a crippling defect in the governmental apparatus, and he co-operated with us to produce an Open University course, Making Policies Work: systems thinking in government and management, as a way of helping people understand what is needed. Maybe we should offer it for free to every civil servant in the country?