Lovely spoof of BBC News story…
The BBC has confirmed that unknown actor David Cameron will become the new
Doctor Who….
From Owen’s Blog.
Category Archives: Asides
Wikilaw launched
Main page here. Its goal is “to build the largest open-content legal resource in the world”. It claims there are “roughly 1,000,000 lawyers in the United States”. Pardon me while I lie down in a darkened room. It’s the thought of all those lawyers laid end to end.
I love the story about Sam Johnson and James Boswell walking together down a street behind another chap. The great Doctor pulled Boswell aside and whispered, “I don’t wish to speak ill of any other person, but I believe that man is an attorney”.
The Uses of Play-Doh
Er, so much for fingerprint scanning. According to this report from Clarkson University,
Fingerprint scanning devices often use basic technology, such as an optical camera that take pictures of fingerprints which are then “read” by a computer. In order to assess how vulnerable the scanners are to spoofing, Schuckers and her research team made casts from live fingers using dental materials and used Play-Doh to create molds. They also assembled a collection of cadaver fingers.In the laboratory, the researchers then systematically tested more than 60 of the faked samples. The results were a 90 percent false verification rate.
But do not despair, Homeland Security Spokespersons. Help is at hand. The Clarkson researchers found that if you scan for sweat, then the detection of fakes improves.
Which only goes to prove that, as someone once said, “genius is five percent inspiration and 95% perspiration”.
(Sorry — couldn’t resist that.) Thanks to the Guardian Online Blog for the link.
The problem with ‘problem’
I’ve just been listening to the CEO of the drinks company Britvic (which is being launched on the UK Stock Market) dealing with journalistic questions about the company’s flat sales in the last year. Did he acknowledge that they had a problem? Of course not. He talked about ‘challenges’ instead. This is par for the course nowadays — nobody wants to be caught acknowledging that they have a problem, with the result that it has become a pariah word in political and governmental circles.
This is daft, because problems are what we really need. I first learned this many years ago from Donald Schon, who taught architecture at MIT and wrote a wonderful book about professionalism entitled The Reflective Practitioner. In it, he challenged the prevailing view that professionals (lawyers, doctors, architects, etc.) are “problem solvers”. They’re not, argued Schon: they’re problem creators. A problem is a perceived discrepancy between a current state and a desired one. ‘Solving’ a problem means devising a means of getting from one to the other. So if you have a ‘problem’ then you’re half-way there: at least you know where you stand.
But most of the time in life we aren’t sure about one or other or both states — where we are now, or where we want to get to. So what happens is that people with hazily-defined difficulties come to professionals for help. The professionals then do some work on those difficulties to convert them into problems, after which they can identify possible solutions. Thus a father who wants to ensure that children of several marriages (each with its own property entailments) are equally treated in his will goes to a lawyer for advice. The lawyer (if she is a good one) will convert that general desire into a problem or problems for which legal solutions are available.
So let’s have more problems, not fewer.
Rat 1, Yale students nil
Lovely New Yorker piece by Louis Menand, reviewing Philip Tetlock’s book on pundits…
Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.
Osama: the facts
From The New Yorker…
Assuming that bin Laden is still alive, he is now forty-eight years old. He developed his vision for his global jihad organization, Al Qaeda, over the course of more than three decades, and his formative experiences have included participation in combat during the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the nineteen-eighties; prolonged exile from Saudi Arabia; the survival of at least two assassination attempts; at least four marriages, which produced at least a dozen children; and, lately, the trials of being the world’s most wanted fugitive.
No wonder he looks knackered in those home movies of his. I had always assumed he was about 108. First it was policemen who were younger than me; then it was High Court judges; now it’s the World’s Number One Baddie.
Would you like fries with that download?
The New Scientist reported, and the NYT followed up on, a Disney patent application which could lead to McDonald’s Happy Meal toys being replaced with portable media players that hold Disney movies, music, games or photos. Users could add files to the devices by earning points with food purchases. The NYT says:
The plan could work something like this: A customer enters a restaurant and buys a meal, receiving the portable media player and an electronic code that authorizes a partial download of a movie, video or other media file, which can be downloaded while in the restaurant, according to a United States Patent and Trademark Office application filed by Disney. Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game.
The report also claims that McDonalds has been kitting out its premises with wireless Internet connections since 2003, and since then has installed Wi-Fi in more than 6,200 restaurants worldwide. It charges customers for Wi-Fi usage and trades promotional coupons and prepaid cards for network access time.
I really must get out more. On second thoughts, perhaps not.
Citizen journalism…?
… or just plain desperation? This appeared on ITV screens this morning after reports of the Hemel Hempstead oil depot fire.
Ambiguous domain names
Quentin has a nice link to an amusing site which collects domain names that are unintentionally funny. Example: an organisation with the perfectly respectable name of Experts Exchange, but the URL www.expertsexchange.com. And then there is the pen specialist, Pen Island. I leave you to imagine the URL.
Words as weapons
Although the content of the speech was highly political, especially in its clinical dissection of post-war US foreign policy, it relied on Pinter’s theatrical sense, in particular his ability to use irony, rhetoric and humour, to make its point. This was the speech of a man who knows what he wants to say but who also realises that the message is more effective if rabbinical fervour is combined with oratorical panache.
At one point, for instance, Pinter argued that “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the second world war”. He then proceeded to reel off examples. But the clincher came when Pinter, with deadpan irony, said: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events. He also showed how language is devalued by the constant appeal of US presidents to “the American people”. This was argument by devastating example. As Pinter repeated the lulling mantra, he proved his point that “The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance.” Thus Pinter brilliantly used a rhetorical device to demolish political rhetoric.
Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian on Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture, delivered from a wheelchair.
Lovely phrase that — “voluptuous cushion of reassurance”. Must remember it.