Monthly Archives: December 2005

It’s not like Vietnam…

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Fred Halliday, writing in OpenDemocracy.net on the US predicament.

Many analogies are being made with Vietnam, but it is perhaps the analogy with the Soviet war in Afghanistan which is most telling. When the Soviets sent the Red army into Kabul in 1979 they sought to limit the political and economic costs by restricting numbers to around 120,000 i.e. to that necessary to garrison the major towns: hence the official term “limited contingent” for their troops in that country over the following ten years.

The US in Iraq has faced a similar problem, in that it has not been able to commit the full level of forces it could and which was necessary effectively to control the country. Those limits have now had their own consequences – in a US force increasingly restricted and vulnerable, without adequate local counterparts, and with almost no significant intelligence on enemy plans and dispositions.

The reply of the Iraqi guerrillas to Bush’s Annapolis speech on 30 November was incontestable: with a lightly-armed unit, and recorded by video cameras, they took control of an important Sunni town, Ramadi, and held it for several hours; a few days later, and also observed by video, they attacked a US patrol and killed ten of its members. Bush, Cheney and the US army have by now realised they are in an unwinnable situation: how long it takes them to act on this remains to be seen.

The Dave effect

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It’s happening, and though I hate to say it, I told you so. Today’s Guardian has the results of an ICM poll which brings uncomfortable news for the government.

Two-thirds of voters believe the government has run out of steam, according to a Guardian/ICM poll which places the Conservatives ahead of the Labour party for the first time since 2000.

The poll finds that the Tories are ahead of Labour by 37% to 36%, with the Liberal Democrats on 21%, compared with Labour’s five-point lead a month ago. Minor parties have also been squeezed from 10% to 7% by the David Cameron-led Tory revival. It is the first time in five years the Tories have been ahead – the last was during the fuel crisis – and the second time since 1993, after the pound crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism. It suggests that a solid majority of voters, 55%, is now dissatisfied with the job Tony Blair is doing as prime minister, though he remains overwhelmingly popular (82%) among Labour voters.

Now here comes the interesting bit…

But Gordon Brown’s chances in a 2009-10 election against Mr Cameron and Charles Kennedy are rated even more pessimistically. With Mr Brown in charge of Labour, the Tory lead widens to 41% to 36% with the Lib Dems on 18% as they lose votes back to Tory candidates.

My conclusion: Labour will have to skip Brown and go for someone younger if they want to hold on to power. It’s the boredom factor at work.

A corporate pantomime

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This morning’s Observer column…

Since this is the time of the year for pantomime, how about one for a corporate audience? It’s called Sony and the Rootkit and it’s a true story.

It tells of how a once-great electronics company fell in with bad company, did some stupid things, was found out by a plucky band of bloggers and now is being pursued through the US courts by some avenging lawyers.

The only thing lacking at the moment is a happy ending for Sony…

More…

Mediamax is the other company Sony called upon for help with DRM. Ed Felten has an interesting post summarising what another blogger found in the prospectus Mediamax filed with the SEC. The Prospectus states, en passant, that “several enhancements have been implemented to make it very difficult to locate and/or remove the device drivers” and that “the software is designed to be completely invisible to users, programs and system components.” Remember that this is their description of their software, not some barbed interpretation by a blogger!

Why I think the BBC licence fee is good value

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Simple. BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting all the works of JS Bach over a ten-day period. It’s just wonderful — no other word for it. And it reminds me of George Steiner’s lovely description of the music — “immense force channelled through a very narrow aperture”. This is what public service broadcasting is for.

Wikipedia 162, Brittanica 123

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From Good Morning, Silicon Valley…

A study published in the journal Nature Wednesday found that in a random sample of 42 science entries, the collaborative encyclopedia averaged four inaccuracies to Britannica’s three. “Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,” reported Nature. “But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

Not bad for a reference work whose open nature allows for inaccuracy, opinion and outright vandalism… Certainly, it’s testament to the innovative power of Wikipedia. “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Nature. “Print encyclopedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.” Editors at Brittanica wouldn’t comment on the flaws in their work, but had no trouble sounding off about those in Wikipedia. “We have nothing against Wikipedia,” said Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications at the company’s headquarters in Chicago. “But it is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor.”

The Net and the future of newspapers

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Typically thoughtful post by Scott Rosenberg on the way the Internet is affecting newspapers. Excerpt:

The newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.

Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it’s cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark’s original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal.

Wikilaw launched

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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

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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’

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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.