Daily Archives: May 11, 2009

‘Honourable’ Members?

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I’m temperamentally suspicious of the British press when it’s in self-righteous mode — as it is currently about MPs’ expenses. (I’m with Macaulay on that one. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous”, he wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.) And I suspect that behind at least some of the apparently outrageous claims there is probably a sensible explanation.

But the thing that really bugs me is the incessant invocation of the mantra that any expense claimed, no matter how bizarre, was “within the rules”. We had the same thing a while back when a very senior Irish bank executive was shamed into resigning when it was revealed that he had been ‘warehousing’ huge personal loans for nearly a decade to keep them off his bank’s balance sheet at the end of each financial year. As he crashed in flames, he issued a statement saying that while his actions may have been ‘inappropriate’, nevertheless they were within the law.

What was missing in his case — and is clearly missing in some British MPs — is any sense of honourable behaviour. His actions were clearly designed to keep the truth of his financial dealings with the bank he ran from being known. Most of us who are lucky enough to be in employment are entitled to claim legitimate expenses. But most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable and what’s not. For example, if I go to London on university business it’s obviously reasonable to claim for any rail, tube and/or taxi fares needed to get me to and from my destination. But is it reasonable to claim for the Americano that I would have had anyway, travelling or not? Obviously not.

And the irony is that Parliamentary etiquette still insists that the shysters who have been exploiting the expenses system should be referred to as “Honourable Members”. Perhaps the best revenge would be to refer henceforth to the most blatant claimers as Dishonourable Members.

As ever, sunlight is the best disinfectant. When in doubt ask yourself: How would this look if it were presented in evidence in court? Or published in the report of a committee of inquiry? And then decide what to do.

The New New Deal

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You’d need to be a psychiatrist to understand what’s going on in the heads of US Republican politicians at the moment. At the moment, for example, many of them are rewriting history to ‘prove’ that FDR’s New Deal was a ‘failure’. Russ Daggatt has a nice rant about this on Mark Anderson’s blog.

Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.

A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.

At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”

I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further…

Russ’s piece has two interesting graphs. One shows that GDP rose steadily through FDR’s time in office. The other graph is of US national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Rather puts Obama’s measures in context, doesn’t it?

WolframAlpha: correction

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Hmmm… Seems that I was wrong. WolframAlpha isn’t really a competitor to Google, or indeed a search engine in the normal sense of the term. Or so the NYT maintains.

WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.

“I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company in Champaign, Ill., that has been quietly developing WolframAlpha.

Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now.

WolframAlpha, which is expected to be available to the public at wolframalpha.com in the next week, is not a finished product. It is an early working version of a project that has been years in the making and will continue to evolve over years, if not decades. As such, there is much it cannot answer now.