Canine Wisdom

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I love the New Yorker dog cartoons. (Remember the 1993 one of one mutt explaining to another that “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”?)

I’ve just come on another classic. Two dogs are walking past a picket fence. One is saying: “It’s always ‘Sit’, ‘Stay’, ‘Heel’ — never ‘Think’, ‘Innovate’, ‘Be Yourself’.”

Which reminds me, perversely, of a New Yorker cat joke. A man, about to go out through his front door, is pointing to a litter-tray and saying to his cat, “Don’t you dare think outside of the box”.

The Paris massacre: journalism is in the front line, but what kind of journalism?

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Interesting comment by Charlie Beckett.

What struck me was how weird it is that these people — and they do deserve the label ‘terrorist’ — have struck against cartoonists. Not drone manufacturers or military bases, diplomats, politicians or financiers, but satirists. It shows what we should have already known. That journalism is part of the ideological war. It is the front-line.

That makes it all the more important that journalists respond thoughtfully and responsibly. I am not going to tell editors what they should publish in relation to this story. But it would be good if their response is in the best tradition of liberal, positive journalism and not just an angry, lashing out that feeds the fear that helps sustain those who perpetrate the violence.

On the other hand, commenting on the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2011, the Time Bureau Chief in Paris at the time wrote this:

It’s obvious free societies cannot simply give in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group. And it’s just as clear that intimidation and violence must be condemned and combated for whatever reason they’re committed—especially if their goal is to undermine freedoms and liberties of open societies. But it’s just evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.

The takedown boom

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From Ars Technica:

Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that Google removed 75 percent more URLs in 2014 than it did the previous year. Google doesn’t tally up annual totals, but it does release weekly reports on DMCA notices, and TorrentFreak took it upon itself to add up the weekly reports. Most of the takedown requests are honored. Google has a longstanding tradition of supplying DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, a website that archives such requests.

Just a few years back, the number of takedown requests could be measured in the dozens, not the millions. In 2008, Google handled 62 DMCA takedown requests, and, in that year, each request was over just one copyrighted work. In later years, DMCA notices came to ask for millions of URLs to be removed to protect multiple works.

In a digital cacaphony, we need journalism more, not less

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Great blog post by George Brock, who thinks that disintermediation is not an unalloyed good, and that sometimes intermediaries are important and necessary. Extract:

What I’m trying to catch with the term “re-intermediation” is this. The way journalism’s intermediary role works has been massively altered, but the need for that function never went away. Whether or not we define it as journalism done by people called “journalists”, people need and want selection, distilling and interpretation.

Never lose sight of the fact that perhaps the single largest change underlying the “digital era” is the simple increase in the quantity and velocity of information moving between people. That proliferation increases the need for intermediary help, not the other way round. Organising and clarifying information (something that social networks do) can create value.

To me, the story of the last few years is one of regular, gentle reminders that raw, unsorted information has few fans. It’s obviously true that in the digital era someone who wants their information uncontaminated by journalism has a much better chance of getting it. But information sifted, verified, clarified and – yes – packaged has the greater appeal.

He’s right. I’ve been a subscriber to the Economist for many years not because I share its ideological views but because it’s a pretty good sieve that often highlights stuff that I might not have spotted otherwise and to which I ought to be paying attention.

Also: on the over-reach of disintermediation. Travel agents are usually the standard case study of intermediaries swept away by the wave of creative destruction. So we — the customers — now do all the bureaucracy associated with booking our air travel. So it’s only when you have to plan a complicated, non-standard trip that you realise how useful a knowledgeable intermediary can be.

The best camera…

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seascape

… is always the one you happen to have with you. In Ireland last weekend I carried a Nikon DSLR but wound up mostly using my iPhone6 because it was so much better at handling the (difficult) light. The Apple camera is very impressive, especially in situations where HDR capability is needed to manage the luminance range. This isn’t a particularly good picture, but the scene completely defeated the Nikon.

Ye olde reality distortion fields

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The strangest thing about Downton Abbey, the reality distortion field masquerading as costume drama, is not that it has been captivating British audiences — for the Brits are congenitally susceptible to this kind of class-ridden crap — but that it is apparently a big hit in the US, which supposedly is a more egalitarian, less deferential society.

Also interesting is the coincidence that — as Thomas Piketty has shown — levels of inequality in the US are now approaching what they were in Britain when Downton Abbey was in its heyday. Wonder how many of those addled American Downton addicts realise that?

Imbecility rules ok?

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Appearances notwithstanding, we are not governed by imbeciles. Our problem is that we are governed by unscrupulous politicians who see imbecility as the way to the voter’s heart. Step forward Theresa May, the current Miss Whiplash of the Tory front bench, who wants a solemn commitment in the next Tory Manifesto to expel all foreign graduate students after they graduate and make them apply from abroad for visas to work in the UK. Yes, you read that correctly. She wants to force bright young foreigners, who come to do research degrees in the UK because we have some great universities, to leave the moment they become available for work in our knowledge-based industries.

Here’s how James Dyson, the entrepreneur and inventor puts it:

Train ’em up. Kick ’em out. It’s a bit shortsighted, isn’t it? A short-term vote winner that leads to long-term economic decline. Of course the government needs to be seen to be “doing something”. But postgraduate research in particular leads to exportable, patentable technology. Binning foreign postgraduates is, I suppose, a quick fix. But quick fixes don’t build long-term futures. And that’s exactly what many researchers are doing.

Bright sparks are drawn to the UK for good reason – our universities are among the best in the world. Particularly for science and engineering. Yet the Home Office wants to say cheerio to these sharp minds as soon as their mortarboards land on college lawns. The moment research is finished students are forced back to their homelands, from where the home secretary is happy to allow them to apply for jobs in Britain. Not exactly motivating. Not exactly practical. This is an abrupt departure from an equally unworkable idea that after their research they have two months to be employed, otherwise they are ejected. No wonder fewer than 10% bother to try to stay.

Our borders must remain open to the world’s best. Give them our knowledge, allow them to develop their own and permit them to apply it on our shores. Their ideas and inventiveness will create technology to export around the world.

The interesting question, of course, is why Miss Whiplash thinks that her daft policy idea will be a vote-winner in a closely-fought election? The logical inference is that she thinks that voters are imbeciles. In which case she is following in the footsteps of one of her heroes, Winston Churchill, who famously observed that “the best argument against democracy is five minutes’ conversation with the average voter”.

Sigh.

Could Facebook be a factor in the next election?

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This morning’s Observer column:

There are two things about 2015 of which one can be reasonably certain: there will be a general election in May and it’s unlikely to produce an overall majority for either of the two big parties. In those circumstances, small, localised events might have big implications: a Ukip candidate shoots his mouth off about, er, non-white people; a Labour candidate turns out to have an embarrassing past; a Tory garagiste cannot differentiate between sexual harassment and bum pinching. The kind of stuff, in other words, that could affect the outcome in a finely balanced constituency.

Which brings us to social media and the question of whether the 2015 general election could be the first one in which the outcome is affected by what goes on there. Could Facebook, for example, be a factor in determining the outcome of some local constituency battles?

Far-fetched? Maybe. But the question is worth asking because in the 2010 US congressional elections, Facebook conducted an interesting experiment in social engineering, which made some of us sit up…

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