The view from Trinity Street on a misty afternoon. Strange how the tower of St John’s college chapel seems to loom out of the fog.
Getting the picture
Pilgrimage
Warning: This film is over 30 minutes long and probably of interest only to photography buffs. It’s the story of how a photographer who still does wet-plate photography made a pilgrimage to Laycock Abbey, the home of Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype process and therefore one of the great pioneers of photography.
If you are going to watch it, brew some coffee and reconcile yourself to not doing any work for half an hour.
Out of their element
Two scholars checking email at an academic conference.
Osborne’s controlled experiment
Lovely New Yorker piece by John Cassidy. Sample:
One of the frustrations of economics is that it is hard to carry out scientific experiments and prove things beyond reasonable doubt. But not in this case. Thanks to Osborne’s stubborn refusal to change course—“Turning back would be a disaster,” he told Parliament—what has been happening in Britain amounts to a “natural experiment” to test the efficacy of austerity economics. For the sixty-odd million inhabitants of the U.K., living through it hasn’t been a pleasant experience—no university institutional-review board would have allowed this kind of brutal human experimentation. But from a historical and scientific perspective, it is an invaluable case study.
At every stage of the experiment, critics (myself included) have warned that Osborne’s austerity policies would prove self-defeating. Any decent economics textbook will tell you that, other things being equal, cutting government spending causes the economy’s overall output to fall, tax revenues to decrease, and spending on benefits to increase. Almost invariably, the end result is slower growth (or a recession) and high budget deficits. Osborne, relying on arguments about restoring the confidence of investors and businessmen that his forebears at the U.K. Treasury used during the early nineteen-thirties against Keynes, insisted (and continues to insist) otherwise, but he has been proven wrong.
With Republicans in Congress still intent on pursuing a strategy similar to the failed one adopted by the Brits, this is a story that needs trumpeting. Austerity policies are self-defeating: they cripple growth and reduce tax revenues. The only way to bring down the U.S. government’s deficit in a sustainable manner, and put the nation’s finances on a firmer footing, is to keep the economy growing. Spending cuts and tax increases can also play a role, but they need to be introduced gradually.
The future’s mobile. It might also be bleak
This morning’s Observer column.
But it’s when one sees how all these people access the net that the data leap into life. Meeker claims that the world now has 1.1 billion smartphone users, ie people who can access the internet and use the web via a handheld device. This trend is reinforced by other developments. A third of US adults now own a tablet or e-reader (up from 2% less than three years ago). And Apple’s iPad is the fastest-selling mobile device of all time (which, in the internet world, means “until the next Big Thing”). There’s a serious trend here.
The really staggering figures, however, are those relating to how people use their mobile devices. They already account for 13% of all internet traffic. This year, 24% of all online shopping on “black Friday” in the US was done via mobiles (up from 6% two years ago). And Meeker claims that in May this year mobile internet traffic in India overtook PC-based traffic.
What do these statistics mean? Well, basically they imply that the future’s mobile. We’re heading for a world in which most people will access the internet via handheld devices – phones and tablets. And this is a really big deal. On the one hand, it will make it easy for billions of people to integrate the net into their daily lives, with all the benefits that that can bring. On the other hand, it will greatly enhance the powers of corporations that few of us have any reason to trust.
Handle with care
Best advertisement for gardening gloves I’ve seen.
Uncomfortable thoughts about Leveson
I’ve been thinking. Always a bad idea (as my mother used to say). And four uncomfortable thoughts come to mind.
A far better indication of the consequential dangers of content regulation by the state is the Hutton inquiry. The content-regulated BBC was called to account for its actions in reporting on David Kelly while Paul Dacre and Lord Rothermere (who ran the same story) were not. The question of independence needs to be tested against broadcasting’s record of investigations of UK political power, and history suggests that this has been less than stellar. Over time, it has certainly been consistently more constrained than parallel probes by the printed press: witness, for example, Hackgate itself, and the Guardian’s crucial role in that.
That’s true. There are some examples where TV journalism has indeed taken on the power of the state and won. Think, for example, of the investigative reporting which led to the freeing of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. But mostly the journalists who did that were working not for the BBC but for the old ITV companies.
Like I said, uncomfortable thoughts.
Comment is free but statues are sacred
The bust of C.P. Scott in the Guardian’s office.
Philip Tetlock on political forecasting
Interesting interview with Philip Tetlock by John Brockman. Excerpt
Let me say something about how dangerous it is to draw strong inferences about accuracy from isolated episodes. Imagine, for example, that Silver had been wrong and that Romney had become President. And let’s say his prediction had been a 0.8 probability two weeks prior to the election that made Romney President. You can imagine what would have happened to his credibility. It would have cratered. People would have concluded that, yes, his Republican detractors were right, that he was essentially an Obama hack, and he wasn’t a real scientist. That’s, of course, nonsense. When you say there’s a .8 probability there’s 20 percent chance that something else could happen. And it should reduce your confidence somewhat in him, but you shouldn’t abandon him totally. There’s a disciplined Bayesian belief adjustment process that’s appropriate in response to mis-calibrated forecasts.
What we see instead is overreactions. Silver would either be a fool if he’d gotten it wrong or he’s a god if he gets it right. He’s neither a fool nor a god. He’s a thoughtful data analyst who knows how to work carefully through lots of detailed data and aggregate them in sophisticated ways and get a bit of a predictive edge over many, but not all of his competitors. Because there are other aggregators out there who are doing as well or maybe even a little bit better, but their methodologies are quite strikingly similar and they’re relying on a variant of the wisdom of the crowd, which is aggregation. They’re pooling a lot of diverse bits of information and they’re trying to give more weight to those bits of information that have a good historical track record of having been accurate. It’s a weighted averaging kind of process essentially and that’s a good strategy.