On the old coach road from London to Cambridge. Great St Mary’s is the University church. There used to be a regulation that University officers had to live within 20 miles of the building, and undergraduates within three. Not sure whether the former regulation still applies, given property prices in Cambridge.
Astonishing story from Estonia about the power of collective action — mediated and co-ordinated using the Net.
Thanks to Jake Chapman for the link.
… in 1925, John T. Scopes was indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Wikipedia suggests that the story of the so-called “monkey trial” is rather more complicated than one might have supposed from the headline, though.
“Never waste a good crisis” is what the Obama crowd always say. Watching David Cameron saying that anyone interested in public service should consider applying to become a Tory parliamentary candidate made me think that the expenses row may be a Godsend for him. After all, what he needs to do to complete the modernisation of the party is to get rid of all those reactionary toffs with their moated piles and Mayfair flats — and until now they have proved rather difficult to eject. But now…?
This morning’s Observer column.
For writers of my (baby-boomer) generation and older, typewriters were the bane of our lives. On the one hand, you couldn’t work without one. On the other, they were a pain to use. Every time you made a mistake, or had second thoughts about a word or a phrase, you had to cross it out and laboriously type the revision. There was no such thing as cut and paste and no backspace-and-erase facility. So the result was often a page that became so awful to look at that in the end one tore it out in a rage, screwed it into a ball and typed the whole ruddy thing again. Cutting and pasting was done with scissors and word-counting by going over the typescript with a pencil, whispering numbers as you went.
Most people who use keyboards today have no inkling of this. Word-processing software has always been part of their lives. As a result, the writing process has subtly changed. As Marshall McLuhan said: we shape our tools and afterwards they shape us. Composing on screen has become more like sculpting…
Just in from Number Ten.
Thank you for the e-petition on internet advertising technologies and customer privacy.
As your petition states, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been looking at the use of Phorm’s Webwise and Open Internet Exchange (OIX) products. However, the only use of the technology so far has been the trials conducted by BT.
Advertisers and ISPs need to ensure that they comply with all relevant data protection and privacy laws. It is also important that consumers’ privacy is protected and that they are given sufficient information and opportunity to make a clear and informed decision whether to participate in services such as Phorm.
The Government is committed to ensuring that people’s privacy is fully protected. Legislation is in place for this purpose and is enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). ICO looked at this technology, to ensure that any use of Phorm or similar technology is compatible with the relevant privacy legislation. ICO has published its view on Phorm on its website:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pressreleases/2008/new_phorm_statement_040408.pdf
ICO is an independent body, and it would not be appropriate for the Government to second guess its decisions. However, ICO has been clear that it will be monitoring closely all progress on this issue, and in particular any future use of Phorm’s technology. They will ensure that any such future use is done in a lawful, appropriate and transparent manner, and that consumers’ rights are fully protected.
So that’s all right then? Er, no.
From today’s NYTimes.
SAN FRANCISCO — In a move that could blunt some of the criticism of Google for its settlement of a lawsuit over its book-scanning project, the company signed an agreement with the University of Michigan that would give some libraries a degree of oversight over the prices Google could charge for its vast digital library.
Google has faced an onslaught of opposition over the far-reaching settlement with authors and publishers. Complaints include the exclusive rights the agreement gives Google to publish online and to profit from millions of so-called orphan books, out-of-print books that are protected by copyright but whose rights holders cannot be found.
The Justice Department has also begun an inquiry into whether the settlement, which is subject to approval by a court, would violate antitrust laws.
Google used the opportunity of the University of Michigan agreement to rebut some criticism.
“I think that it’s pretty short- sighted and contradictory,” said Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and its president of technology. Mr. Brin said the settlement would allow Google to offer widespread access to millions of books that are largely hidden in the stacks of university libraries.
“We are increasing choices,” Mr. Brin said. “There was no option prior to this to get these sorts of books online.”
Under Google’s plan for the collection, public libraries will get free access to the full texts for their patrons at one computer, and universities will be able to buy subscriptions to make the service generally available, with rates based on their student enrollment.
The new agreement, which Google hopes other libraries will endorse, lets the University of Michigan object if it thinks the prices Google charges libraries for access to its digital collection are too high, a major concern of some librarians. Any pricing dispute would be resolved through arbitration.
… in 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic.
For once, a really powerful Leading Article in the Irish Times.
THE REPORT of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is the map of an Irish hell. It defines the contours of a dark hinterland of the State, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference. The instinct to turn away from it, repelled by its profoundly unsettling ugliness, is almost irresistible. We owe it, though, to those who have suffered there to acknowledge from now on that it is an inescapable part of Irish reality. We have to deal with the now-established fact that, alongside the warmth and intimacy, the kindness and generosity of Irish life, there was, for most of the history of the State, a deliberately maintained structure of vile and vicious abuse.
Mr Justice Ryan’s report does not suggest that this abuse was as bad as most of us suspected. It shows that it was worse. It may indeed have been even worse than the report actually finds – there are indications that “the level of sexual abuse in boys’ institutions was much higher than was revealed by the records or could be discovered by this investigation”.
With a calm but relentless accumulation of facts, the report blows away all the denials and obfuscations, all the moral equivocations and evasions that we have heard from some of the religious orders and their apologists. The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflicted on defenceless children – over 800 known abusers in over 200 institutions during a period of 35 years – should alone make it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic.
I’ve been reading the report. In one way, it takes one’s breath away — especially when one realises the extensiveness and scale of the brutality. But in another way, to anyone who grew up in 1950s Ireland, it’s eerily unsurprising. And, in a way, the worst thing of all is the tacit connivance of the Irish state in allowing it all to happen while its authorities were perfectly aware of what was going on.
And there’s more. As the Irish Times puts it:
The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of Brothers, priests and nuns”.
There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of “ritualised” floggings in one institution.
We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name – torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery.
This was the reality of ‘Holy Catholic Ireland’ in the formative decades of the state — and in the years when I was growing up. It’s like reading about an informal Celtic Talibanate. I don’t normally think much about religion, but reading the Commission’s report has reminded me of why I ceased to be a Catholic, and why I’ve loathed the institutional church ever since.
“Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
Often attributed to Winston Churchill. What I hate most about British and offline culture is their aversion to failure. My mother used to say that the person who naver made a mistake never made anything, and she was right. The most striking difference between the UK and the US is that honest failure carries very little stigma over there, whereas here it’s an occasion for shame or embarrassment or worse. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you aren’t trying hard enough. The key thing is to learn from the experience. [/rant]