Liberty on the march

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Yesterday saw one of the most hopeful developments in years — the first nationwide meetings of the Convention on Modern Liberty. One of its driving spirits is my Observer colleague Henry Porter. In today’s paper he reflects on the experience and on why he’s putting himself through it.

More than once, I asked myself – why the hell are we doing this? Putting on a convention with more than 150 speakers in eight different cities across the United Kingdom at the same time as maintaining an alliance of about 50 organisations, not all of whom loved one another – or us – with the weaving, ducking and diving that entails can be demanding.

You begin to glimpse the morbid addictions that fill the life of the seasoned political campaigner. You find yourself developing skills of appearing to agree when you don’t, of smiling when irritated, of asking for money without the slightest shame, of reading and sending more emails than is recommended in a lifetime. Your language deteriorates and by degrees you morph into a version of Alastair Campbell, preoccupied by slights, losing friends fast and living off chocolate biscuits.

The best reason for doing it is — as Henry observes — Jack Straw, the most slippery authoritarian in modern British history. He’s currently Secretary of State for Justice, which just goes to show that satire isn’t dead. His most recent coup is the Coroners and Justice Bill, which contains measures that introduce secret inquests and would lift the ban on data sharing between ministries in the Data Protection Act.

Before the Convention (and the death of his son) David Cameron said that:

“When academics look back on Labour’s time in power the erosion of our historic liberties will surely be one of its most defining, and damning, aspects. Things we have long thought were part of the fabric of liberty in this country – such as trial by jury, habeas corpus with strict limits on the time that people can be held without charge, the protection of parliament against intrusion by the executive – have been whittled away.”

Cameron’s right. It’s difficult — as Andrew Marr said on TV this morning — to see the Tories as defenders of civil liberties, but if Cameron commits the party to a comprehensive rolling back of New Labour’s surveillance state then I’ll vote Tory.

En passant: Here’s an interesting web project for the next election. Create a website which asks every single parliamentary candidate whether s/he supports the plan for a National ID Card. Yes or No. And then post the answer on the site.

Buffett: ‘I was dumb in 2008’

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Wow! I never thought I would read this.

WARREN BUFFETT admitted yesterday that he did “some dumb things” in 2008, as the world’s richest investor announced that Berkshire Hathaway, his company, had its worst year on record.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Buffett said his investments lost $11.5 billion (£8 billion) last year.

He also offered a gloomy outlook for the year ahead. “The economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and for that matter, probably well beyond,” Buffett wrote.

The firm was hit by the deteriorating economy, the collapse of the credit markets and share prices and the second-worst hurricane season on record…

What do you get when you take ‘news’ out of Newsweek?

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My guess: a pale imitation of the Economist.

According to today’s Observer,

Newsweek’s owner, the Washington Post, unveiled a raft of job cuts recently, following a previous round of redundancies that led to more than 100 departures, as it slims its editorial operation. It will no longer cover news, its editor Jon Meacham has said, choosing instead to focus on explaining events and providing readers with commentary and analysis.

A smaller staff working for a smaller Newsweek will deliver intelligent insight to a more discerning, affluent readership. If that sounds familiar, it is because the Economist, one of the most successful current affairs titles for many years, already offers readers a similar service.

Newsweek will position itself as a slightly more upmarket equivalent, printed on heavier, more luxuriant paper, with a new design placing a premium on white space. There will also be a shift in editorial emphasis, with more culture coverage and a bluffer’s guide to the week’s events, an innovation borrowed from the Week – Dennis Publishing’s news digest which now sells more than 500,000 copies in the US, following a 2001 launch. The hope is it will attract new advertisers, including luxury goods groups, weaning the title off its current dependence on financial services giants, car manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry.

The Media commentator and Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff isn’t impressed. He told an audience of industry executives in New York last week: “If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.”

Cloud computing’s silver lining

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s an ugly word that has infiltrated itself into everyday discourse: “outage”. Its etymology is a bit opaque, but it’s clearly modelled on ‘shortage’. Until last year it meant “a temporary suspension of operation, especially of electrical power supply”. Now it means a temporary suspension of ‘cloud computing’ services – ie services, such as email, web-hosting and file storage, provided remotely via the internet.

Until last week, most Europeans were probably blissfully unaware of the term. But then Gmail – Google’s webmail service – went down on Tuesday…

The Piggy Banker: a modest proposal

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You have to hand it to ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin over his refusal to contemplate giving some of his £16million pension pot back to the taxpayer. This is a guy who doesn’t care about winning friends and influencing people. It’s bad PR and might even be dangerous for him in the long term: a lot of people are very pissed off about rich bankers walking away unscathed from the wreckage that they engineered of other people’s lives and pensions. The chances of Mr Goodwin being able to walk around unscathed are, I’d say, pretty poor, even in a law-abiding country like Britain. At the very least he could use the services of Max Clifford.

Gordon Brown & Co are beginning to look not just foolish but pathetic. The Prime Minister is reduced to asking Goodwin to do the decent thing and muttering vague threats of retribution if he refuses. But if Goodwin remains adamant and there turns out to be no legal way of forcing him to disgorge some of his ill-gotten gains, Brown will be left looking silly, and his threats will be unmasked as empty rhetoric.

So here’s a modest proposal. For starters, why not strip Goodwin of his knighthood? (He got it for “services to banking”, if you please.) After all, it’s a privilege, not a contractual right.

UPDATE: Just watching Newsnight on BBC2 and knighthood-stripping is now under discussion. But I suggested it on Twitter this morning.

On this day…

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… in 1991, President George Bush Snr. declared that “Kuwait is liberated, Iraq’s army is defeated,” and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight.

Primates on Facebook

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Nice piece in this week’s Economist about groupings on social networks.

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

And guess what?

The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.