Wikipedia, you are the strongest link

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That’s the headline some clever Observer sub-editor put on this morning’s column…

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of ‘amateurs’ (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.

What’s more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google’s page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits…

The box that changed the world

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Nice piece by Oliver Burkeman, musing on the container ship that lies beached off the Devon coast…

The fate of the MSC Napoli, still beached off the coast of Devon, serves as another reminder of a fact that dock workers and crew members accept with stoicism, even a bit of pride: ordinary people usually never think about shipping containers except when things go wrong. The Napoli has provoked an environmental crisis (200 tonnes of oil have leaked into surrounding waters), and some unsettling realisations about the eagerness of Britons to help themselves to other people’s belongings. But in disgorging such a variety of cargo – shampoo and steering wheels, wine and shoes, carpets and motorbikes and bibles and nappies – it also offers an inadvertent glimpse into a world we all rely on, yet barely consider. It is no exaggeration to say that the shipping container may have transformed the world, and our daily lives, as fundamentally as any of the other more glamorous or complex inventions of the last 100 years, the internet included…

Lawrence of Jesus (Oxon.)

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Just been listening to an absorbing Radio 4 programme by John Simpson about T.E. Lawrence, and was catapulted back to a sunny Saturday afternoon in September 1967, when I made my first visit to Oxford. I wandered into Jesus College (then open to the public) and vividly recall standing contemplating this plaque. (It’s strange how memory plays tricks on one: I’m convinced that I’d seen it in the college chapel, but various online sources concur that it’s in the entrance to the college by the Porters’ Lodge. Must have a look when I’m next in Oxford.)

Translation:

Three years were spent here by Thomas Edward Lawrence who fearlessly championed the cause of Arabia when it was prostrate. This bronze is erected by the young men of Jesus College to preserve his name.

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars”.

The quotation is from Proverbs 9.1, and is obviously where he got the title of his account of the Arab Revolt during the 1914-18 War and of the part that he played in it.

The Bummer Of Davos…

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John Battelle’s at Davos, but has mixed feelings…

Is that nearly every session I attended where I got that unmistakable “Shit I have to post on this” feeling was, unfortunately, off the record. Last night Larry and Sergey sat down with Charlie Rose for an intimate chat at a private event. Off the record. Before that I spoke to a room full of Media Governors – the folks who run just about every major media company in the world. Off the record. Before that, a gathering of influential editors and journalists from all over the globe. Again, off the record….

Just another instance of the nauseating smugness that afflicts journalists who are allowed in to the Swiss gabfest.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link. The headline, btw, is Battelle’s. I think he means “The trouble with Davos…”.

Later: Just remembered that I’ve been to Davos once — not to the gabfest but in the summer (June 1978, when I was walking in the Alps). I thought it a pretty nondescript place (see webcam image) compared with some of the other towns and villages in the locality. I bought a pen-knife (Swiss Army, naturally) and a walking stick in a nice little shop. I still have both.

Still later… How come, then, that the ‘off the record’ session with Larry and Sergey was fully reported in today’s Guardian?

Stuffing and nonsense

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I was generously treated to lunch today in Roast, a celebrated trough in Southwark. When I arrived at our table I was handed a leaflet which read:

ORGANIC ORKNEY HEATHER FED LAMB

As part of our commitment to using the best produce that Britain has to offer, we are promoting the use of rare breeds and organic produce.

Today we have a Shetland breed lamb from the Orkney islands. The lamb was born in April on the Brown’s farm near Holm, overlooking Scapa Flow. They (sic) were killed last Thursday. They fed naturally, at their own pace on heather and grass.

Today we will roast the lamb and it will be served with Ramsey of Carluke award winning Haggis and Clapshot.

Having pondered this for a time, I decided to have beef. It’s always best, I find, to eat animals to whom one hasn’t been, as it were, introduced. I noted that neither of my companions chose lamb either.

Aside: If, like me, you were wondering what clapshot is, Google reveals that it’s a traditional Orkney recipe of potatoes and swede which is usually served with haggis.

MySpace’s growing pains

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Fascinating article on the difficulties MySpace engineers have had in coping with exponential growth. A long piece, but worth reading…

The “network effect,” in which the mass of users inviting other users to join MySpace led to exponential growth, began about eight months after the launch “and never really stopped,” Chau says.

News Corp., the media empire that includes the Fox television networks and 20th Century Fox movie studio, saw this rapid growth as a way to multiply its share of the audience of Internet users, and bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Now, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch apparently thinks MySpace should be valued like a major Web portal, recently telling a group of investors he could get $6 billion—more than 10 times the price he paid in 2005—if he turned around and sold it today. That’s a bold claim, considering the Web site’s total revenue was an estimated $200 million in the fiscal year ended June 2006. News Corp. says it expects Fox Interactive as a whole to have revenue of $500 million in 2007, with about $400 million coming from MySpace.

But MySpace continues to grow. In December, it had 140 million member accounts, compared with 40 million in November 2005. Granted, that doesn’t quite equate to the number of individual users, since one person can have multiple accounts, and a profile can also represent a band, a fictional character like Borat, or a brand icon like the Burger King.

Still, MySpace has tens of millions of people posting messages and comments or tweaking their profiles on a regular basis—some of them visiting repeatedly throughout the day. That makes the technical requirements for supporting MySpace much different than, say, for a news Web site, where most content is created by a relatively small team of editors and passively consumed by Web site visitors. In that case, the content management database can be optimized for read-only requests, since additions and updates to the database content are relatively rare. A news site might allow reader comments, but on MySpace user-contributed content is the primary content. As a result, it has a higher percentage of database interactions that are recording or updating information rather than just retrieving it.

Every profile page view on MySpace has to be created dynamically—that is, stitched together from database lookups. In fact, because each profile page includes links to those of the user’s friends, the Web site software has to pull together information from multiple tables in multiple databases on multiple servers. The database workload can be mitigated somewhat by caching data in memory, but this scheme has to account for constant changes to the underlying data.

The Web site architecture went through five major revisions—each coming after MySpace had reached certain user account milestones—and dozens of smaller tweaks, Benedetto says. “We didn’t just come up with it; we redesigned, and redesigned, and redesigned until we got where we are today,” he points out…

Ulster’s rotten (special) branch

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I’ve been reading the Police Ombudsman’s report into the collusion which existed between (i) loyalist paramilitary thugs and killers and (ii) the Royal Ulster Constabulary over a period of 12 years in the 1980s and 1990s. Even to those of us who always assumed that such collusion existed, it makes shocking reading. As the Guardian puts it:

It is hard to think of a more serious allegation against the police than that they colluded in the murder of citizens of the society that they are sworn to protect. Nevertheless, that is the deadly charge at the heart of the report by the Northern Ireland police ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, into the protection of informants. The investigation started as an attempt to explain why Raymond McCord Jr was beaten to death in November 1997, a few months after his arrest in a drugs-running bust. It soon broadened into a wider probe of the relationship between the Royal Ulster Constabulary special branch and local paramilitary UVF police informers, some of whom were alleged to be involved in the McCord killing. These informers have been linked to an array of shocking crimes. Yet, throughout, special branch preferred to protect them rather than hunt them down, and with the full approval of senior supervisors, even going to the length of destroying much of the evidence.

There has been a lot of grave head-shaking in government circles today about Mrs O’Loan’s astonishing report. But this is invariably accompanied by exhortations to “move on” and “leave the past behind”.

All of which is understandable, but outrageous. At the very least, any ex-RUC officer connected in any way with the abuses chronicled by Mrs O’Loan and still serving in the (supposedly-reformed) Police Service of Northern Ireland ought to be forcibly retired. From tomorrow.

Now comes the bit which makes you want to pinch yourself. ‘Sir’ Ronnie Flanagan, the RUC Chief Constable on whose watch this stuff happened is now — wait for it! — Head of the Police Inspectorate of England and Wales. That is to say, he is the guy charged with investigating whether mainland police forces are maintaining standards of efficiency, integrity and honesty.

Truly, you could not make this stuff up.