Dont think — just report

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I followed a link from Jeff Jarvis’s Blog to Armando Ianucci’s Tate Britain lecture, and was very glad I did. He was talking about why British comedy now has so much political content. One passage stopped me in my tracks:

Comedy is so prevalent now, it’s cool by association. So politicians speak and act according to the rhythms of comedy. Labour trying to portray Cameron as a chameleon – it’s an attempted sketch.

This has come about for three reasons: politicians have stopped speaking to us properly, the media has stopped examining their actions in anything like a forensic way, and broadcast culture has become so watered down, so scared of fact, that people are less inclined to turn to anything other than entertainment for information.

Broadcast journalism today promotes itself not so much on what it talks about but on the method it uses: “Broadcasting 24 hours a day, correspondents in over 50 capital cities, giving you all the headlines every 15 minutes, up to six generations of journalists gathered in one newsroom, making you feel all the news you want to feel, even on Christmas Day.” Hi-tech software and speedy transmission makes everything instant news, but we lose sight of the skilled individuals who can process this random unstoppable flow of information and somehow construct a meaningful examination of it. We need narrative.

I found myself hungry for narrative in the build-up to the war in Iraq. Here, surely, were facts – or, indeed, a glaring absence of facts – that required piecing together. Here, surely, it was clear that political debate was operating on a curiously surreal level. We were being asked to attack a country on the basis that the weapons we knew (but couldn’t prove) it had would definitely be used against us, especially if we attacked it. This Alice Through the Looking Glass logic has continued after the invasion. Now, it seems, it was necessary to have invaded Iraq to rid the world of the terrorist cells who have flooded into the country since it was invaded. The terrorist attacks in London and mainland Europe since are, officially, unconnected with the invasion of a country that was invaded because it had links with terrorist attacks in mainland Europe.

My favourite quotation from the eminently quotable George Bush is a remark he made last year about the constant attacks on US troops in Iraq: “The insurgents are being defeated; that’s why they’re continuing to fight.” It’s a stunning reversal of all logic. Measuring success in terms of how far you are from success. An even stranger utterance came from Tony Blair at Labour’s 2004 Conference when he defended his actions by saying: “Judgments aren’t the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe.

“I only know what I believe.” I find that one of the most chilling statements uttered by a seemingly rational politician. Apart from the fact that it overturns about 16 centuries of western philosophy and questions the entire principle of scientific inquiry, it’s also, surely, how the Taliban get through their day…

Afterwards… I found it hard to believe that Blair had said that, so I checked with the text. He did say it.

I’m also reminded of the “balance as bias” phenomenon which came up in a something I posted in 2003 about Paul Krugman’s Harvard lecture.

Nielsen conference on user-generated media bans blogging

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From Greg Verdino’s Blog.

Today, I am off to Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ clients-only CGM Summit 2006.  The agenda is cram packed with sessions covering all aspects of Consumer Generated Media (CGM) including an overview of where we are today, why people do this stuff, where CGM is going in the future, and how exactly marketers can leverage and measure this powerful channel.  Ironically, the confirmation email I received for the event includes this warning:

“Off The Record: the CGM Summit is off the record, so please no blogging, reporting, recording or broadcasting.”

Hmmm…  So how can you host an event about consumer generated media and not let your consumers, um, generate media?

ACAP, hypocrisy and Orwell

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In his column this morning, my colleague Peter Preston mentions ACAP — the initiative launched by the World Association of Newspapers to control access to newspaper sites by search engines. Here’s a useful summary of the proposal:

The World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council (EPC), International Publishers Association and European Newspaper Publishers’ Association will pilot an Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) beginning 6 October at the Frankfurt Book Fair, said Kaye, who is advising on the project.

ACAP will allow content providers to systematically grant permissions information relating to access and use of content in a form that can be read by ‘crawlers’ so search engine operators and any other users can automatically comply with applicable licenses or policies, the EPC said. There are already existing protocols to help website owners tell search engine ‘spiders’ which areas of a site can be indexed. ACAP will not replace them, but will try to overcome problems such as the simplistic nature of the permissions they control, basically, ‘yes, please spider this page’ or ‘no, please do not spider this page.’

During the 12-month pilot, publishers will develop terms and conditions for the search engines to whom they have given the authority to automatically search and index their works. If successful, the standard will allow all publishers to take a tailored approach to search engines, ultimately enriching users’ experiences, the EPC said. While the project will focus first on the needs of print publishers, it will be usable for every type of online content, including video and audio.

To an Orwellian analyst of language, the interesting phrase is “enriching users’ experiences”. What form will this “enrichment” take? Why, this:

ACAP is supposed to tell a search engine something like this: ALLOW, but only for two weeks, then delete from cache and redirect to payment gateway instead.

I can see why newspapers would want to do this, but the only “enrichment” that would follow from it is theirs.

More seriously: do newspapers really think this is going to help them in the long run? In a way, we’ve been here before — with those arguments years ago about ‘deep linking’. I seem to remember that the New York Times got it and negotiated a deal with Dave Winer which gave blogs access to deep-linked pages while diverting ‘ordinary’ visitors to the paywall gateway. In a networked world, the only way you’re going to have any influence (or be read) is to have properly-linkable content. End of story. And if that doesn’t fit with your existing business model, then maybe you need a new one.

‘Windows Genuine Advantage’? Bah, humbug!

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This morning’s Observer column…

I wonder if anyone in the Microsoft empire has ever read George Orwell’s essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, that admirable meditation on the ways in which language can be used to obscure inconvenient truths. Consider his observation that ‘modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists of gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.’

The Microsoft humbug division has been working overtime in recent years. Example: Windows ‘Plays for Sure’ – a standard which, according to the company, ‘makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together’. In fact, it’s just a euphemism for the particular digital rights management (DRM) system they’re using with Windows Media, and is essentially Microsoft’s attempt to counter the dominance of Apple’s iTunes Music Store (which in turn employs its own distinctive ‘plays for sure – but only on iPods’ DRM system). It would perhaps be more accurate to say that Microsoft ‘Plays for Sure’ really means ‘plays on Windows-based platforms’, but that would involve telling the truth…

In a bowl, brightly

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One of my favourite places to eat in London is the brasserie in the Groucho Club. You can guess where the name came from. If not, try here. I’ve been a member since 1989. Among its attractions is pervasive Wi-Fi, so I find it a great place to work when in London.

Oracle, Open Source and Red Hat

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Interesting comment by ex-Oracle insider, Dave Dargo, on Larry Ellison’s bluster about stealing Red hat’s business. Excerpt:

But what about the other part of [Ellison’s] quote, that [Oracle’s] support has to be better. There’s a survey from CIOInsight that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIO’s in 2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they ranked 39 out of 41.

The other thing I’m most curious about is the concept of Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). The claim is that it takes less than a minute to switch from Red Hat’s Network (RHN) to ULN. It’s going to take more than a minute, and a fair amount of cost, to get through the legal agreements and process of switching over. But even with that aside, I’m mostly curious as to why Oracle’s first real support network is for someone else’s product. Where’s the Oracle Database Network and Applications Network and PeopleSoft Network and Siebel Network? Where are the support infrastructure networks for Oracle’s own products to automatically distribute fixes, patches and alerts? It’s amazing that they can provide all that for a mere $399 for a competitor’s products, but not for their own $200,000 product…

The Gulf Stream (contd.)

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My post about the possibility of the Gulf Stream switching off elicited two interesting emails.

Quentin pointed me to a letter in the Economist from Professor Carl Wunsch, an MIT oceanographer, which said, in part:

The Gulf Stream is a wind-driven phenomenon (as explained in a famous 1948 paper by Henry Stommel). It is part of a current system forced by the torque exerted on the ocean by the wind field. Heating and cooling affect its temperature and other properties, but not its basic existence or structure. As long as the sun heats the Earth and the Earth spins, so that we have winds, there will be a Gulf Stream (and a Kuroshio in the Pacific, an Agulhas in the Indian Ocean, etc).

Shut-off would imply repeal of the law of conservation of angular momentum. The primary mechanism of heat transport in the ocean is the wind-forcing of currents that tend to push warm water toward the poles, cold water toward the equator. Widely disseminated and grossly oversimplified pictures showing the ocean as a “conveyor belt” have misled people into thinking ocean circulation is driven by a sinking motion at high latitudes. A comprehensive literature shows that with no wind, heating and cooling could produce a weak flow, but one not at all resembling the observed circulation.

If the sinking motion at high latitudes were completely stopped, by covering that part of the ocean by sea ice for instance, there would still be a Gulf Stream to the south, and maybe an even more powerful one as the wind field would probably then become stronger. If the sinking were stopped by adding fresh water (a deus ex machina often invoked to change the climate), the Gulf Stream would hardly care except in so far as the wind system changed too. The amount of heat transported by the system would shift, but could not become zero.

Many writers, including scientists, toss around the words “Thermohaline Circulation” as though they constituted an explanation. In the ocean, most of the movement of heat and salt, the real Thermohaline Circulation, is driven directly and indirectly by the wind field. Thus the Gulf Stream, and hence the wind, rather than being minor features of oceanic climate are best regarded as the primary elements. Many real climate change effects exist and require urgent attention; focusing on near-impossible Gulf Stream failure is an unproductive distraction.

My son Brian wrote to point out the irony that GulfStream is the brand name of a very successful executive jet aircraft!

The donkey in the room

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Nice piece by Michael Kinsley about the November 7 elections in the US…

This year does seem to be different. You hear people say – though rarely as forthrightly as the Times – that they are voting for the party, not the person. Well, more accurately, they say they are voting against the party, not the person. The Republican candidate for the Senate or House may be saintlike in general, no worse than muddled on the war in Iraq, and good on stem-cell research. Meanwhile the Democrat may be a grotesque hack just inches from indictment, whose views on Iraq are equally muddled with less excuse (since loyalty to the president is not a factor). Nevertheless, many people are voting for the Democrat simply out of anger at or frustration with the Republican party.

[…]

Even under the American arrangement there is nothing ignoble about voting the party line. It is an efficient way to minimise your information costs. Voting is an irrational act: your vote does not matter unless it’s a tie. And even 2000 was not a tie. The more effort you put into learning about the candidates, the more irrational voting becomes, and the more likely you are not to bother. A candidate’s party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything you would like to know, but it tells you something. In fact it tells you a lot – enough so that it makes sense to vote for your party preference even when you know nothing else about a candidate. Or even to vote for a candidate that you actively dislike.

True, people might question your sanity if you were to declare that you were voting for the Democratic party agenda. The what? If there’s anything worse than ignoring that famous elephant in the room, it’s imagining a donkey that’s not in the room. Even so, a vote for the Democrat is a vote against the Republican. And voting “no” to a record of failure is more important to the functioning of democracy than voting “yes” to any number of promises about the future.

The Gulf Stream

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Global warming poses awful threats to many poor parts of the world (for example, Bangladesh). For Britain and Ireland, however, a more direct threat is the possibility that the Gulf Stream might switch off or reverse — something that could happen relatively quickly (and has happened before). In which case my beloved Kerry would start to resemble Sweden. So this report is scary.

Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.

Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004…