Log

Sanity in public office

The nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate for the 2008 elections has a lot of liberals worried. She's appealing, and right-wing. She's not only anti-abortion, she's a creationist.

I take a dim view of anti-abortionists. I think they hold an immoral position. However, being moral is not a prerequisite for public office.

I'm also not in favour of religion, but it's not a coherent phenomenon, and contains much that is good. In particular, while I don't happen to see any point in beliefs about the answers to questions that, scientifically, are ill-posed, such as "is there a god?" or "what is the meaning of life?", by the same pragmatic criteria I think it's unfair to categorise them as mad. They're simply redundant.

Being a creationist is, however, simply believing something that is demonstrably false. It's not merely stupid, it's insane. I do think that sanity should be a condition of fitness for public office.

But can't immoral be insane? Certainly. Psychopaths are often entirely at ease with physical reality. They shouldn't be in public office either. However, we haven't yet got to that point with abortion: unlike murder, it's still up for debate. So, to get back to reality, is string theory. On the other hand, there's no serious debate over the idea that the earth was created 6,000 years ago.

Palin doesn't need votes, she needs help.

17th September 2008

25th June 2008

Ipsos MORI business units mostly each either private or public. Offices in Edinburgh, Manchester, Belfast (Wales?). London-centric but particularly for qualitative research researchers travel widely.

Ben Page

Lots of data, and more to come: 1,100 respondents per London borough.

Geographic granularity of polarisation in wealth or ethnicity

Inner London rated better for quality of life. Best is City! Very satisfied: 17% inner, 11% outer

Young suburbanites least happy

Middle-class suburbs are the incubators of apathy and delirium (Cyril Connolly)

Government's formula allocates more money and much more per person to inner London. Despite greater diversity, concentration and deprivation in inner London, ratings of local services have risen more quickly.

Urbanisation of the sub-urban? Much more renewal in the centre in the last 10 years?

How much is it about local governance?

NHS migration 2001-6 shows that people are moving out of central London.

Money and class matter: living among rich and upper-middle class people you'll be happier. Best correlaltion with wealth.

Those living in areas with big differences in income are happier with the area.

Those on lower incomes are markedly more happy among wealthier people. It makes the rich sadder but only very slightly.

For any level of deprivation, things are worse in outer London.

The challenge of diversity: people mostly enjoy the cultural diversity at about 70-75%. But NIMBY. The most mixed areas are the unhappiest. This has also been found by Putnam in the US. Same thing for PCT (NHS) ratiangs. Three areas in the country with lots of under 25s and low levels of concern about anti-social behaviour: Oxford, Cambridge & Durham. Perception of ASB correlates precisely with quality of life. 46% of variation in satisfaction with area is explained by ASB.

Promoting the interests of local residents:suburban residents less impressed. Since 2000 inner London has improved, outer London has gone down and their relative positions have reversed.

Doing better than much of the rest of Britain, except in the NHS.

(Do all the different measures just go up and down with each other?)

Paul Corrigan, Director of Strategy and Commissioning, NHS London

Different genetics and culture are important, hence importance of ethnic fractionalisation.

Churn and change: people are much more mobile, and the idea of "registration" is not benign to everyone. Hence a lot of people now try to use A&E rather than GPs as gateway to NHS.

The nature of a successful city is to recreate inequality. People bring poverty and riches with them.

Two distinct forms of inequalities: those between boroughs and those within. In Tower Hamlets 12 years' difference in life expectancy between best and worst wards.

Perhaps perceptions of Outer London are worse because newer so less accepted.

Importance of this to others:all about health, not just health services.

John O'Brien, Chief Executive, London Councils

London Govt Local Context

Challenges

The "glue" between the ambitions of a global city and the communities upon which it depends.

Distinction between suburbs and sub-urban areas. Need more regional (pan-London and sub-regional level) because there are natural economies to exploit; finding the right means of collaboration is important.

Responses

"Trusting devolution"

Working out how to bring together pan-London and borough leaders

Policy development that recognises difference in an overall London context

Tony Travers, Director the Greater London Group, LSE

Outer London swung the 2008 mayoral election.

London is a young, high BME and religious city. But is more politically like Britain than any other region.

In the last 10 years the core of many major British cities have been transformed whereas the suburban areas have decayed. Rural lobby is very strong; suburbs don't have such a lobby. Outer London town centres have lost out to centre and to big shops in sheds (often even further out).

Development, like new populations, have started to move to Outer London, causing discontent. In Inner London it's more redevelopment, in Outer, more development.

Outer London has many of the same disadvantages as Inner but fewer of the advantages.

Political fallout from elections this year and borough elections in 2006 and even 2002. Big shifts from Lab to Con, particularly in outer London, particularly in white-dominated areas. Also middle-class.

Questions

Many ways to cut the data: seemed to be a West to East slant! Do people relate to outer/inner London in their consciousness of themselves as opposed to of self-identified areas.

How to unify and make happy diverse communities? What are Londonders' concerns?

TT: More self-identified. Local governments need to explain the benefits of migration to speed up unification of communities. Clayhall, Redbridge is the most religiously diverse ward in London.

JO: Self-identified. Some people who actually live outside London disappointed not to be electing the mayor. Many people who spend a lot of time here without living here.

BP: People have more affinity with London than with any borough. Concerns: cost of living. Lowest level of economic optimism ever recorded just recorded by MORI. When you look at how people feel about diversity: only white people (in particular Christians) don't like diversity on their doorstep.

People have to go where the work is (most outer London boroughs don't have enough jobs). Inner Londoners don't explain to outer Londoners very well: much more growth both in residential capacity and jobs.

BP: No correlation between population density and satisfaction. Or in terms of housing market composition. Most fractionalised place Barking, where the BNP is the official opposition. But this has happened very recently.

TT: In outer London people don't expect change, and may have moved there to escape it.

How did transport feature? (TfL employee)

BP: Proportion of people who say transport is a problem has fallen steadily since 2000 and a substantial minority who say transport's the best thing about the city. Also, our surveys include a lot of people who don't work.

JO'B: more emphasis needed on orbital routes (according to Outer London), and congestion has been growing much faster in Outer London.

   >The Big Conversation

Coding and Cajoling: hacking the hackers

I've spent several working months, mostly in the last three years, working on a wide variety of free software and open source projects. When I started, I was coding mostly for small, immature projects, and only submitting bug reports and suggestions to larger, more established ones. As my confidence increased, and I found I had more time for programming, I was inspired to try to contribute to some more established projects.

I found nothing unusual: the bureaucracy involved in making a contribution rose according to the number of maintainers and (less importantly) users. The thing that surprised me most was how many quite basic improvements had not been made to widely-used projects: although most programmers probably like coding more than I and persuasion less, I found it hard to believe that some of the improvements I made had not already been made, given the triviality of much of the programming and the relative ease of persuasion. For example, transparent decompression in grep, which is on the to-do list (and for which at the time of writing my patch has still not been made because I haven't heard from the overworked maintainer what dynamic linking API to use), or merging the MIME and non-MIME magic files in file/libmagic (why they were ever allowed to de-merge is likewise a mystery). Others were more obvious: I gave SoX's build system a long-overdue overhaul, using relatively recent GNU autotools, a job which was only directly of interest to packagers, since it allowed codecs and effects to be distributed as plugins, and hence to distribute both third-party plugins and problematic code such as MP3 encoder bindings separately from the main package.

Perhaps my single most productive action, however, was to encourage another developer, the energetic Rob Skyes, to join the SoX project, who ended up doing a lot more work than I did, and best of all, to stay on rather longer than I and continue to improve and modernise SoX.

I also want to mention another neglected area of bug fixing in which I still indulge: fixing typos in documentation. The lovely thing about typos is that reporting them is easy, as no testing or analysis is involved, and for the same reason, maintainers love fixing them. And it is worth it: every typo fixed improves the program's image, or if it changes the sense rather than being a mere cosmetic error, makes it more accessible to users, as well as giving the egos and hearts of everyone involved a quick fillip.

12/6/08

Hard books for children

Or at least children who have internet access. Books for children, even those that don't assume they're stupid in ways they aren't, tend always to be self-contained and explain their references, unless they're part of a hidden agenda (e.g. religious and social propaganda and allegory). I wonder whether now it's possible to assume that children will know how to search things they don't understand, and allow them to do so, perhaps with a hidden agenda of critical thinking, and maybe, rather than explaining things, simply highlighting terms that most readers will want to, or should, look up.

12/6/08

Tortoises are bad at version control

In the beginning was TortoiseCVS, a cunning hack that overlaid CVS over Windows Explorer. To start with it offered context menu items for checkout, update and checkin, and, perhaps most usefully, indicated with overlaid icons whether a directory contained any modified files, and whether a file was modified, up to date, or (by its absence) not under version control.

Then TortoiseCVS became more complex, and Tortoises started to proliferate for other VCSs, and everything went horribly wrong. Tortoise is now Evil and Bad, because it is still superficially seductive, but, especially in the hands of the inexperienced users whose path it is supposed to smooth, it is confusing and dangerous.

The problems only arise because it gets complex: the worst part is that the original TortoiseCVS was a good, if limited, system. The problems arise from first, trying to do more than Windows Explorer seems to allow technically (or possibly, bugs), and secondly, overloading the user interface.

The problem in the first class is that the overlaid icons aren't always up-to-date. The only reliable workaround is to ignore them, but they're compelling and, most of the time, correct.

Problems in the second class arise mostly because first, Windows Explorer can't represent time, and secondly, it does double duty for both the file view and the repository view. As there's no way to represent time/revisions, history and log functions, and many others, are relegated to long context menus, and hence the fact that it's in Explorer is really no better than a custom interface. Worse confusion results from the confusion of the file system and repository, as many operations, such as copying and renaming files, have to be performed by different methods, and Explorer operations such as copying and moving can have unintended consequences, as in VCSs which store metadata in every directory (CVS and SVN) they move metadata around, which is normally not what is desired.

The problem is largely fixable, at the cost of complicating the interface by having two types of Explorer window. I don't know if Windows supports the sort of virtual directory one would need to display, but it seems to have various other sorts, so it shouldn't be impossible. The default view should be the repository view, which should have a different colour scheme from normal Explorer windows to distinguish it, and should be able to move between revisions; it should also be possible to open a standard file view for low-level operations.

12/6/08

Wot no rhetoric?

Rhetoric is no longer taught in most schools, and so most people have little or no idea how arguments are structured. Sigh.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of why thinking is not taught directly. Not only that, it seems to be the elephant in the room: it's hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media. I am absolutely baffled as to why not.

12/6/08

Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line": religions are the only value systems that endure (so we need a BWP for humanism?). (early '08)

BWP = "British Way and Purpose", a course produced by Army Education during WWII to counter a feeling among troops that they didn't know what they were fighting for.

12/6/08

The universe is like two beautiful sisters, one whispering in the other's ear, and the other laughing at what she hears: charming to almost everyone, a few it obsesses, a few infuriates; many seek comfort in falsehood. (While watching "The Saragossa Manuscript" at the NFT, 28/12/2007).

"change in literary style; needs research" (late '07/early '08)

I think I was thinking about how the standard literary style has evolved, as distinct from the underlying language, and that it would be interesting to trace. Also, I think I may have started by thinking about how much literary research is bogus, and wondering what good work there is to be done. I'm not sure whether I had any ideas about how literary style has evolved. One idea that occurs to me now is that it seems to approach speech and become more informal, just as speech itself has become less formal, but I'm not sure if those with poor reading skills feel just as condescended to as ever, or whether the modern literary style is less elitist than of old.

12/6/08

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