Here's a question. Having seen the Google's new "Priority Inbox" feature and also John Graham-Cumming's POPFile application, both ways of using a Bayesian classifier to guess which e-mail you will want to read first and to file it automatically, I was wondering if anyone had applied the same idea to RSS. I've recently started to add new blogs to my reader again, and it struck me that reading them took up enough time that it might be useful to prioritise and classify them automatically. It might even be yet another project I probably won't find the time to finish.
Searching the web, though, I was surprised to find quite a lot of similar projects that didn't seem to have many users or for that matter to be in active development. It actually looks like this is one of the problems that almost all developers at one point or another feel the need to tackle. But nobody's made it stick. Somebody even had their RSS feeds delivered by e-mail and used POPFile itself, but that's silly. I can think of a couple of reasons - one is that the use case might be fundamentally flawed. If it wasn't for surprises, the blogosphere would be pretty dull - otherwise you might just read Martin Kettle's column or watch TV. If you could have a feed of blog posts that you were guaranteed to read, would you want to read them? Of course, you could introduce some sort of random element, perhaps promoting some proportion of the posts least likely to be read, but that would defeat the point.
One feature which I didn't see anywhere was a social element. I could certainly see a use for an application that classified RSS items into groups, and let multiple users contribute to the same group. I mark some of the items as "Telco 2.0", and therefore train the classifier to filter things relevant to the company into that bucket. But other T2 people have opinions about what is relevant to the company, and they might benefit from mine as well. Obviously, if we use the same classification profile we'll get the same results - interestingly, we'll get the same results in some sense even if we're not all reading the same blogs. So I'd like to be able to have shared group filters.
Does anyone know of an application that does this, preferably without letting some random website see everything I read? Points for integration with other RSS readers, notably either Akregator or Firefox/Sage. I'd be OK with a web page served on localhost (or on a server I control). At the moment, this is in the lead, but it strikes me as being rather more heavyweight than is ideal.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Thursday music link...on Monday
Thursday music link on Sunday didn't happen because I was out of the country and offline for 2.5 whole days. So here goes, and thanks for contributions so far. They said they wanted to make the girls dance, but that was widely considered unsuccessful. This suggests there's been some progress.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
I'll show you thursday music link...(on Sunday)
How about some music? The aim of this feature is to make D^2's thursday music links look silly, and the only rule is that everything has to be performed by someone other than the original. Call it an agonising reappraisal. Here's the Clash with Janie Jones, doing "(Get Up I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine" in 1982.
baaack...
It seems horribly fitting that, with the Tories back in, Wigan have started winning the league again. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with them. It's just the effect of the years when they won literally everything, year in, year out. And Maurice Lindsay, of course.
If we have to have Wigan though, I think the Wigan who played last night are about as good as you could get. The real giveaway of how good they were was how good St Helens were. There is still no club like them for style - they started playing catch-up in the first half and would have outplayed most sides, but against Wigan they just didn't quite convert the chances they created. To be honest, that's usually a sign the other side were better... Even the fact Wigan missed so many kicks and used three goal kickers (oddly, not including Paul Deacon, who was available and playing a damn good game) didn't stop them.
Even Keiron Cunningham's last spell in the game didn't change anything. I think they're going to win and keep on winning.
If we have to have Wigan though, I think the Wigan who played last night are about as good as you could get. The real giveaway of how good they were was how good St Helens were. There is still no club like them for style - they started playing catch-up in the first half and would have outplayed most sides, but against Wigan they just didn't quite convert the chances they created. To be honest, that's usually a sign the other side were better... Even the fact Wigan missed so many kicks and used three goal kickers (oddly, not including Paul Deacon, who was available and playing a damn good game) didn't stop them.
Even Keiron Cunningham's last spell in the game didn't change anything. I think they're going to win and keep on winning.
the frontier
Am I right in thinking this is a form of "superempowerment", of the NATO forces on the border, the Taliban, and the Pakistani Frontier Corps on the other side?
Any one of them can trigger a violent response from the other, which rapidly flips the whole situation into a higher energy state, with consequences at least up to the operational level. Of course, the FATA are only sovereign territory in a very special and restricted sense of the word "sovereign" - but arguably, optional sovereignty is a useful political tool, permitting the Pakistani state to a) tolerate the jihadis in some parts of the country when that is useful, b) tolerate the Americans in the same places when useful, and also c) assert sovereignty to push back on the Americans when useful, in the light of this.
This is actually roughly what Gallagher and Robinson meant with the "crumbling frontier" 50 odd years ago - zones of ambiguous sovereignty were important because they provided reasons for imperial expansion, reasons against it, and a way for peripheral political actors to use the empire for their own ends.
Pakistani authorities say that the checkpoint guards tried to alert the US helicopters that they had strayed into Pakistani territory by firing in the air, but the US pilots mistook this action for a hostile attack and blew away the checkpoint.
Any one of them can trigger a violent response from the other, which rapidly flips the whole situation into a higher energy state, with consequences at least up to the operational level. Of course, the FATA are only sovereign territory in a very special and restricted sense of the word "sovereign" - but arguably, optional sovereignty is a useful political tool, permitting the Pakistani state to a) tolerate the jihadis in some parts of the country when that is useful, b) tolerate the Americans in the same places when useful, and also c) assert sovereignty to push back on the Americans when useful, in the light of this.
This is actually roughly what Gallagher and Robinson meant with the "crumbling frontier" 50 odd years ago - zones of ambiguous sovereignty were important because they provided reasons for imperial expansion, reasons against it, and a way for peripheral political actors to use the empire for their own ends.
This is an article about a statistic
(Inspiration here.)
A numerical variable was today reported to have either increased or decreased or remained constant. Depending on which one, this may represent a record value for this variable, a dramatic rise or fall since whichever point in time is required to show a dramatic rise or fall, or nothing whatsoever. In a development which is probably entirely unrelated, although there is no way the business editor will admit this and publish this bit, the FTSE-100 share index rose or fell slightly on the news.
Speaking to this website, a spokesman for a lobby which claims to care about the current value of this variable said that the integer demonstrated clearly that the lobby was right. The spokesman said that the government must act, that the government must immediately stop acting, or perhaps that the current value of the variable showed that although insufficient, the government's policy was a step in the right direction. In any case, it demonstrated the enduring relevance of their members' concerns.
Reached for comment, the Ministry of Variable said that it was going to take tough action on the number. Friends of the minister said he or she fully understood their concerns, but that he or she would not be stampeded into action. However, the minister will say, modernisers would not be held back in the comfort zone by variable interests. The Shadow Minister for Variable said that the government was relying on a fundamentally flawed measurement and that their own preferred measure showed that the variable should be significantly higher or lower. He or she accused National Statistics of twisting their measurement of the variable to suit the government of the day. The Minister's office retorted that they would take no lessons on variable from a party that had allowed the value of variable to rise to record levels, fall to record levels, or stagnate at a constant level when they were last in office.
The Campaign For or Against Variable said that the public were in danger and the precautionary principle should be applied. "So-called statisticians claim that this level of variable is perfectly safe, but how can anyone really know? Also, the weekly level of variable has been recorded as being as high or low as X in the last six months, when the statisticians say there is only a 5% chance of this. So how come it's happened once in 24 weeks?"
The mean value of variable over the last 20 years is Y, and it typically varies as much as Z year-on-year. Over the long term, variable in the UK is typically A% higher or lower than the average of OECD countries, EU countries, or the world. On the basis of variable's distribution and standard deviation, this week's value could be expected about every B years, and therefore this news is either important or pure noise. To be more accurate, the variable should perhaps be given as a percentage of GDP, as a per-capita value, a median value rather than a mean, or as a percentage of some total or broader average. It's very likely that this may be explained better by drawing a graph. Unfortunately, this paragraph was edited out of the final article, or quite possibly the author never bothered to write it in the first place.
Both the people we spoke to in the street, because they looked likely to say something sensational, who recognised variable but didn't bother us with comments like the paragraph above said they were deeply frightened and baffled by the issue.
A numerical variable was today reported to have either increased or decreased or remained constant. Depending on which one, this may represent a record value for this variable, a dramatic rise or fall since whichever point in time is required to show a dramatic rise or fall, or nothing whatsoever. In a development which is probably entirely unrelated, although there is no way the business editor will admit this and publish this bit, the FTSE-100 share index rose or fell slightly on the news.
Speaking to this website, a spokesman for a lobby which claims to care about the current value of this variable said that the integer demonstrated clearly that the lobby was right. The spokesman said that the government must act, that the government must immediately stop acting, or perhaps that the current value of the variable showed that although insufficient, the government's policy was a step in the right direction. In any case, it demonstrated the enduring relevance of their members' concerns.
Reached for comment, the Ministry of Variable said that it was going to take tough action on the number. Friends of the minister said he or she fully understood their concerns, but that he or she would not be stampeded into action. However, the minister will say, modernisers would not be held back in the comfort zone by variable interests. The Shadow Minister for Variable said that the government was relying on a fundamentally flawed measurement and that their own preferred measure showed that the variable should be significantly higher or lower. He or she accused National Statistics of twisting their measurement of the variable to suit the government of the day. The Minister's office retorted that they would take no lessons on variable from a party that had allowed the value of variable to rise to record levels, fall to record levels, or stagnate at a constant level when they were last in office.
The Campaign For or Against Variable said that the public were in danger and the precautionary principle should be applied. "So-called statisticians claim that this level of variable is perfectly safe, but how can anyone really know? Also, the weekly level of variable has been recorded as being as high or low as X in the last six months, when the statisticians say there is only a 5% chance of this. So how come it's happened once in 24 weeks?"
The mean value of variable over the last 20 years is Y, and it typically varies as much as Z year-on-year. Over the long term, variable in the UK is typically A% higher or lower than the average of OECD countries, EU countries, or the world. On the basis of variable's distribution and standard deviation, this week's value could be expected about every B years, and therefore this news is either important or pure noise. To be more accurate, the variable should perhaps be given as a percentage of GDP, as a per-capita value, a median value rather than a mean, or as a percentage of some total or broader average. It's very likely that this may be explained better by drawing a graph. Unfortunately, this paragraph was edited out of the final article, or quite possibly the author never bothered to write it in the first place.
Both the people we spoke to in the street, because they looked likely to say something sensational, who recognised variable but didn't bother us with comments like the paragraph above said they were deeply frightened and baffled by the issue.
a glimpse of the press in action: Johnson family edition
Sorry about this, but yet more journobashing follows. And I warn you that the actual information in this story is media-bollocks, but it may be interesting all the same. Zoe Williams interviews Rachel "Boris Johnson's Sister" Johnson, editor of the Lady.
That would be another Moretti Moment, I think. It gets better, a bit. But the problem with this piece is a classic case of burying the lede. You have to get through 16 paragraphs of stuff like this:
...before the remaining readers who haven't yet scooped out their lobes with the kitchenware to escape all this hideousness arrive at some content, yer actual Shannon information.
So the point is to convert the paper into a new right-wing organ? Now that's actually interesting and informative. A new right-wing organ edited by the Mayor of London's sister (and that of the MEP for the South East and MP for Orpington). That's also actually interesting and informative, especially as a lot of Tories apparently don't really accept Boris Johnson as a genuine Tory, and tension is picking up between Johnson's administration in City Hall and David Cameron's government upriver in Whitehall.
And you can see how this could work. The owners obviously aren't particularly obsessed with the circulation or the display-ad revenue, or they would hardly have let it go on in its current form all these years. Or, for that matter, appoint an amateur catblogger whose chief qualification is being the Mayor of London's sister as editor. The point of an opinion mag isn't circulation, but influence, or propaganda - it's about influencing the stuff that gets into the newspapers that do have a real circulation. The paper does fit rather well with both the Johnsons' public image and the aesthetic culture of the current Tories. And the rather grand offices in Covent Garden look like a great place for an "event".
Also, getting your sis appointed editor is a lot cheaper than buying the paper. Further, the fact she brought her husband (the communications director of the National Trust, would you believe it) to the job interview is interesting.
So, if we were going to reconstruct this as journalism, we might move this couple of sticks up to the lede, just ahead of the rather good point that despite all the "chat" the paper's circulation has gone nowhere. In fact, we might make the point that rather than "chat", in its political context, this is the real substance of the Johnson family - relentless self-publicity and self-promotion transmitted through a total determination to attend the opening of every abscess in town, to say nothing of envelopes, and to get in front of every camera that isn't marked "Westminster City Council". We might also set to editing the rest of the story with a two-handed Viking broadsword (Hack! Slash! Cleanse! Flense!), but there's them as likes that guff.
Rachel Johnson has been editing the Lady for almost a year. In that time, it has generated a spectacular amount of chat – gossip columns, a massive article in the Sunday Times, a full hour on Channel Four, and now a book, A Diary of the Lady: My First Year as Editor (which, incidentally, is a total romp. I don't know why I'm talking like this. I seem to have caught something from the book, a contagious mannered poshness).
That would be another Moretti Moment, I think. It gets better, a bit. But the problem with this piece is a classic case of burying the lede. You have to get through 16 paragraphs of stuff like this:
Johnson is possessed of a great deal of charisma, which makes her seem incredibly beautiful in a way that surprises you afterwards, because in photos she looks like a pleasant, bossy, female version of her brother, Boris...I don't really see it as anything to do with journalism, or editorial in-fighting, or the fortunes of the magazine, but more a series of small skirmishes that are so closely, unflinchingly described that they are magnetic, the way a mother and a daughter fighting in a shoe shop is magnetic, even though you know exactly what they're going to say...Amusingly, every time she leaves off from her detached self-flagellation and is unpleasant about anyone but herself, especially anyone in the Lady offices, she finishes by telling you how beautiful they are, or, if that absolutely won't stand, willowy...
...before the remaining readers who haven't yet scooped out their lobes with the kitchenware to escape all this hideousness arrive at some content, yer actual Shannon information.
It is pretty obvious that this just isn't a family trying to revive a flagging magazine, it's one that wants a bit more heft in the world. They want the mayor of London's sister on speed dial, they want an editor who has a picture of herself talking to David Cameron on her noticeboard. "They just want a seat at the table, don't they?" She shrugs. "The magazine's not a power in the land, though, is it? It could be again. What I think would be quite nice would be to have an alternate offering to the Spectator, which looks lovely. We're not intellectual, but we don't talk down." "You want it to be the Spectator's wife?" "Yes! Exactly!" This wasn't at all my point, but it's not the first time I have to submit to her superior conversation-management. Her appointment, the subsequent sackings, the documentary, none of this has anything to do with a magazine. I feel bad for her that she's sweating the numbers, but then it occurs to me that maybe the intoxication of power makes up for it.
So the point is to convert the paper into a new right-wing organ? Now that's actually interesting and informative. A new right-wing organ edited by the Mayor of London's sister (and that of the MEP for the South East and MP for Orpington). That's also actually interesting and informative, especially as a lot of Tories apparently don't really accept Boris Johnson as a genuine Tory, and tension is picking up between Johnson's administration in City Hall and David Cameron's government upriver in Whitehall.
And you can see how this could work. The owners obviously aren't particularly obsessed with the circulation or the display-ad revenue, or they would hardly have let it go on in its current form all these years. Or, for that matter, appoint an amateur catblogger whose chief qualification is being the Mayor of London's sister as editor. The point of an opinion mag isn't circulation, but influence, or propaganda - it's about influencing the stuff that gets into the newspapers that do have a real circulation. The paper does fit rather well with both the Johnsons' public image and the aesthetic culture of the current Tories. And the rather grand offices in Covent Garden look like a great place for an "event".
Also, getting your sis appointed editor is a lot cheaper than buying the paper. Further, the fact she brought her husband (the communications director of the National Trust, would you believe it) to the job interview is interesting.
So, if we were going to reconstruct this as journalism, we might move this couple of sticks up to the lede, just ahead of the rather good point that despite all the "chat" the paper's circulation has gone nowhere. In fact, we might make the point that rather than "chat", in its political context, this is the real substance of the Johnson family - relentless self-publicity and self-promotion transmitted through a total determination to attend the opening of every abscess in town, to say nothing of envelopes, and to get in front of every camera that isn't marked "Westminster City Council". We might also set to editing the rest of the story with a two-handed Viking broadsword (Hack! Slash! Cleanse! Flense!), but there's them as likes that guff.
a glimpse of the press in action: Ed Miliband edition
Has anyone else found that the Guardian's coverage of the Labour conference made them want to throw up? Here's Patrick "Unseasonably Mild" Wintour:
So David Miliband's decision to resign is both going to "hamper...his efforts to show he can lead a united, re-energised party" and also prevent "splits, jealousies, and factionalism". Right. Also, the actual news in the story - that David Miliband isn't going to serve as shadow chancellor - has been buried, because it's more important to show that Wintour still gets given talking points by Blairite press officers. The piece attributes statements to "friends", "aides", his "team", or to nobody at all ("it is said") some eight times in 23 paragraphs. Also, there are four "he will say" statements - i.e. "I have been given a copy of the speech, like the other reporters, and like them I am trying to retail this as if it were a secret".
Meanwhile, we get a vast quantity of stuff about David Miliband's wife and his hurt feelings (no less than three Wintour pieces use the same quote about her). ""David is giving Ed some space to carry on torching the house we built." comes up in some form multiple times as well.
So much for Wintour. As usual, if it was news you were after you'd have done better to read the paper's second string political reporters, notably Allegra Stratton. But the rot is not entirely contained. Here's Patrick Barkham.
Honestly. There's a scene in Nanni Moretti's film Caro diaro where the protagonist, stuck in Rome in August with not much to do, has gone to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer based on a review in one of the newspapers. Having walked out of the movie, he tracks down the critic and confronts him in his bed, shaking him awake and forcing him to listen as he reads out the review. He cowers with embarrassment at each sentence. Reading this slab of dreck (so he wore a different colour tie each day, and this is a departure from a "scattergun approach"?) I felt like doing something similar. At least on the Daily Hell you're allowed to do an Alan Smithee and have pieces like this attributed to DAILY MAIL REPORTER when the management insists on them.
There's more, and worse. Jon Henley is sent out to do that classic piece of vacuous psuedo-reporting, a vox pop. In order to grasp the temper of the peuple de gauche, he gets sent to Pangbourne of all places. Even there, though, he struggles to find the rage he was sent for.
He pays a visit to the local working men's club:
Oh really?
In fact, the only people he encountered with any objection to Ed Miliband were two self-declared conservatives, one of whom turned out to be William Hague's sister. But he could always try back at the office. Here's Madeleine Bunting:
This is in a piece about the fact that Ed Miliband is not married. So, what are the other characteristics in that "accumulation"? She doesn't say, except that ("metropolitan") he lives in London, like all the other 650-odd MPs and Madeleine Bunting. I wonder if he might be a rootless cosmopolitan or a sinister left-wing intellectual? Has anyone heard if such might be the case? Worse yet, apparently the reason why the Blairs came to be so distrusted is that they weren't married. Who knew?
But his efforts to show he can lead a united, re-energised party committed to redefining the centre ground of politics look likely to be hampered by the expected decision of his defeated brother, David, to leave frontline politics to give him the chance to lead on his own terms.
Ed Miliband is said to be still trying to persuade him to remain at the top of Labour politics, and insisted there was "no psychodrama" between them. David Miliband has been offered the shadow chancellorship, but friends say he does not want it. More broadly, they say, he fears that if he remains the brothers will be ground down by rumours of splits, jealousies and factionalism that disfigured nearly a decade of Tony Blair's premiership.
So David Miliband's decision to resign is both going to "hamper...his efforts to show he can lead a united, re-energised party" and also prevent "splits, jealousies, and factionalism". Right. Also, the actual news in the story - that David Miliband isn't going to serve as shadow chancellor - has been buried, because it's more important to show that Wintour still gets given talking points by Blairite press officers. The piece attributes statements to "friends", "aides", his "team", or to nobody at all ("it is said") some eight times in 23 paragraphs. Also, there are four "he will say" statements - i.e. "I have been given a copy of the speech, like the other reporters, and like them I am trying to retail this as if it were a secret".
Meanwhile, we get a vast quantity of stuff about David Miliband's wife and his hurt feelings (no less than three Wintour pieces use the same quote about her). ""David is giving Ed some space to carry on torching the house we built." comes up in some form multiple times as well.
So much for Wintour. As usual, if it was news you were after you'd have done better to read the paper's second string political reporters, notably Allegra Stratton. But the rot is not entirely contained. Here's Patrick Barkham.
For his three days as Labour leader, Ed Miliband has worn purple ties every day: first a gravitas-imbued deep purple and then a heavily textured lilac affair yesterday that was far closer to blue than red....Miliband's purple policy looks very deliberate given his scattergun approach to ties in the past. Mary Riddell, the commentator, has noted that during the intensive pre-Copenhagen summitry last year, Red Ed liked nothing better than to buy "garish ties from street traders" in New York. Was he stocking up on purple in preparation for his immaculately-tied leadership tilt?
Honestly. There's a scene in Nanni Moretti's film Caro diaro where the protagonist, stuck in Rome in August with not much to do, has gone to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer based on a review in one of the newspapers. Having walked out of the movie, he tracks down the critic and confronts him in his bed, shaking him awake and forcing him to listen as he reads out the review. He cowers with embarrassment at each sentence. Reading this slab of dreck (so he wore a different colour tie each day, and this is a departure from a "scattergun approach"?) I felt like doing something similar. At least on the Daily Hell you're allowed to do an Alan Smithee and have pieces like this attributed to DAILY MAIL REPORTER when the management insists on them.
There's more, and worse. Jon Henley is sent out to do that classic piece of vacuous psuedo-reporting, a vox pop. In order to grasp the temper of the peuple de gauche, he gets sent to Pangbourne of all places. Even there, though, he struggles to find the rage he was sent for.
"We don't vote on stuff like that any more, do we?" said Dan Perkins, 31, a geography teacher supervising a group of schoolchildren..."Judi Green, 34, said she thought that was "brilliant. All to the good; really quite refreshing. The sign of a new era, even."
He pays a visit to the local working men's club:
In the working men's club – "the only working men's club for millionaires in the country", one winking lady member suggested – the lunchtime drinkers, of an earlier generation, weren't quite so sure.
Oh really?
"They'll use it against him, the tabloids and that." ...Ann Willoughby, a widow from the former council estate who would, personally, "have liked to see John Prescott get it, because he's really one of us", agreed Ed Miliband's family arrangements could be "a stick for his enemies to beat him with. They'll try anything."...Her son Mark, 42, an HGV driver, reckoned simply that "none of that stuff bothers me, and nor should it bother anyone". Jane Turner, a single mother of 43 on her bike, said she couldn't care less either. ...it would be "wrong to judge someone on that, in 2010"....felt strongly that it was "far better for a politician to be honest and up-front than pay lip service to a faith you don't have"...
In fact, the only people he encountered with any objection to Ed Miliband were two self-declared conservatives, one of whom turned out to be William Hague's sister. But he could always try back at the office. Here's Madeleine Bunting:
What's really at stake here is not a few details about his family life but an accumulation of characteristics that speak to the cliche of a metropolitan liberal elite. It's part of why the Blairs came to be so distrusted and Miliband will have to work hard to head off the damage that some of these associations could generate.
This is in a piece about the fact that Ed Miliband is not married. So, what are the other characteristics in that "accumulation"? She doesn't say, except that ("metropolitan") he lives in London, like all the other 650-odd MPs and Madeleine Bunting. I wonder if he might be a rootless cosmopolitan or a sinister left-wing intellectual? Has anyone heard if such might be the case? Worse yet, apparently the reason why the Blairs came to be so distrusted is that they weren't married. Who knew?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
now you tell us
This Clinton person is making sense, on Israeli politics, on settlements, and on this:
Moreover, Clinton said, Hamas militants will soon have military technology that will allow their relatively low-damage attacks on Israeli population centers to have greater accuracy and lethality.
"It's just a matter of time before the rockets have a GPS system on ‘em and a few rockets will kill a whole lot of people. Netanyahu understands that," said Clinton.
iterative post mortem
Theo Farrell has published a new paper on the British Army in Helmand, which makes some more progress in explaining just how it went so wrong.
elsewhere
Elsewhere: how the Lib Dems learned to love Nemesysco's fake lie detector and outsourcing to Crapita. Yes, really.
in this week's edition of the Low Expectations Journal
OK, so let's remind ourselves of the rising chatter about a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan from a couple of months ago. We know that there was some evidence of Hezb-i Islami cooperating with ISAF. The first group targeted as part of the diplomatic effort were the Haqqani network.
Since then, we've learned about the build-up of US reconnaissance in Afghanistan. As a result, the drones strike more and more often. Here's Sean Naylor on what seems to be a broader offensive against the Haqqanis. Note that this also refers to even more reconnaissance and intelligence assets being deployed, transferred from Iraq. (Looking at this, a subplot of getting out of Iraq seems to have been getting better at data analysis in the field.)
Noah Schachtman's piece does connect this with the negotiating track, but not in the way I think they are related. This reminds me of two things - one of them is the IRA concept of the Tactical Use of Armed Struggle, from the 1990s. The basic idea was that the main effort was the negotiations, and the violence was intended to support their negotiating position. The other one is, yet again, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which the Russians often carried out operations that were intended to put pressure on particular warlords to get on side.
Armchair Generalist has interesting quotes from the IISS's recent report on Afghanistan:
This is close enough to my line to make no difference, although I do suspect that the key factor in this will be good old low expectations.
Meanwhile, Joshua Foust would like everyone to know that Turkey has no possible advice to offer on fighting separatist guerrillas or transitioning from a military dictatorship towards democracy without achieving a 626% electoral turnout, and Indonesia knows nothing whatsoever about a complex, sometimes violent polity with radically different levels of development and a tradition of guerrilla activity.
I add this merely to remind myself that the Pajamas Media brand retains significant value as a counterindicator.
Since then, we've learned about the build-up of US reconnaissance in Afghanistan. As a result, the drones strike more and more often. Here's Sean Naylor on what seems to be a broader offensive against the Haqqanis. Note that this also refers to even more reconnaissance and intelligence assets being deployed, transferred from Iraq. (Looking at this, a subplot of getting out of Iraq seems to have been getting better at data analysis in the field.)
Noah Schachtman's piece does connect this with the negotiating track, but not in the way I think they are related. This reminds me of two things - one of them is the IRA concept of the Tactical Use of Armed Struggle, from the 1990s. The basic idea was that the main effort was the negotiations, and the violence was intended to support their negotiating position. The other one is, yet again, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which the Russians often carried out operations that were intended to put pressure on particular warlords to get on side.
Armchair Generalist has interesting quotes from the IISS's recent report on Afghanistan:
A tripartite dialogue between Afghanistan, India and Pakistan is desirable; not least to diminish risks that enduring conflict could escalate to civil-war proportions. Central Asian states, Russia and Iran will have competing concerns in Afghanistan that will have to be reconciled, but a less ambitious coalition military posture in Afghanistan should be used to make this possible.
This is close enough to my line to make no difference, although I do suspect that the key factor in this will be good old low expectations.
Meanwhile, Joshua Foust would like everyone to know that Turkey has no possible advice to offer on fighting separatist guerrillas or transitioning from a military dictatorship towards democracy without achieving a 626% electoral turnout, and Indonesia knows nothing whatsoever about a complex, sometimes violent polity with radically different levels of development and a tradition of guerrilla activity.
I add this merely to remind myself that the Pajamas Media brand retains significant value as a counterindicator.
tea
Arising from this, it struck me that there is something very important about continuity in politics. In many ways, it's a habit - the group of professional rightwing publicists who invented "teabaggers" in late 2008 were clearly very well aware that a movement survives by acting out its emotional rituals and internalised skills. Whether it's accurate to say that they looked at the new organising models and styles of the 2000s and installed them onto their wetware, they got the trigger-movement right. (This is roughly what I was thinking of at OpenTech a couple of weeks back - even if most of the people who signed up for Democracy Club would drift off after the elections, the ones who didn't would be the ones you'd need for the next election. It's a kind of neural Darwinism.)
So I reckon Labour is recovering, while the Lib Dems have just discovered the joy of doing the exact opposite of whatever party conference votes for.
So I reckon Labour is recovering, while the Lib Dems have just discovered the joy of doing the exact opposite of whatever party conference votes for.
"Cyberwar" and Iran: the other side of the hill
If I hadn't been fiddling with file permissions to get Wordpress running last Sunday, I'd probably have been writing about the Haystack saga. I'm a bit gestört by some of the coverage of it - Evgeny Morozov, typically, has been doing good work in the general war on bullshit, but I'm less convinced of his broader conclusions. See here.
What stands out about Haystack isn't so much the technology - which we can't really make statements about, because they kept everything secret until it all fell down, and the implementation is apparently so awful nobody wants to release the code in case someone tries to use it - but the meta-technology. As this post makes clear, perhaps the biggest problem was that it was half-open, half-closed. The code wasn't released, so it was impossible for anyone to review it, but it was circulated widely enough that the core development team had little or no idea how far it might have spread. In fact, some people who did have the source code thought it would be a good idea to compile it, package it, and share it with people who might need it.
And although there is apparently a client-server element in it, the server was allowed to accept connections from the wider Internet. So they'd accidentally allowed the unfinished and untested project to start operating in production.
The Guardian is mocked; John Graham-Cumming is right (and check out the remarks about Tor in comments) and points out that Haystack's crypto was reliant on a source of random numbers that, well, isn't random. The EFF has good advice.
Now, this week has another superspy Iran story, Stuxnet, the worm that apparently attacks a Siemens SCADA application. Here's JGC again, being sceptical. There's a rundown at Alliance Geostrategique. The author of the theory that it's an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant is self publicising here - I, for one, am not convinced that the fact they hadn't got some software licence key in 2009 is great evidence, especially as the Windows .lnk exploit involved wouldn't care either way. It's the one from July in which Windows will execute code packed into the icon file for a desktop shortcut on a USB stick, so how pleased the Business Software Alliance is with the Iranians is here or there.
And it also seems to target Indian and Indonesian systems. Maybe its authors are protesting against Eat, Pray, Love.
To put it another way, I think we're under a cyberattack from a sinister network of chancers and self-publicists who have glommed on to the whole issue as a way of getting their faces in the news and their hands into the till. As our occasional reader Bos puts it:
Meanwhile, what's going on in Iran? In many ways, this is much more interesting. Way back in 2006, I blogged about how the Iranian government was putting impressive resources into aid to Afghanistan. One facet of this was that they had laid a fibre-optic cable from Iran to Herat; another was that the cybercafe in Kabul with the most bandwidth and the least censorship was the one in the Iranian cultural centre.
Now, it looks like the Iranian wholesale telco monopoly, DCI (Datacomms Iran), is becoming a significant transit provider to networks in Iraq, specifically Kurdistan, and Afghanistan, including the Afghan Government. As the good people at Renesys point out, this is perfectly sensible for the Kurdish operators - they're getting rid of their expensive and slow VSAT links, and diversifying their sources of transit - but this is dependent on actually diversifying, rather than just replacing.
The Afghan government's network, it turns out, has recently started to show up through DCI as well as through Pakistan and an Uzbek provider. For a while, all the Afghan prefixes were being routed via either Iran or Uzbekistan and Russia, after a fibre cut on the route to Pakistan.
You can certainly see why the Afghans might not want to pass all their traffic through Pakistan. But treating this as a political issue does have a point. Back in the summer of 2009, the Iranian state found an elegant way to use DCI as an instrument of political power - rather than turn everything off, as in Burma, or call out the troll army, as in China (although they do have that capability), they rate-limited everyone down to about 20% of the typical throughput. As all Iranian ISPs have to use DCI for transit, this meant that a lot of hostile Internet activity will just not have happened, although the really determined would get through.
They are, of course, the ones you want to catch. Squelching down the bandwidth also probably meant that the traffic was reduced to a level where their lawful-intercept infrastructure* could capture and process it all. Almost certainly, they can do the same to any of their downstreams, or continue to pass customer traffic while squelching their own.
It is impressively ironic that a few router configuration rules can mean freedom in Herat and tyranny in Tehran.
What stands out about Haystack isn't so much the technology - which we can't really make statements about, because they kept everything secret until it all fell down, and the implementation is apparently so awful nobody wants to release the code in case someone tries to use it - but the meta-technology. As this post makes clear, perhaps the biggest problem was that it was half-open, half-closed. The code wasn't released, so it was impossible for anyone to review it, but it was circulated widely enough that the core development team had little or no idea how far it might have spread. In fact, some people who did have the source code thought it would be a good idea to compile it, package it, and share it with people who might need it.
And although there is apparently a client-server element in it, the server was allowed to accept connections from the wider Internet. So they'd accidentally allowed the unfinished and untested project to start operating in production.
The Guardian is mocked; John Graham-Cumming is right (and check out the remarks about Tor in comments) and points out that Haystack's crypto was reliant on a source of random numbers that, well, isn't random. The EFF has good advice.
Now, this week has another superspy Iran story, Stuxnet, the worm that apparently attacks a Siemens SCADA application. Here's JGC again, being sceptical. There's a rundown at Alliance Geostrategique. The author of the theory that it's an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant is self publicising here - I, for one, am not convinced that the fact they hadn't got some software licence key in 2009 is great evidence, especially as the Windows .lnk exploit involved wouldn't care either way. It's the one from July in which Windows will execute code packed into the icon file for a desktop shortcut on a USB stick, so how pleased the Business Software Alliance is with the Iranians is here or there.
And it also seems to target Indian and Indonesian systems. Maybe its authors are protesting against Eat, Pray, Love.
To put it another way, I think we're under a cyberattack from a sinister network of chancers and self-publicists who have glommed on to the whole issue as a way of getting their faces in the news and their hands into the till. As our occasional reader Bos puts it:
When you say "weapons-grade cybermunitions developed by nation states", I hear "this patchwork of consulting gigs won't cover my coke bill."
Meanwhile, what's going on in Iran? In many ways, this is much more interesting. Way back in 2006, I blogged about how the Iranian government was putting impressive resources into aid to Afghanistan. One facet of this was that they had laid a fibre-optic cable from Iran to Herat; another was that the cybercafe in Kabul with the most bandwidth and the least censorship was the one in the Iranian cultural centre.
Now, it looks like the Iranian wholesale telco monopoly, DCI (Datacomms Iran), is becoming a significant transit provider to networks in Iraq, specifically Kurdistan, and Afghanistan, including the Afghan Government. As the good people at Renesys point out, this is perfectly sensible for the Kurdish operators - they're getting rid of their expensive and slow VSAT links, and diversifying their sources of transit - but this is dependent on actually diversifying, rather than just replacing.
The Afghan government's network, it turns out, has recently started to show up through DCI as well as through Pakistan and an Uzbek provider. For a while, all the Afghan prefixes were being routed via either Iran or Uzbekistan and Russia, after a fibre cut on the route to Pakistan.
You can certainly see why the Afghans might not want to pass all their traffic through Pakistan. But treating this as a political issue does have a point. Back in the summer of 2009, the Iranian state found an elegant way to use DCI as an instrument of political power - rather than turn everything off, as in Burma, or call out the troll army, as in China (although they do have that capability), they rate-limited everyone down to about 20% of the typical throughput. As all Iranian ISPs have to use DCI for transit, this meant that a lot of hostile Internet activity will just not have happened, although the really determined would get through.
They are, of course, the ones you want to catch. Squelching down the bandwidth also probably meant that the traffic was reduced to a level where their lawful-intercept infrastructure* could capture and process it all. Almost certainly, they can do the same to any of their downstreams, or continue to pass customer traffic while squelching their own.
It is impressively ironic that a few router configuration rules can mean freedom in Herat and tyranny in Tehran.
Admin Notice: Migration
You may have noticed that the blogspot version of TYR looks funny. The news is that we're moving - with luck, our national nightmare of blog bifurcation and manually maintained archive links (there's a reason the ones on TYR classic haven't been updated in years) will be at an end.
Before this happens, though, I'd like to thank whichever bloody idiot at Google has broken the Blogger Data API, so that Blogger-Wordpress exports no longer work. This has made my life a misery for the last week or so. I've so far tried - the official, server-to-server migration, which doesn't work, the horrible hack of trying to server-server import the Blogger blog into a temporary Wordpress.com blog, then dump the Wordpress export file, then upload that (12MB over a crappy ADSL uplink topping out below 100Kbps), the even worse hack of dumping the Blogger export, then uploading that to Wordpress.com, the same thing having "converted your template to New Blogger" after Blogger refused to give me the dump file, etc, etc.
And no migration. Also, it turns out to my utter horror that the Wordpress.com thing about not liking anything with a <script tag> - like Google Maps (although they have finally and grudgingly accepted that one) or IBM ManyEyes - exists in an independently hosted Wordpress install, too. Apparently there's a plugin. Seriously - a third party extension to stop it mangling my stuff. Shouldn't this just be a config option so I can just turn it off? So I'm actively considering binning WP and installing Movable Type instead. Such, such were the joys.
So I'd like to apologise to anyone I've been grumpy towards as a result. And the blog will soon be back, better, stronger, more orange, and 50% less bifurcated. If you link to us, you will soon be notified of the new URI, and I will chase you up. Once the Neo-Ranter is operational (technically it's operational now, just there's nothing in it), I'm going to close comments on the other versions and eventually shut them down, once I've SQL-d the links so that they all point within the new blog.
Before this happens, though, I'd like to thank whichever bloody idiot at Google has broken the Blogger Data API, so that Blogger-Wordpress exports no longer work. This has made my life a misery for the last week or so. I've so far tried - the official, server-to-server migration, which doesn't work, the horrible hack of trying to server-server import the Blogger blog into a temporary Wordpress.com blog, then dump the Wordpress export file, then upload that (12MB over a crappy ADSL uplink topping out below 100Kbps), the even worse hack of dumping the Blogger export, then uploading that to Wordpress.com, the same thing having "converted your template to New Blogger" after Blogger refused to give me the dump file, etc, etc.
And no migration. Also, it turns out to my utter horror that the Wordpress.com thing about not liking anything with a <script tag> - like Google Maps (although they have finally and grudgingly accepted that one) or IBM ManyEyes - exists in an independently hosted Wordpress install, too. Apparently there's a plugin. Seriously - a third party extension to stop it mangling my stuff. Shouldn't this just be a config option so I can just turn it off? So I'm actively considering binning WP and installing Movable Type instead. Such, such were the joys.
So I'd like to apologise to anyone I've been grumpy towards as a result. And the blog will soon be back, better, stronger, more orange, and 50% less bifurcated. If you link to us, you will soon be notified of the new URI, and I will chase you up. Once the Neo-Ranter is operational (technically it's operational now, just there's nothing in it), I'm going to close comments on the other versions and eventually shut them down, once I've SQL-d the links so that they all point within the new blog.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
I was about to comment on this Jamie Kenny post about the blackly comic way that 10 years after the 11th September attack, the US or at least its media-political complex is in thrall to some book-burning nut in Florida who got thrown out of Germany for helping himself to the communion plate. Then I realised I couldn't remember the Bruce Sterling quote I wanted exactly. Here it is, for the record and to make the original point:
The amusing thing is that, before I gave up and grabbed my copy of Distraction, I googled for Bruce Sterling American world policeman diva. Which is a near-SHA1 hash of the content of that paragraph, no? The fifth result for that search is part one of my response to the UK Strategic Defence Review as a Blog.
And come to think of it, it's actually quite relevant, although the fact AFOE links to Troubled Diva probably has something to do with it.
The American national character really wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a sombre and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.
The amusing thing is that, before I gave up and grabbed my copy of Distraction, I googled for Bruce Sterling American world policeman diva. Which is a near-SHA1 hash of the content of that paragraph, no? The fifth result for that search is part one of my response to the UK Strategic Defence Review as a Blog.
And come to think of it, it's actually quite relevant, although the fact AFOE links to Troubled Diva probably has something to do with it.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
survival of the survivors
A thought, while writing the last post. Thinking about international politics invariably involves a lot of rational-choice stuff, or rational-choice at one remove. Although this may not make sense in a platonic game-theory way, how do so-and-so's interests, preferences, and meta-knowledge of their own situation have to differ from yours to make it work? They've been arguing about this over at Crooked Timber for some time.
It struck me, anyway, that this is a lot like the notion of "fitness" for biologists, which is famously problematic. Everyone's heard of "survival of the fittest", but what is "fit"? Clearly, it means something like "able to survive". So we're talking about the survival of the survivors, which is not very useful. Survivors survive. No shit, Sherlock. Similarly, how do we know that some actor did something on the basis of a rational judgment? Because if it didn't fit their preferences they wouldn't have done it!
There's another issue here, too. The statement that the survivors survive is tautologous, but it's not a stupid statement. Reflect on the survival of survivors, and you will actually learn something about evolution - that it is driven by chance, that it is without aim, that it is not teleological or value-laden. Ug's genes were conserved because the cave didn't collapse on him. We are full of hacks and errors that continue to exist not so much because they helped our ancestors survive, but because at some crisis in the past they were irrelevant and therefore not selected out. Survival itself is often a matter of chance.
We look around and see rational choices, but we're afflicted by enormous survivorship bias - however irrational your choices, if they didn't lead to total failure, they will be justifiable in hindsight as rational on some terms. Now, the biologists eventually got rid of the survival of the fittest, and biology as a science gained immensely from unpacking the idea. Rational choice has something else in common with the survival of the fittest. Herbert Spencer probably didn't mean the phrase as an exact statement of theory, but as an elegant popularisation. And rational choice is a bit like that, too - the very simplicity of the idea explains why it survives.
It struck me, anyway, that this is a lot like the notion of "fitness" for biologists, which is famously problematic. Everyone's heard of "survival of the fittest", but what is "fit"? Clearly, it means something like "able to survive". So we're talking about the survival of the survivors, which is not very useful. Survivors survive. No shit, Sherlock. Similarly, how do we know that some actor did something on the basis of a rational judgment? Because if it didn't fit their preferences they wouldn't have done it!
There's another issue here, too. The statement that the survivors survive is tautologous, but it's not a stupid statement. Reflect on the survival of survivors, and you will actually learn something about evolution - that it is driven by chance, that it is without aim, that it is not teleological or value-laden. Ug's genes were conserved because the cave didn't collapse on him. We are full of hacks and errors that continue to exist not so much because they helped our ancestors survive, but because at some crisis in the past they were irrelevant and therefore not selected out. Survival itself is often a matter of chance.
We look around and see rational choices, but we're afflicted by enormous survivorship bias - however irrational your choices, if they didn't lead to total failure, they will be justifiable in hindsight as rational on some terms. Now, the biologists eventually got rid of the survival of the fittest, and biology as a science gained immensely from unpacking the idea. Rational choice has something else in common with the survival of the fittest. Herbert Spencer probably didn't mean the phrase as an exact statement of theory, but as an elegant popularisation. And rational choice is a bit like that, too - the very simplicity of the idea explains why it survives.
2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrong
Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn't defeat the Israelis and hold a victory parade in Tel Aviv, but then nobody least of all them expected or aimed for that. The outcome of 2006 can only be understood in the light of a realistic assessment of the conflict parties' capabilities, interests, and priorities. A score draw is a much better result for Stoke City against Manchester United than it is for Manchester United against Barcelona.
For Hezbollah, the first and overriding goal was surely survival - as it is for everyone, it's even the title of the IISS Journal - followed closely by survival as a force in Lebanese politics, survival of their capability to maintain their self-declared insecurity zone in northern Israel, and finally, inflicting casualties and costs on the Israelis in order to create a deterrent effect. In that light, the result of 2006 was surely just as good from their point of view as they made out - they came away still in the field, still firing rockets, and with their status in Lebanese politics enhanced.
For Israel, well, perhaps one day they'll work out what their strategic aims were.
Elkus argues that the tactical situation at the point when the UN ceasefire went into effect was favourable for Israel, and that had the war gone on they might have done better. This is possible. However, it's also very common for wars to end like this. The Israelis' campaign in 1967 was designed, once they got the upper hand, to get to the Canal and onto the Golan before the UN blew the whistle - one of Ariel Sharon's frequent blind-eye manoeuvres in 1973 was also intended to complete the encirclement of the Egyptian 3rd Army before the UN ceasefire went into effect. The Indian plan for the 1971 war was explicitly intended to take Dhaka before a ceasefire was imposed. More recently, the Russian operation in Georgia was subject to a similar deadline. International intervention is part of the environment, and only fools wouldn't take it into account as a planning assumption.
An interesting sidelight on this, also from Elkus, came up in a parallel blog debate about "network-centric warfare" - he pointed to this gung-ho but good piece about the action in northern Iraq in which John Simpson was blown up. What struck me about it, however, was more that it was an example of this kind of thing - which should certainly make you think about 2006, especially in the light of this.
Tangentially, Sean Lawson's essay on the history of "network centric warfare" is well worth reading, especially for the way so many US officials in 2001-2006 seem to have been competing to see who could validate all the most extreme stereotypes of themselves the fastest, and more broadly on the way a basically sensible idea can become a sort of gateway drug to really insane strategic fantasies.
Measured against the sort of capabilities the NCW thinkers knew they had, and the kind of goals they dreamed on the basis of them, what possible results wouldn't look like failure? Compared with the enormous arrogance of this vision - they really did want everyone who thinks the CIA wants them dead, dead - what resistance wouldn't look like success?
For Hezbollah, the first and overriding goal was surely survival - as it is for everyone, it's even the title of the IISS Journal - followed closely by survival as a force in Lebanese politics, survival of their capability to maintain their self-declared insecurity zone in northern Israel, and finally, inflicting casualties and costs on the Israelis in order to create a deterrent effect. In that light, the result of 2006 was surely just as good from their point of view as they made out - they came away still in the field, still firing rockets, and with their status in Lebanese politics enhanced.
For Israel, well, perhaps one day they'll work out what their strategic aims were.
Elkus argues that the tactical situation at the point when the UN ceasefire went into effect was favourable for Israel, and that had the war gone on they might have done better. This is possible. However, it's also very common for wars to end like this. The Israelis' campaign in 1967 was designed, once they got the upper hand, to get to the Canal and onto the Golan before the UN blew the whistle - one of Ariel Sharon's frequent blind-eye manoeuvres in 1973 was also intended to complete the encirclement of the Egyptian 3rd Army before the UN ceasefire went into effect. The Indian plan for the 1971 war was explicitly intended to take Dhaka before a ceasefire was imposed. More recently, the Russian operation in Georgia was subject to a similar deadline. International intervention is part of the environment, and only fools wouldn't take it into account as a planning assumption.
An interesting sidelight on this, also from Elkus, came up in a parallel blog debate about "network-centric warfare" - he pointed to this gung-ho but good piece about the action in northern Iraq in which John Simpson was blown up. What struck me about it, however, was more that it was an example of this kind of thing - which should certainly make you think about 2006, especially in the light of this.
Tangentially, Sean Lawson's essay on the history of "network centric warfare" is well worth reading, especially for the way so many US officials in 2001-2006 seem to have been competing to see who could validate all the most extreme stereotypes of themselves the fastest, and more broadly on the way a basically sensible idea can become a sort of gateway drug to really insane strategic fantasies.
Cebrowski talked of a “booming export market for…security” and warned those who would resist, “If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense” (Cebrowski, 2003c).
Measured against the sort of capabilities the NCW thinkers knew they had, and the kind of goals they dreamed on the basis of them, what possible results wouldn't look like failure? Compared with the enormous arrogance of this vision - they really did want everyone who thinks the CIA wants them dead, dead - what resistance wouldn't look like success?
mildly amusing roundup
Extremists. 
I can't help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta's work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him looks like he's on a demo to demand that ordinary decent schizophrenics can de-compensate without the EDL lowering the tone.
Due to the 30th birthday, I didn't cover this at the time, but there's a really nice piece on the Bradford EDL rally and counter-demo here. "It's the middle of Ramadan, as if we're bothered about this lot", indeed. And the EDL were the only people ever to decide that the Rubble Zone was a great place to hang out.
Something else I missed, except for the last 15 minutes: the Challenge Cup final. Lee Briers got the Lance Todd. Kevin Sinfield got his third runner's up medal. He must be really desperate to escape the fate of another Loiner, Garry Schofield, who played in four finals and never won, a record.
Elsewhere: I'm sticking the boot in over at Stable & Principled again. What is it about the Blair/Gove academies that makes them so suited to influence peddling?
I can't help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta's work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him looks like he's on a demo to demand that ordinary decent schizophrenics can de-compensate without the EDL lowering the tone.
Due to the 30th birthday, I didn't cover this at the time, but there's a really nice piece on the Bradford EDL rally and counter-demo here. "It's the middle of Ramadan, as if we're bothered about this lot", indeed. And the EDL were the only people ever to decide that the Rubble Zone was a great place to hang out.
Something else I missed, except for the last 15 minutes: the Challenge Cup final. Lee Briers got the Lance Todd. Kevin Sinfield got his third runner's up medal. He must be really desperate to escape the fate of another Loiner, Garry Schofield, who played in four finals and never won, a record.
Elsewhere: I'm sticking the boot in over at Stable & Principled again. What is it about the Blair/Gove academies that makes them so suited to influence peddling?
Monday, September 06, 2010
ambassador, with this pdf you are spoiling us
So I was trying to parse the London Diplomatic List (this month's edition yet to make an appearance). Cian suggested pulling out the fontspec tags on the grounds that they're often redundant and it might be possible to identify groups among them. So I did just that and then a little bit of data reduction.
25 tag declarations squash to 11 unique font/size/colour declarations. Mmm, compression. The bad news is that, for example, countries and ambassadors (or rather, chiefs of mission - not all of them are ambassadors) are in font 1 - but font 1 is actually identical to fonts 2, 7, and 8, which include diplomats' names, spouses, and styles. The good news is that at least font-grouping will help to filter the crap like lists of national days and page numbers and obvious MS Word copy-paste artefacts.
(wordpress.com still eats embedded spreadsheets: here's a link.)
25 tag declarations squash to 11 unique font/size/colour declarations. Mmm, compression. The bad news is that, for example, countries and ambassadors (or rather, chiefs of mission - not all of them are ambassadors) are in font 1 - but font 1 is actually identical to fonts 2, 7, and 8, which include diplomats' names, spouses, and styles. The good news is that at least font-grouping will help to filter the crap like lists of national days and page numbers and obvious MS Word copy-paste artefacts.
(wordpress.com still eats embedded spreadsheets: here's a link.)
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