MishMash

2000 Terrorists. Don't trust anyone!

Craig Murray in fine fettle:

The truth is that since September 11 Islamic militants have killed about 70 people in the UK. That's 12 people a year in a country of 60 million. Every death is terrible, but a threat to our existence it is not. You have a much better chance of drowning in your own bath, of being struck by lightning or of winning the national lottery than of being killed by a terrorist. But that wouldn't persuade you to give up your civil liberties, or that we have to invade more oil rich countries for our security.

And from a commenter to Murray's post:

Perhaps the government could give us a fear list, from 1 to 10, of the things we should fear most. Then we'd know where we are, and could start some serious and structured fearing without having to worry about whether we're fearing about entirely the wrong thing.

School or factory?

Who needs personal contact when we can monitor pupils using RFID tags (via Schneier on Security). *Shudder*.

Child obesity = global warming = terrorism = fascism

Mick Hume in the Times:

We were officially told this week that obesity is as big a threat as climate change. Not long ago we were told that global warming is as big a threat as terrorism. And earlier, that terrorism is as big a threat to the British people as the Second World War. So: child obesity = global warming = terrorism = Fascism. Ergo, those crisps in your child’s lunchbox are today’s moral equivalent of the Nazis. Now do you feel guilty?

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O

The Onion:

CHICAGO—In what is being called the first conceptual terrorist attack on American soil, the landmark Sears Tower was encased in 18 million tons of strawberry gelatin early Monday morning, leaving thousands shocked, angry, and seriously confused.

Newcastle University Compromises on Excellence

High hopes for our new Vice Chancellor take something of a battering with this latest news:

Key themes of the discussions centred around how the pursuit of excellence should be balanced with relevance to student vocations, business and society in general.

Er ... pardon?

Looking forward to the next announcement:

After careful consideration, Newcastle University has decided that it can best provide relevance to student vocations, business and society in general by striving for unequalled mediocrity in all of its activities.

Craig Murray on University management

It looks as if Craig Murray is going to be a fly in Dundee University's management's ointment in his new role as Rector. He expresses surprise at how far the University is from the self-governing body it once was:

Interestingly every academic and graduate representative on Court voted against the cuts, but they were rammed through by an array of co-opted members, who appeared without exception to be either businessmen or from the government's educational administration establishment.

Here at Newcastle University we await with interest the arrival of our next Vice Chancellor, Professor Chris Brink. As an academic, will he show more interest in people and less in buildings?

Our data to be freed?

Rich sent me a link to this BBC story about evidence that the UK government's attitude towards data is changing. They have, “decided to make access to a database of UK laws completely free for the public to access and re-use.”

Let's hope that this is a harbinger of a more general change in attitude. The debate around Ordnance Survey mapping will continue for a long time, though there have been reports that OS are interested in opening up some way. The primary business of the Survey is to collect spatial data and produce maps. I have much less sympathy with government agencies which collect data in the line of fulfilling their statutory and tax-funded duty, yet still make obtaining access to that data difficult and time consuming (and therefore, indirectly, expensive) for academic researchers and impossible for the general public.

At the lauch event for the Intitution of Civil Engineers'  report "Learning to live with rivers" report, commissioned by the government after the Autumn 2000 floods, I asked a representative of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) (Defra) for a response to paragraph 11.11.1 of that report:

The Commission recommends that publicly collected primary and processed data (topographical, meteorological, hydrological and hydraulic) should be made publicly available, as is the case in the United States. This would result in improved flood risk assessment and management.

The gist of his response, as I remember it, was that without charging for data there was no way of knowing its value. This was some sort of official line, and he expressed a less hard-line view in private later. It occurs to me only now that this response is to some degree a red herring anyway: much of this data are available "free" to some, such as researchers on Defra or Environment Agency approved projects, and not at all to others. That point aside, the argument is redolent of accountant-driven policy. All one can establish by charging for data is its commercial value, and even that only crudely.

Blocking access to data (data, remember, which must be collected anyway), whether by charging for it or simply not making it available,  destroys much of its value.

May the changes continue.

Juggle!

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stand on his head and juggle ice-cream.

(via Craig Murray).

Is this (the facility, that is, rather than this petition) an attempt to reduce petitioning to a game, and therefore remove any sting it might have had?

Is it likely that you could get any media coverage for the deadline passing on a petition on the PM's official web site, for example?

Government defeated at last (and on 90 days)

As Matthew says, "Rejoice! Rejoice!":

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | PM urges 'responsibility' on terror bill.

BBC: A £200 ticket to ride

Some relatively unhelpful commentary from Aunty (Auntie? does it matter?) about yesterday's Tyndall Centre report on the impact of air travel [PDF].

Two main problems:

1. Doesn't the hitch from Frankfurt to Basel make the cheap flights trip a bit of a nonsense?
2. As usual no mention is made of the fact that airlines are subsidised not just in fuel, but in the regional airports which they fly to. Airport tax is kept low, apparently for the sake of the economic vitality of the region. So what about subsidising rail in the same way? Just how is it less essential to that same vitality?

Ah well.