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It’s good to see an ancient stereotype confirmed, this time the one about British judges being less than completely alert and on the ball on all occasions.
One of the men convicted of plotting to snatch £200 million worth of diamonds from the Millennium Dome has lodged grounds of appeal alleging that the judge at his Old Bailey trial fell asleep more than once during the hearing.
Lawyers for Raymond Betson are trying to trace two witnesses who were present at the trial and may be able to give evidence about when Judge Michael Coombe dozed off.
Betson’s claim – part of his challenge to his conviction of conspiracy to rob – was disclosed in the Court of Appeal today when his case was delayed for at least seven weeks.
Betson’s counsel, Edmund Romilly, said: “Statements from two people present at the trial show that the judge fell asleep on a number of occasions. We have been making efforts to contact these people, so far without success.”
All of which confirms that old Peter Cook sketch from Beyond The Fringe about how, when you get old and doddery and useless, you had to stop doing mining, but that this didn’t apply at all if you did judging.
I don’t know what else this proves. Probably that most court cases, even about dramatic events such as this attempted Dome robbery – which was like something in a Peter Sellers movie – are stupefyingly boring.
There’s a long article in today’s New York Times about Diebold, the voting machine company, and their struggle to prevent internal emails about security weaknesses in their software getting around on the Internet. They’re arguing intellectual property. Their opponents argue “fair use”. First three paragraphs:
Forbidden files are circulating on the Internet and threats of lawsuits are in the air. Music trading? No, it is the growing controversy over one company’s electronic voting systems, and the issues being raised, some legal scholars say, are as fundamental as the sanctity of elections and the right to free speech.
Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company’s internal communications about its electronic voting machines.
The students say that, by trying to spread the word about problems with the company’s software, they are performing a valuable form of electronic civil disobedience, one that has broad implications for American society. They also contend that they are protected by fair use exceptions in copyright law.
Hurry if you want to read all of it. NYT stuff seems to go behind a payment wall quite soon. They take their property seriously too, I guess. (By the way, is this NYT policy recent, or is it just me having only recently noticed it?)
This posting now is rather non-topical, in that the clutch of words it refers back to was emitted three weeks ago in a news story about how our Prime Minister is going to stop us all getting so fat. I paid attention to this anti-fat initiative because I was interviewed on the radio about it, and one particular little phrase associated with this story has since stuck in my mind. I still have some print-outs of the relevant media coverage. Here’s how the Observer reported it:
In a letter to Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, a copy of which has been leaked to The Observer, Blair spells out what he sees as the Government’s failure to promote exercise: ‘Government policy has not delivered the outcomes we want in this area,’ he writes. ‘We have started to make progress on the school sport agenda, but also need to more effectively tackle activity levels in the adult population.’
Referring to the Government’s long-term target of getting 70 per cent of people physically active by 2020, the letter, written in July, states: ‘We need an ambitious delivery strategy, using the Olympic bid as a catalyst, to develop more innovative and interventionist policies across the public, private and voluntary sectors in both health and sport if that target is to be achieved.’
Setting aside the nightmare vision of the Olympic Games being held in Britain and coinciding with a government propaganda barrage tell us all to do physical jerks, the phrase that interested me here was Tony Blair’s reference to the government not having “delivered the outcomes” that he wanted. → Continue reading: The menace of “delivering outcomes”
I did a posting yesterday on Transport Blog about how they’re now using lie detection software to monitor phone conversations from insurance claimants, to flag up potential liars, and then “give them the opportunity to change their story”. The result is a fall in insurance claims, and hence, presumably, potential cheaper car insurance.
I have a the overwhelming feeling that this procedure will bring bad news as well as good, in a White Rose Relevant way, when governments start using stuff like this for instance, as I dare say many have. But what form will this bad news take? I can’t think of any obvious badnesses, but I feel sure there are some. Comments please.
One suggestion. The insurance companies mentioned in this story are all saying at the start of their conversations that “this call is being monitored”, although I don’t believe they say straight out that this means a lie detection machine. Clearly others will not be so scrupulous, and will simply monitor all conversations and flag up what the machines says are lies, all the time. What are the White Rose Relevant implications of that?
On the face of it, I think I have the right to buy a machine that helps me decide whether I trust someone at the far end of a phone line. I could simply say “Is this a junk phone call?” every time I suspect it is, and if they say no but my machine goes “ping”, then down goes the phone. At present the danger is that with our own more fallible bullshit detection software that we all have in our brains, we do this to “real” phone callers who are merely a bit clumsy in identifying themselves, or whom we are a bit clumsy in identifying.
Presumably what makes this so much more usable now is that the kit has got a lot cheaper, and it supplies answers straight away, while the conversation is still going on.
Techo-food for thought here, I think.
To all outward appearances, the Conservative Party has gone mad, and many of its most rabid enemies will now be rejoicing at the turmoil now afflicting it.
Just when the Conservatives ought to be uniting, concentrating on the issues, attacking the government, pulling together, speaking with a united voice, racing ahead in the polls, blah blah, they are instead deep into a leadership battle, concerning the future of a man who has yet to lead them into a General Election. What kind of mad bastard loser psychopath idiots are these people?
That’s the text. But I think that this is a case where the subtext is far, far more important – the subtext and the context.
The context first. For the first time since it was elected over six years ago the Labour government is in serious trouble, six years being the usual time it takes, for some reason, for a Labour government to fall to bits. The Iraq war has turned a relatively amicable coalition of semi-normals and lefties into a shouting match, and the manifest failure of the government to sort out “public services” by any means other then chucking money at them has finally become obvious to all. The honeymoon, the benefit of doubt, wait and see – all that’s coming to an end.
At the deeper level of things, Europe is turning from a Labour issue back to being a Conservative issue. Because of the expansion of Europe, the case for serious deregulation in defiance of the Franco-German axis is now seriously puttable. And ask yourself this: which party of the big two feels more comfortable with such pro-free-market rhetoric? This stuff will play well with the Conservatives and only cause yet more havoc within Labour. The times they are a-changin’ and in a profoundly Conservative direction.
And this – and now I’m moving to the subtext bit – is precisely why the Conservatives are now in such turmoil. Suddenly, it matters who their leader is. This is now a job worth having. → Continue reading: The dogs of Conservatism – fighting now, hunting soon
Following up on this earlier report here, more London School of Economics Hayek Society, here’s their latest news, from the society’s President Nick Spurrell:
Compassion and Capitalism Event – There will be held a major event tomorrow, Wednesday 29th October, with French thinker Christian Michel from Liberalia, entitled “Compassion and Capitalism”. Please do come along. There will be a talk and then questions and debate. D703, Clement House (Hong Kong Theatre Building) on the Aldwych. 12pm. Wednesday 29th October. No tickets necessary.
Students’ Union Elections – Tomorrow and Thursday (29th and 30th October) there will be held the LSE Students’ Union elections for various positions which hold authority and influence on the policy of the students’ union, the body which regulates the work of student societies including the Hayek Society.
Should you wish to vote, you may do so in the Quad, off Houghton Street on Wednesday or Thursday. The following Hayek Society Committee members are standing:
General Course Representative: Jonathan Gradowski (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); NUS Conference: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President), Peter Bellini (Hayek Society Financial Officer), Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Postgraduate Students’ Officer: Natalia Mamaeva (Hayek Society Secretary), Ryan Thomas Balis (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Court of Governors: Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Academic Board: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President); ULU (University of London Union) Council: Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer)
Discussion Group Next Monday – There will be held, as usual, next Monday evening, the Hayek Society discussion group. All are welcome, in this informal environment to take part in a chaired discussion. The topic this week will be on the environment. More details soon… Monday 3rd November, 7pm, George IV pub, on campus, upstairs. Please feel free to come along.
The thing that impresses me about all this is that the stuff in the middle, about standing for various electoral offices, is not happening on its own. These people are holding speaker meetings and discussion groups as well.
Libertarians/classical liberals/whatevers who get involved in student politics often justify this by saying that the politicking “draws attention to the ideas”. But often they get so busy politicking that they forget about pushing the ideas. Worse, in order to get more votes in their damned elections they actually conceal or even contradict the ideas in their public statements, on the grounds that the important thing is “successful” politicking and if the ideas don’t help with that, then they must be dumped.
But the important thing is to do the ideas successfully, and if the politicking doesn’t help then the politicking should be dumped.
Politicking makes heat, and you make this heat is to draw attention to the light, which is the ideas. Trouble is, politicking sometimes burns up all the energy that ought to be used making light. All manner of “attention” is thus drawn, to nothing.
These guys don’t seem to be making this mistake. I’m impressed.
My thanks to CNE President Tim Evans for emailing me about this New York Times article, about the Free State project. I usually look at the daily NYT menu. Sod’s Law (and a rugby game – won by plucky little USA) decreed that today I didn’t. First few paragraphs:
KEENE, N.H. – A few things stand out about this unprepossessing city. It just broke its own Guinness Book world record for the most lighted jack-o’-lanterns with 28,952. It claims to have the world’s widest Main Street.
And recently, Keene became the home of Justin Somma, a 26-year-old freelance copywriter from Suffern, N.Y., and a foot soldier in an upstart political movement. That movement, the Free State Project, aims to make all of New Hampshire a laboratory for libertarian politics by recruiting libertarian-leaning people from across the country to move to New Hampshire and throw their collective weight around. Leaders of the project figure 20,000 people would do the trick, and so far 4,960 have pledged to make the move.
The idea is to concentrate enough fellow travelers in a single state to jump-start political change. Members, most of whom have met only over the Internet, chose New Hampshire over nine other states in a heated contest that lasted months.
(The other contenders were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. One frequently asked question on the project’s Web site was “Can’t you make a warmer state an option?”)
Once here, they plan to field candidates in elections and become active in schools and community groups, doing all they can to sow the libertarian ideals of curbing taxes, minimizing regulation of guns and drugs, privatizing schools and reducing government programs.
I’ve quoted at some length because the New York Times’ stuff has a habit which I’ve recently learned about of going out of one-click no-cost reach after all while. (Is that recent? Or was I just ignorant about it all along?)
I predict two things about what will happen as a result of this project.
- It will have results.
- The most momentous results will not be what anyone envisaged to start with.
The law of unintended consequences applies, after all, just as much to libertarians as it does to anyone else. Most gatherings of the faithful in the USA seem to result in a bit of spreading of the faith but not a lot, and then, interesting business activities.
One thing already seems likely, however, which the moving spirits of this project did intend. It will stir up media interest in libertarian ideas, not only within the USA but to some extent also beyond it, this New York Times piece being a perfect example of that process.
Coverage of surveillance in the Nov 2003 issue of National Geographic is summarised and accessed here.
The theme, a running meme here, is that because surveillance technology can do such good stuff, it will be installed, and then it can also do bad stuff.
Underwater surveillance, we are told, saved this man’s life:
On this particular day maybe the lifeguards weren’t paying as close attention as they should have been. Certainly they believed the trim, athletic LeRoy was not a high-risk swimmer.
But on this evening LeRoy was practicing apnea swimming – testing how far he could swim underwater on one breath – and at some point, without making any visible or audible disturbance on the water’s surface, he blacked out. The guards failed to notice as he stopped swimming and descended to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. With his arms crossed over his head and his feet twitching, he was unconscious and drowning. It would take him as little as four minutes to die.
Although the human lifeguards watching the pool were oblivious, 12 large machine eyes deep underwater were watching the whole thing and taking notice. Just nine months earlier the center had installed a state-of-the-art electronic surveillance system called Poseidon, a network of cameras that feeds a computer programmed to use a set of complex mathematical algorithms to distinguish between normal and distressed swimming. Poseidon covers a pool’s entire swimming area and can distinguish among blurry reflections, shadows, and actual swimmers. It can also tell when real swimmers are moving in a way they’re not supposed to. When the computer detects a possible problem, it instantly activates a beeper to alert lifeguards and displays the exact incident location on a monitor. The rest is up to the humans above the water.
Sixteen seconds after Poseidon noticed the large, sinking lump that was Jean-François LeRoy, lifeguards had LeRoy out of the pool and were initiating CPR. He started breathing again. After one night in the local hospital, he was released with no permanent damage. Poseidon – and, more precisely, the handful of French mathematicians who devised it – had saved his life.
And if the machines can see stuff like that, what else can they see?
Almost anything you say about how ideas spread and eventually get accepted and acted upon is liable to be (a) true, but (b) over-simplified, because the whole truth about how ideas spread and get acted upon is far, far too complicated ever to keep complete track of. Where the definite falsehood creeps in is when people say, or more commonly imply through the other things that they say, that ideas can only spread in this way or that way, and that all the other ways they can spread don’t count for anything.
There is one such implied falsehood which we at Samizdata, for humiliatingly obvious reasons, are likely to be particularly interested in and cheered up by contesting. This is the idea that what matters when it comes to spreading ideas is sheer weight of numbers. It’s the idea that getting some other idea to catch on and be acted upon is a question of assembling a sufficiently huge number of people who believe this idea to be true or good or appealing, and then for this vast throng of supporting people to prevail against the other almost equally vast (but not quite) throng of people who believe the opposite.
Clearly, as a partial description about how some ideas spread, at some times and in some places, this kind of thing can definitely happen. Political elections are often just like this. This vast throng of humanity votes for this idea, that throng votes for that idea, and the winners are the ones who appeal to the biggest throng.
But as a complete description of how ideas spread this picture is false. Most things, after all, are not decided by political elections. For example, I would say that when historians look back on our era, they will say that the development of the Internet was a huge historical event, up there with the first printed bibles in local languages, or with the development of the railways or of the motor car. Yet neither the internet, nor printing, nor railways, nor motor cars were any of them set in motion merely by political electorates, and nor, once they had got underway, were any political electorates ever invited to vote against them.
The weight-of-numbers model is even seriously false when it comes to understanding the full story of most political elections. Yes, elections decide who will occupy various political offices, and what will be written about in newspaper editorials for the next few years. But these elections seldom decide very much about what actually gets done from these offices. Instead, democratic true believers (the ones who really do believe that absolutely everything should be decided with a head count) constantly rage at how “undemocratic” democracy typically turns out to be. They have a point.
I will now offer you a thought experiment, the point of which is to explain how unimportant mere numbers of believers in an idea can be, and how much more interesting and complicated the spread of and adoption of ideas can sometimes be. → Continue reading: How ideas spread and get acted on – the weight of numbers fallacy
I hate emails like this. But now, instead of suffering alone, I can spread the load to all of Samizdata’s readers. That way, even if the problem remains unsolved, it can at least rot out there in the Commons where it belongs.
Dear Mr Micklethwait
I am writing a concise statement of ancient rights as part of a longer publication.
I want to include all the most important Common Law rights: life, liberty, property, family life, fair trial in open court, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury etc.
I cannot find a comprehensive list anywhere. Do you know of one please?
Regards,
Richard Marsden
My irascible Libertarian Alliance colleague Chris Tame is fond of translating such communications until they read more like this:
Dear Mr Tame
Please do all my work for me.
Regards,
Lazy Bastard
But maybe I now have friends and acquaintances who can be a little more constructive and polite than that. I don’t know the answer to Mr Marsden’s question, but maybe one of you clever geezers does.
Any suggestions?
For a while now I’ve been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.
There’s more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.
The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you’ll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.
Here’s the start of the New York Times coverage today:
Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration’s mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration’s domestic policy?
The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.
In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called “in need of improvement.” The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.
This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that’s what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these ‘education reformers’ would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.
The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply “better” education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!
No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.
I guess it’s all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it’s all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.
The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.
If more money is spent, that’ll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.
As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.
Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:
A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.
When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.
At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.
To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.
An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.
I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.
I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun’s reporting of the story. They regard the “response from the international community” as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does…
With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass “filter” with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.
They invented their “electrokinetic” water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.
…and how significant it might be:
The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.
The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.
The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?
More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?
And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?
Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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