Nov
20
2008
Nov
20
2008
More BNP goodness
Those pinko liberal commie scumbags at the Guardian having been having fun trawling the far-right message boards to find messages of panic from exposed BNP members. The schadenfreude runs deep and true. My personal favourite:
“There must have been a commie mole within the BNP. This is nothing short of political persecution at its worst.”
Look, you haven’t quite got the hang of this politics thing, have you? If it’s “political persecution” to reveal your membership of a political party, what does that say about the party of which you’re a member?
Nov
20
2008
Yahoo builds something excellent…. with Google
Yahoo Glue (glue.yahoo.com) is really, really good. Well done to them. Also interesting that it includes a Google Blog Search within the results. In the week that Jerry finally succumbed to the inevitable, it’s good to see a tangible result of the new “open Yahoo” making an appearance, and in such a convincing way. But the old niggling worry is still there - they were talking about this three years ago, so why has it taken so very, very long?
Nov
19
2008
links for 2008-11-19
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"The basic reason is that we can be pretty sure that no matter what we do, we don’t need to worry about this exact thing happening all over again. Investors will be extremely reluctant to get involved in the exact kinds of products that recently crashed, everyone will worry that the first sign of housing price increases is a bubble, and regulators will be keenly aware of everyone’s pet theory of what went wrong. But the crux of the matter is that though the phenomenon of financial crises repeat over time, but no individual crisis repeats itself. The trick, if you can pull it off, isn’t to prevent a repeat of the current crisis, but to prevent (or mitigate) the next crisis which is something else entirely."
Nov
19
2008
My BNP mashup
Everyone’s getting excited about building BNP mashups. Here’s mine. It’s in response to the news that BNP members have been “targeted by threats”. There’s only one response to that: a highly sophisticated piece of client-side scripting that shows people laughing. Or a Flickr badge. Whichever you prefer.
www.flickr.com
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Nov
19
2008
Peston v. Barclays
Out of interest, has any BBC journalist declared war on a British corporation in quite such a forthright way as Peston does on his blog this morning?
And don’t think this is about losses suffered by funny, remote people in the City with no connection to you.
It represents an erosion of wealth for millions of us saving for a pension, since most of our pension funds and life companies have an interest in Barclays.
You should be concerned.
Just asking.
Nov
19
2008
Wow, hate’s expensive
Californians against Hate have done one of those things which we Brits can only dream of. In the land of the free (unless you’re gay) it’s still possible to find out - and *list* - individuals who’ve given money to particular propositions, in this case California’s Prop 8. And I’m just amazed at how much money people are prepared to hand over in order to impose their own morality on others.
Howard Ahmanson Jr? Never heard of him. But he was prepared to stump up almost $1.4 million to prevent gay men and women in California marrying each other.
And John Templeton? The man behind the John Templeton Foundation? $1.1 million is the price he puts on his own personal morality. (Incidentally, my alma mater, Cambridge, has their logo on the front page of the Templeton Foundation website. Did Templeton seek permission for that? Did Cambridge grant it? Are they happy to be associated with a free-spending right-winger with such a limiting view of human freedom that he believes others should be prevented from publicly displaying their love for each other? If they are, I’d like to make my own views known on their website, please).
Terry Caster & Family? (And how ironic is that “and family” bit - do they preach homophobia over breakfast?). $693,000, thank you very much.
Elsa Prince, whose dead husband invented the “lighted sun visor mirror” (it’s interesting how many of the big donors on the list are spouses or offspring of men and women who made a lot of money - they obviously need something to fill their time)? $450,000. Cheers.
Dorothy Nelson, a “retiree” in La Verne, CA? $150,000. Ta, you mad old bat.
William Bolthouse, who “was made wealthy through his family business, Bolthouse Farms, the 2nd largest producer of carrots in the world”, gave $100,000. It doesn’t say whether Billy founded Bolthouse Farms. But I’ll bet you a significant donation to an Aids charity of your choice that he didn’t.
All in all, there’s several millions of individual donations on the first page of the list. I feel obliged to point out that Take That chose to give their money to Children In Need. The world would be a significantly better place if this list of nutters, ne’er-do-wells and the undeserving rich found it in themselves to give money to causes that help people rather than causes that limit other people’s freedoms. And while that thought is trite and uninteresting, it is worth pointing out that seeing the names of these people and how much they contributed allows one to feel a more potent, and more real, sense of shimmering outrage.
Nov
18
2008
links for 2008-11-18
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'His heart is still beating somewhere'
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"The UK economy, which had previously looked more vulnerable to the global recession than any other G7 country, is now likely to suffer less than the rest of Europe, as a result of unprecedented policy stimulus from the lowest interest rates in history, a super-competitive currency and a big reduction in tax. Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition in Britain has been confused, discredited and splintered by the financial crisis as badly as John McCain's campaign." Pow!
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Looked like this was enormous fun. And how nice to have a platform that *can* be hacked.
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"The preview for the upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed movie looks pretty good, but the shot of the speedometer early on seems to imply that we’re still not on the metric system in the 23rd century, long after the USA has been subsumed into the United Earth government and then the Federation. My understanding is that Abrams doesn’t really care for Trek fans, and no doubt remarks like this won’t change his opinion of us for the better. But still!"
Nov
17
2008
New design
Sometimes I have to redesign this blog just to remind myself how marvellously easy it is to do so in Wordpress. This month’s template is Elegant Grunge by Michael Tyson, and I think it’s my favourite ever. It also fixes the annoying bug whereby some people on some flavours of Firefox on some flavours of Windows couldn’t see the Submit button on comments. So expect to see thousands of commenters appearing magically out of nowhere. Not.
Nov
17
2008
links for 2008-11-17
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"But the bedrock strength of Tindle Newspapers is the opposite of lunches with the London mighty: all 225 titles are sacredly local. Editors print lists of funeral mourners and flower show winners in a way that once gave the weekly Somerset Guardian Standard 125% penetration in Frome. That's a quarter of the town buying more than one copy a week. Tindle's favourite story is how he gave the Tenby Observer a second chance in 1978, when it was so bankrupt that he had to use a call box to phone the receiver because the lines were cut. "They'd tried to save it by expanding and turning into the West Wales Observer. That was exactly the wrong thing to do. I asked the staff if they could get the paper out that week, they said 'yes' and I said: 'I'm in then, but throw out anything that isn't Tenby. We're not interested in Carmarthen and Haverfordwest.'""
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"But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done. " via Russell Davies
Nov
16
2008
links for 2008-11-16
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"The priorities of our Boomer led society are clearly born out in the above figures. We spend more eating out than we give to charity. We spend as much on big screen TVs and stereos as we do on education. This may explain why 37 million (12.5%) of all Americans live in poverty and our high school students trail the students of 25 other countries (including Latvia) in science and math knowledge. Our school system processes many more clueless morons who don’t know the candidates for President, versus intelligent, thoughtful, hard working, driven young people. The $160 billion spent on gambling is indicative of the get rich quick without hard work attitude of the Boomer generation. Even worse, households with income under $13,000 spend, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all their income. Our government feeds this addiction by siphoning off billions in taxes from these gambling revenues to redistribute as they see fit."
Nov
15
2008
links for 2008-11-15
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"Media regulator Ofcom has received a petition with around 50,000 signatures from fans of evicted X Factor contestant Laura White complaining about the hit ITV1 show's phone voting set up." 50,000. Jesus H Fucking Christ.
Nov
14
2008
links for 2008-11-14
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"Emotional problems like depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, seen through this lens, appear on Mom’s side of the teeter-totter, with schizophrenia, while Asperger’s syndrome and other social deficits are on Dad’s".
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More optimistically, the Net Geners are much more positive than their predecessors about their family. Half of those interviewed regard at least one parent as their “hero”. Mr Tapscott believes the internet is producing an improved, more collaborative version of family life, which he calls the “open family”. Parents increasingly recognise that their youngsters have digital expertise they lack but want to tap, and also that their best defence against their children falling foul of the dark side of the internet, such as online sexual predators, is to win their children’s trust through honest conversation. Ironically, Mr Tapscott’s recommended “platform” for this essential social networking could hardly be more old tech: the family dinner table.
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Mr Yang told the conference audience that he wants Yahoo! to become a “platform company”, suggesting that outside developers should build applications to make Yahoo!’s services more useful. But Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce.com and all other self-respecting technology firms nowadays want to become platforms, too. Why should Yahoo!, which has been less innovative, be the one to succeed? This argument is the one that pains Mr Yang the most. There is a “perception that we’re following,” he admitted, but “we do believe we’re innovating.” The audience of web entrepreneurs, many of them once inspired by Mr Yang’s example, let the matter drop. It is a bit sad to tell this old web hero to go. He must decide to do so himself.
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"It all depends where the brand image is placed. A viewer who fast-forwards a DVR may see only one in 24 frames. This means some brand images appear on the screen for just a third of a second. But provided the brand image was in the centre of the screen, this was long enough for the volunteers to remember it. Eye-tracking showed viewers concentrated on the centre of the screen while fast-forwarding, probably because it is difficult to keep moving your eyes to take account of things around the edges."
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"They stick stodgily to a rule that only a third of customers’ deposits (which totalled £115m in 2007) should be advanced in loans, a third kept on deposit with other British banks for liquidity purposes and a third invested in government bonds. Profits, limited to between £500,000 and £750,000 a year, are made only to bolster the bank’s reserves, £14m last year. There are no shareholders: Airdrie Savings Bank’s customers own it."
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"This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate. "
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"One group is doing what Sure Start intended. A Welsh charity called Save the Family takes in people who are about to be made homeless. It gives them an intensive programme in life skills. It provides childcare while parents take its courses - but not as daycare while they shop. The charity maintains its relationships with some people for many years, but deliberately avoids institutionalising them. Their stay on site is only temporary. And this is vital. Even a heroin addict whose first two children were taken into care is now coping well with her third. This is my answer to the defeatists. People who are savvy about milking the benefits system are capable of taking responsibility. Poverty and immorality need not go together. And we must stop institutionalising shamelessness. That is deadly." Brilliant column.
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Best email exchange since Steve Gibson replied to the guy who applied to be manager of Middlesboro based on his Championship manager experience.
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"That also brings us to passwords. In order to analyze your @replies, I need to make a web service request to Twitter, which requires your user name and password. As I’ve mentioned in my blog, there are alternative authentication mechanisms out there, but for whatever reason, Twitter hasn’t adopted them yet. So I went ahead and hacked together a simple app, which asked for a user name and password. Those of you who used the site early on might’ve seen a big red box with a rather lengthy warning about how “you should be afraid.” That text, which someone later found commented out and then misinterpreted, was there to prompt users to think twice before entering their passwords. If people were turned away by it, that would’ve been fine by me. Frankly, I only expected a few of my friends to use it." So why *do* people give their passwords away so willingly on Twitter?
Nov
13
2008
links for 2008-11-13
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“Look,” Rosenbaum concludes, “there’s nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing.” Gosh, thanks, Ron. But if you question my authority to discuss the future of journalism, I wonder who made you the DMV of the discussion.
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"Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it's more "measurable" than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector's maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it's still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer's sales."
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"He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn’t actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer’s investment bankers stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: “I’m a junior analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I’d worked on a deal for the Money Store.” He was promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. “What I didn’t tell him was that my job had been to proofread the documents and that I hadn’t understood a word of the fucking things.”"
Nov
13
2008
The riposte to Dawkins
It’s not meant like that, but I can’t help thinking Karen Armstrong’s invocations of compassion are an effective, and highly sophisticated riposte, to the potentially arid atheism of Dawkins. Watch and be inspired, whether you have religious faith or not.
Nov
12
2008
links for 2008-11-12
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"The broadcast era is coming to an end. The network era is well under way. Only openness can keep the BBC relevant through the transition." Bowbrick's state of the openness nation on the BBC Blog.
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"None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century–national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First–anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment."
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"Look, there's nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing. He's said some savvy, if unoriginal, things about journalism (advocating looking at the article as an ongoing process, not a product, for instance). He's among the most rational of the new thinkers. But it's the callous contempt for working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession for a brief shining moment—well, longer than that—before it became a platform for "reverse engineering."
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"It’s now known as the Buncefield Depot explosion, and little has been done to remedy the situation for the people affected by this massive incident. Ian lost everything, his beautiful home, all of his belongings, and years later he suffers from symptoms caused by the blast. Frankly, he’s lucky to be alive– and he knows it, but deserves closure and help from the companies that caused it."
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"Pete Clifton, head of editorial development for multimedia journalism at the BBC, speaks to Jemima Kiss about metadata and sharing the organisation's technology"
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“I work at the BBC. I’m far from racist and that uneducated woman has no right to call me one.” She says of her daughter: “I don’t want her to turn up with a guy with a turban on. It’s going to freak her out. She’s not used to Asians.”
Nov
11
2008
links for 2008-11-11
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“Yes we can” had never been much more than a motivational vitamin, too close for comfort to Bob the Builder’s “Yes he can!” But by attaching the phrase to the past tense, to achieved history, Obama stripped it of its bright futurity and invested it with a measure of uncertainty, as if intoning both “Yes we did” and an implied “Yes we may.”
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Amazing uniqlo visualisation. HT James Page.
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"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases. This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."
Nov
10
2008
Dacre speaks truth and then bollocks
It’s common practice amongst newspaper people to hold the Daily Mail, and its editor Paul Dacre, in quite some regard. “Whatever you think about its politics,” the line goes, “you’ve got to admire the professionalism with which it’s put together. It’s a brilliant newspaper.” Which is rather like asking me to ignore the blood seeping out of my throat while admiring the knife work.
So I was rather surprised to find myself agreeing with Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors, at least in part. First, he eviscerates Richard Desmond as a pornographer who is “contemptuous” of journalists. Nice one. Then he has this to say about the Mail online, after a mea culpa about being late to the digital party:
“On any given weekday Mail Online now attracts 450,000 British users, each of whom will spend on average nine minutes per visit and over 20% of whom will pay more than one visit that day. I’d love to tell you what the equivalent figures are for our competitors but they won’t publish them.
This in the context of remarks about other publishers’ “vainglorious” trumpeting of monthly uniques. As any fule kno, monthly uniques are increasingly meaningless (to the extent they ever were), and I much prefer Dacre’s formulation of daily users plus time spent plus number of visits. That’s a far better measure of the amount and type of attention a newspaper is getting.
And then just as I find myself applauding Dacre’s wisdom, he starts in with this:
But my question is why does not a day go by that the subsidariat papers, blissfully oblivious of their own pocket-sized shapes and circulations, don’t carry the obligatory sneer at the tabloid press?
And we’re back in paranoid Dacreland. Listen Paul, if your newspaper is so strong and so butch and so wonderful, why on earth are you so worried about what the Guardian thinks of you? Could it be that (whisper it) you think it’s a bit better - morally, culturally and politically - than the garbage you print every day?
Nov
8
2008
links for 2008-11-08
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Obama pics from the night of the election. aka The Set That Brought Down Flickr.
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