Francis's News Feeds

This combines together on one page various news websites and diaries which I like to read.
Also: BBC In Pictures | mySociety panopticon | mySociety Google reader | Francis is (my own blog)

July 04, 2009

Guest Photos From Anchorage, Alaska | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 4 July 2009, 06:03 PM

Now it's not every bloody day we get guest photos from Alaska! So we're well chuffed to be able to...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Area committee makes way for Harriet Harman | by Your Coleridge Conservative Councillor | 4 July 2009, 03:52 PM

The city council's East Area Committee is coming to Coleridge this week, beginning 7pm at Lichfield Hall on Wednesday.

This is a day earlier than was planned and therefore at a different location. The meeting was moved for the convenience of the committee's Labour councillors, who sheepishly admitted that it was so they could attend a social with Harriet Harman. This no doubt avoids a tricky dilemma between the charms of the Minister for Women and Equality and attending the council meeting!

There is no neighbourhood policing item on the agenda this time so aside from the open forum (intended for members of the public to ask questions) the main item of interest to Coleridge is likely to be a planning application for the old Cambridge Building Society building on Cherry Hinton Road: "Change of use from A2 (financial and professional services) to A3 (restaurants and cafes)."

The regeneration game | by Futurismic | 4 July 2009, 12:06 PM

Exciting results from the world of biology, with implications for human medicine: researchers looking at the limb regeneration process in salamanders have discovered that it works in a different way to what they thought previously. [image by jurvetson]

Rather than having their cellular clocks fully reset and reverting to an embryonic state, cells in the salamanders’ stumps became slightly less mature versions of the cells they’d been before. The findings could inspire research into human tissue regeneration.

“The cells don’t have to step as far back as we thought they had to, in order to regenerate a complicated thing like a limb,” said study co-author Elly Tanaka, a Max Planck Institute cell biologist. “There’s a higher chance that human or mammalian cells can be induced into doing the same thing.”

[...]

They found that salamander regeneration begins when a clump of cells called a blastema forms at the tip of a lost limb. From the blastema come skin, muscle, bone, blood vessels and neurons, ultimately growing into a limb virtually identical to the old one.

Researchers, many of whom hoped their findings could someday be used to heal people, hypothesized that as cells joined blastemas, they “de-differentiated” and became pluripotent — able to become any type of tissue. Embryonic stem cells are also pluripotent, as are cells that have been genetically reprogrammed through a process called induced pluripotency.

Such cells have raised hopes of replacing lost or diseased tissue. They’re also difficult to control and prone to turning cancerous. These problems may well be the inevitable growing pains of early-stage research, but could also represent more fundamental limits in cellular plasticity.

If Tanaka’s right that blastema cells don’t become pluripotent, then the findings raise another possibility — not just for salamanders, but for people. Rather than pushing cellular limits, perhaps researchers could work within nature’s parameters.

Another step towards transhuman immortality, perhaps? It’s fun seeing such science fictional subjects in ‘regular’ news venues, if only to watch journalists asking the sort of questions science fiction has always hinged on – like Khaled Diab at The Guardian, for example, trying to imagine what the world would be like if Aubrey De Grey is right about the immortality singularity:

Should people’s lives be extended indefinitely? If not, should society or the individual choose when to pull the plug? Should a 250-year-old physical teen be treated as an adult and served alcohol or not? Would society take long-term threats, such as the environment, more seriously because people will actually live to see the consequences? Does living so long rob future generations of their right to life? Would you like to live in a society without death?

I figure that, if it happens, we’ll work out a way to cope during the journey – much like Jamais Cascio suggests we’ll cope fine with intelligence augmentation, because it’s an iterative process rather than a momentary leap of change.

Of course, De Grey has already secured himself one form of immortality – the only form of it in which I’d be interested, anyway. I’m sympathetic to the transhumanist project, but the thought of living forever just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve always theorised that without the ticking clock of mortality we’d have very little to motivate us to create anything new or unique; you struggle to produce a legacy to fill the void of your leaving, if you will. Of course, my attitudes may change as I get older… but even so, if offered the choice right now I’d settle for a standard lifespan minus the gradual decline into senescence and frailty at the end. Death doesn’t scare me, but dying slowly sure does.

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Like Vintage Bicycle Posters? | by The Copenhagen Bicycle Culture Blog | 4 July 2009, 11:07 AM

Here's a poster for your wall, if you fancy it.

A collection of my favourite bicycle posters from back when we excelled at promoted cycling positively.

Git yers tout suite down at our Cafe Press online boutique. Or don't. That's the beauty of a market economy.

Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

Khmer rouge trial a "novel approach to international justice" | by Cambodia Calling | 4 July 2009, 09:50 AM

Just read this interesting article on how victims of the Khmer Rouge want money and the precedent this sets for international justice. But you can hardly fault the Khmers for demanding money - they learn from their leader, from their police. Besides, what meaningful alternative is there since most of the KR leaders are dead? There's no justice left to extract.

From the article by the Christian Science Monitor :

"It's a novel approach in the field of international justice," Clint Williamson, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said at a recent press conference in Phnom Penh. "We think victim participation in the process is a positive thing, but it should not be taking place because people are seeking some type of monetary remuneration at the end of the process."

Siem Reap Tonle Sap boat tour scams | by Cambodia Calling | 4 July 2009, 09:50 AM

I'll have to find the old photos to show how the place has changed. Before, it was a menagerie. When you arrive, boat men will come up to you to tout their services and you hop on a boat. There was no jetty like today.

The boatman told me why. A Korean company now operates the Tonle Sap boat tours in Siem Reap.

To get to the Tonle Sap, you need to take a tuk-tuk from Siem Reap town. We paid Phern USD15 for the whole day but a return trip by an independent tuktuk is just USD6 or 7. If you book with a travel agent it is USD10.

The boat ticket itself is another matter. Of course, they tried to scam us Singaporeans. My aunt and her friend were charged USD15 per person. I refused because it was ridiculously expensive. I argued and tried to bargain but the corrupt, arrogant man running the ticketing sales said it was "fixed price". Just as the boat was about to leave, he let me on free, partly because Phern asked on my behalf, but mainly because he had profited enough from my friends and it would not have cost him anything to let me go on.

The REAL PRICE is USD12 PER BOAT if there is one or two persons on that boat. If there are three of you, it becomes USD5 per pax, which makes it USD15 PER BOAT. That means the asshole made a profit of USD18 for that trip. And you can bet the boatman who does the actual work gets zero of that.

The other scam happens halfway on the boat, when the boatman will try to get you to visit a school so you can buy supplies for the children. Fine - except what they charge for the supplies. Here is one traveller's experience, as posted on travelfish.org:

I agree that the floating village is not worth to see. We got there with a Tuk-Tuk, payed the entrance fee ($ 20 pp!!!), got a small boat (we were the only 2 tourists), we shiped around the village for half an hour, but there was nothing special to see. After introducing a little of their lifestyle we were asked if we want to visit a school. We agreed because there was nothing else to see. But they nearly forced us to buy some pencils, pens and books for the school (they insisted to bring something for all 40 pupils). We would love to do it, but the "shop" in the floating village asked $ 1 for 1 pencil! Here you really get ripped off! So we bought only 4 pencils and the crew (2 young boys) got really angry and the didn't speak to us anymore! I would not recommand to go there!

A bit further along our driver asked us if we were interested in buying some stationery and books for one of the local very poor schools. Well, what can you say to that without sounding like a total jerk? Of course we agreed and before we could say "Boat House" we were moored alongside the local General Store - floating variety. Now this is where the fun began. The shop proprietor was obviously well versed in this scenario as she met us with a package of books and pencils - asking price US$25!!! "You must be joking", I said. "Do I look like a fool?" After a bit of haggling, during which time I was feeling like we'd been totally scammed we finally settled on $10 and not a penny more! What a con - and for some reason, I felt like I should have known it was going to go down like this. Anyway, we were then dropped off at the local school comprising of one floating classroom complete with basketball court on the top to present our "gift" to the eagerly awaiting principal. I only hope the kids actually get to use the books, which by the way would have cost little more than a $1 in Siem Reap."

Angkor Wat, Killing Fields, now the Tonle Sap boat tour | by Cambodia Calling | 4 July 2009, 09:50 AM

Is there nothing the Cambodian government will not privatise?

I once met an engineer from mainland China who was sent by the Chinese government to restore some temples at Angkor Wat. He found it puzzling that "the Cambodians have no pride" [his words, not mine - and I am saying this upfront because I am sure I will be flamed for this entry by overseas Khmers, as I do every time I am critical of this country ]. He said this because he believes China would never "sell" the Great Wall and other national treasures to foreigners, unlike Cambodia, where the main tourist sites are privatised to foreign in addition to local companies.

In fact, most Cambodians are extremely proud of their heritage (misplaced pride, as I've written before). However, it is true that for some Khmers, these objects have less significance than money which is why Cambodia is in the situation it is.

In May, I took my aunt and her friend on the Tonle Sap boat tour to see the floating villages here in Siem Reap. The place has changed remarkably since I was last there a couple of years ago. It is now organised and you have to pay USD15 for an hour's trip (previously it was USD10). You get the tickets from a ticket booth and get assigned a boat.

I found out why it was so organised. The tours are now operated by a single company, a Korean one. The company is Sou Ching Investment Co. Ltd, part of a large investment fund established by two major Korean companies - SK Securities and Golden Bridge Asset Management.

"SK Securities asset manager, Yim Yeo Ngijin, was quoted as saying that the companies were expecting returns on their investment of up to $1 trillion. He described the Sou Ching Port Investment as part of a "cultural exchange package." [yeah, right.]

"According to an April 2007 tourism working group meeting at the Ministry of Tourism (MoT), about 60,000 tourists now visit the Chong Kneas area each month in high season. By charging $1 dollar per tourist, the working group estimated that revenues of $120,000 every two months could be achieved rapidly.

Based on figures provided by an official here, the company stands eventually to earn about $18,000 a month in entrance fees. The profits are to go to a fund that is half owned by Cambodian government officials. The company has agreed to clean up and organize the site. Some fear that will dull the raw immediacy that gives the area its haunted.

Phnom Penh in Dragonair's Silkroad magazine | by Cambodia Calling | 4 July 2009, 09:50 AM

I write freelance to earn some money since I don't get a salary from Bloom (although I have been thinking this must change, after almost 3 years). This one was on business in Phnom Penh for the carrier Dragonair, a subsidiary of Cathay Pacific. The in-flight magazine is called Silkroad. Dragonair has daily flights from China to Phnom Penh and most of its passengers are business people, hence the business angle. (Don't you just love the photo of Phnom Penh's Monivorng Boulevard? It's by Anthony Gibbin for Lonely Planet Images)

It was a great opportunity to meet some businesspeople in Phnom Penh and I made sure to get all different nationalities in different industries. In the end I wrote about ANZ Bank (with New Zealander James Lowrey, head of corporate and institutional banking), the Pavilion Group in the hospitality industry (with French owner Alexis de Suremain), web design company House32 (with American owner John Weeks), publishing company AsiaLIFE Guide (with British owner Mark Jackson).

I need to get permission to upload the entire story on my blog, but there was a lot of information and insight the gentlemen gave me about business in Cambodia, which was fascinating to me, since I also run a social enterprise here. I'll write those up as separate entries when I can, to share with others interested in business here.

Writing is fun, and is the only thing I really enjoy these days in Cambodia.

Interesting photos - 3 Jul 2009 - Flickr | by Daily interesting photos - Flickr | 4 July 2009, 07:50 AM

Romecore | by BLDGBLOD | 4 July 2009, 06:53 AM

[Image: A Greenland ice-core at the Hayden Planetarium; for further reading, visit the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory. Photo by Planet Taylor, used under a Creative Commons license].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

The Crypta Balbi is a relatively recent, low-profile addition to Rome's museum compendium. It's billed variously—and confusingly—as a museum of archaeology, a museum of ancient Rome, and a museum of the Dark Ages. All of these descriptions are, in fact, cumulatively accurate, because the site is actually a city-block-sized core sample of Rome, threaded through with staircases, tunnels, and elevated walkways for visitors.

Crypta Balbi is located in an irregular pentagonal plot in the Campus Martius, an area that, unlike many regions in the ancient city, remained largely inhabited through the Middle Ages. In fact, according to Filippo Coarelli's authoritative Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide, the Campus Martius was originally supposed to be kept free of buildings altogether and "reserved for military and athletic exercises." However, historian Suetonius describes the city’s gradual encroachment, explaining that: "During his reign Augustus often encouraged the leading men of Rome to adorn the city with new monuments or to restore and embellish old ones."

[Image: A satellite view of the city-block core sample, via Google Maps].

As a successful military general and favored member of Augustus's entourage, L. Cornelius Balbus the Younger stepped up to the plate, building a theater and attached crypta—a rectangular porticoed walkway where the theater's scenery could be stored and around which the public might stroll, protected from the elements. Apparently, the Balbi Theater's grand opening in 13 BC took place during one of the Tiber's regular floods—meaning that it was, briefly, only accessible by boat. Nonetheless, the Theater and Crypta thrived, and they are depicted intact on a chunk of the Severan Forma Urbis, an amazing 60'-x-43' incised marble map of the city created for public display in 203 AD.

Eventually, Rome’s earthquakes, fires, barbarian raids, and radical population shrinkage (from a million people in 367 AD to just 400,000 less than century later) combined with architectural re-use and the passage of time to take their toll. There isn't much of the original Crypta left to see—a reconstructed stucco arch, and the massive travertine and tufa walls that now serve as foundations for modern houses in Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Via dei Delfini.

[Image: A fragment of the Forma Urbis, showing the Balbi Theater. For more on the Forma Urbis, visit the seemingly great but non-Mac-friendly Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae project].

However, layered above the Crypta's original floor plan are traces of this city block's shifting usage—a condensed narrative of Rome's destruction, accretion, and evolution. It is this series of transformations and reuses of both the Crypta and the urban space it occupies, rather than the fragmentary ancient ruins, that the museum aims to make visible. Like a series of stills from an impossible time-lapse film, the visitor who descends to the basement or climbs to the third floor can see this awkward cuboid chunk of city ruined, reshaped, reused, and reoriented over two thousand years of urban history.

Equally amazing are the expansive historical detours prompted by even trace elements in the urban core sample. For example, as early as the time of Hadrian, a "monumental" public latrine was inserted into a section of the Crypta. From the quantity of copper coins that fell, and weren't worth recovering, archaeologists have extrapolated the amount of coinage in circulation in Western Europe during the latrine's life-span. (Astonishingly, it was only in the 19th century that small change was to be this common again in Western Europe).

[Image: Museum display panel diagramming five distinct road levels wandering across the Crypta's ruins (apologies for the quick snapshot)].

Two centuries later and a few feet higher, two graves bear witness to a city in ruins between the 5th and 7th centuries, as the prohibition against burial within city walls lapsed, and the dead were buried singly in abandoned buildings or beside roads. Ironically, in a museum that preserves the urban structures of each era equally, during the medieval period the Crypta actually housed one of the city's largest lime-kilns, where the marble inscriptions, statues, and building blocks of classical Rome were brought to be crushed and melted down into lime (a key ingredient in the cement needed to build the city's new Christian architecture).

In the 1940s, the convent that had occupied the site for the past four hundred years was demolished for a planned new Mussolini-era construction, which thankfully never materialized. Finally, in the 1980s, the Soprintendenza archeologica di Roma authorized the excavation of the abandoned city block; and, in 2002, the northwest corner was opened to the public, even as work continues on the rest of the site.

[Image: An interior view of the Crypta Balbi].

Aside from the execution, which is excellent, the very idea of a museum built into an urban core sample—a stratigraphic investigation of the shifting use of space over time—is incredibly exciting to me. Imagine a similar hollowing-out of urban space in Istanbul, Cairo, or Paris—residents as disoriented as tourists as they clamber through the hidden foundations and forms woven underneath and around their own city.

In New York, this might even be an idea whose time has come: as The New Yorker pointed out in December 2008, the expiration of a residential construction tax-abatement law encouraged builders to dig foundation trenches early, so as to secure better financing, but the subsequent recession has put many of these projects on hold, semi-permanently.

"What will become of the pits?" asks Nick Paumgarten, speculating that they could turn into "half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England" or even "urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby." These are both attractive ideas, but with a little expenditure on zip-lines, elevated walkways, and interpretative signage, visitors could circulate around several millennia of Manhattan's history, from the collision of the North African and American continental plates to the tangled evolution of New York's water mains, via retreating glaciers and the housing bubble.

Meanwhile, back in Rome and less than a mile away from the Crypta, engineers have teamed up with the Soprintendenza to sink several new urban cores, this time in the guise of excavating the elevator and escalator shafts for a new subway line.

Angelo Bottini, director of the Soprintendenza, can hardly hide his excitement, telling the Wall Street Journal that, under usual circumstances, "We never get to dig in the center of Rome." Sadly, it seems as though most of the finds will be documented and then destroyed, due to a shortage of museum space and the already astronomical construction costs (an estimated $375 million for one mile of track in the city center).

But how amazing would it be if the new subway station walkways and escalator shafts could themselves become Crypta Balbi-like museums of buried stratigraphy? Rome would be riddled with urban cores, awestruck tourists ascending and descending through sampled spatial histories across the city. Meanwhile the Sistine Chapel lies miraculously empty...

[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include The Tree Museum, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, and Park Stories].

Cutting public spending the right way will be popular | by John Redwood MP | 4 July 2009, 06:44 AM

Let me repeat a few old truths, and add a few new examples. I detect a new mood in the public and the media. Many people know public money is being wasted on undesirable schemes, on inefficiencies, poor quality, and on marginal projects. Unlike their government, most votes know this cannot go on on the current scale.

There are some obvious areas of spending to remove.
1.Begin by abolishing the whole ID cards scheme.
2.Stop the centralising computer contracts that have been so badly managed.
3.Abolish unelected regional government in England.
4.Abolish the targets and circulars bureaucracies that ensnare local goverment.
5.Have a couple of years off from legislating more regulation
6.Put through a repeal act, cutting out less desirable or ineffective regulation, so fewer regulators can concentrate on the things that matter.
7. Sell off parts of the banks to cut risk and raise cash
8. Stop all free newsheets and PR materials from government departments for a year
9. Cut the number of Ministers by 10%, reallocating responsibilities to raise their productivity.
10. Cancel all Ministerial and senior official fact finding and non essential visits abroad.

There are some general spending disciplines that need to be introduced into every government department and quango.

1. Place a freeze on all outside recruitment, save in front line roles like teachers, nurses, doctors and service personnel. Seek to appoint from within, and reduce the number of administrative posts each time someone leaves.
2. Place a freeze on new outside consultancy contracts, requiring a senior Minister to consider the case for such work and to sign off on it in exceptional cases where in house staff cannot manage the task.
3. Review all procurement, with a view to buying better.
4. Run down in house stocks which are often large and badly managed. Go over to something closer to a just in time principle for supply.
5. Close all public sector pension schemes to new staff and set up defined contribution schemes instead.
6. Set cost down targets for every sub department and quango.
7. Review corporate plans of all quangos at Ministerial level with a view to identifying substantial cost savings
8. Raise quality targets. Error rates in government are very high, leading to too many expensive complaints and to the need to do things twice.
9. Rationalise building use, shedding surplus space as the staff reductions from natural wastage kick in.
10. Rationalise transport use, which at the moment is wasteful and often not co-ordinated between users.

The government wants to prosecute more parents | by John Redwood MP | 4 July 2009, 05:55 AM

Yesterday we were treated to the news that the government is going to investigate how many parents might have made misleading claims when applying for a preferred state school place for their children. No sooner than we learn that Harrow are not going to prosecute a parent who applied for a place at a better school from her parents address where she was staying at the time, than the government decides to take up the cudgels to stop people finding imaginative ways of gaining the place they want.

I have some advice for the government. Instead of declaring war on parents trying to play the system, reform the rotten system. This would not happen if there were enough places at good schools in each County or unitary Council area. Whilst I of course do not condone misrepresentation or fraud, I think the right punishment for anyone found guilty of it should be loss of the favoured place and a place at a poor school, not a term in prison. There needs to be some sense of proportion.

We pay lots of tax to have education departments which serve those with children well. Those departments should be trying to ensure that all parents have a school of their choice, not seeking to enforce complex catchment rules to ration scarce good places in a way which comes down heavily on the disappointed. We need schools departments dedicated to creating more good schools, and more places at good schools.

The very system encourages people to be selective with the truth. You are unlikely to get a place at a good school from outside its catchment by saying you want your child to go to School A because it has better exam marks than School B. Arguments have to be constructed around issues like school transport, single sex education, where other family members go and what the specialism of the school might be. I have met a good few caring and sensible parents in my time, desperate for their child to go to School A. I always support their applications, whilst of course advising them to put the best truthful case forward that they can muster. I want a system which allows more parents to get their first choice, not a system which seeks to criminalise them if they get the application form wrong by mistake, or even if they dress up their answers a bit because it is so important to them.

All of us in the public sector should remember who pays the wages. PUblic servants are here to serve the public, not to create ever more complicated and unsatisfactory systems so they can prosecute more people who fall foul of them.

EU solidarity will come with a price | by John Redwood MP | 4 July 2009, 05:40 AM

Beware all the statements from EU leaders that the UK has their support over the Iranian attacks on UK embassy staff. There was yesterday an orchestrated PR attempt to show the EU is on the UK’s side. Of course they are and of course they should be, as the principle of diplomatic immunity is an important one which all sensible countries uphold in their own interests. If a country’s diplomats wrongly interfere in domestic politics in their host country they should be expelled, not locked up.

I suspect the UK and EU governments decided to use this diplomatic spat between the UK and Iran as an opportuntiy to arrange some favourable publicity for concerted EU action. I note that the action does not run to other EU countries breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran or doing more than telling Iran they do not approve. Doubtless the UK governemnt is smarting from the strong showing of anti EU government votes in the recent European elections, and thinks us hearing the President of France talking of solidarity will win us all over to Lisbon and yet more powers for the EU. Dream on. The more we hear of EU politicians seeking to take our right to self government away, the more we will vote against EU government.

Corner. Scarf. Orange. | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 4 July 2009, 04:00 AM

Cornering. Cycle Chic is what you make it. There's something nice about orange bicycles.The...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Change | by Only In It For The Gold | 4 July 2009, 02:53 AM

Palin for Prez? Alaska gov to step down, cash in, and misinform public on energy and climate | by Climate Progress | 4 July 2009, 12:18 AM

Who do you think will be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012?

“If I had to guess, we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 campaign.”

That’s conservative pundit Bill Kristol, calling into Fox News after the only governor who can see Russia when she stands on a really, really tall building announced she is quitting her job in a few weeks.

And why not?  Top GOP contenders for 2012 are dropping like adulterous, love-sick flies — and let’s not forget “Eruptions of know-nothingism from conservative savior Bobby Jindal.”

And let’s certainly not forget this post-election Rassmussen poll about the woman who wears a polar bear pin even though she is working overtime to wipe the species out:  “64% of GOP voters say Palin is their top choice for 2012, 69% say Palin helped McCain.”

So here’s a little Palin primer on energy and climate:

• McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Pat Buchanan acolyte
• Protecting polar bears gets in way of drilling for oil, says governor [Palin]
• Palin’s axis of evil animals: Beluga whales join polar bears and wolf cubs
• Must see ad: Palin “champions … savagery”
• Palin does not even know basics of Alaska energy
• Palin in debate STILL gets global warming backwards and repeats Big Energy Lie twice
• Palin on CBS: “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” Seriously.
• Sarah Palin is the fungible candidate

It’s quite ironic she’s known as Sarah Barracuda — given that her positions, if adopted at a national level, would wipe out most ocean life, especially those that tend to dwell around reefs (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”).

But is she going to go national?

Think Progress notes that, on the one hand, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports:

“Talking to people who are very close to Sarah Palin, I have been told that she has told her supporters that she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn’t like her life. She feels like she has to raise her family. She’s sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capital and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she is stepping down in order to figure the way for a presidential run. In fact, she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.”

On the other hand,

Palin political adviser Fred Malek said that Palin isn’t ruling out a future run for office, and he expects her to help other Republicans raise money. “She’s not going to go hide in a cave,” Malek said in a telephone interview. “She’ll continue to be a major friend and force for Republican figures in this country.”

What do you think the future holds in store for the thrilla from Wasilla — and the GOP in general in 2012?

July 03, 2009

Nerds and Jocks | by Nat Friedman (Gnome) | 3 July 2009, 11:47 PM

Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood.  Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends.  Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well.  Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight.  It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count).

Both these terms are pejorative, but “nerd” was my stigma.  At dinner one evening in 3rd grade, I explained to my parents that my friends and I were the nerds, and that we were proud of it.  I still remember my father’s horrified reaction. “You’re not a nerd!” he said.

Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense - but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice.

So when I moved to Germany, and found myself having to explain this whole concept to bewildered friends and colleagues, I started to think about the nerd-jock duality a little deeper.  What I realized is that, in Germany, engineering is not stigmatized in the same way that it is in the US.  It is possible to self-identify as an engineer, even at a very early age, without being a nerd.

Germany is, in fact, a country of engineers.  It has to be.  Think about it: a cold, cloudy country ranked only 62nd in land mass, 14th in population, and yet in 2008 Germany was #1 in the world in exports by dollars!  Yes, ahead of the US and ahead of China.  How is that possible?  Nerds!  Oops, I mean engineers; engineers who design and build high-quality cars, engines, tools, machinery, scientific equipment.  This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers.

But what kind of country do you get  when you do stigmatize nerds?  I’m afraid you get a country of importers.  A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school.  A country of people who don’t make things.

My 20 year old sister informs me that the “nerd” thing has softened a bit in recent years, but maybe not always for the right reasons.  Lots more people spend time with technological devices now, and to be part of the priesthood that creates them, tweaks them, hacks them is more impactful than it used to be.

But one of the reasons “nerd” isn’t such a dirty word now is because some nerds get rich.  And that’s the wrong reason to appreciate nerds.  Because only very few nerds will get rich, but we need lots of engineers to build our society.

The archetypes that you have as a country matter.  They affect the kind of society you create.  We have a lot of good archetypes in the US.  We have the pioneer, the frontiersman, the individualist, the entrepreneur.  Let’s keep those.  But we can do without the whole nerd/jock thing.  It isn’t helping.

And I think we’d do well to celebrate the engineer archetype again.  I hear it was a big thing in the 50s.  Can we bring it back?

Cambodia: Khmer Gold | by Global Voices (Cambodia) | 3 July 2009, 10:22 PM

Mongkol visited the National Museum and was able to view the recently donated rare Angkorian gold and jewelry which have never been seen before in Cambodia.

Stephen Hawking on transhumanism | by Futurismic | 3 July 2009, 10:21 PM

Physicist Stephen Hawking has commented on transhumanism and the future direction of humanity:

Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. “At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information.”

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

“I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,” Hawking said.

This point has echos of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewarts ideas of extelligence, Richard Dawkins‘ notion of the meme, and Kevin Kelly’s concept of the Technium. What is special about humans is as much about what happens outside and between our minds as any other intrinsic properties of homo sapiens sapiens

[via George Dvorsky, from The Daily Galaxy][image from Peter Kaminski on flickr]

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Bahrain: Congratulations, India | by Global Voices (India) | 3 July 2009, 09:37 PM

Gay Bahraini blogger Shams Al-Ma7aba congratulates India on decriminalising homosexuality [Ar].

India: Court Ruling Decriminalizes Gay Sex | by Global Voices (India) | 3 July 2009, 08:27 PM

On Thursday, 2nd of July the Delhi High Court ruled that treating consensual gay sex as a crime was discriminatory and therefore a violation of fundamental rights protected by India's constitution. We hear the response of some Indian bloggers to the ruling in this post.

Amit Varma of India Uncut says:

July 2, 2009—mark this day. It’s a big day in the history of independent India because today the Delhi High Court effectively decriminalized homosexuality. As of today, it is no longer illegal to be gay in India. I’ve often written about how India gained its independence in 1947, but Indians weren’t free in some many different ways. Well, notch one up for individual freedom. […] This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have suddenly become an enlightened society. There will still be much homophobia, stereotypes of gay people will abound in popular culture[..]. But at least it isn’t illegal any more. How big is that?

The Rational Fool quotes from the ruling:

It's a victory for secular democracy in India. In a landmark judgement, the Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah of the Delhi High Court, along with Dr. Justice S. Muralidhar, ruled in favor of the petitioner, Naz Foundation, and held that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in its current form was violative of the of the constitutional provisions of Article 21, Article 14, and Article 15, “insofar it criminalizes consensual sexual acts of adults in private”. The ruling brings cheers not only to the LGBT community, but also to anyone who believes that liberty and equality before law cannot be held hostage to irrational beliefs and values in perpetuity.

Suriya Subramanian leaves a comment at Blogbharti to say:

I’d like to draw attention to the part of the ruling, which I think is the most important, but no one is talking about. The court did not just decriminalize homosexuality, but they went way ahead and offered people protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Harini Calamur at POV says:

About time. The State has no business to peek into our bedroom. This is not just about decriminalizing homosexuality – it is about ensuring everyone’s right to privacy.

Blogger ??! writing at This is a Title asks:

You hear that? That's the sound a stupid law makes when it's finally overturned. […] Poor cops though, one less easy money-making scheme taken away from them.

And ??! reminds us that not all the responses to the ruling have been positive, suggesting readers look at the Rediff commentboard. Here is an example of the opinions stated there, by Puneet Gera:

First time in life, I despite being Indian, accept Pakistan is a better country than India, at least gay sex is not legalised there. They have maintained their cultural values. I salute you Pakistan for your good values.

Szerelem is thrilled:

My friend informs me, via her lawyer brother, that while the judgement was passed by the Delhi High Court it is applicable all over the country, till overturned by specific states. This (a) makes the verdict even more awesome and (b) makes me wonder if/ when/ where it will be overturned, though hopefully not at all, because the judgement was way too long coming. Also, &#@$ you to the mullahs, right wing hindutva types and general assholes who seem to populate discussion forums in this country and are decrying this.

However, Dilnavaz Bamboat at Ultra Violet believes there is plenty more to be fought for:

While the decriminalization of consensual gay sex is indeed a victory for those rooting for orientation-equality, constricted notions of propriety continue to be imposed on basic choices deemed even remotely threatening to social fabric. A case in point being denim. I kid you not. Jeans, according to the Uttar Pradesh Principals Association, may well be the root of degenerate teen behavior. Scrap the blue stuff and voila! We’ll have model citizens.
The two may be seemingly unrelated but they point to a constant struggle to assert our right to self-expression and fundamental choices. And remind us that it’s far from over. Self-determination, for the most part, is still sitting pretty in the latter half of a dictionary.

New licensing applications | by Your Coleridge Conservative Councillor | 3 July 2009, 08:44 PM

The City Council has received two applications from shops for premises licences to sell alcohol:

How I learned to stop worrying and love the blogosphere | by Climate Progress | 3 July 2009, 07:15 PM

The debate over Waxman-Markey reminds me of what I love most about blogging.

No, it’s not what you think, it’s not the chance to be snarky.  I don’t need the blogosphere for that.

No, what I like about the blogosphere is that it ultimately drives a precision in language and a clarity of thought because it is filled with people like The Talented Mr. Pielke, people who are too clever by half [or is that half clever?], people who are ready at a moment’s notice to spin some slightly ambiguous molehill of phrase into a mountainous assault on you, people whose primary blog, the ironically-named “Prometheus,” just died – let us pause for a moment of silence … and weekend of celebration, barbecue, and fireworks.

The problem arises for many reasons, such as malicious mischief, but here I’m going to focus on just one — the generally humorless nature of the global warming deniers and delayers.

My father, a lifelong newspaper editor known for his sense of humor, always said that no matter how blatant the humor he might use, some reader would inevitably take it literally and write him an angry letter.  I have endeavored to address that problem here with the “Humor” category — but that doesn’t work for small bits of humor in an otherwise serious post.

So for the first time ever — and I hope the last — I’m going to explain two jokes for the sake of those cheerless cheerleaders for climate chaos, and their head cheerleader [jeerleader?], The Talented Mr. Pielke (Jr).

The motivation for this post is a rather silly little attack on me by Pielke that I first saw on Climate Change Fraud via WordPress’s Technorati-based system that points out who links to me.

Yes, I normally ignore The Talented Mr. Pielke until his misinformation has been picked up by some credulous journalists uninterested in preserving his or her reputation.  But Pielke’s post, “Portents of Cap and Trade Doom?” first alerted me to an especially dense line of attack — that my position on Waxman-Markey has somehow radically changed over time.

Yes, I know, it is quite rich that anybody with Pielke’s history of intentional ambiguity and ferocious flip-flopping could possibly accuse anybody else of inconsistency (see Why do deniers like Pielke shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather? and Pielke in Nature: “Clearly, since 1970 climate change … has shaped the disaster loss record” and “Finally, Roger Pielke admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming or more“).

Let me skip the details, since I have discussed the issue at length here.  What I want note here is that the first piece of evidence that Pielke and the other deniers offer that I somehow was at one point infaturated with W-M and thus blind to its many faults is my post(s) titled “How I learned to stop worrying and love Waxman-Markey.”  They cite Part 2, of course, since Part 1 partly explains the reference for those too young or too classic-film-illiterate or too busy to use Google to get it.

The Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill is certainly not “da bomb.”  At best, it’s a B+.

Then again, it is not a total bomb, as some think.  So you don’t have to be Dr. Strangelove — or the bill’s mother — to love it.  You just have to compare it to the alternative (i.e. utter failure and business as usual emissions).

No infatuation, there.  Sorry deniers.

Indeed, if the deniers weren’t so humorless, they’d understand that the title of my post is in fact what would normally be called “black humor.”  Indeed, it refers to “a 1964 American/British black comedy film” (as Wikipedia puts it in the link I provided), Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  Needless to say, anyone who has actually seen the Kubrick movie or who simply reads the plot summary would know that, by using the phrase “How I learned to stop worrying and love Waxman-Markey,” I am not saying that I “love Waxman-Markey.”  Quite the reverse.

Yes, I had already noted in this post, which Pielke linked to, that the “headline was intentionally sardonic.”

And speaking of sardonic movie references going completely over the head of deniers, Pielke actually wrote in response to that post:

[Romm is] giving me a cute new nickname, which I like much better than (”delayer 1000-eq”).

And what is this “cute new nickname” he likes so much?

The Talented Mr. Pielke

Seriously!  This in spite of the fact that after using it several times, I gave him the link:

And yes, as cinephiles know, The Talented Mr. Pielke is a too-apt moniker for Roger, Jr.

Ripley, of course, is a man “with a talent to survive by doing whatever is required,” which includes murder, lying, and pretending to be someone else.  Yes, his entire life is a lie.  That’s his talent.

That’s the cute new nickname Roger Pielke, Jr. likes.

[Note:  I'm now inclined to think plain old "denier" is a better moniker for both Pielke and his father.  Still, they both pretend to be people who accept climate science, even while they murder it, so in that respect, they are the Talented Mr. Pielkes.]

No wonder “Prometheus” died.

One final ironic note on references missed by deniers.  Prometheus, of course, famously “stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals.”  If by modern fire, one means global warming — that human-caused amplifier of wildfires, heatwaves, and scorching droughts (created primarily by the burning of fossil fuels) — the “hell” in Hell and High Water, then the blog’s name was more apt than Pielke realized.

And that’s why I love the blogosphere — in a Stanley Kubrick sort of way.

The Honduran coup d'etat | by The Big Picture (Boston Globe) | 3 July 2009, 05:51 PM

Supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya clash with soldiers near the presidential residency Tegucigalpa, Monday, June 29. 2009. Police fired tear gas to hold back thousands of Hondurans outside the occupied presidential residency as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez appealed to Honduras to reverse a coup that ousted the president. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Comments are Fixed | by Michael Totten's Middle East Journal | 3 July 2009, 05:51 PM

The comments section was broken during the last couple of days, but it seems to be fixed now.

‘Microvolunteering’: Doing good through social media | by Futurismic | 3 July 2009, 05:39 PM

Nobody expected Twitter to be as useful as it’s turned out to be. Maybe this will work, too. National Public Radio has a story about The Extraordinaires, which is not a 60s British spy show but a social-media enterprise that encourages brief bursts of volunteerism.

Through The Extraordinaries, you might be able to use your smart phone — while waiting in the dentist’s office or standing in the Dept. of Motor Vehicles line — to:

• translate a foreign-language document into English

• add identifying tags to photos and videos for a museum

• give advice to a college applicant

During your lunch break you could snap a picture of a pothole that needs patching and zap it to the proper authorities. You could report a dying elm to the parks-and-recreation department or spot a rare woodpecker for the Audubon Society.

“This is an organization that changes the paradigm,” says Jacob Colker, 26, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Extraordinaries. “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games.”

Skepticism is healthy, too, of course. I’m still on crowdsourcing 101, myself, but unintended consequences can sometimes be positive.

[What are you doing? by wharman]

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Plug In and Save | by Climate Progress | 3 July 2009, 05:38 PM

Individual action is always worthwhile, even while we keep our eyes on the prize of national and international action.  Energy efficiency upgrades in particular can be very profitable (see “20 steps to a greener home” and “The first five steps to a greener home are not what the NYT’s Green Home column says“).  Energy monitors such as the one below allow users to monitor the energy usage of a single appliance or an entire house, as explained in this CAP post.

How much energy does it take to keep that old refrigerator running? Probably more than when you bought it, and an energy monitor will tell you just how much.

There are two basic types of energy monitors:  Those for a single appliance and those that measure your entire home’s energy use. The best way to figure out which option works best for you is to decide what level of energy monitoring you want to achieve, how much you want to spend, and how much you want to save.

Single appliance monitors cost about $25 to $75 and calculate the usage of a single device, which is plugged directly into the monitor. Most monitors will tell you how much energy is used during a given period while displaying the current usage. Measuring usage over a 24-hour period or longer is the best way to determine your appliance’s efficiency as many of them cycle on and off throughout the day.

These monitors are useful for keeping track of how your appliances are holding up. You can measure your refrigerator’s energy usage at the beginning and end of a season to see if it its efficiency has changed. If it’s draining more power than it did in the past, it may need a tune up.

Whole house monitors are a bit more expensive at about $100 to $200, but they are a useful way to get a wider look at how much energy you are using and how much that usage is costing you. You can enter your utility rates for peak and off-peak usage into most monitors to calculate just how much you can save by, for example, setting a timer to start your laundry or run the dishwasher during the day or in the middle of the night.

House monitors work best for measuring usage that is distributed throughout the entire house, such as central heating or cooling. It also helps you determine the savings of lifestyle changes that affect more than one appliance.

You probably won’t be using your monitor every day, so try sharing it with friends and family. It’s a great way to get people interested in green living and lets them see for themselves how much money they can save by turning back the thermostat a few degrees.

You can also broadcast your usage to the world using Tweet-a-watt, a modified energy monitor that broadcasts your energy using Wi-Fi. It automatically uploads domestic energy use to your Twitter account, which you can then use to share or compete with friends. Now you can use the same technology to tell your friends what you’re reading on the web to brag about just how green your new OLED television is.

India: Question To The Minister Of Railways | by Global Voices (India) | 3 July 2009, 05:01 PM

Roger Alexander questions the the Minister of railways of India, who presented this year's budget in the parliament today: “why has the cash surpluses of the Railways depleted so rapidly in such a short span of time?”

Sustainable Energy news | by Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air | 3 July 2009, 05:25 PM

SEWTHA was published in the USA on May 1st. Last week, it was reviewed in Science magazine, and now some people who like SEWTHA have written a submission to slashdot "Solving the Energy Crisis by Tripling Electricity".
If you like this article and have a slashdot account, please click on the "+" button to help the article get promoted.
And finally, the third printing of SEWTHA has just come out, and it has got a NEW COVER (shown above). My publisher and I are very democratic about these things, and when the Guardian's Leo Hickman opened his review with the words "It has a crashingly dull cover and title", we were happy to respond to feedback. We hope you like the new cover! [full size image]
The third printing brings the number of copies printed to 30,000.

Tins path set to be closed for maintenance | by Your Coleridge Conservative Councillor | 3 July 2009, 05:10 PM

From the County Council:

Super Girl Li Yuchun's Family Planning Ad | by EastSouthWestNorth | 3 July 2009, 04:00 PM

A Chongqing town family planning department used an unauthorized photo of Super Girl winner Li Yuchun and created an Internet storm.

DARPA | by Futurismic | 3 July 2009, 03:00 PM

Chalk yet another one up to Frank Herbert; the DARPA people have just awarded a Phase II contract extension (whatever that means) to a company called AeroVironment so that they can continue developing their ‘Mercury’ Nano Air Vehicle ornithopter prototype. [via Hack-A-Day]

Ornithopters – which feature heavily in the Dune series – are aircraft that are propelled by flapping their wings like a bird rather than using rotors, propellors or jets. Check out the Mercury prototype in action:

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seek balance | by Ayesha's photos | 3 July 2009, 02:47 PM

london_lime posted a photo:

renamed Seek White Balance

DSC_0321 | by Ayesha's photos | 3 July 2009, 02:46 PM

london_lime posted a photo:

Media outlet refuses to run GOP’s TV ad filled with falsehoods on clean energy bill | by Climate Progress | 3 July 2009, 01:50 PM

The NY Times takes cash from ExxonMobil to publish its lies on the front page.  The Washington Post was on the verge of offering lobbyists off-the-record access to the “powerful few” for $250,000 (!) — until the Politico (and others) called them out.  But there still are a few media outlets that won’t sell their integrity for a few pieces of silver, as this Think Progress post explains.

Yesterday afternoon, Roanoke television station WDBJ-TV, announced they will be refusing to air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), citing factual inaccuracies. The NRCC had been planning to run television ads against Democratic members of Congress, like Perriello, who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation that passed last week. After receiving information about the factual inaccuracies in the ad, the station pulled it from rotation.

For any objective observer, the the ad is pulled out of thin air. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.” According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day. An EPA estimate of the bill found similar results, projecting the cost to be about $80 to $111 per a year.

Still refusing to accept reality, the Republican leadership is instructing its members to lie about the clean energy economy bill:

– Last week, Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) posted a message erroneously claiming that clean energy legislation will amount to “a national energy tax of up to $3,100 on all Americans.”

– Republican leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) posted on his website that the clean energy bill will cost “$3,100 a year,” then modified that number to “$3,000 per household per year.”

– Republican conference chair Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), not to be outdone, claimed the clean energy bill would be “over $4,000 a year.”

All the numbers cited by Republicans are at least seventeen times the highest possible projection by the CBO and EPA.

Clearly, Republicans opposed to the clean energy bill seem willing to justify their opposition using outright falsehoods. But fortunately, at least some stations are not willing to propagate it.

Related Posts:

• MIT Professor tells GOP to stop ‘misrepresenting’ his work and inflating the cost to families of cap-and-trade by a factor of 10
• MIT Professor says GOP “misrepresentation” of his April 2007 study to project costs for Waxman-Markey is “inappropriate,” “silly” and “just wrong”

Our True Colours | by Cambodia Calling | 3 July 2009, 02:40 PM

A great article pointing out that Indians who accuse Australia of being racist should take a look at themselves. Racism Indian Style:

- A Madurai sessions court sentences Farook Batcha to two years' RI ["Rigorous Imprisonment" apparently, whatever that means in India] in 2008 for harassing his wife so much about being dark that it drove her to suicide.

- The information and broadcasting ministry issues a notice to Nimbus Communications for a racist ad during the 2007 India-West Indies series. The promo featured a West Indian running around for water after eating spicy food. No Indian comes to his help. The ad's punchline: "It's tough being a West Indian in India."

- Bilyaminu Ibrahim, a Nigerian student at an engineering college in Greater Noida, is spat at by one of his Indian seniors.

- Robert, a Kenyan student in Pune, is denied entrance to a pub. He is asked to return on Tuesday for an "all-black" night.

- A controversial ad for Fair & Lovely cream features a father who is unhappy because his daughter is dark and unsuccessful. The cream changes her complexion and lands her a glamorous job.

The new Commissioner's challenge | by Open Secrets (Martin Rosenbaum, BBC) | 3 July 2009, 01:34 PM

The Information Commissioner's Office in Wilmslow is situated in an area popular with the purveyors of very fast cars, but its operations don't always seem to be speeding along the fast lane.

The new commissioner for the UK, Chris Graham, took up his post this week - and one of his main challenges will be to tackle the lengthy backlog of cases that the office has been struggling with.

The ICO has been strongly attacked today by the Campaign for Freedom of Information over the extensive delays before it issues formal decisions.

In the worst case identified by CFoI, the commissioner's decision notice was issued three years and 10 and a half months after the complaint was made. (My own oldest appeal has only been with the commissioner's office for three years and nine and a half months, and I'm still waiting on that one, so I don't know whether it might seize the record).

This is one example in a painstaking analysis [280Kb PDF] compiled by the campaign group of the time taken by the ICO to rule on those cases which involve formal decision notices.

The group's report [559Kb PDF] shows that the average wait between a complaint arriving and a decision notice was nearly 20 months.

The ICO states [46Kb PDF] that it is trying to speed up its processes and that most cases are resolved informally and more quickly. But the campaign argues that many of these complaints are trivial and it is the significant ones which are most likely to require decision notices.

Chris Graham ran the Advertising Standards Authority before becoming Information Commissioner, so he has experience of leading a complaints-handling body. We will see in due course whether this helps him speed up the time-consuming processes without undermining the quality of formal decisions, which has improved since the first couple of years.

The ICO published a new strategy [81Kb PDF] for considering FOI complaints last month. This shows that it will be trying to resolve an even greater number of cases informally in order to increase its productivity.

It will also be interesting to see whether Mr Graham adopts a more aggressive public stance towards pushing the Ministry of Justice for more resources. Matt Davies at FoiNews thinks he may already be detecting signs of a new, more outspoken approach.

Of course, delays in the freedom of information process are not limited to the ICO.

Last year, central government exceeded the recommended time limit for reviewing freedom of information appeals in one in three cases.

If you think you've read that sentence before, you may well be right. I wrote exactly the same sentence last year about the government's FOI statistics for 2007 [1.10Mb PDF]. And this still applies to the 2008 statistics [1.04MbKb PDF] which were published last week.

But the credibility of the commissioner in cracking down on delays in government is seriously undermined as long as his own office is taking an excessive time to deal with many complaints.

Update 1408: The ICO tells me that the letter to Matt Davies is "not indicative of any policy change".

The Conservatives’ Climate Campaign | by Forum for the Future | 3 July 2009, 01:03 PM

Earlier this week, I found myself, in the sweltering heat, on the roof terrace of a swanky Soho club. A specially curated modern art exhibition adorned the walls. Around me the conversation buzzed excitedly as celebrities rubbed shoulders with shadow cabinet members.
 
The reason for this glossy affair? It was the launch of the Conservatives’ Climate Campaign.

I was intrigued for a number of reasons. There was a sense of youth, energy, and excitement that had a strong echo of the mid-1990s when new Labour was becoming newly-fashionable. This felt like the place people wanted to be.

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor spoke. The campaign promised “bold and transformational policies to allow Britain to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050” and “a big NO to any new coal-fired power station that does not have carbon capture and storage from day one”.

Business turned out in force, too. Indeed the launch booklet was full of ads from sponsor companies, such as Asda. Sponsored policy-documents are a rather depressing sign of the times, but at least, I reflected, the Conservatives are being up-front and transparent about the fact that business is paying.

Change is certainly afoot. A decade ago, I just can’t imagine the Conservatives launching such an initiative. Now they feel edgier than the government on the climate change agenda. The raffle – there always has to be a raffle at a Tory do – was to fund their campaign against a third runway at Heathrow!

We have yet to see how deep climate concern runs in the Conservatives, or the detail of their policy prescriptions. But as I sipped my glass of wine on that warm summer evening, I did get a strong sense of tectonic plates shifting.

Crowdsourced insurgency 101: monetizing the local network | by Futurismic | 3 July 2009, 01:00 PM

It’s not been mentioned much on this side of the pond, but I imagine Stateside readers will have already heard about the US soldier allegedly “sold” to a militant Afghani clan by local-level insurgents. Here’s hoping he gets hauled out of there sooner rather than later. [image by Soldier's Media Centre]

John Robb points out the marked difference in military networking that this sort of action represents; the Haqqanis are leveraging an entrepreneurial instinct in their local supporters, a sort of monetized and crowdsourced insurgency that relies less on having a standing army and more on rewarding local people for doing things your way.

As Fourth Generation Warfare becomes increasingly prevalent, perhaps the military forces of the West should take a page or two from the playbooks of their opponents – maybe wallets and billfolds are better targets than hearts and minds. After all, if your country is being torn apart economically by a war you don’t understand, who are you going to support – the alien invaders with expensive military hardware who blow a lot of stuff up in the name of political concepts that you don’t fully understand, or the guys who reward you for easily accomplished favours on your home turf?

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TheyWorkForYou Redesign | by mySociety News | 3 July 2009, 11:52 AM

Richard Pope has been redesigning mySociety’s biggest site TheyWorkForYou.com for a couple of months.

He’s done a heroic job, as has Matthew with his epic import of Hansard data from 1935 onwards.  TheyWorkForYou is a much better site for their combined work recently. We’ll be writing more on the historic stuff soon.

There are a few things I’d like from you as a member of the mySociety community:

1. Please say a big thanks to Richard. This was not an easy or relaxing task at all, and he’s done it brilliantly. Just check a Lords debate to see the attention to detail. We are a very lucky organisation to have him, as he’s always in demand.

2. Please give some constructive criticism on how it could be even better (please note, focussing on design here, we already have a load of feature priorities to deliver).

3. Anyone who could help supply a redesigned logo, or some nicely processed parliamentary-themed artwork to sit in the background grey-boxes on the homepage would be doing a very Good Deed for mySociety.

And lastly, please do pledge to become a TheyWorkForYou Patron, so we can keep doing things like this in the future!

| by BLDGBLOD | 3 July 2009, 11:20 AM

A few quick things while I have a signal here: I was very, very happy to see that The BLDGBLOG Book made it onto SEED Magazine's "Books to Read Now" list, and I enjoyed Jim Rossignol's honest review of The BLDGBLOG Book, as well.
Pick up a copy here, if you don't have one yet.
In less self-interested news, I arrived back in London last night to find a huge stack of mail – including Vicente Guallart's recent book Geologics, published by Actar, ETH Studio Basel's brand new MetroBasel comic book (available in English), and the most recent issue of MARK Magazine.
Also, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this, but tonight, 3 July, down in Bermondsey, Blueprint Magazine is hosting a design picnic to celebrate their own newest issue – stop by if you get the chance!
And provided I can magically slice open the structure of the day and find two extra hours waiting patiently for writing, I will get some regular posts up again this weekend.

“Rodent” is definitely the fashionable robot body-form for 2009 | by Futurismic | 3 July 2009, 10:55 AM

… because here’s another one of ‘em. SCRATCHbot is designed with a highly sensitive set of whiskers for feeling its way through rubble, perhaps to rescue people from collapsed buildings or natural disasters.

I reckon there’s probably some mileage in a Saturday morning kid’s cartoon called Robot Rescue Rodents. No sign of robot capybaras yet, though…

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Bad mathematics and dodgy economics | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 3 July 2009, 10:54 AM

Robert Peston today attempts to demonstrate that bank executives have ripped off bank shareholders over the last twenty years or so since deregulation of the City.

Why bankers aren't worth it | by Robert Peston (BBC business editor) | 3 July 2009, 09:27 AM

Some of the most arresting analysis of the causes and consequences of the financial crisis is being made by Andrew Haldane, the executive director of what the Bank of England calls - with no hint of irony - "financial stability".

His latest speech, "Small Lessons from a Big Crisis" [pdf link], is grist for those who believe top bankers are being paid far too much (although this is not a conclusion he draws himself).

First, Haldane looks at the returns generated by UK banks and financial institutions since 1900, to see whether shares in the financial sector have performed better than the market in general.

What this shows is that from 1900 to 1985, the financial sector produced an average annual return of around 2% a year, relative to other stocks and shares.

So for 85 years investing in bank shares was "close to a break-even strategy" (his words), nothing special.

But in the subsequent 20 years, from 1986 to 2006, returns went through the roof: the average annual return soared to more than 16%, which was the best performance by financial-sector shares in UK financial history.

And it's no coincidence that the pay of top bankers also zoomed up to the stratosphere. Which at the time upset only a few, because the bankers seemed to be enriching the owners of the banks, their shareholders (millions of us through our pension funds).

That, of course, is not the whole story.

The collapse of banks' share prices in the past two years has wiped out most of those gains: to March this year, when the low point was touched, the fall in UK bank share prices was more than 80%, an all-time record plunge.

What this means is that in the full period from 1900 to the end of 2008, the annual average return on financial shares was less than 3%, almost identical to the market as a whole.

Which is what common sense would predict should have happened, since banks are to a large extent a utility, serving the needs of the wider economy, and its difficult to see how banks in general can therefore grow significantly faster than the wider economy.

What went so right in 1986 to 2006? Had top bankers become much more brilliant than their predecessors, such that they deserved disproportionate rewards?

Haldane answers this question by breaking down banks' return on equity - the return generated on ordinary shareholders' capital - into its two component parts, which are the return on gross assets and the leverage employed by the bank.

This is slightly complicated, but bear with me, because it is absolutely central to assessing whether bankers merited their lavish remuneration.

Now if you want to know whether bankers are particularly skilful, you have to look at the return on gross assets. If one bank earns consistently bigger margins on the loans and investments it makes, that tells you it is probably doing something cleverer than its rivals.

By contrast, leverage - or the ratio between a bank's gross assets and its stock of shareholders' equity - is the Las Vegas part of the return on equity, the contribution made by a punt or a gamble.

Here's the important point: for any rate of return earned per unit of a bank's gross assets, the return on shareholders' equity rises as the assets-to-equity ratio rises - or, to use the jargon, as leverage rises.

Which is easier to grasp by way of a practical illustration.

Suppose a bank has lent £1,000 and earns a 1% net return on this, or £10. If that £1,000 is backed by £50 of shareholders' equity - which is a leverage multiple of 20 - the return on equity is 10 divided by 50, or 20% (which, for what it's worth, is a handsome rate of return).

Now, suppose another bank lends £1,000 on a leverage multiple of 50, or supported by just £20 of shareholders' equity. In this case, the return on equity is 10 divided by 20, or 50%. So the return to shareholders is a stupendous 50%.

Or to put it another way, increasing leverage is a simple and automatic way of increasing returns to shareholders. And as I hope you've noticed, there's nothing terribly clever about it.

But if all you care about is fat returns, and you're not interested in how they're earned, you'd give the boss of the highly leveraged bank a cigar, a bottle of Krug and a £5m bonus.

As I've observed many times in this column, maximising leverage is the equivalent of buying a house with the maximum amount of debt: it looks like an awfully smart thing to do when everything's going up up up, but is the fastest way to lose money when the economy turns.

Just to prove the point: if our banks were to lose £20 on their £1,000 of loans, the bank with just £20 of equity would be wiped out, it would be bust (a big hello to Royal Bank of Scotland, which at the peak of its lending and investing had a balance sheet that was indeed 50 times the size of its core equity).

So what has Haldane discovered about the golden banking years from 1986 to 2006? Were the super-normal returns of banks the consequence of management skill, viz high returns on gross assets? Or were they casino profits, generated because banks in general increased their leverage, their ratio of assets to equity?

This is what Haldane says:

"Since 2000, rising leverage fully accounts for movements in UK banks' ROE [return on equity] - both the rise to around 24% in 2007 and the subsequent fall into negative territory in 2008."

In other words, in the seven years before the crash, British banks' bumper profits were in aggregate generated wholly by a massive increase in leverage by the industry: and in Haldane's view, these would be returns generated by gamblers' luck, the jackpot from the roulette ball landing on black.

What follows?

Well, it's uncontroversial that we all paid something of a price, in the form of the worst global recession since the 1930s, when the bankers' luck ran out, when the wheel spun to red.

Which means that we all have an interest in preventing bankers from repeating these reckless gambles.

These would be a few useful lessons.

1) The overall level of bankers' pay was inflated over the past few years by the rewards they scooped from the leverage gamble. It should be cut to a level commensurate with an industry that's closer to a boring utility than to a wealth-creating, entrepreneurial venture. This has not happened yet. In fact, if anything, bankers are pumping up their pay packages again (the recent remuneration deal made by Royal Bank of Scotland with its chief executive, Stephen Hester, would not have looked mean in the boom-boom era).

2) Regulators should impose a legally binding maximum - and at a relatively modest level - for the ratio of a bank's gross assets to its equity, the leverage multiple, to restrict bankers' freedom to gamble.

3) Owners of banks should be very cautious indeed about rewarding bankers for the returns they generate on equity, and should focus rather more on the returns earned on gross assets.

If you're still with me (wakey, wakey), there's one other important related issue I want to explore, which is how to re-introduce moral hazard into banking, how to persuade bank chief executives that they'll really suffer if they place reckless bets that go wrong.

The problem is that no one can possibly any longer believe that there are any circumstances in which our government will let one of our biggest banks collapse.

Which is an enormous comfort to the chief executive of a bank. It means he or she can do something spectacularly stupid, safe in the knowledge that taxpayers will bail out the bank as and when it all goes wrong.

The best deterrent against greed-fuelled gambling by banks is the threat of being sacked when it all goes pear-shaped. But that's not a particularly scary threat to any banker who's earned enough in the preceding years never to need to work again.

That rather implies that bankers should be paid a decent wage, but should not be able to get their mits on any serious wealth for years and years and years.

Arguably they shouldn't be allowed the big haul till they retire and it's clear beyond a scintilla of doubt that they haven't dangerously over-mortgaged their respective institutions.

And once again we're back to the serious critique of Royal Bank of Scotland's board for sanctioning Sir Fred Goodwin's never-have-to-work-again pension.

But Sir Fred is just one embodiment of how banking became a casino run for the benefit of bank executives: the sucker punters were the shareholders and - little did we know it - taxpayers.

Sargent and Co - Bespoke Bicycles | by The Copenhagen Bicycle Culture Blog | 3 July 2009, 09:53 AM

On my recent visit to London I spent the better part of two days cycling throughout the capital on a photo assignment. My indispensible guide, Oliver from Hackney Cyclists, brought me quite on purpose past Sargent & Co Bicycle Shop.

My god, I'm glad he did. The shop was closed but Rob Sargent, the owner, was kind enough to open the door and let us in inside for a look. It was time for a tea break, anyway.

Rob opened up the shop about a year ago after settling on a bicycle shop as a 'lifestyle change'. It's more of a workshop than a bicycle shop proper as Rob gently restores vintage racers at the most relaxing, aesthetic pace.

That's Rob making the tea in the background and it's Eric Deeks in the foreground. Eric is teaching Rob the tricks of the framebuilding trade. He used to build frames for Paris Cycles back in the day.

I don't know what it was about the shop but I keep returning to it in my head. The atmosphere was calm, the air scented with the unmistakeable sweetness of oil and vintage. Buzzing gently below the surface was that unique passion for bicycles, like the sound of a distant bumble bee at the bottom of the garden.

The most remarkable thing about this bicycle shop is that you feel as though it has occupied the premises since, I don't know... 1948... and that Rob's dad and grampy had puttered around inside throughout the decades before handing it down. You don't quite believe the Established 2008 sign outside and are quite convinced that the old walls have strained under the weight of hanging frames and wheels. Indeed, that they were built solely for this purpose.

Speaking to Rob you are seduced by his quiet manner and gentle voice. Just hearing the way he speaks and you know how he handles the old frames and bicycles that are wheeled into the shop. Gently, lovingly, passionately.

Business is fine, apparently. Too fine, you sense. Meaning less time for the quiet pleasures of restoring old bicycles to former glory and building new frames. The bicycle in the left window in the top photo is Rob's first framebuilding effort. you can see a better photo of it on his Flickr Photostream. He was well proud about it in the most relaxed way. It certainly is a beauty.

Eric used to build Paris bicycles not that far from the shop. His prescence in the place is one of quiet authority. Hands grey with grease as he sips his tea you can't help thinking of what it was like building bicycles in the 1950's and you secretly wish you were there to experience it.

That's Rob's bike on the wall but he has a 'pub bike' out front which is just a beat up old mixte that nobody will nick.

Left: An old R.H. Wakefield is on the rack, ready for treatment.
Right: The cellar workshop.

If you're in London, be sure to meander past. Even if the shop is closed, peer through the windows. It's enough, somehow.

Sargent & Co is at
74 Mountgrove Road
Finsbury Park
www.sargentandco.com/

Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

Just because the Orange call centre says problem solved doesnt mean it is | by William Heath | 3 July 2009, 08:02 AM

U. writes out of the blue to say

Hi william

Just been reading about your problems with orange. I’ve run into similar problems in that 5 years ago my phone got stolen in spain. I rang orange to bar the phone at the time which they said they’d do. 2 days later I rang about getting a new phone to be greeted with the news they hadn’t barred it and that I owed them 725 pounds. Basically I outlined situation again and was given the impression that matter had been dropped (but unfortunately not in writing - I was being a bit naive at the time). 5 and a half years later orange have sold the debt on to a debt collection agency who are basically giving me grief. Essentially I’m spending a lot of time arguing with them but should also now start writing letters to Orange. My mate is a lawyer and has helped me draft letters to the debt collection agency and their solicitors but I guess the best way is really getting orange to drop the debt as you have been trying to do.

Who have you been contacting at Orange? the legal department? I’m currently waiting all my bills, correspondance etc under the data protection act from Orange and a deadlock letter before referring the matter to CISAS.

This is what we needed David Hume’s “Registered Call” service (which recorded and date-stamped the call on your behalf). Keep us informed U! Anyone should feel free to use my Farrers letters as patterns or examples in their dealings - that’s what I put them up for.

AJ Fosik - An Introduction | by Wooster Collective | 3 July 2009, 07:56 AM

AJ Fosik Artist Profile from Kwality Media on Vimeo.

Interesting photos - 2 Jul 2009 - Flickr | by Daily interesting photos - Flickr | 3 July 2009, 07:52 AM

25 Rebellions in Bill Presented — Sustainable Energy (Local Plans) Bill — Clause 10 — Proceedings in Parliament | by Interesting Divisions (Public Whip) | 3 July 2009, 05:50 AM

25 rebellions (501 voters) in vote on Bill Presented — Sustainable Energy (Local Plans) Bill — Clause 10 — Proceedings in Parliament on 2009-07-01

13 Rebellions in Deferred Divisions — Adjournment (summer) | by Interesting Divisions (Public Whip) | 3 July 2009, 05:50 AM

13 rebellions (466 voters) in vote on Deferred Divisions — Adjournment (summer) on 2009-07-01

The Chancellor - don’t do as I do, do as I say | by John Redwood MP | 3 July 2009, 05:26 AM

We learn today that the Chancellor is warning the City not to go back to the ways and days of big bonuses.

This is the same Chancellor who allowed a near £10 m pay and bonus package for the CEO of RBS, a bank where he represents the controlling shareholders!

This speech is almost as good as his “moral hazard” speech in 2007, saying the government would not bail out bad banks. I remember being very critical of that at the time. This is another corker.

Markets and unemployment | by John Redwood MP | 3 July 2009, 05:23 AM

Big falls in share markets yesterday were put down to worse than expected unemployment figures in the USA.

Readers of this site will not be surprised that the real economy is still struggling. In this recession in the US and the UK industrial companies have been much quicker to cut employment costs. Some have done this by agreeing unpaid leave, temporary factory closures and short time weeks. Others are simply firing many people, deciding there is too much capacity and wanting to get rid of the costs before they bring the whole enterprise down. Expect more job losses on the both sides of the Atlantic, as the green shoots do not extend to a significant upturn in industrial orders yet.

More regulation? | by John Redwood MP | 3 July 2009, 05:20 AM

We can be sure of one thing. On both sides of the Atlantic the architects of the current failed system of regulation will conclude we need more regulation in the future. They will be interested in what they can add to an edifice which worked badly, not thinking about what they should demolish before rebuilding.

In the UK we should expect two things. They will wish to strengthen the Tripartite system rather than replace it. Instead of transferring FSA powers over banks to the Bank of England, and giving the Bank a unified command over bank supervision and the money markets they use, both the Bank and the FSA will be given bigger roles in regulating banks.

There is unlikely to be a Glass Steagall law requiring the separation of investment banking from clearing bank activities. The authorities rightly understand that some of the weakest banks in the last crisis were either traditional mortgage banks like Northern Rock, or specialist investment banks like Lehmans. The large conglomerate banks got sucked in to the crisis at a later stage.

Instead they think they will increase the capital and cash requirements of both investment banking and traditional banking activities, probably being tougher on the former. This will limit the capacity of any large bank to do more of both and force choices about priorities to use the capital. It will also mean slower growth for the economy, and more difficulty in getting out of the slump, as it constrains bank balance sheet growth and therefore limits the amount of money in circulation. The regulatory policy is currently pushing against the monetary easing policy announced.

They will continue to devote a lot of effort to micro regulation – seeking to regulate each transaction and customer relationship – as well as putting more emphasis on high level or system regulation. Before and during the crisis the authorities had the powers necessary to demand more cash and capital but failed to do so. It was not a lack of power, but a lack of judgement which led them to permit the excessive build up of debt and books of financial instruments which characterised the period 2003-7.

We need to ask will they be any better next time round? The issue is do the regulators have a leader or top officials with both the judgement and the confidence to use that judgement to control bank balance sheets sensibly? It does not require more people or new armies of number crunchers. You can do it by just examining the balance sheets of the top half a dozen UK based large banks. Any annual reading of those between 2000 and 2007 should have told the informed reader that leverage was getting out of control. In say 2005 the regulators should have asked banks to raise more capital, keep more cash, or rein in their lending levels.

Today the regulators should not be raising their demands for cash and capital immediately. They should give the banks time to adjust their balance sheets, sort out their past bad debts and get their costs under control. The central Bank should be prepared to act as lender of last resort to ensure all the main banks have access to cash should they need it. The time to demand more cash and capital will come when we see money growth and bank balance sheet growth spurting ahead again. Instead of hiring a new army of regulators and inventing a new sequence of regulations, we just need one or two people at the top of the system with judgement and confidence. They already have quite enough power to do the job. The worry is the West will hinder its recovery with too much inappropriate regulation, leaving the field more open for eastern competitors. We should also expect continued policy lurches, as the authorities have still not restored normality to interest rates, money markets or banking.

Hat's Off To Copenhagen | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 3 July 2009, 04:00 AM

A classic Copenhagen cycling girl pedalling tourists around the city. On a blustery day no...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Extrapolating | by xkcd | 3 July 2009, 04:00 AM

Bug Report | by Only In It For The Gold | 3 July 2009, 03:51 AM

http://xkcd.com/258/

To clarify: I feel the same way xkcd (aka Randall Munroe) does about conspiracy theories in general.

I mention it here because I was specifically thinking about the idea that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists to convince people of the otherwise absurd idea that there might be some problem about releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and to squelch any arguments to the contrary.

Instead of, you know, overwhelming evidence.

The Virgilio Anderson Project | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 3 July 2009, 02:01 AM

Fans of Robert LePage and Richard Herring (there must be one of you out there) may enjoy The Virgilio Anderson Project, in which Herring attempts to steal Virgilio Anderson's identity in return for Anderson having taken his.

Inexcusable Austin/Singer/Lindzen Letter | by Only In It For The Gold | 3 July 2009, 12:08 AM

July 02, 2009

Yes, On-Air Program Promos Work | by Social Networking Watch | 2 July 2009, 11:45 PM

Recently, we ran a series of tests to evaluate how well on-air program promotions do at actually driving viewers to watch specific television shows. We analyzed anonymous set-top-box data through TNS's Infosys Media System. The results we found were pretty enlightening, so I thought that I would share some of them with you today. Here are findings related to viewer responsiveness to on-air promos for NBC's "Parks and Recreation" from this past spring, which were quite representative for the dozens of shows that we have looked at....

Notes on Civil Power | by Dom Fox | 2 July 2009, 10:11 PM

Looking for, and so far unable to find, my copy of Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power. I’d been reading Without Title on the train, thinking it was his most recent and wondering why it wasn’t as good as I remembered (it has its moments). Most of the lines I wanted to quote from it [...]

Modelling the climate | by Futurismic | 2 July 2009, 09:49 PM

An interview with Gavin Schmidt over on Edge explores the nature and development of climate modelling:

What we have decided, as a scientific endeavor, is to extrapolate as much as we can from our knowledge of the individual processes that we can measure: evaporation from the ocean, the formation of a cloud, rainfall coming from a cloud, changes in the wind patterns as a function of the pressure field, changes in the jet stream. What we have tried to do is encapsulate those small-scale processes, put them altogether, and see if we can predict the emerging properties of that fundamental complex system.

He explores the sometimes contradictory predictions of different climate models:

In the same way that you can’t make an average arithmetic be more correct than the correct arithmetic, it’s not obvious that the average climate model should be better than all of the other climate models. So for example if I wanted to know what 2+2 was and I just picked a set of random numbers, the answer by averaging all those random numbers is unlikely to be four. Yet when you come to climate models, that is kind of what you get. You get all the climate models and they give you some numbers between three and five and they give you something that is very close to four. Obviously, it’s not pure mathematics — it’s physics, it’s approximations, there is empirical tuning that goes on.
…
You need to have some kind of evaluation. I don’t like to use the word validation because it implies a kind of binary/true-false set up. But you need an evaluation; you need tests of the model’s sensitivity compared to something in the real world that can give you some credibility that that model has the right sensitivity. That is very difficult.

It is a lengthy essay/video interview but well worth the read/watch, as it is refreshing to hear firsthand from a professional climatologist.

[at Edge][image from Nicholas T on flickr]

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Creepiest vintage ads of all time | by Cambodia Calling | 2 July 2009, 09:19 PM

I think Pears was trying to say the baby had so much fun during bath time he toppled over!
The Gilette razor: so smooth it can even be used on babies, by babies!
Eeeps! What a creepy little girl!
Suicide pork.
All photos from retrocomedy.com. Go check it out, the author's got some great lines! My favourite...
6. Locked Out
You better wash out your privates with Lysol, or your husband will install cartoon locks on the door. Hahahah!
Thanks to souryoghurtsupergirl for adding to reddit!

London Recalling | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 2 July 2009, 08:12 PM

So, just got back from London. It was a lovely visit and the photo assignment was great. I cycled...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming — or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it. | by Climate Progress | 2 July 2009, 08:03 PM

RealClimate has just eviscerated Roger Pielke, Sr. in an important post, “More bubkes.”  I am going to excerpt it at length because:

1. It thoroughly debunks some now-standard denier talking points on sea level rise, ocean heat content, and Arctic sea ice that the Pielkes, WattsUpWithThat, Inhofe, George Will and others have been pushing.
2. It has some excellent figures, including ones from the recent major peer-reviewed synthesis report of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report (which I wrote about here).
3. Pielke Sr. accused me of “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling” in a post (here) about ocean heat content (which was gleefully reprinted by the anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat), even though, as RealClimate definitively shows, it is Pielke who either fails to understand the science or chooses to willfully misrepresent it.

In my post “Breaking: NOAA puts out ‘El Niño Watch,’ so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record,” I had noted that Pielke Sr. loves to cherry-pick climate data over short time spans to make misleading scientific claims about climate.  Climate, of course, is about long-term trends.

The basis for Pielke’s claim I don’t understand the science of climate:  “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003….  Even the last few years of the Levitus et al 2009 paper shows this lack of warming (see).”  And then he links to his discussion of that paper and puts up this figure:

What serious climate scientist would look at that data and have the nerve to tell the public it documents that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003.  If you wanted to play this game — and game is a kind word for this willful attempt to mislead the public — you could much more truthfully say “upper ocean warming has soared since 2002.”  But both statements are beside the point.

How could any serious climate scientist possibly look at such noisy data, which is full of short-term gyrations and brief, multi-year periods of little obvious warming — but an unmistakable upward trend for decades — and have the audacity to pick the year right after a staggeringly rapid increase in upper ocean warming as the basis of his public pronouncements on this issue?  And Pielke Sr. has the chutzpah to say my writing exhibits “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling.”  Doctor — heal thyself.  It’s sad, really, since, unlike his son, he is actually a “climatologist.”

Pielke Sr. tries the same crap on the climate scientists of RealClimate — and their devastating must-read response should end forever any notion that Roger Pielke, Sr. is a credible source on climate science:

Roger Pielke Sr. has raised very strong allegations against RealClimate in a recent blog post. Since they come from a scientific colleague, we consider it worthwhile responding directly.

The statement Pielke considers “misinformation” is a single sentence from a recent posting:

Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago — such as rising sea levels, the increase of heat stored in the ocean and the shrinking Arctic sea ice.

First of all, we are surprised that Pielke levelled such strong allegations against RealClimate, since the statement above merely summarises some key findings of the Synthesis Report of the Copenhagen Climate Congress, which we discussed last month. This is a peer-reviewed document authored by 12 leading scientists and “based on the 16 plenary talks given at the Congress as well as input of over 80 chairs and co-chairs of the 58 parallel sessions held at the Congress.” If Pielke disagrees with the findings of these scientists, you’d have thought he’d take it up with them rather than aiming shrill accusations at us. But in any case let us look at the three items of alleged misinformation:

1. Sea level. The Synthesis Report shows the graph below and concludes:

Since 2007, reports comparing the IPCC projections of 1990 with observations show that some climate indicators are changing near the upper end of the range indicated by the projections or, as in the case of sea level rise (Figure 1), at even greater rates than indicated by IPCC projections.

This graph is an update of Rahmstorf et al., Science 2007, with data through to the end of 2008. (Note the comparison is with IPCC TAR projections, but since AR4 projections are within 10% of the TAR models this makes little difference.)

Pielke claims this is “NOT TRUE” (capitals and bold font are his), stating “sea level has actually flattened since 2006” and pointing to this graph. This graph shows a sea level trend over the full satellite period (starting 1993) of 3.2 +/- 0.4 mm/year and is very similar to an independent French analysis of those very same satellite data shown in the Synthesis Report (blue lines above). The best estimate of the IPCC models for the same time period is 1.9 mm/year (coloured dashed lines in the middle of the grey uncertainty range). Hence the conclusion of the Synthesis Report is entirely correct.

The “flattening of sea level since 2006” that Pielke refers to is beside the point and deceptive for several reasons (note too that Anthony Watts has extended this even further to declare that sea level from 2006 to present is actually “flat”!). First of all, trends over such a short sub-interval of a few years vary greatly due to short-term natural variations, and one could get any result one likes by cherry-picking a suitable interval (as Pielke and Lomborg both have). The absurdity of this approach is seen by picking an even more recent trend, say starting in June 2007, which gives 5.3+/-2.2 mm/yr! Secondly, this short-term trend (1.6 +/- 0.9 mm/yr) is not even robust across data sets -– the French analysis shown above has a trend since the beginning of 2006 of 2.9 mm/year, very similar to the long-term trend. Third, the image Pielke links to shows the data without the inverted barometer correction –- the brief marked peak in late 2005, which makes the visual trend (always a poor choice of statistical methodology) almost flat since then, disappears when this effect is accounted for. This means the 2005 peak was simply due to air pressure fluctuations and has nothing to do with climatic ocean volume changes. The trend from 2006 in the data with the inverse barometer adjustment is 2.1 +/- 0.8 mm/yr.

2. Ocean heat content. The Synthesis Report states:

Current estimates indicate that ocean warming is about 50% greater than had been previously reported by the IPCC.

This is a conclusion of a revised analysis of ocean heat content data by Domingues et al., Nature 2008, and it applies to the period 1961-2003 also analysed in the IPCC report. Pielke claims this is “NOT TRUE” and counters with the claim: “There has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003.” But again this is not relevant to the point the Synthesis Report actually makes and again, Pielke is referring to a 5-year period which is too short to obtain statistically robust trends in the presence of short-term variability and data accuracy problems (the interannual variability for instance differs greatly between different ocean heat content data sets):

For good reasons, the Synthesis Report discusses a time span that is sufficiently long to allow meaningful comparisons. But in any case, the trend in from 2003 to 2008 in the Levitus data (the Domingues et al data does not extend past 2003), is still positive but with an uncertainty (both in the trend calculation and systematically) that makes it impossible to state whether there has been a significant change.

3. Arctic Sea Ice. The Synthesis Report states:

One of the most dramatic developments since the last IPCC Report is the rapid reduction in the area of Arctic sea ice in summer. In 2007, the minimum area covered decreased by about 2 million square kilometres as compared to previous years. In 2008, the decrease was almost as dramatic.

This decline is clearly faster than expected by models, as the following graph indicates.

Pielke’s claim that this is “NOT TRUE” is merely based on the statement that “since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.”

Yes, same thing again: Pielke’s argument is beside the point, since the Synthesis Report is explicitly talking about the summer sea ice minimum reached each September in the Arctic, and we don’t even know yet what its value will be for 2009. And Pielke is again referring to a time span (“since 2008”!) that is far too short to have much to do with climatic trends.

We thus have to conclude that there are no grounds whatsoever for Pielke’s wild allegations against us and implicitly the Synthesis Report authors. The final sentence of his post ironically speaks for itself:

Media and policymakers who blindly accept these claims are either naive or are deliberately slanting the science to promote their particular advocacy position.

Indeed.

Yes, Pielke actually wrote that the scientific observation that Arctic sea that is “progressing faster than was expected a few years ago” is NOT TRUE because of data “since 2008.”  What’s next, Dr. Pielke, we are going to to tell the public that the climate didn’t change since a week ago?

If a graduate student had tried this crap during a thesis defense, he would be denied his degree and thrown out of the Ph.D. program.

It simply boggles the mind to see someone who was once considered a serious climate scientist descend into this kind of desperate misinformation — which is all the sadder for him because it is here permanently in the blogosphere for everyone to seek, including, one hopes, the media.

If you didn’t know beforehand that this guy was Roger Pielke, Jr.’s father, it certainly wouldn’t come as a big surprise:

• Why do deniers like Pielke shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?
• Roger Pielke, Jr. baselessly smears the good name of hundreds of top U.S. scientists
• Pielke in Nature: “Clearly, since 1970 climate change … has shaped the disaster loss record.”
• Uber-denier Inhofe misquotes Hadley, gives big wet Valentine’s kiss to Pielke — go figure!
• Finally, Roger Pielke admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming or more

And again, let me end with the warning sign that should flash in every journalist’s mind when they read or hear a statement by anyone named “Roger Pielke”:

arxiv Find: The Local Density of Dark Matter | by Cosmic Variance | 2 July 2009, 07:55 PM

One of the big hopes of particle- and astro-physicists over the next few years is to experimentally pin down the nature of dark matter. In a perfect world, we’ll make the dark matter particle at the LHC, observe gamma rays produced when dark matter annihilates in the galaxy, and detect it directly in experiments here on Earth. The world isn’t always perfect, but sometimes it’s even better, so everyone is sitting on the edges of their seats waiting to hear what the experiments tell us.

For the direct-detection strategy here on Earth, we build giant detectors and wait for ambient dark-matter particles to interact with something in the detector. If the dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), that’s not so hard; the difficult part is distinguishing a purported signal from various backgrounds. To know what the signal should be, of course, we need to know how many dark matter particles are zipping through the laboratory. It should be a good number: roughly speaking, there would be about one weak-scale-sized dark matter particle per coffee-cup-volume in the universe, and in our galaxy these particles will typically be trucking along at around 300 kilometers per second.

Still, you’d like an accurate estimate of how much dark matter there is supposed to be in your detector. That’s what Riccardo Catena and Piero Ullio claim to have provided:

A novel determination of the local dark matter density
Authors: Riccardo Catena, Piero Ullio

Abstract: We present a novel study on the problem of constructing mass models for the Milky Way, concentrating on features regarding the dark matter halo component. We have considered a variegated sample of dynamical observables for the Galaxy, including several results which have appeared recently, and studied a 7- or 8-dimensional parameter space - defining the Galaxy model - by implementing a Bayesian approach to the parameter estimation based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. The main result of this analysis is a novel determination of the local dark matter halo density which, assuming spherical symmetry and either an Einasto or an NFW density profile is found to be around 0.39 GeV cm$^{-3}$ with a 1-$\sigma$ error bar of about 7%; more precisely we find a $\rho_{DM}(R_0) = 0.385 \pm 0.027 \rm GeV cm^{-3}$ for the Einasto profile and $\rho_{DM}(R_0) = 0.389 \pm 0.025 \rm GeV cm^{-3}$ for the NFW. This is in contrast to the standard assumption that $\rho_{DM}(R_0)$ is about 0.3 GeV cm$^{-3}$ with an uncertainty of a factor of 2 to 3. A very precise determination of the local halo density is very important for interpreting direct dark matter detection experiments. Indeed the results we produced, together with the recent accurate determination of the local circular velocity, should be very useful to considerably narrow astrophysical uncertainties on direct dark matter detection.

So they’re claiming the density is about .39 GeV per cubic centimeter (where one GeV is about the mass of the proton), whereas the standard figure is something closer to .30 GeV per cubic centimeter. More importantly, they claim to trust their estimate to a precision of about 7%, while the usual number is supposed to be uncertain by a factor of 2 or 3.

I’m not expert enough to judge whether they are right, but it would certainly be very impressive to pin down the density to such high precision. They do assume spherical symmetry, however, which I suspect is not a very good assumption. There are ongoing arguments about how lumpy the distribution of galactic dark matter really is, and I can easily imagine that lumpiness can distort the local density by much more than 7%. But work like this is going to be very important in interpreting the results, if (when?) we do directly detect the dark matter.

Electronic cigarettes | by Cambodia Calling | 2 July 2009, 08:36 PM

Hahahaha! Check out the electronic cigarette. It seems one Dr Murray Laugeson of Health New Zealand found the ecigarette "...very safe relative to cigarettes, and also safe in absolute terms on all measurements we have applied. Using micro-electronics it vaporizes, separately for each puff, very small quantities of nicotine dissolved in propylene glycol, two small well-known molecules with excellent safety profiles, – into a fine aerosol. Each puff contains one third to one half the nicotine in a tobacco cigarette’s puff. The cartridge liquid is tobacco-free and no combustion occurs."
Check out the cigarette pack which you can plug in to charge!
The site is convinced "electric cigarette technology is the future of smoking". It's better for you than real smoking in number of ways! It's safer because "each puff contains one third to one half the nicotine in a tobacco cigarette’s puff. The cartridge liquid is tobacco-free and no combustion occurs." Which means you won't burn your house down in case you fall asleep smoking!

Another ExxonMobil deceit: They are still funding climate science deniers despite public pledge | by Climate Progress | 2 July 2009, 06:05 PM

In its May 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report, ExxonMobil promised:

In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.

Bullshit.

Okay, you’re not shocked.  Still, it is worth publicizing their deceipt, as the UK’s Guardian did:

ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate denial groups, records show

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

…  Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.“

The oil giant’s full list of 2008 grantees is here.  They also gave money to such purveyors of misinformation on climate change policy as American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research and American Council on Science and Health and Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and National Black Chamber of Commerce, which recently released this doozy:

NBCC Study Finds Waxman-Markey Reduces GDP by $350 Billion

But apparently that utter nonsense doesn’t qualify as diverting attention from the important discussion of how to deal with climate change.

And the above is just a partial list of the “public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner” that ExxonMobil is still funding.  For the full list, just cross-reference the oil giant’s 2008 grantee list with the list of misinformers from ExxonSecrets.

Here are more details from the Guardian:

On its website, the NCPA says: “NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth’s current warming trend is [sic] still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce CO2 emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause.”

The Heritage Foundation published a “web memo” in December that said: “Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007″. Scientists, including those at the UK Met Office say that the apparent cooling is down to natural changes and does not alter the long-term warming trend.

And let’s not forget the Heritage Foundation pushes ‘completely untrue’ attack on clean-energy jobs with a panel bought and paid for by dirty energy.

If ExxonMobil wants to fund disinformation and anti-scientific deniers, no one can stop them.  But hopefully we can stop them from lying about it.

Related Posts:

• The New York Times sells its integrity to ExxonMobil with front-page ad that falsely asserts “Today’s car has 95% fewer emissions than a car from 1970.”
• Shame on the New York Times for running ExxonMobil’s greenwashing ad once again — they can’t plead ignorance this time, only greed
• NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled “Green is for Sissies.”

Royal Mail in a falling market | by Robert Peston (BBC business editor) | 2 July 2009, 05:39 PM

On 22 October last year, Gerry Sutcliffe, the sports minister, told MPs that the privatisation of the Tote - the horse race betting business - would be shelved for the foreseeable future. These were his reasons:

"In my Ministerial Written Statement on 21 July I said that, whilst the Government remained of the view that it should remove itself from detailed involvement in the affairs of the racing and bookmaking industries, the Government would need to be satisfied that it was right to proceed with a sale in the light of prevailing market conditions.
"After further work over the summer, I have now concluded that it is not appropriate to pursue a sale in these market conditions. I have therefore decided that the Tote should be retained in public ownership for the medium-term, and brought to the market when conditions are likely to deliver value for the tax payer and racing."

Sutcliffe seems to have read the market pretty well.

And market conditions have not yet improved sufficiently for the government to want to flog off the Tote - even though it's widely viewed as a highly attractive business.

Curiously, less than two months after the Tote disposal was shelved, and at a time when the economy was in freefall and credit was almost impossible to obtain, Peter Mandelson took a rather different view of the state of the marketplace.

He embarked on his auction of a sizeable stake in Royal Mail.

Which can only show, I think, that he rather likes making bets on 100-to-1 outsiders.

Perhaps he believed that a tentative offer from TNT, the Dutch post office, was more serious than it turned out to be. But even if he did somehow persuade himself that TNT was unlikely to walk away - which is what it has done - he surely can't have expected there to be any serious competitive tension in the auction.

It was fairly clear at the time that the going would get tougher for almost all possible bidders from the postal industry, such that their appetite for a substantial acquisition could well shrink to nothing.

That said, in view of CVC's sizeable investment in continental postal services, that private-equity firm was always likely to make an opportunistic bid. However CVC's partners did not become stupendously wealthy by overpaying for assets.

So a decent price could not possibly be extracted for the taxpayer if CVC ended up bidding against itself - which was the predictable outcome.

It's possible to say, and not just with the benefit of hindsight, that Peter Mandelson took quite a punt when pressing ahead with the partial privatisation of Royal Mail. And what he wagered - according to some of his colleagues - was the unity of his party at a time when political conditions were as fraught and unstable as market conditions.

Doubtless, now that he's shelved the sale, they'll carry him shoulder high as a hero once more.

Age discrimination | by Only In It For The Gold | 2 July 2009, 05:21 PM

I find it interesting that age discrimination is frowned upon in most situations but celebrated in science. It's a bit demoralizing now that I am on the losing side of the proposition, but I can see both sides of the argument. 

Self-publish and be damned… or not? | by Futurismic | 2 July 2009, 04:23 PM

There’s lots of discussion going on about self-publishing for authors at the moment. Over at Apex Online, Maurice Broaddus talks about why he’s resisted the temptations of self-publication:

I know the temptation of going the self-publishing route. I have a novel that I’ve shopped around, but have been rejected. I believe in the book, I want to see it in print, but I won’t self-publish it. The rejections have taught me that the book isn’t ready. Self-publishing would mean that I would have a bad (at worse) or prematurely released (at best) novel on my resume.

[...]

Self-publishing if fine if you’re a hobbyist and just want to see your name in print. It’s fine if you have a small niche you wish to reach. It’s also fine if you have a guaranteed audience that you can get product to. I know a few writers with dedicated fan bases for whom it made perfect sense to self-publish a project. It’s your career choice. Do your research.

The prevailing wisdom is that self-publication is a mistake for an aspiring author, though attitudes are relaxing in some quarters as times change. Here’s Jeff VanderMeer laying out the situations in which he thinks it can be beneficial:

I self-published my first fiction collection, The Book of Frog, and also The Surgeon’s Tale & Other Tales (with Cat Rambo)–the context for each consistent with my views on self-publishing as it exists today. If you can’t get traction in the publishing world with a first collection despite having had stories in good publications, I think it’s okay to self-publish. If you’ve got books out from major publishers and you want to do a less commercial project, I think it’s okay to self-publish. That said, within five to ten years, self-publishing in general will probably lose its stigma altogether and we’ll have a situation closer to what you find in indie music.

Self-publishing’s image is tarnished primarily because it gets used as a short-cut to publication for writers who – to be nice about it – simply aren’t yet up to writing a decent book. The obvious defence to that accusation is that not all unpublished writers are bad writers, and that’s certainly true… but I know from my editing work that the overwhelming majority certainly are.

So, as Jeff points out, things will be come much like the indie music circuit: the barriers to participation and distribution will be much lower, but it’ll be no easier to sell your work to people if you’re just not writing what people want to read (or writing it very well). Perhaps that will raise the profile of reliable reviewers and critics? A medium operating under the economics of abundance has a greater need for aggregators and gatekeepers to filter the infinity of choices, after all.

Any of you lot read any good self-published books that don’t deserve the stigma? And are there any self-published authors who’d like to share their experiences?

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

Related posts

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Energy and Global Warming News for July 2nd: Dump the “Saudi Arabia of solar” meme; Environmental toll of plastics | by Climate Progress | 2 July 2009, 03:49 PM

Contest: Replace the ‘Saudi Arabia’ Trope!

On Monday, as I was listening to a news call with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary, Mr. Reid spoke some proud words:

Nevada, he said, is the “Saudi Arabia of solar energy.”

But is it? Indeed, with all due respect to Mr. Reid, claims for “the Saudi Arabia of solar energy” have already been made on behalf of Australia and Africa.

Forbes recently suggested that Saudi Arabia was the Saudi Arabia of solar power….

But given that the planet’s oil supplies, including those in Saudi Arabia, are finite by their very nature, it might well be time to find a new metaphor — particularly when referring to renewable energy sources.

After all, Matthew Simmons, the author of “Twilight in the Desert” (2005), has argued that Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are peaking, and could decrease far faster than Saudi officials say.

The environmental toll of plastics

From cell phones and computers to bicycle helmets and hospital IV bags, plastic has molded society in many ways that make life both easier and safer. But the synthetic material also has left harmful imprints on the environment and perhaps human health, according to a new compilation of articles authored by scientists from around the world.

More than 60 scientists contributed to the new report, which aims to present the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health, and offer possible solutions.

“One of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet is the accumulation and fragmentation of plastics,” wrote David Barnes, a lead author and researcher for the British Antarctic Survey. The report was published this month in a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B, a scientific journal….

“Plastics are very long-lived products that could potentially have service over decades, and yet our main use of these lightweight, inexpensive materials are as single-use items that will go to the garbage dump within a year, where they’ll persist for centuries,” Richard Thompson, lead editor of the report, said in an interview.

Evidence is mounting that the chemical building blocks that make plastics so versatile are the same components that might harm people and the environment. And its production and disposal contribute to an array of environmental problems, too. For example:

• Chemicals added to plastics are absorbed by human bodies. Some of these compounds have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.
• Plastic debris, laced with chemicals and often ingested by marine animals, can injure or poison wildlife.
• Floating plastic waste, which can survive for thousands of years in water, serves as mini transportation devices for invasive species, disrupting habitats.
• Plastic buried deep in landfills can leach harmful chemicals that spread into groundwater.
• Around 4 percent of world oil production is used as a feedstock to make plastics, and a similar amount is consumed as energy in the process.

People are exposed to chemicals from plastic multiple times per day through the air, dust, water, food and use of consumer products.

For example, phthalates are used as plasticizers in the manufacture of vinyl flooring and wall coverings, food packaging and medical devices. Eight out of every ten babies, and nearly all adults, have measurable levels of phthalates in their bodies.

In addition, bisphenol A (BPA), found in polycarbonate bottles and the linings of food and beverage cans, can leach into food and drinks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 93 percent of people had detectable levels of BPA in their urine.

The report noted that the high exposure of premature infants in neonatal intensive care units to both BPA and phthalates is of “great concern”….

“We have animal literature, which shows direct links between exposure and adverse health outcomes, the limited human studies, and the fact that 90 to 100 percent of the population has measurable levels of these compounds in their bodies,” said John Meeker, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a lead author. “You take the whole picture and it does raise concerns, but more research is needed.”

Shanna Swan, director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Reproductive Epidemiology, conducted studies that found an association between pregnant women’s exposure to phthalates and altered genital development in their baby boys.

Also, people with the highest exposure to BPA have an increased rate of heart disease and diabetes, according to one recent study. Animal tests studies of PBDEs have revealed the potential for damaging the developing brain and the reproductive system.

First Biodiesel Pipeline Starts Operations

A commercial shipment of biodiesel has moved through a pipeline in the United States for the first time, according to Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, a pipeline company.

A 5 percent biodiesel blend moved from Mississippi to Georgia, and also from Mississippi to Virginia, via the Plantation Pipe Line Company, which is owned jointly by Kinder Morgan with a 51 percent stake, and Exxon Mobil with 49 percent. Last December, Kinder Morgan announced that the nation’s first ethanol pipeline had begun service.

An insurance plan for climate change victims

As western governments dither at the negotiating table over how to help the world’s poorest people cope with climate change, some unlikely saviours have stepped up to the plate: the giants of the global insurance industry.

As well as providing protection from the increasingly unpredictable weather, the premiums could also be a powerful way to get poor people to adapt to climate change by encouraging them to invest in measures like drought-resistant crops. Is this profit-driven endeavour too good to be true?

U.S. joins International Renewable Energy Agency

The United States joined 136 other countries this week as members of the new International Renewable Energy Agency.

Committing to IRENA’s goals of promoting a rapid transition toward the widespread and sustainable use of renewable energy on a global scale is another step in the State Department’s commitment “to make climate change and clean energy priorities of our foreign policy agency,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

“IRENA will help ensure that global resources are put to maximum effect, especially in response to the needs of the developing world,” Clinton said.

US cuts Indonesian debt for forest protection

Indonesia committed to the conservation of its dwindling tropical forests in a multimillion dollar debt-swap deal signed Tuesday with the American government, the U.S. Embassy said.

Jakarta’s payments to Washington will be reduced by $30 million over the next eight years under the U.S. Tropical Forest Conservation Act, the embassy said in a statement.

The Indonesian government will donate the money it saves to the charities Conservation International and the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation, which will deposit the money into a local forest conservation fund.

Detroit Electric Discusses Asian Ambitions

Last week, the Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor Corporation and Detroit Electric Holdings — keeper of the Detroit Electric brand, a decades-old, long-defunct electric vehicle label that was recently ressurected as a Netherlands-based, largely Asian-financed maker of electric drive train technology — announced plans to jointly research, develop, market and sell fully electric vehicles in China.

The partnership follows on the heels of Detroit Electric’s $331 million assembly agreement with Proton Holdings, a Malaysia-based automotive manufacturing company, signed at the end of March. It will allow Detroit Electric to expand its international sales, and the company says it aims to sell 45,000 vehicles across Europe, the United States and Asia by next year. It says it will increase that to 270,000 by 2012.

Plants Save The Earth From An Icy Doom

When glaciers advanced over much of the Earth’s surface during the last ice age, what kept the planet from freezing over entirely? This has been a puzzle to climate scientists because leading models have indicated that over the past 24 million years geological conditions should have caused carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to plummet, possibly leading to runaway “icehouse” conditions.

Now researchers writing in the July 2, 2009, Nature report on the missing piece of the puzzle – plants.

“Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have been remarkably stable over the last 20 or 25 million years despite other changes in the environment,” says co-author Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. “We can look to land plants as the primary buffering agent that’s held CO₂ in such a narrow range during this time.”

Plants’ Internal Clock Can Improve Climate Change Models

The ability of plants to tell the time, a mechanism common to all living beings, enables them to survive, grow and reproduce. An international team has studied this circadian clock from a molecular viewpoint and has found an ecological implication: it makes climate change scenarios and CO₂ level figures more accurate.

Group: World failing to halt biodiversity decline

Governments are failing to stem a rapid decline in biodiversity that is now threatening extinction for almost half the world’s coral reef species, a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals, a leading environmental group warned Thursday.

“Life on Earth is under serious threat,” the International Union for Conservation of Nature said in a 155-page report that describes the past five years of a losing battle to protect species, natural habitats and geographical regions from the devastating effects of man.

Drax protesters ‘not criminals’

Environmental protesters who ambushed a coal train as it approached a power station have told a jury they believe they are not criminals.

Twenty-two people on trial at Leeds Crown Court deny obstructing a train carrying coal to Drax in Selby, North Yorkshire, in June 2008.

Louise Hemmerman, 31, of Hartley Avenue, Leeds, said she felt her home city was under threat from pollution.

Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg and 30g/km CO2 | by Green Futures | 2 July 2009, 03:42 PM

‘Open source’, locally manufactured fuel cell car designed for sharing 

With politicians and carmakers waxing lyrical about electric vehicles, the squat hydrogen fuel cell car with a top speed of 50mph introduced by start-up Riversimple in June is definitely bucking prevailing trends.

But what the Urban lacks in pzazz, it makes up in green credentials. Thanks to its super-light carbon composite body (just 350kg), fuel efficiency reaches an impressive 300mpg. It gives off no exhaust pipe emissions, and, says Riversimple, it’s also a ‘lower carbon’ car than the all-electric G-Wiz. The carbon emissions resulting from generating the electricity used to produce its hydrogen fuel work out, per kilometre, as half as much as those emitted in producing the power for the G-Wiz (30g/km as opposed to over 60g/km).

Riversimple’s lead engineer, former racing car driver Hugo Spowers, describes it as a first attempt at a “sustainable car” in the widest sense. That’s why Urban’s whole design and manufacturing process looks very different to your average car.

Firstly, it’s ‘open source’, which means design blueprints will be freely available for others to improve on. Secondly, the Urban won’t be sold outright, but leased to car sharing companies, local councils and individuals. ‘Sharing’ features, such as card-key door locks, are central to the design. And Spowers hopes to add a swappable dashboard so that different drivers can customise the same car with their own settings and driving stats. He reckons each car will have a 16-year life span, four times the average ‘leasing expectancy’.

Manufacturing will also be local and fairly small-scale. If Spowers is successful in finding the next $32 million in investment, he hopes to establish a site producing around 5,000 cars a year – possibly in Oxford.

Why hydrogen, you might ask. The fuel is not yet produced on a large scale without electricity from fossil fuels, nor is there existing infrastructure. “Hydrogen, in my opinion, is a massively better option [than electric batteries] for a city car,” responds Spowers. He explains that the Urban is not a fuel cell car in the same way as Honda’s Clarity FCX, which replaces a powerful internal combustion engine with a large (and expensive) fuel cell. Instead, it uses a small, 6kW fuel cell – perfectly adequate for the modest flow of power to the four wheelbased electric motors – and a bank of ultracapacitors, charged by a combination of the fuel cell and regenerative braking, to deliver brief bursts of high power for acceleration.

Spowers said Urban’s efficiency and range (200 miles compared with G-Wiz’s 75) mean drivers need refuel only once a week – so one hydrogen station could service scores of cars.

But will drivers be interested in sharing cars? Spowers thinks the idea of individually owned vehicles may be on its way out, especially if fun-to-drive cars like Urban can provide better city mobility. “We’re definitely taking the long view on this one,” he says. – April Streeter

Talk is cheap | by Forum for the Future | 2 July 2009, 02:38 PM

Talk is cheap

In the beginning was the word, and it was chattered from the treetops, chanted in the darkness of smoky caves, sung across the plains and dripped poisonously into ears. It was a stentorian bark across the battlefield, a sensual whisper in the moonlight, and a gasp of new life . . .

And then Mr Watson was summoned for his chat, and everything changed. It’s not that all those things above no longer happened, it’s rather that with the coming of the telephone they happened more, plus louder, faster and, crucially, further than ever before.

Words and communication are what our society is built upon and, generally, the better you are at communicating, the more successful you are. Equally, this human need to talk continues to drive innovation, generating huge sums of money or prestige for those who find ways to make it cheaper, better, and more convenient.

It’s little wonder, therefore, that the mobile phone has rapidly gone from being a heavy ostentatious symbol of decadence for people with sports cars, into the third essential item that no-one leaves home without – Keys? Wallet? Phone? (and even that hierarchy is being eroded).

And the service providers have been there guiding and nurturing us throughout. They let us throw our voices down their networks, and have introduced us to new ways of communicating by text and picture (transforming the ways we think, and our language in the process).

But, as lovely as they are, none of this has happened for free (especially over really long distances), and since the word is too powerful to be constrained by the barrier of cost, it’s inevitable that it should have eventually found a cheaper outlet – currently the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Skype was the first to take the VoIP concept and turn it into something truly useful and usable. It is now used by millions of users around the world to speak (and videoconference) easily and cheaply via the internet.

This trend is set to continue with Google Voice which allows users to link their many work/home/personal numbers together under one Goole Voice number, and do all manner of ‘cool things’ with it (like seamless switching of calls mid-conversation, for example from landline to mobile so you can take your office conversation out to lunch, or from one mobile to another if the first battery is about to die). Most worryingly for the networks, however, is that calls to and from the Google Voice number are also likely to be free.

So, given that service providers are frequently little more than data pipes for transporting the word, and given that we're seeing the rapid development of virtually free pipes (soon to be made more ubiquitous in the UK with the government's aspirations of broadband for all, funded by the new tax), what role is there left for them?

3 has been the first to respond to the VoIP threat by embracing it. After all, “if you can't beat 'em . . .” It is currently the only network to offer free Skype calls from its handsets, meaning customers can use their phones without paying 3 anything at all (even on pay-as-you-go phones for which you theoretically never need to buy a top-up). Others, like O2, are transforming themselves into a lifestyle choice and offering services beyond basic communications – witness its drive to create the O2 experience (spearheaded by the O2 arena), and the launch of the new family organiser, the joggler.

Interesting news from Vodafone and T-mobile, on the other hand, is that they are looking at femtocells – home wireless points that connect a user’s mobile phone with their broadband network. These not only provide the homeowner with flawless mobile connectivity at home (without the need for the network to provide costly main masts), but their integration with home broadband must surely mean that a VoIP offering is also on the way.

So what next? The word will out, by whatever means necessary, and whilst it’s too simple to say that they need to diversify or die, the networks do need to innovate and become more responsive to the needs of their users (something which, historically, hasn’t always unduly troubled them).

One thing is clear, as time goes on, speech really will be freer than ever before.

My tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap 2 | by Cambodia Calling | 2 July 2009, 03:24 PM

I've written about Phern, my tuktuk driver here in Siem Reap. He is 54 and speaks very little English. I mentioned in my previous post that is the reason why I use his tuk tuk. It is almost impossible for him to compete with the younger tuk tuk drivers who speak English. They are the ones who get the tourists and the big tips.

Whenever friends visit, I always suggest they help him out, because he is a sweet old man and is very honest. Recently he told me because of the low season he gets sometimes only 2000 riels (50 cents) a day. Phern has 4 children so it is hard for him. I try to help him out by giving him odd jobs. More recently, I asked his wife to try making necklaces out of recycled paper which I can buy to sell in the Bloom shop.

Anyway I visited Phern and his family recently. This is his home, a single room for which he pays 50,000 riels (USD12.50) a month. His place is only one room, with one door, not the whole building. It is the one with the table and the plastic chairs, which Phern's wife (pictured) took out for me, my aunt and her friend. I had bought them different varieties of fruit and they insisted we have some (of course we felt shy). Cambodians are very hospitable. Even if they have nothing in the house, you can be sure they will offer you at least water.

You can see in the second photo his home consists of 2 beds, one for the parents and the other for the 4 kids. He has a gas stove which is kept on the bed during the day as the wife prepares the day's meals. At night it is put on the floor to make space on the bed. The red bucket on the bed contains drinking water. Underneath the bed in a basket are plates and bowls and cooking utensils. Clothes are put in baskets (behind Phern's wife in the photo).

The house is unbearably hot during the day because of the zinc roof, so the family usually sits outside the door. The shared toilet, the one made out of bricks, is used by three families, so 10-12 people. Phern is showing my aunt the chicken coop in the next photo.

My aunt and her friend were quite affected by the visit. They were dismayed at the living conditions. I explained that as far as Cambodians go, Phern is actually ok. He has a concrete house, which means the family is protected from the monsoon rains. They also have mosquito nets and access to a toilet and running water. It is hard for Singaporeans to imagine anything worse. My aunt says even in the 50s in Singapore, people were not so badly off.

The last one photo shows firewood. In case you think it is shared--it is not. The wood all belongs to the landlord, who sits on a huge wooden double storeyed house in the same compound. I wanted to take a photo of his house, but his wife who was sitting under the house (it is raised on stilts) was eyeing me suspiciously.

Tom Friedman: Obama “is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill….” | by Climate Progress | 2 July 2009, 02:06 PM

“… If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.“

If Obama wants the Senate to pass Waxman-Markey — preferably strengthened — then he needs to put the same effort into it that he has begun for health care.  And you, the informed public, must get more involved.

The NYT reported lasted month, “Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care“:

After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Terrific.  Awesome.  About time.  That, however, is also what passing strong climate and clean energy legislation will take, as I’ve said many times.  Tom Friedman argues in “Just Do It,” his recent column on House passing Waxman-Markey (despite its many flaws):

Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

… if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.

And he makes the central point that it will take a very hands-on Obama:

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.

I believe Obama does understand that he will be tarnished forever if this bill goes down.

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues:  global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so.

How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent Dust Bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply.  This will require an unbroken — and indeed escalating — response by our political leadership throughout this century.

But so far we have only had “half an Obama” on this.  Yes, he’s been pushing for the bill with Members mostly behind the scenes, sending his senior staff to do serious lobbying and arm twisting.  He’s been giving great second-tier speeches — no prime time address yet — and focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on the clean energy message.  Yes, he does talk about climate impacts, but he walked away from the biggest chance he had to elevate that issue to national prominence, when he didn’t join Holdren and Lubchenco for the rollout of the landmark 13-agency report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (see Lubchenco says, “This report is a game changer,” Holdren says it’s time to act “after many years of dithering and delay,” plus a new website with full report, summaries, charts, AND a slideshow).

What was the result of the Obama no-show?

As Tom Laskaway, a media and technology professional who blogs at Grist and elsewhere put it:

… a good chunk of congressmen and women are fundamentally unserious about addressing climate change.

And why shouldn’t they be? A good chunk of the media, of Americans, of everybody really (perhaps excepting Pacific Islanders) is fundamentally unserious about it. The Obama adminstration released a horrifying new climate change report yesterday and it had the impact on the newscycle of a wet noodle. Obama’s science team all but announced the world as we know it was scheduled to end by 2090. Shrug. The tree fell. Nobody heard it. Moving on.

The “wet noodle” comment made the Swift-boat smearer’s day at ClimateDepotted, but it isn’t an indictment of the report, as the deniers would have you believe.  Quite the reverse, it is an indictment of the success of the deniers in spreading their disinformation, in convincing the media that this is a political story and not a scientific story, and in persuading progressives, including Obama’s senior advisers like David Axelrod, to to soft-pedal climate science.  Hence, no Obama at what is probably the single most important climate science report the administration is going to release — certainly it is the most important report it will release before Congress makes its final votes on the climate legislation that will determine whether Obama and Axelrod are viewed historically as successes or utter failures.

Yes, some environmentalists and progressives think they have polling to support this “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the subject of climate science. They are dead wrong both tactically and strategically.  Pollster Mark Mellman makes the best case for why they are wrong tactically — see Mark Mellman must read on climate messaging: “A strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action” — ecoAmerica “could hardly be more wrong.”

Also this is a dynamic messaging environment, so if our side downplays climate impacts, it essentially gives the deniers free reign to shape half of the debate, which they do with a vengeance, indeed with a disdain for both science and scientists — see “Why do deniers like Pielke shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?”

“In short, a strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action,” as Mellman writes.

This leads to the key strategic point.  Most of the public gets this — and in particular they understand things are going to get much worse on our current emissions path.  That’s why it is so crucial we keep messaging on climate science and impacts, and keep warning people about what is to come.

It is always the best political strategy to tell the truth.  It is especially important in the rare cases where that truth will become increasingly self-evident to the public.

And speaking of the public, Friedman ends his piece with this admonishment to all of us:

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

Hear!  Hear!

Sex and the Cambodian artiste/artist | by Cambodia Calling | 2 July 2009, 02:17 PM

From romony.blogspot.com, a Cambodian blogger living in Japan who is a follower of this blog. I just checked out her site, which I found interesting for its pan-Asian coverage. Among other things, Romony writes about entertainers in Korea, Taiwan as well as Cambodia. Here is one, with a youtube video of Cambodian singers "playing behind the stage" with a sex toy.

Says Romony in her post:

I remember these people; popular or not, they were Cambodian singers I used to see on the stage. They used to step on to the stage from the room behind and greet audiences with their gentle words and gesture traditionally (matching their acts to Cambodian culture). However, the video footage below shows their hidden faces and acts - things that are still unacceptable to Cambodian society (at least to the conservative Cambodians)....Many people in Cambodia are now playing more with camera embedded within their hand-phones, thanks to what is termed technological diffusion. When camera-ing something like their own naked body or own sex scene, however, these people totally forget or never think of the consequences, particularly in the age that internet is far beyond our control.

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Georgia: Managed democracy criticized | by Global Voices (Georgia) | 2 July 2009, 12:56 PM

Social Science in the Caucasus sums up a recent talk given in Tbilisi about the state of democracy in Georgia. The blog says that democratization pushed from outside has exacerbated polarization and conflict in local politics.

iPhone: Khmer unicode, water proof and porn | by Cambodia Calling | 2 July 2009, 01:34 PM

In February, channelasian asked on discussions.apple.com when the iPhone will support Khmer unicode. This led to a back and forth with another user who insisted to: "You bought a hacked phone. There are no authorized resellers of the iPhone in Cambodia at this time which is also why you don't have language support." [You can get officially unlocked iPhones in Cambodia, imported from Singapore.]

Another user weighed in: "You can keep track of where the iPhone is available here. Cambodia is not yet anywhere on the list. As for Khmer, this script is not yet included by Apple in the full version of OS X, so I think support on the iPhone is quite a long way off. But tell Apple you want it apple.com/feedback/iphone."

But all is not lost, channelasian noted "now there's someone can build khmer font and keyboard for iphone, but he sell too expensive. it's not the real version from apple."

Cool. Where there's a will, there's a way.

I found this youtube video where a man using his iPhone 3G S accidentally dropped it into a pool--"Wait, it still freaking works!"


Chanroeun (currently doing his PhD in Australia's ANU), who also left a comment on my earlier post, reviews the phone here: "unbelieveable latest iPhone 3G S".

A poster to the video says this is what to do if any phone, including your crummy non-iPhone falls into water:

"Take it out of the water as quickly as possible, do not press any burrons, turn it off, or any of that - get some uncooked rice and a ziploc bag, fill the ziploc up half way with the uncooked rice, place your phone inside the bag, fill the rest of the bag with rice. This will suck the moisture out of your phone overnight and has worked for everyone I know who has tried it."

Finally, there was a chance Cambodia would not be able to enjoy the iPhone. Anyone remembers Prime Minster Hun Sen's ban on 3G networks in 2006, a few months after operators started offering the service? All because his wife received porn on her phone. It made international news:

According to Reuters, Hun Sen announced the clampdown today to an assembly of Buddhist monks in Phnom Penh, with: "I have written to the Minister of Telecommunications to delay the use of certain mobile phones. We can wait 10 more years until we have managed to improve morality in society."

New Blog Search tools: Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts | by Official Google Blog | 2 July 2009, 01:29 PM

Ever since the new Google Blog Search homepage launched, we've been fielding requests for a myriad of different features. Today we're happy to announce the launch of our most requested feature: RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under "Subscribe" in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader.

If you don't use a feed reader, we're also offering an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.

With these new ways to read Blog Search stories, you might think our homepage was going unloved, but not to worry. We've also added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.

Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it's an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web. Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them.


There's a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster.

Posted by Akshay Patil, Software Engineer, & Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11 | by Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog | 2 July 2009, 12:22 PM

Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11 has just been sent out:

Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11

Welcome to the eleventh Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter!

Contents:

• The OKF turns five and we need your support!
• Open Database License (ODbL) goes 1.0
• European Open Data Inventory + Summit
• Launch of the Open Data Grid
• New developments on Public Domain Works
• Other news in brief
• Thanks to our volunteers!
• Support the Open Knowledge Foundation
• Further information

THE OKF TURNS FIVE - AND WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!

This month the Open Knowledge Foundation is five years old. Over those last five years we’ve done much to promote open access to information — from sonnets to stats, genes to geodata — not only in the form of specific projects like Open Shakespeare and Public Domain Works but also in the creation of tools such as KnowledgeForge and the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, standards such as the Open Knowledge Definition, and events such as OKCon, designed to benefit the wider open knowledge community. (To find out more about what we’ve been up to in the last year, you can read our latest annual report [1]).

While we have achieved a lot, we believe we can do much, much more. We are therefore reaching out to our community and asking you to help us take our vision further.

Our aim: at least a 100 supporters committed to making regular, ongoing donations of £5 (EUR 6, $7.50) or more a month.

These funds will be essential in expanding and sustaining our work by allowing us to invest in infrastructure and employ modest central support. To pledge yourself as one of those supporters all you need to do is take 30 seconds to sign up to our “100 supporters” pledge at:

• http://www.pledgebank.org/support-okfn/

We will always be a not-for-profit organization, built on the work of passionate volunteers. But with these additional funds, we believe we can make our efforts go much, much further. Please consider becoming a supporter and help us take our work forward.

• The OKF Turns 5 - And We Need Your Support
• [1] Open Knowledge Foundation Annual Report 2008-2009

OPEN DATABASE LICENSE (ODbL) GOES 1.0

Open Data Commons, an OKF affiliated project, has now released v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) after 6 months of consultation. The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open share-alike license for data and databases.

This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data as there are few license currently available which are appropriate to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data).

This work has been led by an OKF Board Member, Jordan Hatcher, and has benefited over the last 6 months of consultation from extensive comments and feedback from the open data community, especially those in the Open Street Map project.

• Open Database License (ODbL)
• Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Released

EUROPEAN OPEN DATA INVENTORY + SUMMIT

The First European Open Data Summit in Brussels brought together journalists, researchers, civic hackers, and representatives from European institutions for two days of documenting and building on documents and datasets from European institutions and member states. Work from the event received coverage from the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times.

We presented our work on the European Open Data Inventory, which includes just under 150 packages. You can see these under the ‘eutransparency’ tag on CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/tag/read/eutransparency

For each package we looked for legal information and whether or not items could be downloaded in bulk - providing direct download links where possible. Data includes everything from budget information to statistics to postcode databases.

• European Open Data Summit

LAUNCH OF THE OPEN DATA GRID

We started a distributed storage project, aiming to provide distributed storage infrastructure for OKF and other open knowledge projects. After researching various technical options, we’ve launched an Open Data Grid based on Allmydata’s open-source “Tahoe” system. Anyone can store open data on the grid, or start running a storage node.

• Open Data Grid
• Launch of Open Data Grid

NEW DEVELOPMENTS ON PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS!

We have now completed a major load of data into the Public Domain Works database. There are now 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database. The data we have there comes primarily from two sources: people and book data from Philip Harper’s NGCOBA and recordings data from the online discographies provided by KCL’s CHARM project.

We also have a load more sound recordings data (~ 600k items) almost ready to go courtesy of Edward Betts and the Open Library. (And we are yet to even get started on the BBC GRAMS data …).

Also work on the public domain calculators is still ticking over. Gisle Hannemyr recently put together a first draft of a copyright flowchart for Norway.

• Public Domain Works
• New developments on Public Domain Works!

OTHER NEWS IN BRIEF

• Talis launches ‘Connected Commons’ for open data at OKCon 2009
• 5th Communia Workshop: Post-Event Information + Statement
• CKAN 0.8 Released
• Cornell University Library keeps reproductions of public domain works in the public domain
• Virtual Meeting for Open Textbooks
• Data.gov goes live!
• Flickr put shapefiles in the public domain
• Virtual meeting for Working Group on Open Data in Science
• New mailing list for open knowledge in development
• Two new board members: James Casbon and Paula Le Dieu!
• KForge v0.16 Released
• French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
• New developments on ‘Where Does My Money Go?’

THANKS TO OKF VOLUNTEERS!

As usual, a big thank you to our volunteers and to our extended virtual community for all of their valuable input!

SUPPORT THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION

A donation to the Open Knowledge Foundation would greatly help us with our overhead costs, including hosting (currently around £1000/year) and project development. To find out more about supporting our work, please visit:

• http://www.okfn.org/support

FURTHER INFORMATION

If you would like to know more about what we are up to, please take a look at our active projects page.

• http://www.okfn.org/projects/

If you are interested in participating in any of the OKF’s projects, please see our participate page, or join the OKF discuss list.

• http://www.okfn.org/participate/
• http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

For further news and comments, see our blog:

• http://blog.okfn.org

You can follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter at:

• http://identi.ca/okfn
• http://twitter.com/okfn

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization. It is incorporated in the United Kingdom as a company limited by guarantee with company number 5133759. The registered office is 37 Panton Street, Cambridge, CB2 1HL, UK.

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The bankruptcy auction that wasn’t | by Futurismic | 2 July 2009, 12:01 PM

Here’s an interesting art installation that involves some science fictional thinking. Toys by Tomasso Lanza features digital renderings of assets to be sold at auction following the bankruptcy filing of a fictional Enron-like corporation. we make money not art explains:

The quick collapse of the company led to a fire-sale of most of ENT’s assets. In the months following the Chapter 11 filing, the liquidation team split the enormous sale across a number of auction dealers. Lanza created a photographic essay of some of the items surfaced by the bankruptcy auction, some of them perfectly mundane (executive chairs, workstations, gold balls and clubs, luxury cars, a range of sat nav, etc.), others fictitious. They are listed in the catalogue of an auction that dealt with low to mid-valued items and leftovers from previous auctions; despite the low-key of the sale, the dealers got their hands on a few items which were sold at much higher prices than originally expected thanks to their unique nature.

The fictitious items are straight out of a near-future/present day satire of corporate secrecy and hubris.

This lot consists of an off-the-shelf viewfinder, plugged into some sort of digital tuning device with the words FTSE, DAX, HSI, DSM200, PHLX/KBW, MIBTEL, NIKKEI, NYSE, NASDAQ etched on. There is no documentation provided, although it is believed that these devices were secretly owned by a small number of executives and used for monitoring stocks and other financial products too sensitive to be displayed on-screen or retrieved on the company’s computers.

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The Case of the Missing Journalists | by Media Standards Trust | 2 July 2009, 12:52 PM

What’s the similarity between these 7 Telegraph sports journalists?Oliver Clive (44 articles since November 2007, most recent on 30th June)Austin Peters (109 articles since October 2007, most recent on 18th May)Charles Carrick (169 articles since October 2007, most recent on 1st July)Matthew Hannah (14 articles since September 2008, most recent on 30th June)William Gray (180 articles since

Caribbean: On the Honduran Coup | by Global Voices (Cuba) | 2 July 2009, 11:42 AM

Writing at Havana Times, Guillermo Fernandez Ampie examines the Honduran coup d’état, while Repeating Islands reports that “heads of state throughout the Caribbean region have expresses their condemnation of the military coup in Honduras that has removed President Manuel Zelaya from office.”

India: High Court Rule Legalizes Homosexuality | by Global Voices (India) | 2 July 2009, 10:31 AM

Sanjukta Basu at Desicritics informs that today morning the Delhi High Court legalized homosexuality in India in a ruling in favor of a petition, which challenged the constitutionality of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code. The code criminalizes all acts of oral and anal sex between individuals irrespective of age and consent.

Increase profits by working less | by Sigurd Rinde | 2 July 2009, 10:25 AM

Solar farm to transform Welsh city's skyline | by Green Futures | 2 July 2009, 10:05 AM

Newport council outshines UK Government on solar power
Swimming pools, sports centres and schools are being eyed up as sites for a new ‘solar farm’. The Welsh city of Newport plans to pitch large-scale photovoltaic arrays on all public buildings, after a report found “great potential” on the rooftops. One sure target is the Velodrome, which will use power on-site from its 8,500-square-metre roof, while installations on other civic rooftops would feed sunshine back into the grid.
 
The plan, outlined in Newport Council’s Sustainable Development Proposal, takes its lead from the Moorland Park Community Centre, which won a 50% grant from the Low Carbon Building Programme to install a 2.75kWp system with 14 modules. The array was completed in June last year.
 
The initial report estimates that each 200W panel will generate 750kWh a year, to be sold back to the contracted supplier (currently EDF) at 10p a unit, generating £75 per year. This would pay back the cost of installation in less than 15 years, and then generate profit over the remaining ten years of the panel’s life.
 
Newport’s solar skyline is clearly ahead of the game, with the UK warranting only a D grade in a nation-by-nation report on PV progress. The report, by Green Cross International, found “no significant support for solar growth” in the UK – while France, Spain and the US all walked away with Cs, and no others matched A-grade Germany.
 
Germany currently has the highest capacity in Europe at over 5,000MWp, but Spain is catching up quickly with the fastest rate of improved capacity, according to the EurObservER barometer. The sunny kingdom added 2,600MWp to its PV total last year thanks to a feed-in tariff that proved profitable for large-scale plants. – Anna Simpson

Friendfeed for lawyers | by Binary Law | 2 July 2009, 10:02 AM

Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed. So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great post [...]

Obama drives up fuel efficiency on cars | by Green Futures | 2 July 2009, 09:48 AM

Robust new mileage standards for US auto industryFlanked by two unlikely allies – California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson – President Obama has announced groundbreaking vehicle standards that will further cement the greening of the US car industry.
 
By regulating both miles per gallon and exhaust pollution, the new uniform federal standard links curbs on greenhouse gas emissions with fuel economy standards for the first time in US history.

Covering vehicle model years 2012 to 2016, the legislation will require car makers to achieve an average fuel economy for their fleets of 35.5mpg in 2016 (with 39mpg specified for cars and 30mpg for light trucks). It will replace the current CAFE – Corporate Average Fuel Economy – standard of 27.5mpg for cars and 24mpg for light trucks. According to White House calculations, the four-year programme should result in a saving of about 1.8 billion barrels in oil consumption, and a total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 900 million tonnes – the equivalent to taking 3.7 million cars off the road.

The new single standard will replace existing federal and state laws governing both fuel standards and greenhouse gas emissions. Initiating a national vehicle emissions standard also brings to a close the increasingly bitter battle between California and the US vehicle industry over the state’s efforts to impose its own legally binding greenhouse-gas emissions standard. Seventeen other states had said they would follow California’s lead if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted its request for a waiver enabling the state government to act unilaterally. While the EPA has not yet ruled on the waiver request, Obama’s national approach supersedes their decision.

The new standard may be modest in comparison with Europe, but it represents a huge step forward in the US, where motor manufacturers and their lobbyists have successfully squashed previous efforts at improving mileage requirements.

At the White House announcement, industry leaders were enthusiastic. “It launches a new beginning,” said David McCurdy, President of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “The President has succeeded in bringing three regulatory bodies, 15 states, a dozen automakers and many environmental groups to the table.” – Polly Ghazi

State Of The Internet In India 2009 | by Global Voices (India) | 2 July 2009, 09:35 AM

Rajesh Jain at Emergic gives a brief overview of the state of the internet in India in 2009 in a multi-part series. Read them here (part 1, part2, part3, part4).

| by BLDGBLOD | 2 July 2009, 09:30 AM

Consistent internet access has been hard to come by these past few days, post-Rome, so posts have suddenly come to a standstill – but I'll have new material up ASAP... More soon.

A Conversation with Robert D. Kaplan | by Michael Totten's Middle East Journal | 2 July 2009, 09:09 AM

There are few places in the world Robert D. Kaplan has not visited and written about in his books and magazine articles. He travels to countries hardly anyone else even considers – to Turkmenistan, for instance, during the time of the lunatic "Turkmenbashi" who transformed his post-Soviet republic into the North Korea of Central Asia. He has an uncanny ability to see conflicts looming on the horizon well in advance and – reversing the standard relationship between journalists and officials – U.S. defense policy professionals often ask him for briefings about what he has seen.

His regular dispatches in the Atlantic ought to be required reading for anyone interested in foreign affairs, as should his numerous books.

I met him a few weeks ago in Washington D.C. while he was briefly in town after returning from a month-long trip to post-war Sri Lanka. We discussed Colombo’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign there against the Tamil Tigers, what China has been up to while no one was looking, Russia’s revived imperial project in its "near abroad," the geopolitcal ramifications of a more liberal Iran, Israel’s difficulty in fighting effective counterinsurgency warfare, and our new man-hunting General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.

MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?

Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that’s over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they’re not.

What are the Chinese getting out of this? They’re building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they’re doing all sorts of other building on the island.

Now, why did the Chinese want Sri Lanka? Because Sri Lanka is strategically located. The main sea lines of communication between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It’s part of China’s plan to construct a string of pearls – ports that they don’t own, but which they can use for their warships all across the Indian Ocean.

Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader’s son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.

MJT: Wow.

Kaplan: There are a thousand disappearances a year in Sri Lanka separate from the war. Journalists are terrified there. The only journalism you read is pro-government. So that’s one thing they did.

The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say "you have to kill all the people to get to us." So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.

MJT: Tamil civilians?

Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course of winning this war. It acted in a way so brutal that there are no lessons for the West.

MJT: Would you say it was as brutal as Russia’s counterinsurgency in Chechnya?

Kaplan: Yeah. It was. The U.N. is investigating whether as many as 20,000 civilians have been killed during the last few months.

MJT: I didn’t know it was that brutal. I’ve read accusations that there were human rights violations, but we’re so used to hearing that no matter what happens.

Kaplan: The West thinks of Sri Lanka as unimportant, whereas for the Chinese and the Indians it’s very important. And I consider Sri Lanka part of the new geography. It’s part of the new maritime geography, and that makes it very important.

MJT: Until China started helping Sri Lanka, where was Sri Lanka geopolitically?

Kaplan: It’s a place that registers the geopolitical reality between China, India, and the Indian Ocean. The Indians have a very checkered record in Sri Lanka. They sent in a peacekeeping force in 1987 and got their asses kicked by the Tamil Tigers. They came in to help the Tamils, but the Tigers wanted no part of any force there. They came in to help the Tamils, and they wound up fighting the Tamil Tigers.

MJT: Sri Lanka’s government naturally isn’t aligned with India, though.

Kaplan: Right. But it has reasonably good relations with India. It’s now at a point where it’s balancing between India and China.

MJT: Sri Lanka has been fighting this counterinsurgency for decades. Have they slowly made progress all this time and have now finally finished it off, or was there a tipping point recently where a seemingly endless conflict just ended almost suddenly?

Kaplan: The Sri Lankan government was elected in 2005 to win the war. And it has done that. Extremely brutally. It’s a government that’s very nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist. These are not the Richard Gere’s "peace and love" Buddhists. These are the real blood and soil Buddhists, where Buddhism is like any other religion when it’s threatened and it’s defending a piece of territory. It can be very brutal.

It was elected to win the war, which it interpreted from the voters as a right to silence the media and to fight without any restrictions.

MJT: It does work, though, doesn’t it?

Kaplan: It does work, yeah.

MJT: Not that we should do it, of course.

How popular were the Tamil Tigers among the Tamil population?

Kaplan: Not particularly popular. The Tamil Tigers pioneered the use of suicide bombers. They pioneered the use of human shields, of fighting amidst large numbers of civilians. They had their own navy and air force.

MJT: They had an air force?

Kaplan: Yeah. They had a few planes that they used for bombing missions over Colombo. It was the only insurgent terrorist outfit that had a navy and air force.

MJT: That’s fascinating.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: Not even Hezbollah has either of those, and Hezbollah is the most sophisticated Islamist terrorist group in the world.

The Tamil Tigers didn’t care much for the Arab and Islamist terrorist groups, did they?

Kaplan: No, they didn’t.

MJT: I read a quote from one of the Tamil Tiger leaders who said he refused to train Islamist terrorists because he didn’t want to help anyone kill Americans.

Kaplan: They didn’t want to create a situation where the West would aid this Sinhalese government under the guise of fighting international terrorism.

MJT: It makes sense. They were off our radar almost entirely.

Kaplan: In Sri Lanka you have a majority Sinhalese Buddhist population that thinks like a minority. They have a minority sense of oppression. Although they have 75 percent of the population while the Tamils have only about 18 percent, there are 60 million more Tamils nearby in southern India. So they’re kind of like the Iraqi Shias and the Serbs, other majorities who feel like minorities, and can be twice as brutal because of it.

MJT: So there are no lessons at all? Nothing for the U.S., Israel, or Pakistan?

Kaplan: No.

MJT: Only moral lessons, perhaps. Yes, this works, but it would take an awful lot to get us to fight that way again.

Kaplan: The only lesson is that while we’re obsessed with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chinese have a fully developed world view. They’re thinking about many countries all at once.

MJT: What’s China’s ultimate objective?

Kaplan: They’re putting a lot of money into their navy, more than their army. Their ultimate objective is to project sea power, and not just in the western Pacific which makes them a great regional power, but also in the Indian Ocean which makes them a great power in total.

MJT: Do you get the sense that China is becoming more ambitious as it gets more powerful?

Kaplan: I think as their economy develops, and as they have more and more economic interests around the world, they suddenly have more national interests. As they trade more, they have more things to protect. So they develop a world view and their military expands accordingly. It’s very similar to the U.S. military expansion in the late 19th century and the early 20th century before World War I.

MJT: That’s what I thought.

Kaplan: Between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I, our economic expansion made us a great power. We suddenly were dealing with Latin America, with the Pacific, and with Europe in ways we hadn’t before the Civil War. And that led to a corresponding military expansion. We very quietly and unobtrusively became a great power.

MJT: I don’t think the U.S. ever consciously intended to become the most powerful country in the world.

Kaplan: No.

MJT: We just slowly, step by step, ended up there.

Kaplan: Right. It just happened. And that’s how I look at China.

MJT: Russia was more deliberate about it. Soviet Russia, I should say.

Kaplan: Russia is a land power. And land powers are much more insecure than sea powers.

MJT: They can be conquered much more easily.

Kaplan: Russia’s only coast to speak of is in the frozen wastes of the Arctic. It’s a polar ice cap. It’s useless.

When you’re threatened on land, you’re much more insecure than if you’re threatened an ocean away. We’re virtually an island nation.

MJT: Russians seem to feel genuinely threatened by NATO expansion.

Kaplan: Yeah, they do.

MJT: Way more than they should.

Kaplan: They’ve been invaded by the French under Napoleon. They’ve been invaded by the Germans. They’re insecure about their Western frontier. That was the whole purpose behind the satellite states of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It provided a buffer region for the Russians, a buffer region that was under their total control. So what the Russians want to do is somehow, some way, create another buffer on their Western border. So there’s a lot of pressure on the Baltic states, on Poland.

MJT: It looks like Ukraine is in danger.

Kaplan: It’s endangered perpetually. Russia as a land power can’t tolerate an independent Ukraine.

MJT: It doesn’t look good for them after what happened in Georgia. I’ll be surprised if nothing much happens there over the next couple of years.

Kaplan: Russia has to be able to control Ukrainian politics behind the scenes.

MJT: They were doing it before the Georgian incident when they poisoned the current president, Viktor Yukoshenko.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: I can see it from their point of view to an extent. It’s as if the U.S. suddenly lost Florida. That’s how the Russians look at Ukraine. They lost a nice place with a warm climate and a beach on the Black Sea. Almost everywhere else is winter for eight months of the year. Almost half of Ukraine is ethnically Russian.

Kaplan: And they lost the Caucasus. The Caucasus figures large in Russian literature, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writing and in others’. They write about the beauty of the Caucasus. It was Russia’s Wild West, its romantic Wild West, except it was to the south. And it’s deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. So the loss of the Caucasus, especially Georgia, really hurt.

MJT: Have you been there lately?

Kaplan: No.

MJT: It’s interesting.

Kaplan: And who knows? They may get it back.

MJT: They got pieces of it.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: I doubt they’ll get Tbilisi back.

Kaplan: There’s a good chance they’ll get a government there that’s, quote unquote, "friendly."

MJT: It’s looking that way.

Kaplan: A "friendly" regime.

MJT: Saakashvili isn’t too popular these days.

Kaplan: No. He miscalculated.

MJT: Yeah. But he’s not a bad guy. He’s certainly better than Shevardnadze and Gamsakhurdia.

Kaplan: Yeah. The problem, though, with Georgia, was the Bush Administration. It spoke loudly and carried a small stick rather than the reverse. They promised Saakashvili all this aid and support. The two presidents had a hug fest and all that. But there was little we could do if the Russians called the bluff.

MJT: And what could we do? We aren’t going to war with Russia over, well, anything, let alone Georgia.

Kaplan: Right.

MJT: If they tried to conquer Western Europe that would be a different story, but of course they won’t.

Kaplan: I thought the body language between Bush and Saakashvili was bad. It was the kind of public friendship that indicated we would back him up. It sent the wrong message.

MJT: To Saakashvili, you mean?

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: There wasn’t much we could do. Likewise, if the U.S. moved into South Ossetia – which of course wouldn’t happen even in an alternate universe – Russia couldn’t have done anything. With Russia and the U.S. right now, the winner is whoever moves first.

Kaplan: Yes. And keep another thing in mind. The Obama Administration is trying to find a way to get Russia’s help with Iran. And what is Russia’s price for that? My guess is they want control of Georgia.

MJT: Do you think that would be enough?

Kaplan: It might be. And keep something else in mind. Since the days of Gorbachev, the Iranians and the Russians have had an unspoken agreement about stability in the southern tier of the former Soviet Union. The Iranians are not mucking about in Georgia and Armenia and other places right on their border the way they’re mucking about in Iraq.

MJT: Right.

Kaplan: And that is something Russia really appreciates. So Russia’s friendship with Iran, and it’s willingness to have Iran’s back at the United Nations, is born of geopolitical and geographical realities.

MJT: They aren’t messing with Azerbaijan all that much either, even though Azerbaijan used to be part of the Persian Empire. There was a Hezbollah terrorist attack foiled there recently against the Israeli embassy, but that only took place in Azerbaijan. It didn’t have much to do with Azerbaijan itself.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: I was there last August.

Kaplan: How’s the government under Aliyev?

MJT: Not great.

Kaplan: Yeah. That’s what I would expect.

MJT: They have the right idea about where the country should go, but the government is autocratic.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: I have to say, though, that I was impressed with the physical condition of the country. At least the capital Baku. Outside Baku it started to look a bit like Iraq.

Kaplan: Yeah. That’s always been the truth. There is a syndrome in a lot of these countries where the capitals are really city-states. All the money flows into the capital and there’s nothing outside. This is true in Bulgaria, in some other places. It’s going to take a long time for the money to flow to the countryside.

MJT: It will. It’s true in Georgia, too, to a lesser extent. It isn’t doing as well as Eastern Europe. Baku, though, in Azerbaijan, is very pleasant.

Kaplan: It has a beautiful old section by the waterfront. You should have seen it in 1993. It was a trash heap.

MJT: I’ll bet.

Kaplan: It was hideous. And then I went back in 1999, and it was a different world. I can’t even imagine it now.

MJT: So you’re working on a book about the Indian Ocean.

Kaplan: Yeah. I’m deep into it. One day we’re going to wake up from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re going to see a changed world. We’re going to see a world where there are still geopolitical contests, but they’ll be between China and India. We’ll see the emergence of China on the world’s seas with less U.S. dominance. We’re going to see a more maritime world. We may live in an era of globalization, but 90 percent of all goods travel by sea in containers. It’s container shipping that allows for the whole globalization, the clothes we wear, the prices we pay for them, etc. Those who control the sea lanes are going to be crucial.

Now, we’ve seen a little of this already in the news with the piracy issue. When does piracy thrive when you read about piracy historically? It thrives when trade is thriving. Pirates are parasites. The more international trade is thriving, the more hosts are available for parasites. So piracy is an indication that things are good, in a way.

MJT: Right.

Kaplan: And we see how critical these sea lines of communication are if just a few hundred pirates can get ships to divert from using the Suez Canal and instead choosing to go around southern Africa. Which is what’s happening.

So I think we’re going to make up more of a maritime world where the rim line of the world is going to be between the Horn of Africa and the Sea of Japan with the Strait of Malacca as sort of the Fulda Gap of the 21st Century. The Fulda Gap, you know, was a valley in West Germany during the Cold War where Soviet tanks would come through if there was ever a confrontation.

MJT: Right.

Kaplan: Global warming could change things a bit, if it’s true. If the seas really are warming and the ice is freeing up, land-locked Russia will no longer be land-locked. It has this vast coast to the north that it could suddenly use for shipping across the Arctic to North America, Japan, and elsewhere. That would bring a whole new advantage to Russia.

Now, of course you could say that Russia is losing population, the health statistics are terrible, and that’s true. That’s also something we’ll have to take into account. Russia is deteriorating greatly in social and medical terms. But if the ice really is melting, that’s going to provide a great benefit for Russia in the decades to come.

We don’t even look at that geography now. But we would start looking at it in an age of ice melt in the Arctic.

MJT: A lot of Americans will listen to what you’re saying about the Indian Ocean, that India and China are going to ramp up their navies, and they’ll be in charge of policing the Indian Ocean area, and say "Great. Finally. Someone else is finally doing this work. Why do we have to do it all the time?"

Kaplan: That’s a good point.

MJT: Would they be right? I mean, neither India nor China is an ideological power.

Kaplan: Right. Excellent. Look, not only that, our differences with China are much less than our differences with the Soviet Union.

MJT: Much less.

Kaplan: And India is a democratic country that’s inferentially pro-American. So your average American would be right. This is a way for us to gracefully retreat from global domination, by leveraging other powers to take up responsibility.

Either way, this is the world that will confront us after Iraq and Afghanistan. We will still be a great power, and an indispensable power. We’re the only great sea power operating in Asia that does not have territorial ambitions in Asia. We’re half a world away.

MJT: I don’t feel threatened by China policing sea lanes to protect their commercial interests. I don’t care for its support of nasty regimes in Burma and North Korea, but I’m not sure this will have much affect on any of that.

Kaplan: China practices what I’d call a very bleak form of realism. It’s classic realism with no light at the end of the tunnel or any kind of sentimental or humanistic outlook.

MJT: It’s very bloodless, isn’t it?

Kaplan: Yeah. They will deal with a democratic power, and they’ll deal with Burma and Zimbabwe and Sudan and Sri Lanka. They’re hungry for energy, for oil. It’s a very bloodless form of realism.

MJT: I don’t like it, but it worries me less than Russia’s outlook.

Kaplan: It should. I agree with you. I’m not painting a disastrous world after Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m painting a different world.

MJT: How does Iran fit into all this? We’re all familiar with how Iran interferes with countries to its west, in the Arab world. What does Iran do on its eastern side?

Kaplan: Iran is so beneficially placed between the two oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. They border both. What’s interesting is that when you travel to Turkmenistan and through Central Asia, Iran is like a cultural lode star. All these countries are influenced by Persian language and culture.

But the current Iranian regime is very unappetizing for all these countries. If Iran loosens up, and I think it might…

MJT: I’m sure it will eventually.

Kaplan: Yeah. It’s going to be an incredibly attractive power in all of Central Asia. And then we will really see a greater Iran. Iranian influence will increase with a more moderate regime for cultural reasons.

MJT: Because of its soft power.

Kaplan: Exactly. Because of the soft power of Persian culture.

MJT: Persian culture, without Khomeinism on top of it, is very appealing. Not just to Central Asians, but also to me.

Kaplan: It’s very attractive.

MJT: Many Kurds in Iraq have told me the same thing. They admire Persian culture much more than they admire Arab culture, which they detest.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: But Iran doesn’t appeal to them much now because it’s smothered under this awful Khomeinism.

Kaplan: Yes. You’ve explained it. You don’t need me to explain it. That’s exactly it.

MJT: But I pay much more attention to what’s going on to the west of Iran. What is Iran up to in its east, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so on? Are the Iranians mucking around over there like they are in the Arab countries?

Kaplan: Western Afghanistan is now essentially an Iranian satellite.

MJT: They speak a version of Persian there.

Kaplan: The Iranian currency freely circulates in Herat. Iran is supplying electricity to Herat and much of Western Afghanistan. So while Western Afghanistan is relatively quiet and free of violence, the reason it is so is because of the influence of Iran.

MJT: I assumed it was quiet more because it’s outside Pashtunistan, so to speak. But I guess what you’re saying is the flip side of that.

Speaking of Pashtunistan, you have written before that Afghanistan and Pakistan are best thought of as a single political entity.

Kaplan: Yes.

MJT: And that’s much more obviously true now than it was when you first wrote it.

Kaplan: Yes.

MJT: Because now we’re seeing a Taliban insurgency in both countries. Do you think this insurgency is beatable if the U.S. can only really operate on the Afghanistan side of it?

Kaplan: I think the U.S. is able to influence both sides. The recent offensive in the Swat Valley by the Pakistani government has been pretty successful. And who do you think is behind all that? Uncle Sam. We really put pressure on them to solve their own problems. They transferred their military resources from the Indian border to the Swat Valley.

MJT: Is the Swat Valley ethnically Pashtun or Punjabi?

Kaplan: It’s more Pashtun than Punjabi, I think. It’s where they overlap.

I traveled all throughout the Swat Valley in the mid-1990s. It was beautiful, touristy, and peaceful. There was no problem. All this is very recent.

I find it interesting that after all this pressure was put on Pakistan by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the Pakistanis really started a major offensive.

MJT: How much of Pakistan’s response was because of U.S. pressure, and how much because the Taliban got so close to Islamabad?

Kaplan: It was both. Probably both. And they’ve really pursued this seriously. Much more seriously than they’ve pursued anything else.

MJT: It was quite striking, actually, how quickly they turned around.

Kaplan: Yeah. It is.

You know what’s interesting? The Israelis. They’ve been great at defeating structured Arab armies, but they haven’t figured out how to deal with a few thousand insurgents in South Lebanon or in Gaza. What did their wars in 2006 and 2009 in Lebanon and Gaza get them?

MJT: It got them fewer rockets for a while, but it’s temporary.

Kaplan: Yeah.

MJT: I don’t know what they should do. They can’t put a David Petraeus in Gaza or Lebanon. It won’t work.

Kaplan: No.

MJT: And they can’t fight a counterinsurgency from the air because that’s just absurd.

Kaplan: Yeah. They haven’t been able to solve this problem at all.

MJT: I’m glad it isn’t up to me what Israel should do. There aren’t any good options. Maybe they should hold Syria accountable. Syria is at least a state with a return address and national interests. I don’t think the Syrian government is particularly ideological. It isn’t like the Iranian government. Syria isn’t an ideology, it’s a state.

Kaplan: It wants to survive.

MJT: Maybe the Israelis should lean on Assad. They can’t lean on Hamas or Hezbollah. They can’t lean on Beirut because Beirut is too weak to do much.

Kaplan: Yeah. I mean, the idea of bombing highway overpasses near Beirut to punish Lebanon for Hezbollah is ridiculous.

MJT: There is no way they could have pulled that off in Lebanon in 2006, no matter how brilliantly they might have fought.

Kaplan: And they didn’t fight brilliantly.

MJT: Even if they did…

Kaplan: Well, as you said, they can’t do what Petraeus did.

Speaking of Petraeus, this appointment of General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan is really interesting.

MJT: What do you think of him?

Kaplan: Oh, he’s got it. He’s another Petraeus. He’s larger than life. I’ve interviewed General David McKiernan, the man he’s replacing. He’s a good guy, but he’s no lightning. He has no great ideas.

I think deep down the real reason the Obama Administration fired McKiernan and wants to bring in McChrystal is because McChrystal is a man hunter. He got Zarqawi in Iraq. And Obama desperately wants to kill Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri to show that they can do this better than the Republicans.

So the White House said, "we want to get these people." And Secretary Gates said, "well, if you want to get them, McChrystal’s your man." He ran the Joint Special Operations Command for five years. It conducts all the secret operations – Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the best Ranger battalions. It’s all very secret. And they go out on man hunting missions and kill people.

You can order Robert D. Kaplan’s books Eastward to Tartary, Imperial Grunts, The Ends of the Earth, and many others from Amazon.com.

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Save City Homes South! | by Your Coleridge Conservative Councillor | 2 July 2009, 10:04 AM

Plans are advancing for the services of City Homes South, which has a public office on Cherry Hinton Road, to be transferred to Cambridge City Council's Customer Service Centre at Mandela House on Regent Street. The latest step was confirmed on 16 June at a meeting of the council's Housing Management board.

While Coleridge Conservatives are pleased that the council is finding ways to save taxpayers' money, we do think that the access point that the City Homes South office provides for local residents is valuable. We would therefore like to see options considered to allow the office to be used in future as a general outpost for access to services provided by the Customer Service Centre.

Dear Lazyweb… | by Daniel Silverstone | 2 July 2009, 08:50 AM

I am currently stuck taking four times the suggested daily dose of two anti-histamines in order to combat my body and its reaction to plants having sex all around me.

I am taking two 10mg Loratadine tablets, and two 10mg Cetirizine Hydrochloride tablets, twice daily. This is effectively four times the recommended dose of twice as many anti-histamines as I should need.

I wasn’t this bad last year, but the year before was similar. Irritatingly, once the drugs kick in (45 minutes to an hour after taking) my runny nose, itchy/burny eyes, slight dopeyness induced by feeling crap, etc. all fade away. Yesterday I needed my second dose a mere 8 hours after the first, but I didn’t need to re-dose until this morning after that.

I guess what I’m asking is—what is the expected side-effects of taking such a high dose of antihistamines. Do any of you out there have to take such high doses, have you seen a doctor about this? All I expect a doctor to do is to either supply me more loratadine on prescription (which is of dubious value unless I get a lot given prescription charges in the UK), or to try me on a nasal spray, which tend to induce nosebleeds for me. If you’ve found other ways to cope, I’m interested. Otherwise I guess I’ll make an appointment to see the doctor in the next week or so.

Interesting photos - 1 Jul 2009 - Flickr | by Daily interesting photos - Flickr | 2 July 2009, 07:53 AM

The Lido with My Workshop Students, Venice | by The Sartorialist | 2 July 2009, 07:15 AM

As I mentioned yesterday I am in Venice conducting a workshop with local Venetian students. A few want to be photographers but most are aspiring fashion designers.

Explaining to the students the hows and whys of the way I work has been a real refresher for me. So many of the things that I do are instinctual, but verbalizing it to someone else really helps to restore my focus on the fun of my job/art.
The first day here we walked around Venice trying to shoot people in a similar way that I would in New York - it was a disaster. No one interesting to shoot, very hot and the students weren't really motivated. After a while we all sat down as a group and I tried to find out what they like to do when they have free time. Most all of them said that they like to go to the beach. So the next day we went to the beach.

I wanted to them to see that you don't have to separate having fun and taking pictures. I take pictures walking around on the street because I find it very relaxing and fun. What each student needed to do was to find what they were passionate about and try to capture that passion with images.

I tried to explain that if they want to become a fashion designer they should try to take photos that will inspire a certain feeling of a season, or a gesture, or a mood. The pictures that I took above are, to me, the essence of Summer. If I was a designer I would look at photos like this at the beginning of the spring design season, just to remember what it is that everyone loves about the sun, warmth, and vacation.

5percentgdpmap | by Strange Maps | 2 July 2009, 06:20 AM

The statement on nationalised trains is running 12 hours late | by John Redwood MP | 2 July 2009, 05:56 AM

It was not a great start for the soon to be nationalised Eastern mainline company. The media were told early yesterday morning, whilst the Commons only had official confirmation and a Minister to question twelve hours later. The statement wasn’t worth waiting for. The Minister had no figures of how much revenue would fall, how much of the promised premium payments would be lost, how much capital they would need to put in, or how they would improve the performance and lower the cost of the service.

This is the second franchise that has gone wrong, implying the government’s system for letting these contracts is bad. Taxpayers have had to spend a lot of money on contract negotiation and due diligence on the companies taking them out. There won’t be any explanation or rebates on all that wasted money.

According to the Commons Minister (who simply read out his boss’s statement from the Lords, including referring to his audience as lordships) all will be well. He told us the company is profitable, that taxpayers will enjoy a period of the revenues from the franchise before selling it off again to another private sector company. There was no recognition of what a financial body blow this is to his railways budget. Once again we have a government rushing to nationalise something they clearly do not understand, which will turn out to be a worse financial deal than they let on. There was no sign yesterday of any controlling mind amongst Ministers who knows how to make this proposal work.

What should they have done? They should have taken more security and negotiated a tighter deal when they set up the franchise in the first place. They should have spent more time seeing what the relative cost of dealing with the existing franchise holder would be compared with taking it in house. I am not persuaded they did the homework or came up with the best answer for taxpayers. Given that they signed a bad contract originally, they should have spent more time examining all the options to mitigate their losses. Yesterday’s statement looked like a fit of pique allied to playing to the nationalising gallery.

Three Ministers, no answers, one defeat - another typical day in the Commons | by John Redwood MP | 2 July 2009, 05:42 AM

Yesterday Barbara Keeley produced one of the worst Ministerial replies I have heard during the proceedings on the government’s rushed and incompetent Bill to change the arrangements for paying MPs allowances and salaries. It was so bad her boss Jack Straw also gave a wind up speech on the same amendments, to try to calm the House down. Those of us who asked her to clarify her proposals received no answers of any kind. Shortly afterwards the government lost a vote on the much hated Clause 10 of the Bill, so that clause was struck out.

Sadiq Khan was dragged to the House around 8pm to tell us about the nationalisation of the East coast mainline rail franchise, which everyone else had heard about hours before on the media. I asked him how much money the taxpayer would have to put in as share capital and working capital to set up the nationalised company that would run the service. There was of course no answer, as Ministers apparently have gone ahead with their plan to do this without working out the numbers and the money at risk. As always, they only do soundbites.,

Sarah McCarthy Fry, a junior Treasury Minister, completed the trio by being unwilling or unable to answer basic questions about how their new scheme to encourage saving for people on benefit and low income would work.

Summer Summarum | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 2 July 2009, 04:00 AM

All in all [summa summarum in Latin], it's a lovely summer so far. Temperatures around 30 degrees...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Links and (not-so) brief comments on Krugman, behaviour and long-termism | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 2 July 2009, 12:12 AM

Any of these links could have made a blog posting of its own, but instead why not help yourself to a high-density nutritious snack selection of random commentary?

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Updated using Planet on 4 July 2009, 07:53 PM