What isn't AI?

so data science and its typical tools aren't really AI - machine learning, even deep learning, even generative adversarial nets style deep learning still isn't intelligent, though it sure is artificial - its useful, but claiming that a classifier trained on zillions of human-labelled images containing cats and no cats, is recognizing cats is just stupid - a human can see a handful of cats, including cartoons of pink panthers, and lions and tigers and panthers, and then can not only recognize many other types of cats, but even if they lose their sight, might have a pretty good go at telling whether they are holding their moggy or their doggy - how? well, because humans (probably) have a large collection of tools evolved (and trained) in the brain, and the brain is embodied, and so has perception, interaction, motion, sense of things light touch (how furry is that fuzzy looking cat's tail, how does a cat hold themselves when prowling, playing or just chilling... etc

these tools operate at many levels - some may just be context/recall, some may effectively be analogue programmes that model gravity or other physics things (stuff games software writers call "physics models"), and some may very well look like artificial neural nets (things to de-noise complex signals, and to turn moving images (the retina has gaps and doesn't refresh infinitely fast) into representations that let you find objects and name them (that cool cat is a songby squeeze :-) )

there are feedback loops between the "low level" perception stuff and the high level models so the models are (surprise surprise) nature & nurture...but prefacing learning with a model is going to help with unsupervised learning a lot - if we understand 3D, motion, gravity, materials (skin, bone, fur, muscle, fat, what we're made of, and what these other things are made of, wood, grass, mud, water, air etc) etc, then we don't have to see zillions of images of an X, because we generalize from one or two images to lots of views we'd expect an X to look like when its curled up asleep, or jumping up 3 times its height to catch a bird.

So there's a higher level still than al that, as if that wasn't complicated enough for you: humans (most animals) are pretty autonomous - they have goals (tropisms - find food, find partners, survive, enjoy, avoid pain etc), and they have some slightly less obvious tools like curiosity, imagination, creativity - all with a smattering of randomness. These can help seek out diverse input (and create different interactions) so our low level perception & Interaction are constantly refreshed, and our models are updated by challenges (think, scientific method & falsification & parsimony/occam's razor etc).

Then there can be another level still - things like self-awareness, consciousness,, beliefs, neuroses, and even "taste"/aesthetics, and of course, we are social beings, so ethics and theory of mind, and daft stuff like religion and manifest destiny and other collective psychoses. Ghost bugs in the machine.

data science, ml & ai - so, crates

A young robot's primer on the origins of her learning and intelligence.

Data Science mediates between evidence and knowledge. it is as old as humans.

Plato explains the theory of forms through the allegory of the cave, wherein prisoners can only see
the shadows of puppets on a wall, cast by the light from a fire behind them. the prisoners attempt
to infer what is really going on based on what they see.

The analogy beautifully captures the separation between the imperfect nature of
evidence, and the complexity of the model one might form based on said evidence.

Data (from the Latin for "given") is often flawed. our models (forms) are usually limited.
We have developed natural philosophy, and scientific method, to arrive at the best models we can -
e.g. by parsimony (Occam's Razor). however, for millenia, the job of sifting evidence and creating
models was combined. experts carried out (at least) two tasks.

Statistics emerged as a way to summarise and model the data itself, specialising the business of 
understanding the evidence itself, so that the form of models is abstracted away from the details
of the data (to some degree).

Now, we have moved to a world where the formation of models itself is, to some extent, part of this
new science. in varying degrees, the mechanisation of this process of model formation has moved on.

Machine learning packages up the business of spotting
which puppet is which, and even what the plot is.

Artificial Intelligence attempts to move this on to
figuring out it is a puppet show, inferring that there are puppet masters, 
and deciding what they intend the shadow play to mean.


In the realm of science fiction (The Matrix, Dark City, etc), there are actual puppet masters. In
the realm of superstition, these masters may even be adversarial. Post enlightenment, we usually
assume the puppet masters have no intent, but merely represent a more complex world, for which the
puppets and their shadows give us a chance to understand. Popper's model of objective knowledge
suggests that scientific method allows us to ever improve our (approximate understanding.

The mechanisation of this process starts with the problem of industrial scale data gathering,hence
with industrial scale organisation of society. Hence statistics for things like insurance (actuarial tables)
had to be computers (by people initially; and many other planning tools.

With the emergence of computers & the digital age, we gather more data, store it and can process it
more readily. Excitement over "thinking machines" led to the notion that human intelligence could
be understood through computational models. Early on, Artificial Intelligence researchers realised
that a number of sub-challenges exist, starting from understanding more complex evidence from the
senses - hence image processing and understanding objects and scenes was important from the get-go, for a
robot, for example, safely to navigate its environment. Social intelligence requires communication,
and humans use (largely) speech, so natural language processing was a requirement. Other, grander
challenges concerning consciousness and imagination were envisaged, but there was enough to be
getting on with. Indeed, too much at the time. It wasn't until recent decades that the tools and
techniques scaled up to tackle these problems with comparable efficacy to humans. 

Between the 19th & 20th century advances in statistics, and the discipline of Machine Learning,
there are a great many steps. We are not just concerned with quantities of data ("big data") but
with quality and structure of said givens. There's a huge range in the effort put in to make sure
there are consistent records kept in the simplest system. What those records represent is
also drawn from a wide range of complex structures (including no structure!). The advances in
mathematics and statistics are now coupled with advances in computing platforms to allow
exploration and comprehension of these properties of the data. As we go further down this road, we
start to infer what the data tells us about the world it comes from. This is not easy, as Plato's
allegory illustrates.This is also where we move from statistics to data science - we now have a
discipline which makes (falsifiable) predictions about the shadows and the puppets. Others can see
if out predictions remain accurate, or deviate from what they observe. We can use these predictions
to help look for explanations of what is going on, and choose between different explanations. That
process itself is to an increasing extent also being mechanised (automated). 

However, the biggest advances are really often still the old techniques running on affordable,
very fast hardware with a lot of storage. Rarely do these techniques surprise with something that 
resembles general intelligence. That said, the tools are clearly increasingly very very useful. 
Domains where we have potential to have a huge impact are added every day, and as we gain the
capability to apply data science on new combinations of evidence, the unpredicted or unexpected 
will no doubt emerge. While we started this note with a discussion of the emergence of a science
from the shadows, many of the key applications of the science concern data about us - humans. As we
make more observations, and automate processing and decision making concerning humans, we mustn't
lose sight of that humanity. After all, we are not the puppets.

As Conan Doyle said thru his memorable character Sherlock Holmes: 
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, 
no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

---------part two--------

statistics aren't what they used to be....before and after Bayes...and before and after Hinton....

two advances in statistics combine with lots of fast computers and data to yield a lot of the machine learning and AI excitement - that's the way that we update our knowledge when we learn new evidence, due to the reverend Bayes, and the way we avoid having very much explicit domain knowledge in our machine for learning, due to artificial neural networks and "deep" learning 

first off, we need a bunch of data - and typically, we need some clever people to label that data. so now we need to talk about domain knowledge and expertise, and how machine learning and AI has so often been parasitically dependent on human intelligence. this is where we "crowdsource" (or already have lying around) a bunch of data that has aready been classified in some senses as "A" or "not A" - 

so lets work by example: lets say we want to learn a classifier for images with cats. and we have many many images (e.g. from google search or from some other available data) that has been tagged with whether or not there at cats in the image. so now we "fire up" our very simple neural net on this data, to train it in what is "cat-ness"  - input at each step is an image and the label (cat or not cat). the neural net is, effectively, a big table where we write things in on the left hand side columns, and copy values through to the next columns if they fit some value so far (are near enough), and not if they don't. When we get all the way out the far side, we have a column full of numbers and one box that says "is cat" or "isn't cat". we compare that to the input and if we're right, we increase the values in the boxes in the table, and if we're wrong, we subtract from those values. [n.b. this is a gross simplification of how neural nets work missing out hidden layers, convolution, and piles of important other tricks that make things work "better")...] Another way of thinking of the "layers" of the neural net might be like a series of combs, each with different length (adjustable) teeth, which let things flow through to the next comb, and when the answer pops out the end and is right, we leave combs' teeth lengths alone more, and wrong, we adjust their lengths more. sort of:-) The adjustment process uses a technique called stochastic gradient descent - one way to picture that part of the process is like snowboarding many times down a complicated slope, adjusting which way you go on each trip, til you get the best ride. or skateboarding. 

we do that for millions and millions of images. whether the cats are black or pink, furry or bald, the result is a table/box that is really quite good at spotting cats (a trained classifier) - we can then put that table in (say) a camera, and now the camera will be able to say "cat" or "not cat" and tag pictures itself without a human.

we could to the same with (say) machine translation. again, totally dependant on work already done by people, say we have a lot of text that has been translated (e.g. copies of Dickens' novels or travel guides or web pages, hand-translated between French and Latin and Greek and Basque and Korean. We can take the text and pull it into small pieces (words, phrases, sentences) and learn a classifier for these which "recognises" input phrase x in language A and outputs it in B...again, re-enforced over more and more examples, but once built, just a "table" to run things on your laptop...



What happens if we can't get labelled data? at least two reasons - we don't have time, or people just aren't good at this particular task - for example finding stuff in the asteroid belt, or explaining why a set of moves in Go were good (something people can explain in chess:). So one trick is to generate synthetic input to the neural net, where we "know" in the generator whether we put a pink panther in the picture or not. Another might be that there's something implicit in the output of the trained neural net that tells us if it is on the right track or gonig down the garden path - e.g. wins a game or not....so this is where Generative Adversarial Nets come in - where there are now two nets, one is like Socrates or Yoda, and the other is the "student"....

These techniques are very effective nowadays, although one interesting problem is that we're not entirely sure what the "features" are that they react to in all cases. Entirely different approaches to machine learning, involve taking a more explicit collection of rules (perhaps based in a model which we put in, in the first place) and just learning which are more or less important in which combinations - it isn't clear, but some research seems to be suggesting that there's ways to bring these approaches towards each other somehow...


There's much more to be said about other (and sometimes simpler, sometimes more complex) machine learning approaches, and about more foundational work on AI in the sense of trying to do something utterly different from all the above, which is actually understanding how humans (and other smart species) do so much without supervised learning. some the old and new theory for the latter concerns higher level goals & models & intentions....which maybe we just evolved to have, and sit at an entirely different level than the neurones and synapses in the grey matter and why it won't be just something emergent from more silicon....

Medieval Blockchain

reading david graeber's Debt and learning a lot about what makes the world go round, and it sure isn't "money"

so the cliche narrative for currency starts out using it as a unit of accounting, has it as a mechanism for exchange, and ends up with it storing value...

but before that, it has to kill & eat its ancestors, and it often mis-identifies them as barter, and, perhaps, more correctly, as haggle...

but how would barter actually be a thing? what are the chances, especially in a hunter gatherer community, but even in a simple agrarian society, that I have the very thing you want in the right quantity, and the same time as you have what I want? lets take 150 people and think it through....no, lets not - its just silly. you'd keep some sort of notional tally - indeed, it would be part of your social network - you'd know all those people in your 150 network, how much you "trust" them, and in particular, how much you owe them or they owe you...since when....and whether you ever need to "collect"...

secondly, why would I think something that's worth a handful of fruits to you, is worth a handful of fruits to someone else? more likely, from each according to her means to each according to her needs. obviously - hence, looking at medieval society, a blacksmith would "charge" his lordship hundreds of times the debt that he'd charge his neighbour, the farmer or baker or coalminer, to shoe a horse....the farmer needs the horse to plough the field to grow the wheat to give to the baker to make the bread the blacksmith eats while making horseshoes...the lord only needs shiny horseshoes to look smart at the joust.



lefties ? no, just there's a lot more to how things would work in a truly human economy. a richer world view.

So how would a blockchain support this diversity? certainly not through a blockchain currency. but perhaps through smart contracts, which would unwrap between people, recording, and timeshifting but also value-shifting depending on who the players are on each step of the transaction chain.

a medieval, social-networked based distributed ledger/smart contract/chain space?

The Don - Gifts and Obligations

1. le don - as in mafia - makes you an offer you can't refuse
2. don - as in oxbridge - works on tech because they can, not because they should
3. don - the legendary lover - and hub for STDs....

references 

i) Marcel Mauss

ii) David Graeber

Fake News is a Thought Experiment

Breaking: There is no fake news - the stories are all part of a thought experiement...

firstly, an experiment on the public, to soften people up to the idea - to see how discourse, thought, in public, changes when doubt is cast on the veracity, the inalienable truth, of every day news - how can anyone campaign to undermine the authority of another, when every so-called fact is called into question.

secondly, an experiment that implies to people that news ever was true. that news channels controlled,, owned, censored, modified, changeable, rarely checked, lacking in provenance, authored, only-too-human, were some actual source of authority (in the sense of expertise or reflecting the disciple and learning of the source and utterance) rather than merely authorship, a form of creative writing...

after all, journalists decode what is happening, then encode it. what is lost in translation, modified in interpretation, distorted through cognitive and perceptive bias, to be refracted through the eyes of the reader."


there is no fake news-  there never was. or there always was and will be. "so high you cant get over it, so low, you can't get under it...

zeroth edition

welcome to the zeroth edition, the world's first bespoke counterfeit book publisher. we specialise in fake books. we work very hard to identify authors who resemble in some fashion or other the original author of an original work. We then commission them to write a book. Unlike George Burger's high end operation with his Front, Peter Lyre, we are not out to achieve better than perfect, but more to democratize the process of authorship, hence our product is often quite significantly different than the 1st edition you may have read at school, or seen dramatized on the BBC. No, we believe in a babel-brook approach, where many many versions flow down to the river of readership, and eventually into the sea of dissatisfied librarians, who now have to decide whether to shelve all the different versions by title, so that A Tail of Twosities is kept close to the authentic A trail of Truieities, and not far from the poor quality work of a similar name, or else to sort the works by author, making it impossible for a lifetime of scholarship to uncover all the versions of so many lives.

If you would like to sign up to be an author, you already have. If you would like to be a reader, you already are. If you are a copyright lawyer seeking fun&profit, you already did.

We realize that there are many other counterfeit book publishers already out there, and why would you come to us rather than them? Indeed, who had this idea first? Well, all we can say is that we are never knowingly underwritten.

peer-to-peer-straight-to-hell and no coming back

so what is it with peer-to-peer technology?

it seems like utopic, syndicalist anarchist, socialist techno-philia dream solution to the privacy invasive, attention grabbing, centralised, silicon valley launched interwebcloud of monopolies that we've had to put up with since the last 20 years.

but every p2p thing goes pear shaped in horrible ways  -
the internet becomes the non-neutral verizon-space-control freakery, we live in filter-bubbles and great firewalls of china and halal-land, and napster/freenet becomes itunes, community mesh wireless nets become facebook free basics,
and don't get me started on uber and airbnb, but what of bitcoin?

there's something fundamentally broken about these endeavours, and I can't figure it out....

forces of oppression? ownership of the means of production?

hmmm....

j

Theory of mind versus a logic of collective actions => opinion dynamics in votes

lets assume there's two kinds of people, and they are about to vote on something

now there's a big campaign about that something and a lot of people give away their likely voting intentions.

lets say some people tend to vote in a way that benefits most people
lets say the other people tend to vote in a way that benefits themselves.

now how does each kind of person interpret which way they should vote?
well, it depends what they think of other people -
if they think the people saying vote x are people that vote to benefit themselves, and they think they are not people of that kind, then they might think they should vote not-x.
if they think people who vote x are people who vote to benefit most people, then maybe they should vote like those people whether they are the same kind, or not.

but now lets assume that the theory-of-mind is correlated with the kind of person and (for the sake of argument) that people that vote to benefit most people are more likely to have a better theory-of-mind (think: empathy if you like).

now the people that vote to please themselves mostly have less of a theory of mind. ironically, they will assume people of "the other kind) are voting to benefit themselves and so will vote against them, even thought this will be voting against their own best interests.

so lets call one bunch of people "metropolitan liberal elite", the other bunch of people "old poorly educated post-industrial poor", and make the vote about "brexit" in the UK.

now you see why the outcome went the way it did, AND how hard it is to have any useful discussion about it afterwards.

should not be too hard to verify this....

evidence, experts, discipline

takehome: lets end the numbers racket.

A friend recently wrote these wise words on costing the uncostable

-------------------------tl;dr---------------

I'm sympathetic to having qualitative reasoned debate, but sometimes once can go look at a body of evidence (from experts, yes, really) that includes numbers, but the problem is that it takes time and discipline, and is simply not amenable to snappy soundbites in a bar room fight/real time debate/tv q&a.

one example of a source of information that I read through (but I doubt more than one in a thousand people bothered with) was the civil services 2012 review of the "balance of competences" of the EU - it gives not just figures, but also background and assumptions about figures, for the cost/benefit for every sector in the UK for being a member. In the geek world, we have a passive/aggressive shorthand for articles where people try to summarise a complex, nuanced and contextualized source of information with a "takehome" - we just put tl;dr ("too long; didn't read). here's the document that would have benefitted a lot of people to have read back last year:- 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/review-of-the-balance-of-competences

when it comes to the current discussions, things that influence me are not that Corbyn wouldn't pull the trigger on nukes (how people get hung up on that, when we'd all be already dead by that point), or that May would have a hard time getting a decent deal from the EU for fishermen (all 3 that are left). I get more exercised by the fact that our kids face insane debt before they get their first job, they wont be able to get a decent place to live in the town in which they were bought up, their job prospects are so so despite good quality university qualifications; their pensions don't look too clever; if they get ill, their healthcare looks less dependable; their kids will have even more trouble getting a halfway decent school. etc etc. I get very cross when the academic economists in the USA that built the model that said we needed austerity (nearly 10 years ago) that was followed by much of Europe after the financial fiasco of 2008, admitted that they'd made an elementary mistake in an Excel spreadsheet, so the result was exactly the opposite of what they'd been flying around the world schmoozing politicans of all colour and odour. see

https://theconversation.com/economists-an-excel-error-and-the-misguided-push-for-austerity-13584

hmm so i like experts, but I also don't like experts......oh well..

really what it comes down to is adequate discipline being applied in the right context - a qualiative reasoned position in a face-to-face debate, but in a written position, careful citation of data, assumptions, context and so on....

beyond ironic

so someome ased me yesterday why i havn't updated this blog (which unlike the other two blogs i run, is purely rant&cant [as opposed to computer science or internet related]).

well it has proved impossible to outdo the spectacle of UK-US politics and news - it just is beyond comment.

sigh

christmas special show pitch

while you're all here, maybe you could review my pitch for a christmas
special for a certain long running tv
show

The real reason the Millenium bridge[1] had to be closed shortly after it
was opened
was that it turned out that it was not just wobbly - it was wibbly[2] too.

Early signs something was a miss was when walking across the bridge
we found ourselves looking across at the earlier London bridges from
time to time, e.g. 50AD, 1209, 1831 etc, or even bridges over rivers on other systems --

We now know that there's a beautiful suspension bridge of sighs over the
chasm of oblivion on a gas giant circling Altair V, or, nearer to home,
the short crossing over the ornamental pond in the Palazzo Schifanoia in 1477.

The trouble really started when it seemed the bridge did not just go from the
Tate Modern to Saint Paul's Cathedral, but to many other worlds as well.
And if we could go there, they could come here. And some of them would
confuse art with religion, sometimes wilfully.

This had to be stopped and there was only one gallifreyan for the job...

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQK21572oSU
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LakwV3P3qII

The European Onion - A New Start.

I'm proposing that the UK start a new global movement which for want of a better name I am calling the European Onion (the EO, not entirely unconnected with the excellent american satyrical magazine of similar name). This is quite a serious proposal

Starting with (say) England, Estonia and Greece (for example) we would create a new set of technology based systems of governance.

1. Digital citizenship - based on the estonian system, you can choose levels of citizenship, and pay towards them appropriately - for example, non resident can have some rights, but to get healthcare, you need to be resident and pay tax (or have unemployment insurance, which you may have a right to depending on past history) - this might permit scotland to "stay" in the EU and be part of the UK, whilst England and Wales would be part of some new systems (the bootstrap citizenships of the EO).

2. Currency - a new digital currency, perhaps based on something like rscoin (etherium variant), with various incentive systems, and ability to be used both anonymously, and as an identified part of a distributed ledger, and with the capability to carry tax towards something (e.g. local, or regional, or towards some group affiliation - e.g. a legacy nation or federation, or a new clave).

3. Free movement of people, goods and services will be determined both by the block chain, and by some peering or customer/provider relationships (see "Border Gateway Protocol" bgp) - geographic regions have various local properties (land, resources, schools, hospitals, work, entertainment etc), and can support given populations - movement of people is obviously often beneficial, but on varying timescales - new infrastructure has to be included in the cost, so if an area supports ingress of people, the source of those people has to contribute to the cost of new infrastructure - of course, if the source had contributed (e.g. education) then that has to be factored in to the ingress cost in a fair/balanced way. Peering regions (or legacy nations, e,g, countries staying in the old EU) would have simple free movement, whereas in the new system (the EO) we would have checks and balances.

4. Virtualized Jurisdiction allows complex, nested and intersecting rules to be applied to any relationship between individuals and groups. Legacy jurisdictions (e.g. constitutional systems in legacy nations) can be factored in, but new arrangements can be made - for example, this would be a way to allow Northern Ireland and the Republic to keep an open border and the free movement of people with free residential rights in england (and maybe scotland and wales - depends on them) and voting rights. It would be just like contract law is today, when, for example, companies setting up business relationships (e.g.) between Hong Kong and London might choose to agree that any disagreement is settled under law in New York. Except that we can make up new jurisdictions based in new groupings and new mixes. This could include virtual extradition, border control, tax and criminal law. And rules about surveillance and sousveillance by different groups..

5. Information flow control can be applied using rules similar to Wikipedia, to allow transparent evolution of news and educational material, but to prevent monopoly ownership of sources of verifiable facts and methods.

6. Intellectual property is just another part of the previous rules.

7. The systems will be evolvable - for example, at the least, we could expect new rules to emerge in the currency, jurisdiction and flow control arenas - the DAO stands still for no clave.

The EU didn't exactly help....

...very much - so this current debate is (I think) multi-faceted, but much of the heat is because people are "fed up with this or that" - what are these "thises or thats"?

well, one person puts it down to precarity of the working class. Actually, i think that that is definitely one of the this. but not just for working classes - the middle classes too - we have lost ground on quality of life, but also on predictable futures - this comes from many things - threats to our future in terms of health and welfare, in terms of our kids chances at schools, universities, housing, in terms of our job and personal security, and so on and so forth.

people want to blame someone, so they picked on the elephant in the room - the EU.

however, the roots of our precarity lie elsewhere - from Thatcher (and Reagan) seting in place monetarist policy and deregulating financial services, dismantling our manufacturing industries, and weaking workers rights (unions). Through Blair (and Clinton) doing nothing to reign in the rampant privatization of many state services that actually worked ok. On to Clegg (and Cameron) failing to remove the unelected upper house and failing to remove university fees, and failing to re-regulate the finance sector, and failing to do much about the axis of evil created by Blair  (and Bush) boys own adventures in war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. and on to Osbourne (but not Obama) Austerity programme, with no house building (despite having half a million polish builders ready and waiting) and reduction in real welfare and salaries of state sector and reduction in local government (education, policing, housing) democracy (voting people in who have no money is kind of pointless - which is why a vote for brexit is really really dumb - you'll get poor neo-liberals, which is even worse than rich ones).

So the EU did little to help. Indeed, the troika's stomping on any attempt to fight back against the banks (and loans to ireland, portugal, greece) removed what little fig-leaf of democratic power we thought there still was.

That said, the EU didn't cause any of the above in the first place, and in many ways may have mitigated the harm - it is hard to tell, but my guess is that the overall stability (people shouting about eurozone crisis completely fail to take account of the longevity of the success of the zone, and the trade agreements) has been a force for good that reduced the damage done by all those previous stupidities, which we did. The UK. us. not germany. not france, italy, spain. not the EU. Thatcher. Blair. Clegg. The tories. labour. the lib dems. the brits.

shame on us.

we need the EU to damp down our very own madness.

cognitive dissonance of "balanced" reporting

here's a typical example of "balance" in reporting where the BBC basically completely confuses the reader - in covering the speech (not yet made) by GOrdon Brown, their webpage has five other points, randomly including a fear campaign/gravy train comment from the EC President, a commercial concern (with a union) worrying about business and jobs, a (probably dodgy) prediction of immigration numbers (i.e. 5M more people - wonder where the houses for them wil lcome from eh? and a statement from a tory and labour leader about the campaign....not one of these points is actually germane to Brown's speech, but you could be forgiven for not being able to make use of any of this information in any reasoned response to the referendum vote decision, since it is presented so uncritically, and randomly. Very very poor journalism, whichever way you're voting.
see
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36513921
for this example...

Nobody likes a quitter...

Probably unsurprisingly, I shall be voting to remain in the EU - I am flying back early from a trip to HK especially so I can vote in person.

Why?

Firstly because the vast majority of what has happened in the European Union has benefited most people enormously, from increased peace and prosperity to better health and happiness.
Given the flaws (plenty) are fixable, and there are plenty of people willing to work on them, I think
the experiment should continue. The last 8 years has seen turmoil in the economy and in the movement of people. It is simply incorrect to blame the EU for these. The banking fiasco started in the US and infected the UK (and notably, Iceland), and because of poor policies on housing in Spain and Ireland, they took a beating. The Greeks got in a mess, and the EU tried to help probably in the wrong way, and still is trying. But notice this. Most of the economies survived and indeed started recovery, despite some obnoxious national austerity policies. The EU has not crashed and burned.
And the migrant crisis that has hit us was from the war in Syria (and Eritrea and Yemen, etc etc) - not caused by the EU, but the opposite - many in the EU are trying to help. How is this not a reason to celebrate our resilience and humanity? 5M refugees would represent less than 1% of the population of the EU, not only not a significant burden, but a contribution -- as is the free EU labour movement, where people go through all the upheaval of moving country/language/housing, schools, to better themselves, and therefore to better the nation they arrive in. I work with people in many places across Europe (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, at least) and it has been a pleasure, I hope that can continue. I've been in Paris, Brussels and Helsinki for example, more than once each this year already. I just see great things happening all around there. The sky is not falling. We receive students from all these places and more - both when I was at UCL and now in Cambridge, and it is great that it is not such a hassle for them to come here as it would be were the EU not to be there, or we not to be  a part. Or for us to go there - to work or study or retire. There are so many things to like, so few to dislike, in reality. Our quality of life (when I compare it with being a kid in the 60s and teenager in the 70s) is amazingly better. This is in no small part due to being part of the world's largest social, economic and cultural union. It is fantastic.

Why would I not?

I've already written on this blog about the leave campaign. It is often intellectually dishonest concerning the reasons for leaving, and almost completely bankrupt in terms of any actual  longterm strategy about what to do after an exit by our lone island. Many consequences (likely dismantling of the UK as Scotland leave) are dismissed. Problems creating trade agreements as the 5th largest economy, instead of being part of the largest, are bizarrely claimed to be non-existent. Recognition of the enormous benefits for us to go there, as well as people to come here is absent. The wealth of culture that we inhabit as a part, the fact that the UK is in any case a mongrel nation and English a mongrel language and indeed, one of the most successful at absorbing/integrating just about anything and mutating it into something better  - these are all to be thrown out, with only a vacuum to replace them. Nor do I trust a single one of the leaders of the campaign. Many of them live to the right of the Austrian wannabe president. Despite that we have control of more aspects of the place than most the rest of the European neighbours, with our own currency, language, sovereign, army, borders, judges, health system, education including world leading Universities, despite that all these operate while we have been in the EU and have gotten markedly better every decade for the duration, even during the last period with the aforesaid banking fiasco, those wanting to leave do so with a visceral hatred of the evidence. For some (I suspect UKIP voters) it is sour grapes - they only got 1 MP in the general election. For others, it is sadly, simple xenophobia, though how, given the number of people that visit or move here, and the number of brits that go to the continent for summer holidays, I do not understand.  I am amazed at the vehemence of the quitters. Often, bizarre conspiracy theories appear. Perhaps this is just the UK infected with the US online hysteria.  I hope that is all it is.

leavebots on the line - how to tell when a brexit campaigner isn't a "real" person

so if you engage with online campaigns, you will be aware that much of cyberspace (the twitter sphere etc) is full of bots - it is also full of people who are paid, or lined up one way or another, to "manage" the discussion, rather than let it flow from the population at large.

At one level, this is good, as it can help prevent trolling or other forms of abuse.
At another level, it is bad, as it puts a (deliberate) chilling hand around the throat of human discourse - indeed, methods were developed by Putin in Russia and by the government in China to police social media, and these are showing up around the US and UK online political debating channels increasingly. Amazingly, the linked study of chinese control of media gives 5 examples of methods, and here I paraphrase very slightly, so you can see how much these are used in the brexit campaign social media content:

1. Taunting of Foreign Countries, to take critique of this one:
e.g.  This country "has ijk million people, the more they rise, the more difficult it will be for us to eat, because the earth’s resources are limited."

2. Argumentative praise or criticism
e.g.  "The system automatically had you follow xxx & yyy populist online social media users,
this is a standard tactic of indoctrination and brainwashing,
I suggest you unfollow"

3. Non-argumentative Praise or Suggestions, that are a bit off topic - e.g. (yes, in china)
"...the housing problem"

4. "Factual" Reporting
e.g.  "we suggest you follow the opinion of leader C, with his selfless dedication to moral character and hardwork" - remind you of anyone (boris?)

5. Cheerleading
e.g. "Many heros fought bravely to create the life we have today - respect these heros" - used by both sides relentlessly

A simple clue is to look for "automatic" use of trigger terms - for example, in the brexit campaign, there are some tropes setup by the campaign managers (accuse critics of being a fear or scare monger, of being deluded, or of just being on the gravy train, etc etc

If a response doesn't address anything specific in your content, then it is suspect. If it is long, but appears so soon after your comment on fb or twitter, then likely it was cut and paste from a campaign document - check for this, as then you can draw attention to any of these behaviours, and detract from them, or indeed, get people to start filtering content coming from such non genuine participants.

Once you've learned the ropes, then you may get some rewarding discussions from thoughtful people, and maybe change your mind, or theirs. And that's how participatory democracy works, folks......

At some point, I might fire up our botnet detection software on some of these sites, but I am reluctant to start reporting them for abuse, as every now and then it looks like a real person has just quoted from stuff they've seen unwittingly, but that doesn't invalidate that person's view one bit. well, only just a bit...

brexit - how very really unacceptable a campaign.

So the awfully named brexit campaign is led by UKIP, who hired neil hamilton,of cash for questions fame, and part funded by aaron banks, who said on record that he wants to privatise the NHS, and spoken for by boris johnson, who has no political role right now, and who's legacy as london mayor basically consisted of implementing plans others set in motion (ok, he did the bikes, but that was red ken's idea - and the olympics ran themselves), whose own magazine decried his unacceptable attack on President Obama. how can people have any respect for these people - oh yes and they are in bed with galloway. doh. and iain duncan smith who is under investigation by the police for implementing the back-to-work tests against advice, possibly a wilful neglect of public duty by an official.

you want to vote for a campaign led by these people? really?

one last thing - they all go on about Sovereignty. We have a Sovereign - she leads our armed forces. She's on our currency. The police on the street and at the borders enforce her laws and her realm. We speak the Queen's English. Far be it from me to criticise the brexit campaigners' extremely poor comprehension of basic ideas - I leave that to inconceivably cleverer people, who are also funny.

[later addition - it seems that both sides will make very poor losers - both are accusing the other side of being traitors. this sort of hyperbole is both unpleasant threatening behaviour, and complete abnegation of the whole democratic thing. shockingly so :-( ]

political selfie

Some of you might have noticed me trolling around social media trying to engage with people in meaningful debate about the forthcoming referendum on the EU. I've made a few observations (most the people prepared to actually have a discussion about the pros/cons are women. most of the men on the remain campaign are boring, most men that react to anything critical of the leave campaign get offensive almost immediately - both "sides" repeat a lot of stock (cut&paste) phrases that don't mean much).

A vast generalization of the two sides is that the leavers are emotional (have gut reaction, not always just xenophobic, but mostly not about evidence) and the remainers are over-rational, citing factoid after factoid. One thing i tried was getting an emotionally compelling argument for staying (e.g. "all us christian nations should stick together", or "we need to keep the English Language alive in Europe" etc etc), but that didn't work much - mostly led to people taking me seriously, or just being puzzled. Presenting the leave campaign with facts is a total fail.

So I tried a new approach I've called the "political selfie"

See, looking at the broad bruss emotive arguments ("they come over here, take our jobs, use up our NHS", or "we don't have any sovergn power" or on the other side "we're more secure in Europe" and  the 'scare-mongery' "If we leave, we will hit huge trade tariffs&barriers") - these don't speak to individuals, they speak to national organisations making decisions. Individuals have their own experiences - did you lose a job because of the EU? Did your company get some great deals in france last year? was your holiday saved because you got easier emergency medical treatment? do you know any colleagues who you depend on at work who came over from the EU? did you're research get scuppered because of ludicrous EU red tape? etc etc - these are questions people may have come across in their every day life. And this actually elicits sensible answers. Surprisingly. This leads me to hope that, since most peoples experiences are that the EU had no personal effect on them whatsoever, (directly), they will not vote to leave. I hope :-)

if music be the food of love, it probably isn't for peace and understanding...

so in the past year I read Berverly Martyn's biography (sweet honesty), that reveals what a toerag John Martyn was, and also Barnie Hoskyn's excellent Laurel Canyon, and now Small Talk (woodsmock), which shows what a lowdown double crossing son of a gun half of the CSNY, the Eagles, and then Bobby Dylan himself all were - only human, I hear you cry, but these guys were part of the self-declared Love Generation - but the women came and went  (they're foot servants too), and outside in the cold distance, etc etc

so moving along, then we read viv albertine's fantastic tales about her like, then Kim Gordon's Girl in the Band lament and it seems that the 70s and 80s did not bring much in the way of enlightenment to menfolk about the role of women at work or in the home

reading geezer (jah wobble) and Anger is an energy (john lydon) it seems at least these guys may have been a bit less crap, despite starting with less advantages, and being somewhat confrontational types - it would be interesting to get their respective partners' viewpoints, but is there a lesson (louder, harsher music, nicer guys) ?

and of course, lydon's well known views about hippies  - from the evidence, he was/is right....

shame, coz the music is gorgeous couldn't love you more

Yes, they have no Exit Strategy, those brexit people.

i think a tactic for us that like being in the EU is to try is to write the brexit script - 

What are the exit strategies? oh, and some data

1. law in uk affected by EU legislation
2. impact of immigration on UK (net positive, a lot) and also note that there are about 5M UK citizens living abroad, roughly 2M of whom are brits in the EU, who will have to apply for visas, work permits, pay for healthcare, etc etc - add that to the mix, please.
3. UK science cost of leaving UK

Current stats not at all clear:-

• yougov poll/distribution of votes
• MPs take (not a good match to voters distribution:-)

What's clear is that if the leave vote wins, there will be massive massive fractures in the UK (scotland, wales, london will beg to differ big time). Also begs the question why the outgoing tory mayor and the tory candidate are brexit campaigners when their (prospective) constituency isn't. How does that work, pray?

Now, what were those things the brexit folks have to have answers for:-

• Where do we get our young employees for all those jobs the immigrants are doing? 
• Where do we get our collective defence. 
• How do we negotiate to not be outside the trade zone? what are the quid pro quos?
• What do we do about healthcare costs for 300,000 retirees in spain, and more across all of Europe? 
• What is it like to buy a holiday home in the EU if you aren't in it? 
• What do our passports look like? Who's paying for that? 
• What do we do without the 3B subsidy to NI&scotland? 
• What do we do without the 1B science money the UK gets from EU? 
• Do all EU citizens who want to go to a UK University now become full overseas fees? How does that work?
• What do we do with border controls diferentiy than now (given we're not Schengen anyhow) ?
• What do all organisations do about understanding the new legal/regulatory framework(s) they have to now add once the UK isn't in the EU so is subject to both if it is to do business? 
• What happens to working time directive? do we now all get junior doctor contracts?
• What happens to the channel tunnel? 
• What happens with other joint industries - e.g. AIrbus?
• Will Heathrow airport be a hub if it isn't in the EU? 
• Ditto Eurostar/St Pancras - how does that play with HS2
• Will the City be a financial center of the world if it isn't inside the EU? 
• What happens to EU nationals married to UK citizens when we leave the EU- do they have to get visas? 
• Are we kicked out of the Eurovision song contest ? (Oh, no, wait that would be a good thing now we don't have Wogan anymore:-)

Migrancy & the UK

They come over here, take our jobs & our homes, pay nothing (almost ) in tax
yes, I am talking about foreigners like the people from the middle and far east that park they capital in property in london as an off-shore investment make it unaffordable for local people to live there, and the americans that run US-based cloud business in the UK, and pay practically nothing in corporation tax.
 
These are the migrants the government should be doing something about, not the EU or other citizens who come here to do jobs there wasn't a UK person to do, who are a net benefit to the country.

we should stop the benefit scroungers who drive property prices up, by taxing empty property at some decent percentage of its capital value (say 10% per year), and we should levy tax on people based on the profit they claim in their home country if they choose to operate here - it wont drive the latter away - its a percentage of profit, so they still make money. it might stop the former, who need to go away as they contribute nothing to the economy and are the worst kind of rentiers.

Cambridge University's Sustainability as world leader?

Three things lead me to question the sanity of the powers that be in Cambridge University

First of all, always recall that there is no Cambridge University. It is an emergent phenomenon, a hologram made visible only through the lens of the Scholars, the Colleges and the Departments.

The Colleges are a mix zone, where social things happen, and housing, care and feeding of scholars occurs. Departments do research and teach. At least they have been for 800 years. This is all changing, very very quickly, without any evident thought of the unintended consequences.

1. Pay

I'm not complaining, but note bene - I am paid 2 bands up in the prof scale in recognition of being FRS and FREng. However, in Cambridge, what this translates into is that I am paid below the average professorial salary in the top 20 universities (ranked by pay) in the UK - these are'nt dodgy universities but include most of Cambridge's direct competitors. See
this tool if you want to check (and infer my pay:-)

Does this matter? sure;y the honour of working for cambridge is enough? sure, if you can live in Cambridge, or near enough in commute terms (strictly within 12 miles of Gt St Mary's church spire, or an hour's horse ride, originally) - good luck with that - and the modern scholar isn't a lone monk. They have a family, kids etc - the colleges no longer accommodate them. Nor do many of them work near a college so even dropping in for lunch is pretty unlikely.

2. Land Use

the university is hell bent on filling in all the gaps down by the station leading out to Addenbrookes Hosptial, and out in west cambridge, leading to the M11. Yes, we need more new good lab space. We also like the environment of Cambridge (elegant old buildings surrounded by park space like Midsummer Common, or Parker's Piece, or the Botanical Gardens). So why do we have to put up with this vandalism ? This includes stupid failures to even think about wind tunnel effects (we're in Cambridge with horizontal freezing rain on some days. How nice is that?).

3. Transport

Transport around Cambridge is ok (by bike) but useless if you live in an outlying village and have to drive in (and your kids to school). Compare with london - where people can get around....although they might have to live in Plaistow for an affordable home on a london academic salary...

house price by london tube station

So there will be jobs in lots of high rise buildings no-one can afford to live near, can't commute to and don't like. No shops, restaurants, pubs, green space, school, nurseries, adequate bike routes, etc etc

Mass Observations

today I finished a 2nd book on Mass Observation

Book the 2nd was Worktown subtitled nicely "The Astonishing Story of the Project that Launched Mass-Observation", by David Hall

Book the 1st was Dark Matter&the Dinosaurs, subtitled The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

Both of course are beautifully written accounts, one of the working class in 1930s Bolton, in their every day life, and the other of every day life&death at the end of the Jurassic amonst giant lizards.
Both are ended by dark events, the first by the 2nd world war, the second, by a 10km radius comet that struck the Yucatan coast at 20 Kilometers a second and wiped put about 85% of life on earth.

Both contain interesting theories, but more interestingly, make commentary on methodology- the first is on how to infer new possible models for the Cosmos based on very indirect obsservations - the second, based on how to understand everyday working people based on overheard conversations in the pub.

Both include a lot of sex as well, which is surprising, in a good way.

dangerous cult movement

people may have noticed (although they could be forgiven for not) that I've joined the movemberment

Little did I realize that this is a subtle and devious way to get people to look rediculous (more than white middle aged men with dreadlocks, or comb overs) and indulge in very expensive habits but also to need to seek relationship counselling and other support to cope with their loss of self esteem.

the whole moustache thing is incredibly competitive, mad and macho (mostly)

and while it may be literally truem I cannot say it is growing on me, figuratively.

cambridge goes west

so i've dipped my toe into cambridge (including the river) twice in 5 decades -

first time was traditional experience of being at Trinity College, living right in
the middle of it all surrounded by the full on college and university expeirences of social and academic life mingling via the rich, messy ways they do.

the second time has been very department-centric, in the computer lab just after (15 years ago) it moved to the newly occupied West Cambridge site.
At first, this was a great experience, still zooming back to town for events in college(s) and doing formal halls here there and everywhere, attending seminars on everything under the sun (and the far side of the universe). Excellent.

However, in the past few years, West cambridge has gotten more and more distant from town, and has become more and more of a hi-tech island, isolated from the University, indeed, from time to time, almost cut off by buidling work As I type, the normal cycle/footpath route into town is blocked (and has been for months) by annoying building work o nthe new physics of medicine building. Plans for new bus ways to Cambourne look all set to massacre the area again. The proposal to fill in the Paddock in front of the Vet School threatens us with a wind tunnel (without recourse to the nearby Whittle lab) and no greenery to stare at when lost in thought, and yet more glass/metal buildings, hey, we might as well be in downtown Cambridge Massachusetts, not rural Cambridgeshire, England. West Cambridge, 15 years in, still has zero shops, zero restaurants, zero social spaces worth talking about, zero pubs, zero Cambridge style. It is pretty terrible.

The treatment of the (I believe) 3000 or so people that work and study here is 2nd class - I do not hold out a lot of hope that future developments will prioritize people - they will be about "impressive" builds (stupidly, given we don't have the money to compete on that basis with the likes of Harvard or MIT), rather than nurturing the social, the heterogeneous, messy, cultural weirdness that makes Cambridge University what it is (or should I say was, as it is vanishing).

This is not a good thing. And I am not saying this coz I am unhappy here - its great. It is just not as great as it was in several ways.

True Cycling Advice

1. turn left on red at 4-way (take a cue from the US) -
i) make sure no cyclists are trying to cut on your inside
ii) make sure no cars going across (it is their right of way)
(check there's no filter light for oncoming to turn right!)
iii) make sure no pedestrians, pets or children within 10 meters
iv) make sure no boy racer nutter is acccelerating behind you to turn left the nanosecond the lights go amber
v) just go.

2. going ahead a t a junction when light is red -
i) Make sure no pedex action
ii) make sure no trucks with extra wide loads crossing
iii) if green box, go to far edge
iv) if yellow box, go about 20% into it
v) when no traffic crossing, just go

3. there are laws, then there's reality:
90% of car drivers ignore green box (its same as yellow box for them)
50% of car drivers turning turning either way fail to signal

this doesn't justify anything, but sure makes you feel less bad:)

4. always have good visibility clothes,
and reasonable (not ultrabright) lights.

and make sure your brakes work.

and own the road space (lane) you are in,
don't hog the kerb, or the parked cars.

everything else on the bike is optional.

5. if you see bad car/bus/taxi driver behaviour
and have a camera (phone)
and feel like you want to take a picture to have evidence
to give (to police, or your mum or your pet cat)
check your escape routes, as some drivers become violent
when their evil is being outed.

cycle carefully.

Peer Production and Post Capitalism - between snark & a boojum

Reading about Post Capital and the proposal by Paul Mason to restructure society around peer production to get rid of the:Precariat which appears not to be able to rise up, on account of Acquiescence causing all such occupy/indignados movements to fizzle out, despite the rediculously offensive Capital++ details.
(indeed, there's a whole other blog entry to be written about how the post modern disruption by surkov is remarkably similar to the US employment of shock doctrine, and the EU follows like a poodle....

Anyhow, I have to disagree with Mason's key idea, which seems to be based on the same false premise as Charles Stross' accelerando, that information markets can exponentiate in "value", and have zero marginal costs, so replace capital or labour systems of value.

The problem is that you cannot eat or drink bits. Bits of information do not fend off rain, snow, tides or enemies. Knowledge doesn't keep you warm, although it may reduce the chances you catch diseases.
The problem is that a knowledge economy is built on the same quicksand and lime as the whole financial service industry - indeed, the financial service instruments are exactly that - pieces of (often faulty) knowledge (algorithms for trading), that do not link either to time (labour) or wealth (capital). In the end, humans have to trade time for money, or money for time.

Plus Mason makes no proposal to solve the social inertia, that humans are either driven by greed (for more toys) or by altruism (wish to be liked == greed for more social capital). A new economy needs to have a sound social basis. Even Russell Brand had at least a better stab at that. Maybe we could just revisit socialism (with modern technology) and see how syndicalism might be made to work (it nearly did in Spain until Franco backed, by the Nazis and unopposed by the Brits or the Russians for shameful reasons, killed it. In a modern world, such a movement might be able to resist the IMF.

The Turing Institute for Data Science

trying to work out which of these two pictures will represent the sort of work the ATI will do most

1/ tamagochi hive mind
or
2/ astro turf wars

answers on a post card...

the naked eye aint wot it used to see

John Berger's ways of seeing  tv series was amazing - not just politically, but visually. everyone should atch it while they can (its >25 years old - makes new kids on the block look very naive) - its a polemic, genius art meets politics piece of criticism which is so much better than No Logo or Shock Doctrine. although I liked those too, albeit they were polemical, but with design instead of added art - hmm - maybe i'm just a polemicophile.

meanwhile, the four eye sage continues. Lft eye has accreted weird stuff in cornea so need laster treetment to restore it to pristine post-cataract post-detached-torn retina state. but the right eye now has vitreous partial detachment, so  might have to go thru same old retina shit if the macular/retina decide they like my vitreous more than my eye sight. great. we'll see. literally. and figuratively. and visually. and metaphorically. and luminously, and demonstrably. the outlook is temporary. the view from in here is, hmm// why dangle. floaters and shiny flashes cross the field, and I am not watching a thunderstorm or a plague of paparazzi.

how long does a vivid imagination outlast a visual reminder? the word, imagination: why is "image" in it? that's my currency. i don;t want to retire, even if it was to play blind lemon pledge for a few years (cue martin simpson joke name for blues guitarist) - would learn to play like this, maybe
ddb

s/IMF/potlatch/globally

There's been some (social) success in micro-loan systems in bailing out developing areas of the world, however, the macro-loan business run by the european central bank and the IMF and other neo-liberal agenda organisations is unacceptable.

Why don't we start a macro-loan potlatch?

Potlatch is a mutual system of gifts which bonds societies together - described in anthropology literature, it existed in particular in the Pacific North West of America between native tribes, and resulted in less war, as well as marriage exchanges (ok, so not necessarily all good) - this would fit the exact  same goal that the EU was created for, but without the complex burocracy and mission creep. Also, without the centralisation and mission creep/capture by capital - instead it would be a syndic. Norway could bootstrap it for Greece (but note, it would not be government or financial service agencies - it would be people-to-people, peer-to-peer)

I think such a mechanism could actually realize a techno-anarcho-syndicalist end-run on the whole neo-con/neo-liberal agenda - if you look at the disposable wealth one could offer, a set of a few million brits could, for example, extend a couple of trillion pounds quite easily. but it wouldn't be brit-to-portugal, but interest group to interest group....

needs some wiki-rules to prevent misbehaviour (but given how much the centralized banks and their alleged regulators like the FSA and the credit rating agencies completely screw up, a child of 3 could come up with something fairer and more stable...

time to invade everyware

My Manifesto for May 7

1. Austerity was always a nonsense idea - Keynes was right, Hayek wrong - during times of trouble, especially when there's the lowest interest rates in history, the government should borrow to run big infrastructure projects -the obvious one in the UK is to build about 500,000 houses per year for the next 10 years. The Harvard economists withdrew the empirical study paper that purported to support austerity (after it was shown to contain trivially wrong spreadsheet calculations) - it is no shameful thing to admit that the governments of Europe (esp. Germany) were wrong in following a bogus policy.

2.  Do not leave the EU- the CBI says so, and it is obvious that all the evidence (from trade and other places) is that we cannot afford to leave - we would cripple our economy. Drop the promise for a referendum, which is just a fig leaf for tories to protect against UKIP - confront the stupidty of UKIP with the sanity of the EU. The EU does not interfere in our sovereign law (proven) and is mainly a net massive contribution to our wealth. And political stability and peace. Sure, a few europeans come here to work and live - see next:

3. Do not change immigration policy. It is fine. there are more people going to the rest of europe on health tourism trips than come here by a factor of 10. THere are nearly as many people emigrate to warmer climes in Europe than come here from old eastern block, now EU, countries. The people that leave are old, expensive NHS drags. The ones that come here contribute massively, didn't cost us anything to educate, and do not especially work for less -t hey are too well educated to take the low end jobs.  Stopping them coming here would cost us money, significant amounts of the education and health services would collapse too. Point out UKIP only say this because they are racist. Point out that there is already a points system for non-EU people who want to come here - its almost impossible to get a work permit for a non-EU immigrant even if they have a PhD in the right topic. Ludicrous nonsense is made up about this. We should also be able to stand more asylum seekers from dangerous parts of the world (syria etc) which might make some of our radicalised people think we aren't actually against them.

4. Scrap trident. Being able to nuke Iran after we are a smoking crater is dangerous nonsense as well as being genocide. Money saved would also help with some of the next few things...

5.  Build lots and lots of houses and other infrastructure. I am really not dogmatic about whether you need to keep the right to buy policy, but would just point out that if you added 5M houses in the bigger cities, the price of housing would fall to something affordable and lots of builders would have been paid, so would be able to afford them too...obviously.

6. Make all education (including higher) free for all. It was for ages - we weren't poorer when we introduced fees, we were richer - we can still afford it. Germany repealed fees. We should too. Scotland has. Everyone benefits from having a better educated population. However, re-introduce the split between more vocational (shorter degree programme) polytechnic degrees and more academic R&D, just for clarity of career path. Note, medical and law degrees should be offered in polytechnics.

7. Progressive tax isn't far wrong. It is probably about right. But it needs to be enforced fairly. Corporation tax likewise. Staying in Europe would help with this (pressurising Switzerland to stop acting as a tax haven and Luxembourg to stop acting as a corporate tax haven) - we should offer that the UK will shut down corporation of london and channel island loopholes in exchange.

8. Pay for the NHS upgrade/funding gap 30B is less than 500 pounds per person - who says this isn't affordable? They are wrong.

9. Pay attention to sustainable energy - we could borrow lots of money against a future we'd then enjoy, by building those two big tidal barrage projects and a bunch of offshore wind farms. There are some downsides, but in the long run, the geo-political reduction in dependence (or is it addiction) to gas and oil from OPEC and Putin's Russia would be a Good Thing for everyone.

10. Move towards social, digital Direct Democracy - the Liquid Demos experiments need to continue til we make them work as engaging. Grass roots movements are breaking out everywhere - give them decision making (hey, even tax raising) powers whenever they show responsibility  - this is the way to reclaim being the Mother of all Parliaments - so we could one day soon say:

"We are all westminster, now."!

post feminism or posthumous feminism - is hi-tech just the new rock and roll?

I've read a lot recently about appalling treatment of women in hi-tech companies (c.f. gamergate). I guess its only surprising if you assume the somewhat dubious rhetoric/narrative that the hi-tech world came out of some sort of Californian hippy past (a very weird narrative if you think about Hewlett/Packard, Microsoft, IBM, and why should Google and Facebook be any different?)
[n.b. education is not immune from this - viz, MIT,  Stanford, and I am sure where I work too...]

So then I started reading some jolly good recent autobiographies starting with
Beverly Martyn's revelations about John Martyn - what a git.
So then I got on to Viv Albertine's great dissection of her life - some hard times - mostly less crap guys, but still some.
Then I read Jah Wobble's Memoirs of a Geezer, which has some extremely funny moments, but some odd views on relationships, although some heroic  stand-in work, similar to John Lydon's tale of waywardness and argumentation, followed by some recovering family work.
Finally (well, most recently) I got Kim Gordon's Girl in the Band (which reminds me, I had read Patti Smith's fantastic Just Kids which is mainly a lament for Robert Mapplethorpe), and see some of the same behaviour.

** update ** - just finished Chrissie Hynde's reckless, self penned autobiography - quite the victim-tale as Beverly Martyn (or elss so, Kim Gordon) - looks like la Hynde was actually the perp in quite a few cases of mayhem, but comes over as caring a lot at least....and surviving (like Albertine) not just, but sucessfully with kids in tow/intact too....some rock tour/music details are quite interesting, although if you really want to know how the music industry works in technical detail, go no further than the master work by David Byrne on the perfectly, simply named, How Music Works.

So what's the common thread? These folks represent a sample of people bought up in US and UK counter culture over the past 50 plus years, and yet, 200 years after Mary Wollestonecraft, there's precious little evidence any of these icon's of our time paid a blind bit of notice to what she said.

So even if the hi-tech sector came out of the counter-culture (which it doesn't) their youth heroes and even mentors were basically a bunch of patronising arseholes.

Really Radical

I realize that the roots of the word "radical" are, errrr, just that - going back to roots. But I really dislike the use of "radicalization" to describe the brainwashing of poor western muslims back to the stone age (except, ironically, happily toting 21st century western weapons).

The idea of being really radical for me summons up the re-wiring of ones roots - the subtle, and careful replacement of medieval assumptions with more nuanced behaviours and affordances, permissions and obligations. There are plenty of examples - having just come back from China, I caught up on some of their history (from 13/14th century) and it is a similar story to ours - highly hierarchical societies with a very strict caste system, a priesthood and a royalty, and 11 strata - every detail of behaviour prescribed - penalties for breaking rules could result in everyone from the top 9 strata in your family/entourage being executed - reading about the Peasants' Revolt in about the same time in England, much the same here.

Moving on through the "Englightenment, the 19th and 20th century saw may radical ideas enacted.
People could take the weekend off.
People got a say in how things were run.
The definition of people included folks from any walk of life, men, women,
non-christians.
We got the right to a fair trial (innocent before being proven guilty).
We got to live in peace without interference in your behaviour in your own home.
We got to expect a fair go at education, health, safety, entertainment, fulfilment.

Along with these fundamental rights (and there are a lot more we enjoy)
we got the right to talk nonsense in public. We got the right not to expect the Spanish Inquisition (literally and figuratively). We got Satire. We got to enjoy (or find excruciating) difference. Diversity. Tolerance. Misdemeanour. Letting your hair down. Eccentricity. Daftness.

Long may we persist - I like to think we were heading towards Iain Banks "Culture" philosophy, and a jolly good thing to.

Meanwhile so-called "radicalized" religious "fundamentalists", hear this: you aren't fundamental or radical. You are superficial, ignorant and lacking in any human spirit.

The Revolution Will Not be Branded

Struggling through Russell Brand's tome whose basic flaws this review nails (poor writing, repetitios, long windied and not terribly funny).

However, there are several ill-matched tropes in the book, which for me, ultimately, completely undermine what might otherwise have been a useful contribution to the debate on what should replace western capitalist "democracy":

1. Mixing up his own already fairly public personal voyage with a rag-bag of quite interesting critiques of the situation in which we are in, largely by other people, distracts from the impact.
I don't care that he's a recovering substance abuser. It isn't relevant to the argument, no matter how much he tries to make of the analaogy between his own and societies' addictions. The personal solution doesn't work for society, and the social problems don't gell with his conspiracy of the illumiati-bus load of ultra-rich. You can't blame other people, no matter how wealthy for your own poor choices. Re-organising society from the bottom up isn't just a matter of better ad-blocking.

2. Repeated use of 4 letter words, both for emphasis (ok use of F word and invective/dismissal of individuals (not ok use of C word), will piss of a lot of readers who are  from a more genteel world, or perhaps are just women, or just think the author should use his imagination to come up with less lazy cusses (think, arab curses, for example - may your mother's milk be long life).

3. Religion - so I see where he's coming from with the personal/spiritual aspect of life - there's a brilliant bit in Ursula Le Guin's genius novel, The Dispossessed, when someone from the capitalist planet asks the visitor from the Anarchist neighbour world "so you don't believe in god?" and he retorts that they are perfectly capable of thinking in the spirtual mode - its just one of seven ways of thinking. (Wish Le Guin had listed the other 6!)

The problem is that he didn't get the same level of expert advice or even decent sound bytes on how you might link social, and economic re- organisation with a spiritual structure that doesn't just end up being the same old organisation with priests and temples, hedge fund managers and casino banks, presidents, senators, lords and  white houses.

Oh, and he picked the wrong kind of yoga.

Some further thoughts
i). Brand is somewhat in-awe of "experts, to the extent where he magically places Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty together on a pedestal - as far as I know, Klein is no more "quafid" than Brand to comment (this is not a criticism of Klein (or Brand) - anyone can read up this stuff) but Piketty has "paid his dues" so is an expert (for what its worth) - what makes Piketty and Klein worth reading is that they put their evidence up for inspection - their books are copiously well supported by facts.

ii) Crucial point is that its clear at some points (about midway through the book, for example) that Brand doesn't live the dream quite - when talking about Bankers Bailout he doesn't join up with the discussion of cancelling indivuduals' debts - the argument used by the right wing is that "if we cancel everyones' debt, they will just stop working so hard, and run up more debts". So if that argument applies to the Hoi Poloi/Jane Q Public/The Great Unwashed, how does it not then apply in spades to bankers? The austerity imposed on great swathes of Europe in the name of sorting out the crisis, which was largely bought about by covering failed casino banks and stupid lenders (not borrowers) is one the most awe-inspiring con-tricks of all time. As some of the smart people are quoted as saying in the book, it was transfer of wealth from the poor (who were also borrowers, to the rich who were already coining it from gigantic bonuses and outrageous interest rates.

The Shakespear line  "neither a borrow nor a lender be" sure is bad advice. Pick one, and make sure its a lender. (Brand does quote various olden time cultural and religious proscriptions against lending, to, errr, give him, errr, credit :)

iii) the book should be free (as well as buyable) - this is known not to affect sales of good books, but sets an example - my colleague, Ross Anderson, wrote the best book on security engineering, and got his publishers agreement to make it free online too without any detectable negative impact on sales (in fact, likely the reverse).