Reflections by danah boyd on her first visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he's right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people.

It turns out that former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was laughing all the way to the (run on the) banks:

[Following the release of the minutes of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee's meetings for 2001-2006...]

It makes for quite a fun read if you get past all the boring economic analysis parts. In fact, if the stenographer was accurate, the Committee broke into laughter 45 times in just the January meeting! That's at least 45 jokes (some didn't get laughs – if only we knew the quality of each laughter!). I would have guessed that would be a lot relative to other meetings, right? I mean how funny would it be if the top of the housing market was also when the FOMC was telling the most jokes in their meetings?

Well, being a data nerd with nothing better to do on a Thursday night, I looked into it. To be precise, I went back for just the last six years (2001-06) and searched for how many times the stenographer's notation for laughter appeared in the released transcripts of each FOMC meeting.

Suffice it to say the data is funny…

Sadly, the minutes of meetings of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee are written in a rather dry, formal style, so there doesn't seem to be much scope for a similar analysis of economic policymakers' behaviour over here.

[Via The Morning News]

Get Your Censor On.



[Via jwz]

Assange versus Zuckerberg.

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Daz Wright flies the flag for Eric Pickles:

I, like most people, gave a little patriotic cheer when Eric Pickles announced that the pointlessly bureaucratic rules on flag flying are going to be relaxed. Pickles has always been a man that is willing to confront the issues that others shy away from. [...]

[Via We Love Local Government]

The Metropolitan Police, on why files relating to the force's investigation of the Whitechapel murders should not be released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request:

Detective Inspector 'D' told the tribunal that unveiling the files could deter informants from coming forward in future, and could even put off members of the public from phoning Crimestoppers or the antiterrorist hotline.

"The interpretation on the street will be that the police have revealed the identity of informants," said 'D'.

"Confidence in the system is maintaining the safety of informants, regardless of age."

Det Insp 'D' said the passage of time did not make publication of informants' identities less sensitive because their descendants could be targeted by criminals with a grudge.

"Look at one of the world's best-known informants, Judas Iscariot. If someone could draw a bloodline from Judas Iscariot to a present day person then that person would face a risk, although I know that seems an extreme example," the officer said.

STOP PRESS: News reports have been received of the murder of a Mr Julian Iscariot of 1 Gethsemane Gardens, Whitechapel, London. Detective Inspector 'D' of Scotland Yard has announced that the Metropolitan Police will be interviewing every Christian in the UK to establish whether they had an alibi for the night in question.

[Via The Morning News]

John Naughton relates a lovely line from a recent lecture by Peter Hennessy in which he touched upon the issue of how a Prime Minister deals with his or her responsibilities as regards the potential deployment of the UK's nuclear deterrent:

Hennessy was very interesting on this function of the Prime Minister, which he calls "end of the world stuff". The big issue is the instructions that Trident captains are given before embarking on the 90-day patrol during which time they are are largely incommunicado. Each incoming PM is now required to write, on four handwritten sheets of paper, the four options that the commander of the submarine is given. These sheets are then sealed and the envelope lodged in the submarine's safe. Hennessy raised a grim laugh when he claimed that Tony Blair "went white" when this was explained to him, and speculated that one of his concerns was that the trident patrols are not synchronised with the electoral cycle: when Blair arrived in Downing Street, one of the subs was on patrol – with John Major's handwritten instructions in the vessel's safe!

The secret life of libraries collects a set of anecdotes that serve to remind us of how much more there is to public libraries than mere statistics about the number of books/DVDs sent out on loan each week:

"The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says [retired librarian] Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that."

[Via The Morning News]

Take a chunk of anonymised data from British Telecom's database detailing the origin and destination of phone calls made from UK landlines, take steps to strip out numbers that belong to call centres, plot the calls on a map and you get Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions. Fascinating stuff.

I was surprised to see how Cumbria fared; it always felt to me as if places like Carlisle, Penrith, Whitehaven and Workington had strong ties to the North East, or certainly to Newcastle, but judging by this data that corner of the country seems to be fairly equally interested in talking to Manchester, Scotland and Tyneside.

[Via The Yorkshire Ranter]

Bruce Sterling on the Wikileaks saga:

Assange didn't liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn't a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else's national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It's just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

[Via The Null Device]

The Redundant Public Servant has been so busy submitting job applications lately that he found himself quite unable to change gear when the time came to draft his family's Christmas round robin letter:

Mrs RPS has had significant experience of leading and change management over the last year should have been Mrs RPS has had to deal with an increasingly grumpy husband who is losing his job.

RPS Daughter 1 has a strong track record of achievement in key aspects of the person specification was where I meant to say RPS Daughter 1 has continued to get great grades at school.

Son of RPS has demonstrated his commitment to personal and professional development through his pursuit of a comprehensive learning plan should really have been Son of RPS appears to have an active university social life so far as we can tell from what he writes on Facebook.

RPS is now looking for a new opportunity in an organisation which shares his commitment to excellence and passion for customer service was a convoluted way of saying His Nibs is being made redundant, any chance of a job?

Martin Belam has posted his notes on a talk that he recently attended by John Sheridan in which Sheridan discussed the challenges faced by www.legislation.gov.uk in turning the text of UK legislation into hypertext:

The task before them therefore was to try and take that written word and turn it into linked data with a clear semantic model. It is a very complex and rich set of information to try and represent as pure data. [...] It is common in law for a new Act to insert some text into the body of a previous one. This gives a versioning problem. As John Sheridan put it: "The statute book has known pasts, known futures, and unknown futures. All at the same time"

Fascinating.

Reviewing David Laws's account of the meetings that led to the formation of the coalition government, David Runciman reckons that he's spotted evidence of a new trend in public life.

After observing that many of the Liberal Democrat negotiators adopted the classic Tony Blair strategy of positioning themselves in opposition to the beliefs of the majority of their party's members, Runciman notes:

[...] Laws reconstructs conversations at which he was present, and everyone speaks with Blair's characteristic verbal tic, beginning their sentences 'Look…' 'Look…' says Nick Clegg. 'Look…' says Chris Huhne. 'Look …' says David Laws.

If you listen out for it, this tic has become a new divide in British public life: between the people who say 'Look…' and the people who say 'So…' 'Look…' is a badge of conviction, and it's meant to signal sincerity, respect for the other point of view but a determination to do the right thing. 'So…' is mandarin-speak – it's said to be a characteristic of almost everyone who works at the Bank of England – and it signals a resigned acceptance of the facts, whatever your personal preferences might be. Most academics, in my experience, now begin their seminar answers: 'So…' When my wife and I talk to our children, I notice that we tend to say: 'So…' But Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats are determined to be 'Look…' people. [...]

In the month of Wikileaks – when US senators lean on Amazon to stop hosting a web site they disapprove of, online payment processing services suddenly find it inappropriate to continue to service certain customers, and numerous columnists and out of work politicians express the view that Julian Assange should be hunted down and tried for [espionage | treason | insert capital crime of your choice here]¹ – life truly does imitate The Onion:

US Department of State

Press Statement

Philip J. Crowley
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, DC

December 7, 2010

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 – May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.

The theme for next year's commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age. [...]

You Couldn't Make It Up…

[Via Making Light]

1. Crimes against a nation of which he is neither a citizen nor a resident, let's not forget. ↩

Life imitates Yes, Minister:

Many years ago I was told by the head of the (then) Passport Agency that he'd had a phone call from a Minister. The Minister had said that his passport was coming up for renewal and he wanted a favour. Could the Agency chief arrange for his new passport number to end with "007"? The Agency chief said, politely but very firmly "no, Minister".

Life for Treasury civil servants imitates Yes Minister.

Christopher Andrew, MI5's official historian, on job satisfaction:

[Andrew...] also claimed that the human resources consultants employed to discover the levels of job satisfaction at the British domestic intelligence service had found that there was "only one organisation they had investigated that had higher morale: the publisher Mills & Boon".

Which does rather beg the question of which other organisations they had investigated.¹

1. I'm sure MI5 is a much happier place to work right now than, say, BP's PR agency. ↩

It turns out there's a minor glitch in our new government's policy that ministers eschew the use of chauffeur-driven government cars:

Now ministers are being told they must travel to their constituencies by second class public transport, but for security reasons their red boxes must travel to the constituency separately in a private car.

This seems like the sort of thing that happens when someone takes a new policy just a bit too literally. Surely it's eminently fixable: just make other arrangements for ministers to have access to the material in their red boxes.

Given that much of the material the minister is being asked to review will be reports, correspondence, memos and the like that were prepared on a computer,¹ how hard could it really be?²

[Via New Statesman]

1. Or that could have been prepared in the appropriate format if it was known in advance that this was necessary. ↩
2. That said, let's hope that the chosen solution isn't to have all this correspondence prepared in various nice, accessible formats only to be copied to a flash drive that is handed to the minister on their way out of the building on a Friday night. ↩

Remember Paul Chambers, the Twitter terrorist? Back in January, when the harsh winter was threatening to close Doncaster's Robin Hood airport, he posted:

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Guess what happened next:

I never expected to be charged, but a month later I was: not under the offence of making a bomb threat, for which I was originally arrested, but under the communications act for the offence of sending a menacing message. [...] Even after all the preceding absurdity and near-breakdown-inducing stress, I was confident common sense would prevail in my day in court.

Unfortunately, yesterday I was found guilty and ordered to pay £1,000 in fines and legal costs, which I have to find along with my own legal costs of another £1,000. I am considering an appeal, though I have no means, having left my job due to the circumstances.

I wonder if our new Justice Secretary has any thoughts about whether taking Chambers to court really served the interests of justice.

John Lanchester finds an apt metaphor for post-election Britain:

The voting system and the electorate have botched this election. Reality, as it sometimes helpfully does, offers a metaphor for what we've done. In Chingford, an Independent candidate decided to do something frightfully amusing and changed his name to 'None of the Above'. But because of the way names were presented, he appeared as 'Above, None of the' – at the top of the ballot.