The Guardian have introduced a new travel web site and GU development manager, Nik Silver, has written an interesting article about how it all works. Sounds like it's full of web 2.0 goodness. Some nice uses of tagging and RSS.
I don't have any inside information, but I suspect that this might be a little glimpse into the future of the Guardian web site.
Occasionally, I find that articles from this site are misappropriated for use on splogs. It seems, however, that most of my usual subjects are of no interest to sploggers as it has only happened a few times.
But yesterday's post about Cooking Vinyl seems to have both confused and excited the sploggers. This morning, Google's blogsearch reveals links to that article from nine splogs.
Of course, they're all about cooking :-)
Oops. It seems that the update to the latest version of Movable Type broke the commenting on this site. I'm still not sure what happened (it seems to be a problem with the TypeKey intergration), but comments are working again now (but only because I've removed the requirement for TypeKey authentication).
I'll look at it in more detail this evening.
Sorry about that. I hope no-one had anything too important to say.
Following on from yesterday's piece about "Truth" In Science trying to get their crackpot creationist theories taught in British schools, I see that MP Graham Stringer has tabled an Early Day Motion on this issue. You might consider popping over to WriteToThem and asking your MP to sign this EDM.
The BBC has a story about Digital Music Downloading. This is a forthcoming service where if you like a song you hear on digital radio, you'll be able to buy it immediately. The BBC says this:
The service, called Digital Music Downloading, allows listeners to buy any song they hear, with MP3 copies being sent to their phone and computer.
That "MP3" sounded unlikely to me. If record companies are going to be selling tracks using this method then you can bet that it won't be an MP3, it'll almost certainly be some nasty proprietary format that is DRMed to the hilt. The original press release for the announcement doesn't mention anything about MP3 files, but does say:
DMD broadcasts encoded and encrypted music files, alongside a radio station's audio stream
Which sounds far more likely.
So is "MP3" now being used to mean any digital music file? The distinction between different digital musc formats is important to me. And I'll never knowingly buy anything that has any kind of DRM. But maybe I'm in the minority. Or maybe the recording industry is just trying to blur the distinctions.
Probably only of interest to me, but I've put together a page which lists all of the Cooking Vinyl compilation albums.
As I've written before, Cooking Vinyl were the label who really introduced me to world music, and their compilation albums are a great overview of their catalogue.
If you've got any information to add, then please let me know.
From the front page of today's Guardian:
Dozens of schools are using creationist teaching materials condemned by the government as "not appropriate to support the science curriculum", the Guardian has learned.
The packs promote the creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution called intelligent design and the group behind them said 59 schools are using the information as "a useful classroom resource".
The group behind this are called Truth in Science - which must be a joke as they seem determined to lie about science whenever possible. It's also worrying that that they are a completely different group to the one that has been lobbying MPs recently.
The story goes on to say:
A teacher at one of the schools said it intended to use the DVDs to present intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinism. Nick Cowan, head of chemistry at Bluecoat school, in Liverpool, said: "Just because it takes a negative look at Darwinism doesn't mean it is not science. I think to critique Darwinism is quite appropriate."
This man is head of chemistry. A post that is traditionally held by a scientist.
Now let's be clear on this (as I've been misunderstood when writing about this before). I'm all for pupils being taught the history of belief and comparative religion. But the only way that creationism (or "intelligent design") should be covered in a science lesson is to illustrate how far our understanding of the world has increased in a relatively short time.
And, yes, I'm all in favour of questioning Darwin's theories. That's how science works. Theories are tested and questioned. But any questions need to come from scientific research, not from idiots who are upset because science disagrees with their favourite fairy story.
It's not all bad news though. The government has said that this material should not be used in the classrrom.
The government has made it clear the Truth in Science materials should not be used in science lessons. In a response to the Labour MP Graham Stringer on November 1, Jim Knight, a minister in the Department for Education and Skills, wrote: "Neither intelligent design nor creationism are recognised scientific theories and they are not included in the science curriculum."
So, I wonder what will happen to the teachers who have used it already? In my opinion people who teach this nonsense to children should be banned from teaching. But I'll be very surprised if that happens.
Update: The same story on the BBC.
I'm probably coming to this very late. I'm sure you've all seen it already.
A few weeks ago, I recorded the Amnesty International Secret Policeman's Ball, but I hadn't got round to watching much of it until last night - when I discovered this.
"Torn" is, of course a great song and David Armand's interpretation is very clever.
I've been humming it ever since.
It looks like boo.com is being resurrected. I know people who are still emotionally scarred from its first incarnation.
I've updated this blog[1] to the latest version of Movable Type. If you see any glitches that this might have caused, then please let me know.
[1] And also Alternative Freak, Battersea MP and the Planet Balham Blog.
I'm not quite old enough to remember the Beatles when they were still recording. My earliest memories of Top of the Pops date from just after they split up. But when I started getting interested in music they were still a very recent phenomenon and their influence was felt in every discussion about music. They seemed to get the credit for all of the changes that popular music had gone through in the 1960s. And, of course, they were very influencial - but I think that in the early 1970s their popularity overshadowed many other artists who were just as influential.
Once I reached that conclusion I pretty much stopped listening to the Beatles. Oh, I've got a few of their albums on vinyl, but I never replaced them on CD. Personally, I'd rather listen to the Beach Boys or Bob Dylan.
But my interest was piqued by their "new" CD, Love. And then I found that it is available to listen to for free on the Beatles web site. So I had a listen.
And I have to say that I'm really rather impressed. Oh, there's nothing really new there. The album consists of a number of Beatles songs that have been remixed and "mashed-up" by George Martin with help from his son Giles. But there's something about the way that the familiar songs have been changed in subtle (and, sometimes, not so subtle) ways that really made me listen to them more carefully than I had for thirty years. The songs had become overfamiliar and the alterations knock you out of your complacency and force you to really listen to them. Which is well worth doing, because actually the songs are far better than their overfamiliarity would have you believe.
I still think that the Beatles weren't necessary the best band around in the 60s, but this album has made me re-evaluate them and I'll be listening to them more in the future. I might even buy a CD or two.
It's really not surprising that the god-fearing Daily Mail has taken this approach to the BA "cross-banning" story. And it was obvious that they would side with the Archbishop of York. But what I do find surprising is that they feel the need to point out that Dr Sentamu is Ugandan. I've thought about it for... oh... a good thirty seconds now and the only explaination that I can come up with is that they are saying "Look, this is so obvious that even darkies can see it's wrong". Is there any other way to interpret it?
As for the story itself (here's the Daily Mail version) - personally I'd rather not see religious symbols as I go about my daily business, but if people want to advertise their stupidity then who am I to stand in their way. I just think that we should all point at them and laugh.
Oh, and note to the Mail's sub-editors. I think you'll find that "commonsense" is one word when used as an adjective ("this is a commonsense approach") but two words when used as a noun ("this approach is just common sense").
Tom Watson reports that he has been sent a DVD by a group of creationist nutters (that's probably a tautology isn't it?) which he assumes has been sent to all MPs. Apparently it's sent from the people at creationresearch.net and the covering letter includes the following:
I have yet to find any credible examples of chemicals turning into creatures or animals and plants etc turning into different species....These [school text book examples] have largely been discredited eg Darwin's Galapagos Finches, Proessor Haeckel's embryos and Kettlewell's moths. Apples do not turn into pears slowly or quickly. Making a blind leap of faith in assuming that variety within a major species proves evolution is not tenable.....evolution hasn't produced any radical changes...
It is not surprising that young people are rejecting scientific courses at A Level and university when the curriculum promotes the idea that the "survival of the fittest" and natural selection have lead to the chance evolution of things. It excludes serious consideration of creation.
All complete nonsense, of course. Any sensible person would just throw it away (having watched it first for a laugh). But it worries me that not all of our MPs are sensible people.
I'm currently building a web site that will involve plotting the positions of buildings onto maps. I'm going to be using Google maps for that. Unfortunately, the data that I need to plot is a list of postcodes and as far as I can see, the best way to plot stuff on a Google map is by using its latitude and longitude.
So I needed a way to convert UK postcodes to lat/long. The frustrating part is that I know that the BBC has an application that does that (and many, many other things) and that they have been planning to release it as part of Backstage for some time but that licensing issues have been preventing that from happening.
And licensing is at the heart of the problems faced by people trying to write geographical systems for the UK. Most of the truely useful data is owned by commercial organisations who want to make money out of it. Postcode information is owned by the Post Office and a lot of other data is owned by the Ordnance Survey. And the licenses for this data are expensive enough to prevent most people from using it. This is the basis of the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign.
At this point, I should point out a couple of projects that are trying to address this problem by building a free database of postcodes - Free The Postcode and New Popular Edition Maps. I'd urge you to visit both of these sites and tell them about any postcodes that you know.
Unfortunately, the coverage of both of these projects was too patchy to be of any use to me. But then someone pointed me at nearby.org.uk and all my problems were solved. This site converts between many UK geographical coordinate systems - including converting postcodes to lat/long. And it has a nice web services API which made it simple to write a program to grab the hundred or so values that I wanted.
All in all, a successful afternoon's work.
Oh, and whilst experimenting with Google maps, I built this - places I have lived in London
I was going to write something about Matthew Taylor's little tantrum about blogs. But I see that Rachel has already said everything I would say - and far more eloquently that I would say it.
The new petitions site that MySociety have set up is a really good idea, but I hope that it doesn't get so overwhelmed with petitions that it's hard to find what you're looking for. It seems that every time I look at the list, there are more petitions that I want to sign. Here are a few that I've signed so far:
Tim Ireland has got a bit silly. But currently the petition that I'd urge you to sign (assuming, of course, that you agree with it) is the one abolishing faith schools and banning the teaching of creationism in schools.
The Backing Blair campaign is closing down. The closing statement that is now on the front page of their web site says this:
Right now, at every level of politics, people can be split into two groups:
- Those who feel distanced from politics and/or helpless to change matters because of a growing culture of obfuscation and impunity in the political arena.
- Those who are willing to exploit this culture to gain or maintain power.
Never mind the Labour Party; consider just for one moment what this is doing to undermine our democracy.
There are already countless politicians, media-owners, campaigners and publishers (including bloggers) who are exploiting this state of affairs for their own personal gain and online intrusion is on the increase following several successful attempts to synthesise grass roots movements and/or cynically exploit the frustration that genuine people are feeling.
The time has come for all good people to stand up and face these problems in a tangible way... and have the courage to be judged on their merits.
And there's a link to a teaser site for Tim Ireland's new project - National Service
I've been mostly happy with my bank, First Direct since I started banking with them about seventeen years ago. So it's a bit disappointing to see that they are the first bank to break ranks and start charging certain customers for banking with them.
Under these new rules, it looks like I won't be charged for my accounts as there's plenty of money moving through them on a regular basis. But I wonder if they're just testing the water and are hoping to extend the charges before too long. And I bet that the other banks are watching closely. If this is a success (or, more realistically, if it's not an abject failure) then other banks will be following soon.
I thought that the Windows refund campaign had died in 1999. But the BBC are reporting that a Sheffield man has got a refund of £55.23 from Dell by refusing to accept the standard Windows licence that came with his new PC and installing Linux on it instead.
PC manufacturers like Dell have a deal with Microsoft whereby they pay less for Windows if they pay for a licence on every PC that they sell. This encourages them to install Windows on every PC (as they have to pay for it anyway) and that, in turn, discourages people from installing alternative operating systems on their computers. If you've paid for a copy of Windows then why would you install something else instead[1]?
By forcing PC vendors to refund the money on unused copies of Windows, then they might reconsider the deals they have with Microsoft and will be more likely to start selling PCs with alternative operating systems installed.
Hopefully this will lead to a resurgence of the Windows refund campaign. Which will lead to more choice to consumers. Which can only be a good thing.
p.s. I've just realised that the chap who got the refund is Dave Mitchell who is a member of the core Perl development team. I've always said that Perl hackers were top people.
[1] Well, unless you're one of those communist, open source weirdos!
Oh, and whilst we're talking about creationist loonies, the Guardian has a report from the Creation Museum which will open next year in Kentucky.
The Creation Museum - motto: "Prepare to Believe!" - will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.
It would all be very funny if there weren't so many people who take it seriously. Seriously enough to spend $25m on creating the museum. Of course everyone involved is a complete nutter as the Guardian's gentle probing reveals.
But what, I ask wonderingly, about those fossilised remains of early man-like creatures? Marsh [Patrick Marsh, who designed the displays] knows all about that: "There are no such things. Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they've found, what's the word? ... they could have been deformed, diseased or something. I've seen people like that running round the streets of New York."
It's almost worth a visit. Just to point and laugh!
Update: No need to wait until it opens. Or to travel all that way. The museum web site allows you to laugh at them now. And from the comfort of your own home.
Writing in yesterday's Times, A A Gill put his finger on a problem that has been bothering me about the BBC's latest wildlife extravaganza - Planet Earth. For a science programme, it has very little science in it.
The factual content is now virtually nil, just scene-setting and needless telling you what you’re seeing. There was barely any attempt to differentiate between North and South Poles. Who cared? And the observation becomes ever more disengaged from a human-sized reality. The camera angles get higher and wider, giving an omnipotent view, and the sentimentally grandiose music is beyond bearing, like the overblown accompaniment to a silent movie or Tchaikovsky orchestrating cartoons. The wildlife itself is sentimentalised, anthropomorphised and edited into a cute narrative in a way I thought we’d all grown out of with Disney in the 1950s.
The explaination he comes up with is all very worrying
But mostly what I mind is the hidden hand of American culture and scientific social censorship. Like most big BBC nature series, this was a co-production with the Discovery channel, which has a long and weird set of requirements for its products: very little violence, no blood, hardly any sex and very, very hazy, noncommittal science, especially where it may contentiously upset fundamental Christians. Essentially what it wants is pretty, unnatural nature for 10-year-old, conservative Midwestern creationists. Now, I understand that this sort of programme is eye-wateringly expensive, and getting other broadcasters to share the expense makes bottom-line sense. But the BBC is not a commercial company: your licence fee is being used to subsidise American commercial television, and it’s being made to their specifications.
As regular readers will know, I'm a great fan of the BBC. And their wildlife programmes are usually the best in the world. But really don't want to watch science programs with all the science taken out so that it doesn't offend looney creationists in the US.
I always thought the Canadians were eminently sensible people. From the Ottawa Citizen:
The Quebec ministry of education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin's theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors after an Outaouais school board complained the provincial curriculum wasn't being followed.
Not going far enough of course. Superstition schools should just be closed down. But it's a step in the right direction.
And in similar news, Tom Watson mentions the report in the latest New Scientist about the large amount of home-schooling that goes on in the US. And, of course, most of this home schooling is done because the parents want to indoctrinate their children in the rules of their particular superstitions and don't want to run the risk of the children coming across rational thought.
Very worrying article in today's Guardian technology section. We all know that spam levels are constantly increasing but this article says that 91% of email is now spam. It then goes on to put at least some of the blame on the people who connect completely unprotected PCs to the internet. These PCs then get attacked and taken over by Trojan horse or worm programs which place many of the PC's resources at the resources of unscrupulous people who can then use the PC for various nefarious purposes. These networks of compromised PCs (or "botnets") are increasingly being used to send spam. And there are literally millions of these PCs out there. Which means huge amounts of spam.
ISPs and PC vendors need to do a lot more work to educate people into protecting PCs that are connected to the internet. Currently it seems that the vast majority of PC owners have no idea of the problems so they just carry on regardless. The article contains a guide to checking to see if your PC is being controlled in this way. Everyone with a PC connected to the internet[1] should be encouraged to go through this procedure and then to install decent firewall software.
[1] Well, at least, those running Windows. Computers running Linux or MacOS aren't immune, but they aren't often targeted as so many people run Windows that it offers far greater returns.
The company formed from the amalgamation of ntl, Telewest and Virgin have announced that from early next year they will be rebranding as Virgin Media. I really hope that the promotional video on that page isn't indicative of the quality of their services.
I've had cable TV services for seven or eight years now. I originally signed up with Cable and Wireless. I haven't switched suppliers, but this will be the second time that my supplier has changed name.
I thought that last week's episode of Torchwood was a bit better than the first two, but with this week's episode, Cyberwoman, the quality plunged again.
The pitch probably went something like this: "We'll have an attractive young woman wandering around with Cyberman technology covering as little of her body as we can get away with - it'll be like a Cyberbikini". Someone must have raised the objections that Cybermen are created by transplanting human brains into ready-made Cyberman bodies and that although we've previously seen women who have been turned into Cybermen, none of them have every had breasts - because these objections were dealt with in a line of dialogue which went something along the lines of "towards the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf the Cybermen completely changed the way they created new Cybermen". Hardly a well thought out plot point.
No, it's clear that the point of this episode was the Cyberbikini and all pretence of a logical plot was swept aside in order to get it on screen. And to keep it on screen for a long as possible. Once more I can't help thinking that when the BBC describe this as an "adult drama", they actually mean that it's aimed at teenagers whose idea of a good programme is one full of sex, gore and swearing.
Which brings me to the character of Owen. I suspect that the show's target audience (the sex-crazed teenagers) are supposed to identify with him as a bit of lad. He's the kind of bloke that would be a bit of a laugh on a night out.
But let's not forget that in the first episode he was using alien technology to entice unwilling partners into having sex with him. And in this episode he molests Gwen in a manner which would send any sane woman running to the nearest police station. Not really a very nice bloke at all. Except last week he got so angry when he saw an attempted rape that he tracked the perpetrator and came close to killing him. That all seems a bit inconsistant to me. Or could it be that Owen is just a blank page who can be given whatever personality suits this week's plot. If that's true then it's a sign of a very disjointed production team. They obviously need a better script editor.
See, now I'm in a dilemma. After four episodes, Torchwood really doesn't seem to be good enough to keep watching. But its associations with Doctor Who mean that I'll probably carry on watching the whole series. So currently I'm just hoping that it doesn't get a second season.
Did I miss a memo about English spelling reform? More and more people seem to be spelling ridiculous as "rediculous". Have they all been infected by the same typo? Or is it some street-talk that I'm unacquainted with?
I've just noticed that Firefox 2.0 is a bit too clever for its own good. It's the new RSS autosubscription feature that's the problem. It's great that when I click on an RSS feed, it gives me the chance to subscribe to that feed in Bloglines. But it insists on doing that whenever I try to view an RSS feed. Even if I really want to view the feed in order to debug it.
Oh, I realise that the default behaviour is going to be far more useful to the vast majority of people. Most Firefox users are not going to want to debug RSS feeds. But it would be nice to be able to turn the cleverness off for those of us who do.
I'm just off to wade through the preferences dialogue boxes...
Update: Found it. Tools -> Options ->Feeds. When I click on a web feed - Show me a preview and ask me which feed reader to use.
From the Amazon.com page for the book Google Analytics by Mary E. Tyler and Jerri Ledford
"…very useful." (dave.org.uk, October 2006)
Which is extracted somewhat carefully from the review I wrote
In summary, the descriptions of the Google Analytics reports are very useful if you can ignore the over-familiar language, but the sections that contain deep techical detail are patchy at best.
I know I told them they could do what they wanted with the review, but doesn't it seem like they're clutching at straws a bit if the best they can come up with is to cherry-pick phrases from an almost completely negative review?
See, I thought I was being kind to them when I didn't publish my review on Amazon. but if they're going to abuse my review like that, perhaps I should change my mind.
Update: Ooh. First time I've ever been Dugg.
This idea of calling "faith" schools, superstition schools is a really good one. And you can take it further and substitute "superstition" for many other uses of the word "faith.
For example, I just read a news report that mentioned David Kuo who is apparently the "Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives". Wouldn't it be good if that organisation was more honest and called itself the Office of Superstition-Based and Community Initiatives.
If you watched Richard Dawkins' documentary The Root of All Evil? earlier this year, you will remember Ted Haggard. He's the sickeningly smarmy evangelical priest who threw Dawkins out of his church for calling his congregation animals (when actually all Dawkins had done was to tell him that evolution was true).
Well, it seems that Haggard has some skeletons in his closet. He has stepped down as head of the National Association of Evangelicals and as senior pastor of the New Live church in Colorado pending investigation of claims that he has paid for sex with a male escort. I wasn't going to mention this as it is, after all, only an allegation, but there's now apparently an email going round claiming that at least some of the accusations are true.
Update: This gets better. Apparently a letter from Haggard was read at the services at the New Life church yesterday. In it, Haggard admits that many of the accusations are true.
The fact is, I am guilty of sexual immorality, and I take responsibility for the entire problem.
I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life.
Tony Blair apparently thinks that we should be encouraging more young people to become scientists. Well, maybe he should stop trying to send them to superstition schools.
Bugger. It's already November 3rd and I've completely forgotten about NaNoWriMo. It's been a few years since I tried it (and failed) and I was intending to have another got this year. It's too late though. I could probabyl catch up over the weekend, but this is going to be a busy month and there's no way I'd have the time. Maybe next year...
I do want to do some more writing though. I feel it's far too long since I wrote anything substantial. Maybe I'll try to start something whilst I'm on the cruise.
I do love a nice bit of Daily Mail outrage. And this one is too good to miss. They've got all over-excited about Monday's episode of Spooks which featured a group of christian extremists who were killing muslims. Given the number of episodes where MI5 have been foiling Muslim plots, this one seemed to be an attempt to redress the balance slightly. But the Mail, of course, don't see it that way. They see it as an obvious case of the BBC's anti-christian bias.
The BBC are facing accusations of anti-Christian bias after a BBC drama portrayed evangelical extremists murdering Muslims.
One Christian group said the corporation had a "sinister" and "malicious" agenda against their faith, while another claimed the BBC1 Spooks programme could be an "incitement to hatred" against them.
Oh, and look, they've even got a quote from a frothing at the mouth Stephen Green.
Christian Voice National Director Stephen Green said: "This could even be incitement to hatred against Christians. It is completely ludicrous and brings the BBC into more disrepute."
"Most people watching it will just spot another bit of BBC bias and inaccuracy - nevertheless it shows a worrying mind-set in the people that are producing the programme to even think that there are Christians contemplating violence against any Muslims whatsoever - it is just not what we do."
I predict that the readers' comments on this story will be well worth watching over the next few hours.
Update: Also covered on MediaWatchWatch.
Muriel Gray talks a lot of sense on "faith" schools.
Let’s stop describing these tax-funded establishments as faith schools. They are superstition schools, for that is what they teach. Alongside hard facts, innocent children are hoodwinked into accepting as real the mythology of virgin births, gods who regard women with bare heads as wicked harlots, that Noah’s Ark was real and that Darwin was wrong.
The rest of the article is well-worth reading too.
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