Monday, November 16, 2009
we love dancing and...
We saw Rachid Taha and Vieux Farka Toure on Friday night, one of the few occasions when something held in the Royal Festival Hall actually felt like a proper gig. Taha's shtick is somewhere between a Clash-influenced dub/punk mix and North African things like rai (it sez here - I wouldn't really know to be honest). On the night, there was a hell of a lot of a sort of French 70s big-clattering-soundspace racket that even folk like Daft Punk are tempted by.
For a self-declared punk, he also does a good Mick Jagger act. There was a lot of showboating and wanking about with the audience and jokes in French that made less sense to me than anything Farka Toure said when he wasn't speaking English...or French. The punk tradition of contempt for stage business obviously didn't get across.
However, he does do a lot of fucking great dramatic funky noise, and eventually the whole hall was dancing, quite an achievement given the venue. Oddly enough, there was a sort of steel helmet faction in the front left hand stalls who took a long, long time to get on their feet; I theorise that the rest of us were the cheap seats.
Of course, we'd miss bombastic frontmen if they weren't there; someone noted they were in a spotlight and apparently set about recreating the cover of the Wild Beasts' Two Dancers. (Actually, there's a prediction I should be declaring victory on.)
Vieux Farka Toure had done a note perfect show earlier on; he got hauled back to take part in "Rock the Casbah", which got going after the longest daft intro ever and eventually rocked the concrete.
For a self-declared punk, he also does a good Mick Jagger act. There was a lot of showboating and wanking about with the audience and jokes in French that made less sense to me than anything Farka Toure said when he wasn't speaking English...or French. The punk tradition of contempt for stage business obviously didn't get across.
However, he does do a lot of fucking great dramatic funky noise, and eventually the whole hall was dancing, quite an achievement given the venue. Oddly enough, there was a sort of steel helmet faction in the front left hand stalls who took a long, long time to get on their feet; I theorise that the rest of us were the cheap seats.
Of course, we'd miss bombastic frontmen if they weren't there; someone noted they were in a spotlight and apparently set about recreating the cover of the Wild Beasts' Two Dancers. (Actually, there's a prediction I should be declaring victory on.)
Vieux Farka Toure had done a note perfect show earlier on; he got hauled back to take part in "Rock the Casbah", which got going after the longest daft intro ever and eventually rocked the concrete.
Labels: music
long distance information, give me Goma, DRC
Alex de Waal has an interesting post on the role of satellite phones, and specifically the Arabic and more importantly cheap Thurayas, in the wars of the Sahara today. He argues, in essence, that the capital requirements of being a warlord are coming down; if you don't have a Toyota, you're cannon fodder, if you do, you're a gang leader, and if you have a satellite phone and a Toyota, you're a significant political force. The consequences in tactics and operational art are also important.
In comments, it turns out that Jean-Pierre Bemba of the RCD was an early adopter of the satellite phone too; you may remember him as the Congolese warlord who married off his daughter to Sanjivan Ruprah and who shared a BAC-111 private jet with Richard Chichakli's company. Of course, a number of journalists had Osama bin Laden's phone number before he chose radio silence as a policy.
You can imagine the importance of mobile telephony to these folk; but as the Giuliano Andreotti character in Il Divo says, an archive is better than an imagination. During the period in 1997-98 when Viktor Bout's businesses briefly set up camp in the wilds of northern South Africa, before the South African anti-mercenary legislation caused them to head for the friendly skies of the UAE, they left behind an audit trail in the books of the company they used, having promised huge investments. They also left a gigantic unpaid credit card bill.
Here's the point. In a typical month in 1998, the phone bills ran to some ZAR62,000 for mobile, ZAR49,000 for landlines and fax, and a further ZAR32,000 for telecoms services at their fixed base in Pietersburg. That's a total of ZAR143,000 in phone bills; at the prevailing rate, that's £17,763 a month. More to the point, that's 48% the size of the wages bill and four times the size of the bill for lodging "VB's staff". Even split over the 16 phone numbers broken out in the books, it's a lot of phoning.
Of the names given, it may be worth noting that the biggest talker in "Commodities" is Kumar, with a phone bill over £300 a month, followed by Khalid and Bakri, and in Flight Operations it's "Paul Popov", who almost broke the grand. Smulian is doing about £125-150. Valery Naydo is doing £150 a month; "Dr Oleg" makes it to £350 in October 1997 as the circus wheels into town. "Ange Karam'jabo" spent £665 in January that year.
This last character, whose full name is probably Karamakalinijabo, was also charging a lot in travelling expenses; he'd spent £3,000 on airline tickets the month before, plus maybe another £2,500 if the second appearance of the surname is the same man. According to the AMEX bills, he travelled on South African Airways Flight 055 to Rome and on to Vancouver, SAA 014 again to Lusaka, and finally on Austrian Airlines Flight 066 for Chicago.
Unsurprisingly, Bout was a big chatterbox himself - he got through £845 of fixed-line calls from two numbers in January '98 alone. (The numbers are no doubt assigned to other innocent South Africans by now, or I'd quote them.)
It's old news, really; I've had the documents for some time and I've occasionally used bits, too. But oddly enough, I hadn't thought of looking at the phone costs. I hadn't marinated in telecoms culture then; as always, if you're worried that they're listening to your calls, you don't want to think about what they're doing with the traffic data. Told you billing was exciting.
If there's a nut here, apart from me, it's that I reckon the signature of being operationally important in the system is likely that you were a big source of phone traffic and a big air ticket bill. Who is Ange Karamakalinijabo? Who is Valery Naydo? Who is Paul Popov? One thing about them, they've had the sense to keep their names off the Internet. Naydo only appears in the UN asset blacklist. Popov is a cipher, probably not the long-dead Orthodox bishop in Alaska.
In comments, it turns out that Jean-Pierre Bemba of the RCD was an early adopter of the satellite phone too; you may remember him as the Congolese warlord who married off his daughter to Sanjivan Ruprah and who shared a BAC-111 private jet with Richard Chichakli's company. Of course, a number of journalists had Osama bin Laden's phone number before he chose radio silence as a policy.
You can imagine the importance of mobile telephony to these folk; but as the Giuliano Andreotti character in Il Divo says, an archive is better than an imagination. During the period in 1997-98 when Viktor Bout's businesses briefly set up camp in the wilds of northern South Africa, before the South African anti-mercenary legislation caused them to head for the friendly skies of the UAE, they left behind an audit trail in the books of the company they used, having promised huge investments. They also left a gigantic unpaid credit card bill.
Here's the point. In a typical month in 1998, the phone bills ran to some ZAR62,000 for mobile, ZAR49,000 for landlines and fax, and a further ZAR32,000 for telecoms services at their fixed base in Pietersburg. That's a total of ZAR143,000 in phone bills; at the prevailing rate, that's £17,763 a month. More to the point, that's 48% the size of the wages bill and four times the size of the bill for lodging "VB's staff". Even split over the 16 phone numbers broken out in the books, it's a lot of phoning.
Of the names given, it may be worth noting that the biggest talker in "Commodities" is Kumar, with a phone bill over £300 a month, followed by Khalid and Bakri, and in Flight Operations it's "Paul Popov", who almost broke the grand. Smulian is doing about £125-150. Valery Naydo is doing £150 a month; "Dr Oleg" makes it to £350 in October 1997 as the circus wheels into town. "Ange Karam'jabo" spent £665 in January that year.
This last character, whose full name is probably Karamakalinijabo, was also charging a lot in travelling expenses; he'd spent £3,000 on airline tickets the month before, plus maybe another £2,500 if the second appearance of the surname is the same man. According to the AMEX bills, he travelled on South African Airways Flight 055 to Rome and on to Vancouver, SAA 014 again to Lusaka, and finally on Austrian Airlines Flight 066 for Chicago.
Unsurprisingly, Bout was a big chatterbox himself - he got through £845 of fixed-line calls from two numbers in January '98 alone. (The numbers are no doubt assigned to other innocent South Africans by now, or I'd quote them.)
It's old news, really; I've had the documents for some time and I've occasionally used bits, too. But oddly enough, I hadn't thought of looking at the phone costs. I hadn't marinated in telecoms culture then; as always, if you're worried that they're listening to your calls, you don't want to think about what they're doing with the traffic data. Told you billing was exciting.
If there's a nut here, apart from me, it's that I reckon the signature of being operationally important in the system is likely that you were a big source of phone traffic and a big air ticket bill. Who is Ange Karamakalinijabo? Who is Valery Naydo? Who is Paul Popov? One thing about them, they've had the sense to keep their names off the Internet. Naydo only appears in the UN asset blacklist. Popov is a cipher, probably not the long-dead Orthodox bishop in Alaska.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
what M-PESA is not
Over at James Nicoll's blog:
Well, sort of. People to tend to think of the success of mobile banking in the emerging markets as being a triumph of the Bruce Sterling/Kevin Kelley school of thought, at best, or an example of triumphant libertarianism - to hell with those stuffy old international-aid bureaucrats and state-owned telcos!
However, M-PESA was originally a project sponsored by Vodafone's CSR department, and even less fashionably, by the UK Department for International Development. Much of the engineering was carried out by BSS-OSS (Billing Support Subsystem-Operations Support Subsystem) consultants in Newbury, and you literally can't get less favela-chic than telco billing systems engineers*. And Safaricom is a Vodafone partner network, but the main shareholder is the Kenyan Government.
Once they rolled it out, as history relates, all sorts of exciting unauthorised innovation got going. But getting to that point involved a lot of boring, statey, European Union things happening first, including those awful Aid Industry Bureaucrats getting involved.
*Joke: how do you tell an OSS engineer? He used to work in billing but he couldn't stand the excitement. Since M-PESA, though, that's where all the excitement is...
Cellphones don't require landlines to be strung before they can be used and apparently people have been rather cunning about coming up with ways to use them to replace services they otherwise would not have access to:
Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed. Safaricom, in Kenya, has a service called M-Pesa that lets the cell work as an ATM; to send someone money, you text-message the appropriate code to them, and they get cash from a local M-Pesa agent. Cellphone minutes are traded by phone as a cash substitute. Credit card payments are made by cellphone. Remittances from relatives overseas come by cellphone. [...]
It's like the Street finds its own use for technology.
Well, sort of. People to tend to think of the success of mobile banking in the emerging markets as being a triumph of the Bruce Sterling/Kevin Kelley school of thought, at best, or an example of triumphant libertarianism - to hell with those stuffy old international-aid bureaucrats and state-owned telcos!
However, M-PESA was originally a project sponsored by Vodafone's CSR department, and even less fashionably, by the UK Department for International Development. Much of the engineering was carried out by BSS-OSS (Billing Support Subsystem-Operations Support Subsystem) consultants in Newbury, and you literally can't get less favela-chic than telco billing systems engineers*. And Safaricom is a Vodafone partner network, but the main shareholder is the Kenyan Government.
Once they rolled it out, as history relates, all sorts of exciting unauthorised innovation got going. But getting to that point involved a lot of boring, statey, European Union things happening first, including those awful Aid Industry Bureaucrats getting involved.
*Joke: how do you tell an OSS engineer? He used to work in billing but he couldn't stand the excitement. Since M-PESA, though, that's where all the excitement is...
Labels: GSM
arr!
Stupidity about pirates. (Yes, this again. When will it end?) No doubt the usual suspects will already be drivelling about this story.
Frankly, if you think the best opportunity to rescue the hostages was when they were between a tossing, fibreglass 40-odd foot boat and a 25,000 ton hijacked containership, using as your main equipment a 32,000 ton oil tanker (Wave Knight is a fleet tanker, not a warship), I suspect you may not have done enough research.
Frankly, if you think the best opportunity to rescue the hostages was when they were between a tossing, fibreglass 40-odd foot boat and a 25,000 ton hijacked containership, using as your main equipment a 32,000 ton oil tanker (Wave Knight is a fleet tanker, not a warship), I suspect you may not have done enough research.
Labels: pirates
iWorm - a truly social virus
The iPhone worm is a thing of beauty. Not so much because of the technology involved, which is simple - although, since when has simplicity not been a good thing? - but because of the superb social engineering involved. Its designers demonstrated a perfect understanding of their target user population and came up with an elegant exploit of their psychology.
To recap: an iPhone, underneath the shiny stuff, is basically a little BSD Unix machine. Apple applies a lot of its own security and restrictions-management stuff to it, but this can be circumvented if you want to use software without getting Apple's approval for it - this is the process known as "jailbreaking". One of the most common things people do with the gadget after removing the Apple restrictionware is to install SSH, so they can log into a remote server and administer it from the phone.
Unfortunately, installing SSH also makes it possible to log into the phone from a remote machine, if you know the root password and the current IP address. So, before you do this, you absolutely must change the root password from the default ("alpine") to a strong passphrase. Otherwise, as soon as SSH is available, anyone on the Internet can get access to the phone with root-level privileges - i.e. they can do anything they like.
The worm generated random IP addresses and tried to log in through SSH using the default iPhone password, and if it succeeded, it replaced the home screen with a picture of Rick Astley. Haha. They could also have made hundreds of hours of international phone calls on your bill, scarfed your bank details, grabbed the log of who you called and who called you and carried out some sort of evil social-graph analysis...but they didn't. For now.
What gets me about this is that they obviously had an image in mind of the target user as someone who was clueful enough to install unofficial software on an iPhone, or who at least wanted badly enough to be seen as technically competent that they got someone else to do it, but who was sufficiently incompetent not to realise that they needed to set a real password or that they were connecting a full-blown unix box to the Internet without any security precautions whatsoever. (Given that having a server to ssh into implies you know that you can log into remote machines over the Internet if you know the password, I wonder how many of the victims had actually used the SSH client on the phone?)
As well as a practical implementation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, it's a genuinely social hack in that it identified and targeted a specific social group - annoying moneyed wannabe-geek hipster prats. It was a wanker-seeking missile. It is sheer brilliance, and I'm not at all surprised it was invented by Australians.
Update: As pointed out in comments, why would you need the daemon half of the ssh package? Apparently, some of the jailbreaking methods use it. The virus's creator specifically mentions the fact that so many iPhones had an active ssh service when he tested the scanning element of it in the comments to the source code of the virus.
To recap: an iPhone, underneath the shiny stuff, is basically a little BSD Unix machine. Apple applies a lot of its own security and restrictions-management stuff to it, but this can be circumvented if you want to use software without getting Apple's approval for it - this is the process known as "jailbreaking". One of the most common things people do with the gadget after removing the Apple restrictionware is to install SSH, so they can log into a remote server and administer it from the phone.
Unfortunately, installing SSH also makes it possible to log into the phone from a remote machine, if you know the root password and the current IP address. So, before you do this, you absolutely must change the root password from the default ("alpine") to a strong passphrase. Otherwise, as soon as SSH is available, anyone on the Internet can get access to the phone with root-level privileges - i.e. they can do anything they like.
The worm generated random IP addresses and tried to log in through SSH using the default iPhone password, and if it succeeded, it replaced the home screen with a picture of Rick Astley. Haha. They could also have made hundreds of hours of international phone calls on your bill, scarfed your bank details, grabbed the log of who you called and who called you and carried out some sort of evil social-graph analysis...but they didn't. For now.
What gets me about this is that they obviously had an image in mind of the target user as someone who was clueful enough to install unofficial software on an iPhone, or who at least wanted badly enough to be seen as technically competent that they got someone else to do it, but who was sufficiently incompetent not to realise that they needed to set a real password or that they were connecting a full-blown unix box to the Internet without any security precautions whatsoever. (Given that having a server to ssh into implies you know that you can log into remote machines over the Internet if you know the password, I wonder how many of the victims had actually used the SSH client on the phone?)
As well as a practical implementation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, it's a genuinely social hack in that it identified and targeted a specific social group - annoying moneyed wannabe-geek hipster prats. It was a wanker-seeking missile. It is sheer brilliance, and I'm not at all surprised it was invented by Australians.
Update: As pointed out in comments, why would you need the daemon half of the ssh package? Apparently, some of the jailbreaking methods use it. The virus's creator specifically mentions the fact that so many iPhones had an active ssh service when he tested the scanning element of it in the comments to the source code of the virus.
we flippin' murdered them
Peter Beaumont goes for a Holt's battlefield tour of southern Lebanon:
Go read the rest; there's a fair amount of speculation of the informed sort, and an appearance from Andrew Exum opining that the reinforced UNIFIL has succeeded in moving Hezbollah away from the border, rather as it was meant to. Actually, the reinforced UNIFIL should surely be counted as one of the unexpected successes of the last few years - especially if you remember all the yelling at the time.
However, this may be less important than it appears, especially if the Hezbollah guy's account of their tactics in 2006 is representative - there's no reason why they couldn't keep doing that every kilometre, and indeed that's what the original idea of a screen of small groups of men with guided anti-tank weapons was meant to do in front of the main NATO armies in Germany (remember this post and Stephen Biddle's analysis?)
Further, the whole concept of a buffer force assumes that both sides would rather not fight, but that neither is willing to make the first move - that a classic security dilemma is operating. If one or both parties are determined to initiate more violence, though, this breaks down. And it's worrying to see how a lot of Israeli commentary about 2006 has changed over time - in the first 18 months or so, there was a lot of frankness around. The war had clearly been a failure, and Hezbollah had surprised everyone by defending southern Lebanon effectively. Roughly since Gaza, there's been a denialist phase - a bit like David Lloyd's crack that "we flippin' murdered them" after the England cricket team ran out of time trying to beat Zimbabwe. A lot of stuff was blown up in Beirut, and if it wasn't for those pathetic politicians, we'd have won. You know the pattern.
Cruising through the serene green wadis that connect south Lebanon to the Litani river to the north, the commander explains what happened at the end of the last war. "We knocked out three of their tanks on the first day, as they tried to enter," he explained at a turn-off by the village of al-Qantara. "But after they entered the wadi, we knew they were going for the river and had to be stopped. So we called out to all the special forces anti-tank teams in the area. And they all swarmed the wadi. Boys would set up and wait for the tanks, fire off their rounds and then pull back. Then they would pull back a kilometre or so down the wadi and wait for them again."
According to Israeli military reports, after the first and last tanks were hit by rocket fire or mines, killing the company commander, the 24 tanks were essentially trapped inside a valley, surrounded on all sides and pinned down by mortars, rockets and mines. Eleven tanks were destroyed and the rest partially damaged and Israel lost at least 12 soldiers.
Go read the rest; there's a fair amount of speculation of the informed sort, and an appearance from Andrew Exum opining that the reinforced UNIFIL has succeeded in moving Hezbollah away from the border, rather as it was meant to. Actually, the reinforced UNIFIL should surely be counted as one of the unexpected successes of the last few years - especially if you remember all the yelling at the time.
However, this may be less important than it appears, especially if the Hezbollah guy's account of their tactics in 2006 is representative - there's no reason why they couldn't keep doing that every kilometre, and indeed that's what the original idea of a screen of small groups of men with guided anti-tank weapons was meant to do in front of the main NATO armies in Germany (remember this post and Stephen Biddle's analysis?)
Further, the whole concept of a buffer force assumes that both sides would rather not fight, but that neither is willing to make the first move - that a classic security dilemma is operating. If one or both parties are determined to initiate more violence, though, this breaks down. And it's worrying to see how a lot of Israeli commentary about 2006 has changed over time - in the first 18 months or so, there was a lot of frankness around. The war had clearly been a failure, and Hezbollah had surprised everyone by defending southern Lebanon effectively. Roughly since Gaza, there's been a denialist phase - a bit like David Lloyd's crack that "we flippin' murdered them" after the England cricket team ran out of time trying to beat Zimbabwe. A lot of stuff was blown up in Beirut, and if it wasn't for those pathetic politicians, we'd have won. You know the pattern.
Labels: 4GW, AFOE, cultures of war, Hezbollah, history, Israel, Lebanon
permanently operating factors
Aaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There's an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies' brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the entire project was driven by policy-based evidence - a succession of politicos and thinktanks progressively taking what had once been the upper bound in an actual study, treating it as an actual forecast, and then adding a bit.
Not so long ago, I had the opportunity of discussing this with a source in the Met vice squad, and the take-home message is Davies was being conservative - it was actually worse than that.
Anyway, one of the most egregious examples of PBE in the story was the fault of none other than MacShane, who promptly responded by writing to the Guardian and accusing Davies of "taking the side of the managers of the sex industry". As Davies pointed out in the original story, the whole thing followed the pattern of the campaign for war with Iraq with uncanny accuracy.
There was the exaggeration by stripping out caveats, the practice of using deliberately extreme limiting cases as central forecasts, the search for anyone who would provide the right kind of intelligence when the intelligence services' intelligence didn't fit around the policy...and the shameless red-baiting attacks on anyone who disagreed. Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist? Will you condemn, etc, etc?
The lesson, however, is that some people seem to gravitate to this set of tactics or political style (because that's what it is); if Denis MacShane worked for the Party of Kittens, he'd be secretly briefing the press that Mickey Mouse was part of a decadent Hollywood-liberal elite in league with feline leukaemia, based on his summary of a leaked report from the newly established Council for a Flea-Free Future, and if you called him out on it, he'd get all the members of the Accuracy in Cat-Related Media mailing list to write and accuse you of being objectively pro-dog.
Come to think of it, it's part of the package of modern thinking; you need a Boris Johnson-esque clown figure, a Tony Blair-esque tebbly tebbly concerned type, and a MacShane-esque underhand thug.
Not so long ago, I had the opportunity of discussing this with a source in the Met vice squad, and the take-home message is Davies was being conservative - it was actually worse than that.
Anyway, one of the most egregious examples of PBE in the story was the fault of none other than MacShane, who promptly responded by writing to the Guardian and accusing Davies of "taking the side of the managers of the sex industry". As Davies pointed out in the original story, the whole thing followed the pattern of the campaign for war with Iraq with uncanny accuracy.
There was the exaggeration by stripping out caveats, the practice of using deliberately extreme limiting cases as central forecasts, the search for anyone who would provide the right kind of intelligence when the intelligence services' intelligence didn't fit around the policy...and the shameless red-baiting attacks on anyone who disagreed. Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist? Will you condemn, etc, etc?
The lesson, however, is that some people seem to gravitate to this set of tactics or political style (because that's what it is); if Denis MacShane worked for the Party of Kittens, he'd be secretly briefing the press that Mickey Mouse was part of a decadent Hollywood-liberal elite in league with feline leukaemia, based on his summary of a leaked report from the newly established Council for a Flea-Free Future, and if you called him out on it, he'd get all the members of the Accuracy in Cat-Related Media mailing list to write and accuse you of being objectively pro-dog.
Come to think of it, it's part of the package of modern thinking; you need a Boris Johnson-esque clown figure, a Tony Blair-esque tebbly tebbly concerned type, and a MacShane-esque underhand thug.
Labels: dogs, fisking, Home Office, ideology, London, memes, Met, politics
a reminder that things happen quickly
If you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone's esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again.
Here's some science, via Lou Grinzo's blog. We've been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the bottom of a rather special Irish lake (peat - not much oxygen, so things *last*), and it's possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the Younger Dryas event, which flipped the planet into an ice age 13,000 years ago after a huge ice barrier in North America collapsed and let vast amounts of fresh water pour into the Atlantic.
The killer detail, literally: the new ice age kicked off within months. We had thought it took decades, but instead it tore in within a year. A year. No time to adjust; not even that much time to flee.
This should surely kill off any daft ideas of fiddling with the atmosphere. Shouldn't it?
Here's some science, via Lou Grinzo's blog. We've been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the bottom of a rather special Irish lake (peat - not much oxygen, so things *last*), and it's possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the Younger Dryas event, which flipped the planet into an ice age 13,000 years ago after a huge ice barrier in North America collapsed and let vast amounts of fresh water pour into the Atlantic.
The killer detail, literally: the new ice age kicked off within months. We had thought it took decades, but instead it tore in within a year. A year. No time to adjust; not even that much time to flee.
This should surely kill off any daft ideas of fiddling with the atmosphere. Shouldn't it?
Labels: can you believe we don't have a "science" tag?, energy, fisking, libertarian
Monday, November 09, 2009
it is never too late to MEND
This won't be a substantive post, but more a notice to myself to build one. A seriously under-reported story on the global guerrilla beat is that the Nigerian government has succeeded, at least for the moment, in either defeating the Niger Delta rebels or making deals with them.
It's worth rolling back a little; time was when they were roaring about the rivers of Rivers State in RIBs with three or four huge Evinrude outboards, assaulting oil installations and demanding money, following a strategy that was based on the current situation of the oil market, including things like the latest hurricane sweeping towards the Gulf of Mexico, refinery stock drawdown - essentially, they followed the market for oil like IPE traders in London. Their faceless spokesman operated from a Hotmail account and a PAYG GSM phone somewhere in South Africa, usually.
Everyone, especially J-Ro, reckoned they were our insurgent future. The lumbering energy infrastructure, supposedly, could never be defended from persistent but random disruption aimed at its key network nodes. They certainly were a guerrilla navy that was tactically and operationally very effective, and whose leaders were pursuing an intelligent strategy; their technology was obviously of the moment.
But what happened, then? A key element, of course, was the price of oil. However, the relationship between the Brent index and the violence in the Delta wasn't linear; as the price of oil rose, MEND was more able to cause trouble, but the Nigerian government and the oil companies had more money. They could spend it on soldiers, or on bribes. In the other direction, as the price of oil fell, the power of the insurgents to send bursts of panic into the market fell - but the Nigerian state would itself be weaker, and the pool of recruits wider.
Crucially, the demand for oil fell; this is possibly more important than its price. Here's me in August 2008 on this subject. As an oil-bombing insurgent, it's not so much the price that you're interested in as your ability to cause trouble. Much of the industrialised world has passed its peak demand for oil; the US may have done, or it may be the recession. We will only know in hindsight. This means that the oil market is structurally less sensitive.
This is, of course, less to the point if MEND was indeed a new kind of rebellion. I rather doubted this; it always struck me as a fight for a share of export revenues. Oil, as resources go, is remarkably suited to landlordism. Its extraction is capital-intensive, not labour intensive; much of the work is done by expatriate specialists. And, crucially, it helps to run an artificially high exchange rate, which is an excellent way for an elite to loot a country. As a robber elite, most of what you want in the way of goods are imported, and most of what you want in the way of the capital account is an export. You want to get your money out. This also tends to destroy local industries and favour importers; especially importers who need to get a licence from you.
This, and the back story of the rebellion, suggested that the main aim was what they said it was - to extract oil revenues from the Governor's gut. Unlike tension in the oil market, the money you raise from high oil prices can be stored for later use; the government deployed it this summer, both for force and for persuasion.
I hope this post can expand to take in more information; I'd like to know more about how it happened. I do know that some of the rebel leaders' men paraded through Port Harcourt getting drunk and shooting in the air before piling their rifles. But that's about it.
It's worth rolling back a little; time was when they were roaring about the rivers of Rivers State in RIBs with three or four huge Evinrude outboards, assaulting oil installations and demanding money, following a strategy that was based on the current situation of the oil market, including things like the latest hurricane sweeping towards the Gulf of Mexico, refinery stock drawdown - essentially, they followed the market for oil like IPE traders in London. Their faceless spokesman operated from a Hotmail account and a PAYG GSM phone somewhere in South Africa, usually.
Everyone, especially J-Ro, reckoned they were our insurgent future. The lumbering energy infrastructure, supposedly, could never be defended from persistent but random disruption aimed at its key network nodes. They certainly were a guerrilla navy that was tactically and operationally very effective, and whose leaders were pursuing an intelligent strategy; their technology was obviously of the moment.
But what happened, then? A key element, of course, was the price of oil. However, the relationship between the Brent index and the violence in the Delta wasn't linear; as the price of oil rose, MEND was more able to cause trouble, but the Nigerian government and the oil companies had more money. They could spend it on soldiers, or on bribes. In the other direction, as the price of oil fell, the power of the insurgents to send bursts of panic into the market fell - but the Nigerian state would itself be weaker, and the pool of recruits wider.
Crucially, the demand for oil fell; this is possibly more important than its price. Here's me in August 2008 on this subject. As an oil-bombing insurgent, it's not so much the price that you're interested in as your ability to cause trouble. Much of the industrialised world has passed its peak demand for oil; the US may have done, or it may be the recession. We will only know in hindsight. This means that the oil market is structurally less sensitive.
This is, of course, less to the point if MEND was indeed a new kind of rebellion. I rather doubted this; it always struck me as a fight for a share of export revenues. Oil, as resources go, is remarkably suited to landlordism. Its extraction is capital-intensive, not labour intensive; much of the work is done by expatriate specialists. And, crucially, it helps to run an artificially high exchange rate, which is an excellent way for an elite to loot a country. As a robber elite, most of what you want in the way of goods are imported, and most of what you want in the way of the capital account is an export. You want to get your money out. This also tends to destroy local industries and favour importers; especially importers who need to get a licence from you.
This, and the back story of the rebellion, suggested that the main aim was what they said it was - to extract oil revenues from the Governor's gut. Unlike tension in the oil market, the money you raise from high oil prices can be stored for later use; the government deployed it this summer, both for force and for persuasion.
I hope this post can expand to take in more information; I'd like to know more about how it happened. I do know that some of the rebel leaders' men paraded through Port Harcourt getting drunk and shooting in the air before piling their rifles. But that's about it.
Labels: 4GW, cultures of war
the pundit internationale
Here's that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap - she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa'ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else.
Some points on the text.
1) Black humour. Abu Walid certainly likes his snark. Example?
Something probably gets lost in translation, but you can't deny the punch of the joke about spooks. And this is hilarious:
As is this:
It's like Bernard Manning with much less booze.
2) Self-mockery. You usually expect to find that a fanatic is someone who is utterly blind to the possibility they might be funny. I've always thought that the knowledge of one's own absurdity is a force for civilisation; we're all bloody ridiculous at some level and we should all probably wind our necks in. Orwell thought this about trying to make people goose-step in Britain; H.L. Mencken's crack about a good horse-laugh is much the same point. So this is pretty good writing.
3) A certain amount of the truth. It's always better to deliver the truth in highly controlled doses than it is to lie.
4) Women. On the other hand, there's something seriously wrong here. The text is laced with a sock-pong of misogyny. He constantly goes on about "beauties", and he's obsessed with the figure of Lynndie England - of all the other US war criminals and torturers he could mention, it's only the woman who gets a jersey. Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Cambone, Feith, Cheney, and Miller are nowhere to be seen. Rumsfeld just scrapes in at the finish.
The fitna is worse than murder. And then I opened my eyes and saw a cup of tea....
5) Paying the cost to be the boss. It seems that denying the Holocaust is something you have to do in these circles, like saying "trust the people" and promising to do, well, something with the European Communities Act 1972 if you're a Tory. Abu Walid makes a couple of sick jokes in this line, but I have the impression he doesn't really believe it; his heart isn't in it. Which only makes it sicker.
This doesn't strike me as a real troofer. Although, that's the first time I've ever seen Hitler in scarequotes. The really sad thing here is that, if you were to swap out some nouns (you can probably guess which ones) and pass the whole thing through a proper spike-helmeted chief sub, you'd end up with something indistinguishable from the average output of, say, Fraser Nelson.
Some points on the text.
1) Black humour. Abu Walid certainly likes his snark. Example?
It is relatively easy to believe that the eagle has turned into a canary after a minor facelift. But it is difficult to imagine that academic work can turn a security officer into a natural person, like the rest of God’s creatures.
Something probably gets lost in translation, but you can't deny the punch of the joke about spooks. And this is hilarious:
If this was the case I would have opened an office for consulting and terrorism and become very rich.
As is this:
But if the reverse is proven, I will donate all money seized in order to build a Jewish settlement in Holy Jerusalem.
It's like Bernard Manning with much less booze.
2) Self-mockery. You usually expect to find that a fanatic is someone who is utterly blind to the possibility they might be funny. I've always thought that the knowledge of one's own absurdity is a force for civilisation; we're all bloody ridiculous at some level and we should all probably wind our necks in. Orwell thought this about trying to make people goose-step in Britain; H.L. Mencken's crack about a good horse-laugh is much the same point. So this is pretty good writing.
Mrs Farrall is looking at the subject of Islamic groups, in particular “Al Qaeda”. I am the only one with the chronic writing disease...
3) A certain amount of the truth. It's always better to deliver the truth in highly controlled doses than it is to lie.
In general, the security services always deliberately inflate the risks and invent things from scratch. So we can see them exaggerate the ability of people who are against the law so the efforts of their departments will be admired and valued so they will get the awards and admiration. More importantly, they will get more authority and power so they can fully put society and the country under their control, if that is possible. This has actually happened in many countries, whether big or small.
4) Women. On the other hand, there's something seriously wrong here. The text is laced with a sock-pong of misogyny. He constantly goes on about "beauties", and he's obsessed with the figure of Lynndie England - of all the other US war criminals and torturers he could mention, it's only the woman who gets a jersey. Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Cambone, Feith, Cheney, and Miller are nowhere to be seen. Rumsfeld just scrapes in at the finish.
horrible images of the beautiful female soldiers...the beautiful American...the same beauty with a sweet smile...Today another beauty is researching on a living person and they are a candidate to become the next victim...So we become ready for an intellectual dialogue with the security beauty and the terrorist fighter, Mrs Farrall...The beauty “Leah Farrall” ( the fitna is worse than murder)...our brothers in the Arab media relied on comments in the article written by a woman “Farrall”...the Arab media who only relied on what the Australian beauty said...It is okay because whatever comes from the beauty is beautiful even if it is interrogation techniques approved by the ugly Rumsfeld
The fitna is worse than murder. And then I opened my eyes and saw a cup of tea....
5) Paying the cost to be the boss. It seems that denying the Holocaust is something you have to do in these circles, like saying "trust the people" and promising to do, well, something with the European Communities Act 1972 if you're a Tory. Abu Walid makes a couple of sick jokes in this line, but I have the impression he doesn't really believe it; his heart isn't in it. Which only makes it sicker.
And now they cry over the remains of false tragedies that they invented or made themselves like the holocaust lie or the demolished buildings of New York...........I am fully aware that my picture won’t improve even if they prove I am one of the disciples of Jesus Christ. Also, my picture won’t become worse than it is now, even if they discover I was a consultant to “Adolf Hitler” for the Holocaust.
This doesn't strike me as a real troofer. Although, that's the first time I've ever seen Hitler in scarequotes. The really sad thing here is that, if you were to swap out some nouns (you can probably guess which ones) and pass the whole thing through a proper spike-helmeted chief sub, you'd end up with something indistinguishable from the average output of, say, Fraser Nelson.
eternal September
An American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he's currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to slurp chunks of German into its own culture.
Looking back at this post from June, 2005 - and wasn't the summer of 2005 a fucking joy? - it looks a lot like nobody really wants to do this. Which mirrors the strategy with uncanny precision. Bureaucracy knows; if you want information, measure what you're actually doing.
Looking back at this post from June, 2005 - and wasn't the summer of 2005 a fucking joy? - it looks a lot like nobody really wants to do this. Which mirrors the strategy with uncanny precision. Bureaucracy knows; if you want information, measure what you're actually doing.
Labels: 4GW, Afghanistan, cultures of war
red bloggers of Leadenhall Street
Why are there so many good bloggers on the Left who work in the financial sector?
Just off the top of my head, I can think of Chris Dillow, from Investors' Chronicle, actual fund manager Duncan Weldon, stockbroker Daniel Davies, Lloyds' List journo David Osler. The team at Calculated Risk. You have to decide whether I should be counted under financial or techie, and whether I count as a worthwhile blogger.
(The List is a T&F Informa paper, so on that basis my time at Mobile Comms International might count me in. But then, I remember the CEO sending an all hands e-mail that described us as a Japanese keiretsu and "an archipelago of trading islands rising out of the sea of mediocrity that is the Internet". Or as we put it, a huge disorganised ragbag of entirely random acquisitions that didn't so much as share editorial pubs or lifts, let alone content. I'm pretty sure we published Fishmonger 2.0, and I know we put on a conference on Fire Safety at Sea.)
That's five bloggers; not many. In terms of impact, though, they can all claim a pretty high opinion multiplier effect. Me, I reckon it's a job.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of Chris Dillow, from Investors' Chronicle, actual fund manager Duncan Weldon, stockbroker Daniel Davies, Lloyds' List journo David Osler. The team at Calculated Risk. You have to decide whether I should be counted under financial or techie, and whether I count as a worthwhile blogger.
(The List is a T&F Informa paper, so on that basis my time at Mobile Comms International might count me in. But then, I remember the CEO sending an all hands e-mail that described us as a Japanese keiretsu and "an archipelago of trading islands rising out of the sea of mediocrity that is the Internet". Or as we put it, a huge disorganised ragbag of entirely random acquisitions that didn't so much as share editorial pubs or lifts, let alone content. I'm pretty sure we published Fishmonger 2.0, and I know we put on a conference on Fire Safety at Sea.)
That's five bloggers; not many. In terms of impact, though, they can all claim a pretty high opinion multiplier effect. Me, I reckon it's a job.
Labels: mastur/metablogging
Friday, November 06, 2009
the problem with NPfIT is the "NP" bit
Something interesting about the NHS NPfIT project. During my recently completed two-week conference binge, I spoke to people from a British telecommunications company who were fresh, if that's the word, from tangling with the NHS IT Zombie, and had apparently escaped before it ate their brains with a spoon. I also heard people from a French telecommunications company who had been working in the same field speak.
They agree on this; national healthcare institutions are too complicated for any one organisation to build the kind of comprehensive, end-to-end workflow system that NPfIT envisaged. This is partly because of the incredible complexity of their business processes; an episode of care can span anything from a GP appointment that ends by the patient being told there is nothing the matter with them, or an immunisation being administered in a single visit by a nurse, to 20 years of treatment for a cancer and subsequent surveillance. There are a hell of a lot of other organisations that interact with the NHS, and who aren't part of the project.
In fact, if they were, the scale and scope of NPfIT would increase to the point at which it encompassed most of the public sector; it would have to integrate with the social security system, and because of all those benefits that are delivered as tax credits, with the Revenue as well, and (because the NHS provides the armed forces' medical care) with the MOD's personnel system and even with tactical communications systems in the RAF, because Selly Oak receives casualties direct from the war. Of course, it no doubt already needs to talk to the Treasury's systems. You might as well just ask the ghost of Stafford Beer to build us a Cybersyn for the whole economy.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The real problem, according to my source, was that the designers of NPfIT believed that there was an organisation called the NHS. In fact, this was a bit like modelling a blue whale as a homeogenous sphere to make the maths easier. The killer wasn't that medicine is complicated; it was that the NHS isn't a monolithic organisation. It is, of course, an institution - a set of social, political, and economic expectations and relationships, a recognisable culture, a way of understanding the world. But it's far from being a single organisation.
Instead, it's an ecosystem, made up of many organisations that sometimes play similar roles (it's a hospital; it's a GP practice) but differ dramatically in their internal structure, rather as a dolphin and a Humboldt squid are both social, pelagic, fast-swimming predators in the subtropical ocean. However, only one of them is even a tetrapod, and only a real idiot would assume they were both sufficiently described by the concept of "shark". And the interactions between the creatures in this ecosystem are deeply complicated.
In that sense, it's quite a lot like the Internet. That, too, consists of a grab-bag of diverse organisations that cooperate with varying success on the basis of a few rules and a rough common culture, which is often honoured more in the breach than the observance. That also has a lot of odd emergent features that arise from its complexity, and would almost certainly be impossible to design as a single organisation. Indeed, an old staple of Internet-related mailing lists is the question of what the word "Internet" actually means.
Cue facile libertarian woofing. Yadda yadda Hayek privatise the BBC. Spare me. Neither does this mean the NHS is disorganised; it may well mean that it's better for its geographically and functionally diverse components to work differently. It would be surprising if they all shared a single optimal strategy. Of course, there is a perfectly good paradigm for building effective information systems in circumstances like these (and another one). What's really deeply depressing about this is that after all the blundering about and the money, there's still not the key element that makes a Web-like approach possible - standard data formats and interconnection procedures.
How much would it have cost to sponsor an effort to fix that, coming up with an XML standard or a Semantic Web ontology and some NHS standards, setting down for example where the canonical data would live and who could get at it in what circumstances?
They agree on this; national healthcare institutions are too complicated for any one organisation to build the kind of comprehensive, end-to-end workflow system that NPfIT envisaged. This is partly because of the incredible complexity of their business processes; an episode of care can span anything from a GP appointment that ends by the patient being told there is nothing the matter with them, or an immunisation being administered in a single visit by a nurse, to 20 years of treatment for a cancer and subsequent surveillance. There are a hell of a lot of other organisations that interact with the NHS, and who aren't part of the project.
In fact, if they were, the scale and scope of NPfIT would increase to the point at which it encompassed most of the public sector; it would have to integrate with the social security system, and because of all those benefits that are delivered as tax credits, with the Revenue as well, and (because the NHS provides the armed forces' medical care) with the MOD's personnel system and even with tactical communications systems in the RAF, because Selly Oak receives casualties direct from the war. Of course, it no doubt already needs to talk to the Treasury's systems. You might as well just ask the ghost of Stafford Beer to build us a Cybersyn for the whole economy.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The real problem, according to my source, was that the designers of NPfIT believed that there was an organisation called the NHS. In fact, this was a bit like modelling a blue whale as a homeogenous sphere to make the maths easier. The killer wasn't that medicine is complicated; it was that the NHS isn't a monolithic organisation. It is, of course, an institution - a set of social, political, and economic expectations and relationships, a recognisable culture, a way of understanding the world. But it's far from being a single organisation.
Instead, it's an ecosystem, made up of many organisations that sometimes play similar roles (it's a hospital; it's a GP practice) but differ dramatically in their internal structure, rather as a dolphin and a Humboldt squid are both social, pelagic, fast-swimming predators in the subtropical ocean. However, only one of them is even a tetrapod, and only a real idiot would assume they were both sufficiently described by the concept of "shark". And the interactions between the creatures in this ecosystem are deeply complicated.
In that sense, it's quite a lot like the Internet. That, too, consists of a grab-bag of diverse organisations that cooperate with varying success on the basis of a few rules and a rough common culture, which is often honoured more in the breach than the observance. That also has a lot of odd emergent features that arise from its complexity, and would almost certainly be impossible to design as a single organisation. Indeed, an old staple of Internet-related mailing lists is the question of what the word "Internet" actually means.
Cue facile libertarian woofing. Yadda yadda Hayek privatise the BBC. Spare me. Neither does this mean the NHS is disorganised; it may well mean that it's better for its geographically and functionally diverse components to work differently. It would be surprising if they all shared a single optimal strategy. Of course, there is a perfectly good paradigm for building effective information systems in circumstances like these (and another one). What's really deeply depressing about this is that after all the blundering about and the money, there's still not the key element that makes a Web-like approach possible - standard data formats and interconnection procedures.
How much would it have cost to sponsor an effort to fix that, coming up with an XML standard or a Semantic Web ontology and some NHS standards, setting down for example where the canonical data would live and who could get at it in what circumstances?
Labels: intelligence and stupidity, Internet, managerialism, networks, NHS
Sunday, November 01, 2009
a bit of Bout
A bit of Viktor Bout news. It looks like, according to AFP, that the Americans are planning to deploy B. Hussein Stalinhitler himself, when the President is in that part of the world next month. I can remember when "someone high up in the contracting world" actively wanted to encourage him, in support of a "network of friendly militias".
Relatedly, the Federation of American Scientists' Security blog has published documents of the US case against him. I have to say that I'm underwhelmed; most of it looks like vague scrawl, and the maps and aircraft documents involved are generic to say the least.
This chap's loadmaster trip strongly suggests that quite a lot of the scene has moved down the road to Fujairah, and that the UAE ban on Antonov 12s is far from leakproof. (Why do I always end up parsing more Web pages?)
But, on the other hand....ROARING TRIUMPH! And again! I never imagined they'd catch up with Pierre Falcone, still less that Charles Pasqua would be convicted of anything, but the first got six years and the second one. I'd bet good money Pasqua won't do any time, but still.
Relatedly, the Federation of American Scientists' Security blog has published documents of the US case against him. I have to say that I'm underwhelmed; most of it looks like vague scrawl, and the maps and aircraft documents involved are generic to say the least.
This chap's loadmaster trip strongly suggests that quite a lot of the scene has moved down the road to Fujairah, and that the UAE ban on Antonov 12s is far from leakproof. (Why do I always end up parsing more Web pages?)
But, on the other hand....ROARING TRIUMPH! And again! I never imagined they'd catch up with Pierre Falcone, still less that Charles Pasqua would be convicted of anything, but the first got six years and the second one. I'd bet good money Pasqua won't do any time, but still.
Labels: Viktor
blobby blobby blobby
Here's a case study in unpopular populism: 'The ravers should have more respect for Mr Blobby. He was a hero to a lot of kids and the thought of them taking drugs and having all-night raves in his house is completely disrespectful.'.
The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one:
Of course, it was never popular in the first place, as evidenced by the fact the whole enterprise crashed within two years, with one of the projects only lasting three months. Strangely, the Mail doesn't mention that Noel Edmunds and the local council together managed to burn a sizeable amount of Morecambe taxpayers' money, in what should in hindsight have been a kind of cautionary preview of the whole strength-through-casinos project. (They later moved onto leaping into bed with Urban Splash, just in time for the property crash.)
I'm also, however, surprised that it was so late into the 90s; I'd associated it with the rainy era of early John Major. Now, of course, the medium density fibreboard, gypsum, glue, and pink paint has gone the way of the hype, after 13 years of exposure to successive North-West European winters without maintenance; once the roof leaks, any light structure has had it, "ravers" or no "ravers".
That one could be titled "Spiritual Britain", I think. There's also one of two pink spheres described as "mushroom-type objects". Unfortunately they've removed one that showed the old health & safety at work violation on opening day, grinning over the heads of three visibly unenthusiastic kids.
A special point; behold the benefits of openness. Since the Daily Hell got a proper Web site, I've actually linked to two articles on it; one on ACPO, and this one. In the absence of their Web presence, I wouldn't have even imagined that anything of any interest might come from that quarter; but the ACPO one demonstrated that they do, sometimes, carry out solid reporting, and this is at least funny. And the photo caption "Ghostly: a destroyed miniature Blobby lies abandoned, while filth lines the inside of the house" is a minor classic all to itself.
(Hat tip to History is made at night; you don't think I spend my time actually reading that fucking rag, do you?)
The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one:
Of course, it was never popular in the first place, as evidenced by the fact the whole enterprise crashed within two years, with one of the projects only lasting three months. Strangely, the Mail doesn't mention that Noel Edmunds and the local council together managed to burn a sizeable amount of Morecambe taxpayers' money, in what should in hindsight have been a kind of cautionary preview of the whole strength-through-casinos project. (They later moved onto leaping into bed with Urban Splash, just in time for the property crash.)
I'm also, however, surprised that it was so late into the 90s; I'd associated it with the rainy era of early John Major. Now, of course, the medium density fibreboard, gypsum, glue, and pink paint has gone the way of the hype, after 13 years of exposure to successive North-West European winters without maintenance; once the roof leaks, any light structure has had it, "ravers" or no "ravers".
That one could be titled "Spiritual Britain", I think. There's also one of two pink spheres described as "mushroom-type objects". Unfortunately they've removed one that showed the old health & safety at work violation on opening day, grinning over the heads of three visibly unenthusiastic kids.
A special point; behold the benefits of openness. Since the Daily Hell got a proper Web site, I've actually linked to two articles on it; one on ACPO, and this one. In the absence of their Web presence, I wouldn't have even imagined that anything of any interest might come from that quarter; but the ACPO one demonstrated that they do, sometimes, carry out solid reporting, and this is at least funny. And the photo caption "Ghostly: a destroyed miniature Blobby lies abandoned, while filth lines the inside of the house" is a minor classic all to itself.
(Hat tip to History is made at night; you don't think I spend my time actually reading that fucking rag, do you?)
Labels: architecture, moral horror
optimise your social isolation more efficiently
OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here's something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling's blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when it wasn't Charlie Stross-esque. Notably, two projects struck me as emblematic of a certain kind of thinking.
The first one was the Isophone, which is a mashup of a flotation tank and a telephone. The idea is that you sink into yummy sensory deprivation while talking to someone else in the same condition; it looks like this.
Maybe it's just me, but having to take phone calls under a state of total sensory deprivation is not my idea of fun. I couldn't help imagining some sort of nightmarish prison call centre, a whole pool full of them.
Then there was Mutsugoto. Let the official description speak for itself.
Well, I think we can probably guess. Anyway, I found both of them depressing; it also struck me that too many of these projects are all about sucking information out of the virtual space and representing it on a piece of hardware in private space. Basically, a gadget that reads out Twitter feeds, that you're meant to think is your friend. Further, once you get rid of the microphone, pointing device, keyboard, webcam, etc, you're basically watching TV on your own. It's read-only communication into the private realm.
The suit faction in this field, oddly, works the other way round - the M2M (Machine to Machine) community in telecoms, the big IT types, they're all more interested in getting data from the real world and representing it in virtual space. Basically, it's all SCADA applications - monitoring the current status of CO2 pipeline valve number 58634. Flowrate, direction, valve setting and temperature, please, and when did you last have your grease changed?
What seems to be missing from this as an artistic project is sending stuff into the public space. A lot of data gets captured from the public space into the private space; CCTV is one version, promoting your demo on Flickr and taking photos of the cops is another. Nothing much seems to be sent back, though; can't we have truth-screamer robots that run about yelling out under-reported news? Of course, if you or I were to encounter one we'd probably dropkick it into a handy canal. Splosh; "Hey there! CitizenMediaBot is sinking!"
But it would at least be fun, and more fun than gazing at a waldo that turns puce when #drivel is trending again. I suspect there's scope for this with things like Layar, who were also presenting. Then, we're deep into the Strossosphere; "what do we want? Brains!" indeed.
The first one was the Isophone, which is a mashup of a flotation tank and a telephone. The idea is that you sink into yummy sensory deprivation while talking to someone else in the same condition; it looks like this.
Maybe it's just me, but having to take phone calls under a state of total sensory deprivation is not my idea of fun. I couldn't help imagining some sort of nightmarish prison call centre, a whole pool full of them.
Then there was Mutsugoto. Let the official description speak for itself.
Mutsugoto is meant to be installed in the bedrooms of two distant partners. You lay on your bed and wear a special touch-activated ring visible to a camera mounted above. A computer vision system tracks the movement of the ring and projects virtual pen strokes on your body. At the same time these pen strokes are transmitted to and projected on the body of your remote partner. If you follow your partner's movements and your strokes cross, the lines will react with each other and reflect your synchrony. Special bed linens, silk curtains and other aspects of the physical context have been designed to enhance the mood of this romantic communication environment.But what are the civilian applications? As they say.
Well, I think we can probably guess. Anyway, I found both of them depressing; it also struck me that too many of these projects are all about sucking information out of the virtual space and representing it on a piece of hardware in private space. Basically, a gadget that reads out Twitter feeds, that you're meant to think is your friend. Further, once you get rid of the microphone, pointing device, keyboard, webcam, etc, you're basically watching TV on your own. It's read-only communication into the private realm.
The suit faction in this field, oddly, works the other way round - the M2M (Machine to Machine) community in telecoms, the big IT types, they're all more interested in getting data from the real world and representing it in virtual space. Basically, it's all SCADA applications - monitoring the current status of CO2 pipeline valve number 58634. Flowrate, direction, valve setting and temperature, please, and when did you last have your grease changed?
What seems to be missing from this as an artistic project is sending stuff into the public space. A lot of data gets captured from the public space into the private space; CCTV is one version, promoting your demo on Flickr and taking photos of the cops is another. Nothing much seems to be sent back, though; can't we have truth-screamer robots that run about yelling out under-reported news? Of course, if you or I were to encounter one we'd probably dropkick it into a handy canal. Splosh; "Hey there! CitizenMediaBot is sinking!"
But it would at least be fun, and more fun than gazing at a waldo that turns puce when #drivel is trending again. I suspect there's scope for this with things like Layar, who were also presenting. Then, we're deep into the Strossosphere; "what do we want? Brains!" indeed.
Labels: CCTV, dayjob, funny ha ha, gadget, GPS, GSM, hacker, sci-fi, weirdness
Monday, October 26, 2009
a black square on a white background
Without comment:
Mr Cameron has said he would relish the opportunity: "Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons are no substitute for a proper prime time studio debate..."David Cameron is surely the ultimate anti-blogging candidate; look at what he said. Discursive, textual culture has no value for him.
Labels: Tories
Sunday, October 25, 2009
wkay - update
So where's WhoseKidAreYou? "Well, I'm working on it" is the short answer. I have recently reorganised the code in the user script, and I've been fiddling with Sindice, a semantic/linked data search engine. I'm fairly certain, however, that the first version out will work like this.
User script tries a range of XPath and DOM parsing options to obtain a byline and identify the element in the page that contains it; it then does various paper-specific things to clean up the data and convert it to wiki-style Name_Surname, and templates this into the query. The query is fired as an XmlHttpRequest in the background - because you can do cross-domain requests inside Greasemonkey - and the page renders anyway while waiting. When the queries to Sindice/DBpedia/Sourcewatch/Tobacco Archives happen, the results get templated in a chunk of HTML, if they contain hits, and then this is used to replace the byline.
Otherwise, a default element pointing you to a Wikipedia edit page will be inserted. That way, we get a triangular feedback going.
User script tries a range of XPath and DOM parsing options to obtain a byline and identify the element in the page that contains it; it then does various paper-specific things to clean up the data and convert it to wiki-style Name_Surname, and templates this into the query. The query is fired as an XmlHttpRequest in the background - because you can do cross-domain requests inside Greasemonkey - and the page renders anyway while waiting. When the queries to Sindice/DBpedia/Sourcewatch/Tobacco Archives happen, the results get templated in a chunk of HTML, if they contain hits, and then this is used to replace the byline.
Otherwise, a default element pointing you to a Wikipedia edit page will be inserted. That way, we get a triangular feedback going.
Labels: WhoseKidAreYou
the GOP speaks, and so does the unconscious
Speaking of new Soviet men, The GOP Speaks continues to be a fantastic resource on authoritarian thinking. Short version - chap writes to every county- and state-level Republican chairman in the US and asks them to fill in a questionnaire. Blogs the results as they come in. Here's number 26.
Fair enough.
An interesting event happens between questions 1 and 2, doesn't it? His response to question 1 is eminently rational, but the next one is objectively crazy. It doesn't get any better as the questions go on, either.
One explanation here would be that he answered the question about tactics having thought about it, and then switched off. I don't think so - the language in the following questions suggests someone getting more and more excited emotionally, more and more engaged.
In fact, I think he started thinking after question 1. As far as political tactics went, he was able to answer in the way we use physical skills - a set of gestures and rules that we internalise to the extent that we don't think about them.
If you agree with the thesis of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah (and I agree that'll be a grade one on WhoseKidAreYou) and others like Eric Altemeyer, the US rightwing can be seen as a network of group therapy institutions, repurposed for political ends.
The importance of conversion experiences suggests that they are consciously or unconsciously seeking people who need an external cause to stabilise their personalities; adhering to the cult of personality offers emotional relief, and being given a role to carry out offers validation. The tasks involved are essentially arbitrary, but in this case they are those of a political field operation. Blumenthal goes so far as to suggest that James Dobson's notorious advice on parenting might even be intended to create more raw material.
That would also suggest that external causes of social insecurity are very important to the movement; no wonder the first item on his checklist was to oppose the legislative agenda. And I think I've said before that there's a lot to be said for the tactics of no; with some money, not many activists, and a lot of no, the teabaggers managed to hold the media's attention across the whole summer.
But once he completed his actions on encountering a question, code execution continued from the return value...
1) So long as it's in the opposition, where should the Republican Party focus its energy?
Our first priority should be to stop his legislative agenda.
Second we should work to win as many seats as possible in2010.
Fair enough.
2) What is the most worrisome part of Barack Obama's presidency?Something does not work with mai cortex, egad!
Without question the country has elected a marxist that hates capitalism and liberty
An interesting event happens between questions 1 and 2, doesn't it? His response to question 1 is eminently rational, but the next one is objectively crazy. It doesn't get any better as the questions go on, either.
One explanation here would be that he answered the question about tactics having thought about it, and then switched off. I don't think so - the language in the following questions suggests someone getting more and more excited emotionally, more and more engaged.
In fact, I think he started thinking after question 1. As far as political tactics went, he was able to answer in the way we use physical skills - a set of gestures and rules that we internalise to the extent that we don't think about them.
If you agree with the thesis of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah (and I agree that'll be a grade one on WhoseKidAreYou) and others like Eric Altemeyer, the US rightwing can be seen as a network of group therapy institutions, repurposed for political ends.
The importance of conversion experiences suggests that they are consciously or unconsciously seeking people who need an external cause to stabilise their personalities; adhering to the cult of personality offers emotional relief, and being given a role to carry out offers validation. The tasks involved are essentially arbitrary, but in this case they are those of a political field operation. Blumenthal goes so far as to suggest that James Dobson's notorious advice on parenting might even be intended to create more raw material.
That would also suggest that external causes of social insecurity are very important to the movement; no wonder the first item on his checklist was to oppose the legislative agenda. And I think I've said before that there's a lot to be said for the tactics of no; with some money, not many activists, and a lot of no, the teabaggers managed to hold the media's attention across the whole summer.
But once he completed his actions on encountering a question, code execution continued from the return value...
It is not about race it is about ideology Justice Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Micheal Steele, Alberto Gonzales and many others on the right are ignored or destroyed by the left but never celebrated....No....It is viable. If you talk the talk walk the walk....Liberty is sacred if they can come for me soon enough they can come for youEach section between ellipses is the answer to a question. As the excitement mounts, the punctuation disappears - perhaps a handy rough indicator of cognitive load.
Labels: conservatives, ideology
the new Soviet man
While we're kicking the remains of Superfreakonomics around the car park, here's something else. Via Kevin Drum, it seems that John Meriwether, the chap whose hedge fund LTCM nearly killed the banking sector in 1998, has started another hedge fund, a few months after his come-back ended up being crushed under the financial panic of 2008.
As a comment at RealClimate says with regard to Dubner and Levitt:
Nathan Myrhold is another - he even called his post-Microsoft hobby company "Intellectual Ventures", which ought to put a rough value on the degree of wankishness we're dealing with here. But, of course, they aren't intellectuals or even technocrats; they specialise in hyper-specialisation, rather than any broader culture, and by the time they reach this point they are usually many years from dealing with anything practical.
In fact, as a cultural type, they're almost Soviet figures; believers that if you can get that input-output table\Gaussian copula just right, we'll be able to achieve the new man and true communism\hedge the entire economy perfectly.
As a comment at RealClimate says with regard to Dubner and Levitt:
So, do Levitt and Dubner list Dunning and Kruger as co-authors on this chapter?I think you'll agree this comment wins the Internet. Meriwether seems to be the ideal type of a certain kind of intellectual failure mode, almost an American original - the man obsessed by the notion that his (almost always) numerical expertise makes him an all-round expert.
Nathan Myrhold is another - he even called his post-Microsoft hobby company "Intellectual Ventures", which ought to put a rough value on the degree of wankishness we're dealing with here. But, of course, they aren't intellectuals or even technocrats; they specialise in hyper-specialisation, rather than any broader culture, and by the time they reach this point they are usually many years from dealing with anything practical.
In fact, as a cultural type, they're almost Soviet figures; believers that if you can get that input-output table\Gaussian copula just right, we'll be able to achieve the new man and true communism\hedge the entire economy perfectly.
scary monsters and super freaks keep me running
One consequence of the whole Superfreakonomics fiasco, which has been thoroughly reported elsewhere in the blogosphere, is that I've changed my mind about geoengineering ideas. Up until now, I was of the opinion that the various proposals to check climate change by doing various things to the atmosphere or the oceans were no substitute for reducing CO2 emissions, but they were worth at least studying in order to have an emergency reserve option. And in fact, I always liked the stratospheric sulphur one because it didn't involve massive space structures and it was, at least theoretically, reversible - the stuff rains out within weeks to months, so it's possible to switch the thing off.
I also preferred it because one version - very differently from the daft 18-mile hose with helium balloons and sharks with lasers etc - involved simply changing the specification for Jet-A1 aviation fuel in order to let the refinery leave more sulphur in it. Rather than all that incredibly complicated and expensive fantasy engineering - what James Nicoll would call our viewgraph future - this could be done cheaply.
But the Superfreaks have permitted me, at least, to think this through further. The problems with any climate-engineering, rather than emissions-engineering, approach are just too bad.
The mechanism of action for the sulphate plan is basically that it creates more nuclei for water droplets to coalesce around, and therefore creates high-altitude clouds that reflect heat back out to space. Unfortunately, the nuclei are particles of various sulphate compounds, and when they dissolve in water with sunlight, you get sulphuric acid and hydrogen ions; acid rain. And the plan implies doing this globally, so rather than just damaging forests in northern Europe like we used to, we'd be acidifying the sea at the same time as we'd be acidifying it anyway by asking it to take up a whole lot of CO2.
Then there are the consequences in terms of meteorology rather than climatology, about which the best that can be said is "we have no idea" and the worst that can be said is "there is a nontrivial chance of losing the monsoon, gaining nastier hurricanes, or maybe both". In fact, these are worryingly like the consequences of acute climate change themselves, which tends to make you wonder what the point is.
Like the really bad climate change scenarios, these all carry a lot of political risk as well; Ken Caldeira, who was misquoted in the book and who came up with the sulphate plan in the first place, remarked back in the 1980s that one solution to climate change would be a nuclear war, which looked if anything more likely at the time. (For the inevitable hard of thinking troll, his point was that a nuclear war would both fill the upper atmosphere with cloud-seeding dusts of various kinds, and effectively stop humanity emitting lots of CO2, by destroying industrial civilisation - not that this was a desirable option.)
Unfortunately, anything that risks the Indians running out of rain, the Chinese out of drinking water, or the Americans out of coastal cities, is by definition a threat of the same class as a medium-sized ballistic missile attack, and you can bet that the powers in question would draw the conclusions that follow from that.
And also, there's a serious class break for all climate-engineering plans; what happens if it works for an extended period of time, but for some reason we have to stop? If the underlying problem isn't addressed, as soon as the sulphates rained out, the world would heat up until it hit radiative equilibrium right then, which is as good as any definition of the end of the world. This is the flip side of the advantage of reversibility.
There are, of course, alternative approaches; I think of them as emissions-engineering rather than climate-engineering. They essentially aim to absorb the CO2 rather than change other parts of the system's response, and are as such significantly less difficult, because they have a more direct feedback loop. Unfortunately, one of the most promising - feeding the ocean plankton - has been subjected to a large-scale trial and doesn't seem to work, at least not reliably.
I can still imagine a scenario where these could come in handy; but I'm increasingly convinced that nobody who floats them is being serious.
I also preferred it because one version - very differently from the daft 18-mile hose with helium balloons and sharks with lasers etc - involved simply changing the specification for Jet-A1 aviation fuel in order to let the refinery leave more sulphur in it. Rather than all that incredibly complicated and expensive fantasy engineering - what James Nicoll would call our viewgraph future - this could be done cheaply.
But the Superfreaks have permitted me, at least, to think this through further. The problems with any climate-engineering, rather than emissions-engineering, approach are just too bad.
The mechanism of action for the sulphate plan is basically that it creates more nuclei for water droplets to coalesce around, and therefore creates high-altitude clouds that reflect heat back out to space. Unfortunately, the nuclei are particles of various sulphate compounds, and when they dissolve in water with sunlight, you get sulphuric acid and hydrogen ions; acid rain. And the plan implies doing this globally, so rather than just damaging forests in northern Europe like we used to, we'd be acidifying the sea at the same time as we'd be acidifying it anyway by asking it to take up a whole lot of CO2.
Then there are the consequences in terms of meteorology rather than climatology, about which the best that can be said is "we have no idea" and the worst that can be said is "there is a nontrivial chance of losing the monsoon, gaining nastier hurricanes, or maybe both". In fact, these are worryingly like the consequences of acute climate change themselves, which tends to make you wonder what the point is.
Like the really bad climate change scenarios, these all carry a lot of political risk as well; Ken Caldeira, who was misquoted in the book and who came up with the sulphate plan in the first place, remarked back in the 1980s that one solution to climate change would be a nuclear war, which looked if anything more likely at the time. (For the inevitable hard of thinking troll, his point was that a nuclear war would both fill the upper atmosphere with cloud-seeding dusts of various kinds, and effectively stop humanity emitting lots of CO2, by destroying industrial civilisation - not that this was a desirable option.)
Unfortunately, anything that risks the Indians running out of rain, the Chinese out of drinking water, or the Americans out of coastal cities, is by definition a threat of the same class as a medium-sized ballistic missile attack, and you can bet that the powers in question would draw the conclusions that follow from that.
And also, there's a serious class break for all climate-engineering plans; what happens if it works for an extended period of time, but for some reason we have to stop? If the underlying problem isn't addressed, as soon as the sulphates rained out, the world would heat up until it hit radiative equilibrium right then, which is as good as any definition of the end of the world. This is the flip side of the advantage of reversibility.
There are, of course, alternative approaches; I think of them as emissions-engineering rather than climate-engineering. They essentially aim to absorb the CO2 rather than change other parts of the system's response, and are as such significantly less difficult, because they have a more direct feedback loop. Unfortunately, one of the most promising - feeding the ocean plankton - has been subjected to a large-scale trial and doesn't seem to work, at least not reliably.
I can still imagine a scenario where these could come in handy; but I'm increasingly convinced that nobody who floats them is being serious.
the problem with a submarine is that there's nowhere to have a decent cocktail party
The blog is going to call in Amsterdam this week. I'm going to be attending eComm, the less tiresome telecoms conference. Readers there are welcome to meet up; I'd also be interested in recommendations of anything, really, as I haven't been there since 1996, and using the various hangouts referenced in Charlie Stross novels as a guide seems to take things too far. The conference is held in an old gas works - I used to live in one in Vienna. Is there any European city that hasn't converted a chunk of disused infrastructure into something unconvincingly hip at some point between about 1985 and 2005?
