There was a good comment about wiki being unreliable and indeed pointing out that a student could reference themselves.

Fair points. But I still feel that universities should not still be teaching people to refer to authorities. They should be teaching people to think critically and evaluate the materials they get.

I believe the reference to authority was something from the medieval era, when it often served to stifle original thought pre-renaissance. Until people realised that, whatever the value of the ancient thinkers, they weren’t always right, human progress stalled. The knee-jerk assumption that certain texts cannot be questioned underpins fundamentalism of all kinds. If people treat wikipedia like that, surely it’s a flaw in the nature of education.

I have to concede that many errors don’t get fixed, or even challenged. At least there are mechanisms for doing so.

Wikipedia has got to be the one Web 2.0-style thing that has contributed enormously to human society. It is almost too good to be true, both in concept and operation – proof that individuals can co-operate voluntarily to share their knowledge freely, to the benefit of anyone who wants it.

So, how is it that, according to the Guardian, that most US universities will automatically give an F grade to any student who cites it? If this is not just a myth – which seems increasingly likely, the more I think of it – how could it possibly be justified?

Surely wikipedia embodies the very spirit of scientific enquiry. Anything posted is immediately peer-reviewed and challenged by anyone who has a problem with it? This hardly applies to most academic journals, which are already subject to phenomena like sponsor bias and publication bloat. No one publishes on wikipedia (so far) to keep up their publication average or because a large pharmaceutical company paid for their research. Scepticism is even built in to the process – no one treats wikipedia as objectively true, unlike some traditional encyclopaedias. Errors actually get rectified, within the hour even.

If anything, therefore, wikipedia is possibly one of the most trustworthy sources of information on the planet. So where does the F idea come from? Cite x (2004) at the end of your papers- fine, whether or not it’s utter nonsense, (e.g. creationism or sociobiology :-)), but cite a wikipedia article? Collect that F at the door.

According to the BBC, British scientists have applied for permission to create a cow-human embryo. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6121280.stm.

Wow, what a fantastically useful thing that would be.

In case you, like me, are wondering WHY ON EARTH? The reason is apparently for stem cell research to cure every known worrying disease…..

I have serious doubts about this sort of thing. The only positive thing you could say is that it might spare a few animals from the joys of animal tests. Otherwise, it seems so comically Frankenstein-like as to give even Mary Shelley nightmares.

We seem to have no concern for future generations in terms of considering the potential impacts of genetic research. Can anyone guarantee that unknown future side effects won’t result from this? Clearly not. No one seems to have realised that feeding dead cows to other cows could cause any problems to cows, let alone humans, until we found out about mad cow disease.

However, surely the average person, let alone bigoted vegetarians like me would have said “No, cannibalism is probably not safe” if there had been any public input on the issue of feeding the bodies of dead cattle to live ones. And would have been proved to be correct, in the long term, however irrational their ideas might have seemed in the face of the perceived benefits of faster cattle growth. Sometimes our instinctive distrust of certain procedures proves correct and this human-cow hybrid certainly evokes a great deal of instinctive revulsion, as shown on the BBC feedback pages.

In any case, has anyone seen any of the promised benefits from stem cell research? My reading of the popular science press (and I will happily concede the limitations of that as a source of knowledge) suggests that almost every claim that stem cells will cure paralysis, alzheimers and cancers turns out to be bogus. Indeed a goodly number of the stem cell experiments appear to be bogus in their entirety.

Sheep cloning was a proof of concept. Real sheep produce sturdy offspring by themselves. For free. Cloning produced a sickly creature at a cost of millions. There must be a reason for these lines of research – profit, I assume – but the value largely escapes me.

Amazingly there are only two blogs listed with Technorati tags about the Wire (This isn’t one of them) After a fair bit of searching i found the Wire bits on http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/09/different-voices-diversity-in-wires.html and there is some interesting stuff there.

Such as the idea that the Wire isn’t very popular because most of its characters are black (with some % estimates by various people, suchas Vance Cureton, from something called the Reading Post) or that its characters are all violent and hostile. Uh? The Wire characters cross every level of society and exhibit every shade of moral failing and virtue.

Anyway, it’s a very good blog post, with a quotation from sociology professor that I want to copy here, but, in fear of committing a double plagiarism, I’ve linked to the source.

It tells you that producer Ed Burns, “served both as a homicide detective in the real Baltimore police department and as a teacher in the city’s public schools” No surprise there but informative. It supports the feeling that its realiism is well founded in someone’s experience.

And it provides the fantastic fact that Stringer Bell is played by a British actor. Wow.

I just picked this up from the god-like archives of the god-like Register. In 2003, a school was planning retinal scans before parting with school dinners and library books.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/08/uk_school_plans_retinal_scans/

The article says that tens of thousands of kids had already been fingerprinted then. However, a resourceful chap has found there are serious flaws in biometric iD.

“c’t gave biometrics a resounding thumbs down, after fooling a large number of devices with simple tricks and finding some unusable.

In its attempts at outfoxing the protective programs and devices, c’t concentrated on deceiving the systems with the aid of simple procedures (such as the reactivation of latent images) and forgeries, such as silicon fingerprints. It also achieved some success in eavesdropping on the communication (via the USB port) between a computer and the sensor and using this information in replay attacks to fool recognition systems. It didn’t try to hack into biometric data directly, though this might be another fruitful avenue of attack.”

It seesm that we are going to have to rely on the skills of a few eccentric hackers to keep some of the personal freedoms that used to be considered the essential benefit of democracy.

Democracy, hmm? Do you remember seeing anything in the voting materials at the last general or council elections that said

“By the way, we know you think jury trials and a professionally trained  police force and free movement are so 20th century.  We intend to replace the police with low-paid vigilantes wearing armbands and applying civil A-Social Bastard Orders that don’t requiire proof of actually breaking laws.

Oh, and we know you feel that 25 hour surveillance of everyone’s public activities  is the way to go. We are sure you feel uncomfortable when your biological identifiers,  credit record, medical history and address and telephone number and many other details or rumours about you aren’t held all over the place. We know you want these things to be collated at will by anyone with access to them – that is, more or less any public body or private company. 

We know that you are worried about toddlers wearing hoodies and veils, so we’ll make them our big priority.  Just let them try keeping a library book over the allotted 14 days!  We bet that you are furious that people can just walk into pubs without showing a biomentric passport. Well, we promise to sort all that out for you. Vote for us.”

On a similar theme- i.e. this country is fast approaching the repression levels previously associated with Nazi germany - a teacher who I know was told that the teaching staff in the archetypal ####  Comprehensive where he works would be fined £2,500 if caught smoking on the premises.  Get caught smoking more than a cigarette a month and he would obviously be having to pay to teach.  Even more insidiously, heads of department who know that a member of their staff has smoked on the premises but haven’t grassed him or her to the authorities will be fined a few hundred.

I suspect I couldn’t make this stuff up.

I was going to do the usual thing and keep my mouth shut about the £200 fine for not recycling accurately, as there is a very good blog further down about that. However, hard as that is to believe, there’s much worse.

A Register article just blew away my residual sanity:- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_fingerprints/  The title is

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide

That is, pubs are to get money to fingerprint customers. Seriously.   Pubs in Yeovil are already doing it. There is a nicely understated piece in the Register article that points out quite how voluntary the pubs entrance into this scheme is- they won’t get a licence if tehy don’t and they can open late if they do.

This reminded me of another article in the Register a few days ago that had already pushed the proverbial envelope of calm too far for me to express an opinion on it in moderate language . That was http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/mps_on_kiddyprinting/  Schools are apparently fingerprinting kids – allegedly so they can issue library books….  A simple rubber stamp used to suffice.

These articles are apparently genuine. I’ve found lots of other references to the schools one. Does anyone feel more secure with this stuff. I can sleep easy in my bed knowing that the local publican and school librarian are carrying out ad hoc surveillance at a level that George Orwell would never have dared present in his fiction.

 

Now that a fair bit of the latest Wire series has been on, it’s due for another fanatic reassessment. This series has been less immediately engaging but demanding immediate engagement from the Wire seems oddly immoral, given its depth.

Hence, this will be the start of a more serious appraisal of the Wire. Basically, it is magical in the way it looks at every level of an American city with perfect clarity, while still being totally successful as standard tv narrative. It’s not exactly escapist, though. You have to have a clear head to watch it. You’ll still miss half the things it’s saying. Or more, in my case, as I feel the need for subtitles in some parts.

One of the themes of the Wire has always been the way formal and informal societies mirror each other. For instance, Stringer Bell had a sales conference for his street dealers with a tedious presentation and yes men asking flattering questions. (If you’ve ever worked anywhere, you’ve been there.) In Series 4, they are making these points (maybe a little too obviously) in terms of education and politics.

The opening titles always turn out to have surprising resonances in any case, but, in this series, the opening titles scream circularity – with a circular image in almost every scene. There are lots of circular themes, among them, the way that culture is transmitted across generations. The school is a focus of a few well meaning attempts to rescue the kids. This is achieved partly by the University project fronted by the legalising ex-police chief – which is building on the knowledge that the corner kids have – and partly by the teacher – who was a crazed nerd policeman – providing food and clothes and interesting maths lessons. The ex-con with a boxing gym is trying to become a good role model as well as save some of the kids from trouble. Their small successes are trapped in a context of test-driven educational policies that run counter to real education, lack of resources and the overwhelmingly sordeid environment.

The efforts of the good police chief and the ex-policeman teacher and the ex-con boxer are mirrored in the lessons in killing that are provided by Marlowe’s minions to kids barely old enough to tie their own shoelaces. Marlowe’s two sidekicks are an apparently himocidal little girl and an older cold and psychopathic man. They make the Barksdales seem like choirboys. Omar clearly has the high moral ground, not least when Marlowe fits him up by killing a shop assistant (collateral damage in pursuit of a goal) and threatening the shop owner to claim he wittnessed Omar.

(In the most recent episode, they have been instructed to kill the would-be New York intruders on the Baltimore turf and leave bodies, contrary to their current success in disappearing any signs of their murders. They devise a bizarre test, based on intimate knowledge of local music, that even one of them is unable to pass. The first person in the street who refuses to provide the right answer is shot, seemingly at random, with his body left to be discovered and supposedly send a message to the New York gangs. The utter pointlessness and stupidity of this typifies Marlowe’s rule.)

The political stuff is very good, but less interesting as narrative than the street stuff, partly because it has telegraphed its message too much. Throughout his journey to becoming Mayor-elect, Carcetti has been as slimy as he always appeared. however, he seems to be about to do something right, for once, by choosing the old Wire boss as a Colonel. But, of course, he is putting the truly evil Rawls in as the police chief. The circularity theme suggests that it will be no time before the former levels of corruption and political manoeuvring are restored with a new cast in power.

The titles are themselves worthy of a fair bit of study. Each series has the same song sung in a different style (are you getting the resonance, here?) There is always a collection of images that crop up in the series and are both beautifully shot and subtly significant to the story lines. Each is followed by a quote from a character in the episode, which gathers resonance when you finally hear it and understand the concept.

In fact, the Wire is a true masterwork of television. US tv is getting better and better, while British tv is descending ever deeper into a reality celebrity home improvement swamp that is so far beneath the lowest common denominator that you would need an IQ in single digits to watch it some nights. If any tv series ever gets better than the Wire, there should really be a nobel prize for it.

Not to be spoken of in the same category as the Wire (official Best TV Series Ever) still Numb3rs new series (in the States) is also pretty good as entertainment. 

Sadly, they are almost at the limits of how they can bring maths into the crime-solving arena, so we seem to be getting less Math and more standard crime series stuff. (Which at least avoids the issue of how it is that experienced FBI agents need a maths – sorry, Math – professor to develop complex algorithms to point out some crime-solving things that would be glaringly obvious to the newest recruit with an ounce of common sense.)

Good stuff in the first programs includes – a pursuit algorithm. The use of maths to detect forged artwork, though I found the idea you could do it from a jpeg of a scanned photo to be unconvincing. Their scanner must be better than any I’ve ever seen by several orders of magnitude.

Bad stuff – the level of family values propaganda crammed into each episode is verging on the comical. Get rid of the guy who used to be in Taxi, please.

Odd stuff – the way they say “provenance” in the art theft episode. The first FBI art expert pronounces it as  “pro” (as in sports) “ven arnts.”  A few others do the same. You just think ‘Ok, this must be like saying “rowt” for route and “baysil” for basil. It’s just an American thing.’ Then, confusingly, someone says it as an English person would.

The Best TV Series Ever is on series 4 in the States. So far – the Wire is still the best tv series ever, etc, but, just as in each of the other series, it’s taken a completely different tack. At the moment it’s a little bit too overt with the social commentary. The action and dialogue are toned down a bit. The brilliance of it was largely the way it managed to have all the social stuff and still be completely successful on the standard TV cop show level. But, as was pointed out to me, the other series were always slow to get going.

I can’t do it justice but I’m still going to try to give a brief introduction to some of the plot strands for other afficionados.

This one is mainly down with the kids and up with the politicians. The Wire group is well nigh disbanded for tricking its caretaker boss into subpoenaing all the mayor’s financial backers. A hatchet boss is put in and the senior people all manage to get transfers to Homicide. The baldhead one from the early series was made sergeant after catching the mayor misbehaving (when he was his driver) but, when he gets to the Wire team, finds out the others have gone and he’s working to the team-killer.

The slimeball politician, Carcetti, is making slow progress against the Mayor but the Mayor’s money machine is winning so far.

The lame nervous policeman with the Polish name who went uncharacteristically ape and got kicked out of the force (in series 3) is a trainee teacher. (“Lambs to the slaughter” according to the headmistress) The kids run rings round him, until a girl in his class slashes another one. The police chief who legalised just before retirement has been employed by the University’s social science department, as a sort of street translator on a project that aims to reach the kids before they are utterly destroyed by gang warfare. He gets the researcher to realise they have to go for pretty young kids if they want to find any that aren’t already damaged and dangerous. They end up in the same Junior High as the trainee teacher. The central street-level gang characters in this series are pupils at the same school, in between dealing on street corners and living in conditions so bad they would be remarked on in the poorest Rio favela. The lads have some pretty funny scenes in the first episode, one involving pouring urine on bullies, but getting themselves soaked.

The ireedeemable Marlow is in control of the neighbourhood. He makes Stringer Bell seem to have been moderately benign and Avon Barksdale positively beneficent (though I still haven’t forgiven him for offing the charming de Angelo in series 2) . His only halfway human trait is keeping pigeons. The other gang leaders try to reach some accomodation with him but he’s not interested. Thanks to his approximately 11-year-old utterly psychopathic henchman (/henchgirl, it’s hard to tell) he is burying bodies so successfully that the police chiefs can claim there aren’t any and more or less shut down the Wire.

Because of Marlow’s intransigence, the fat older gang leader persuades Omar to rob a poker game in which Marlow’s winning. This promises to lead to a war against Omar that will make the previous one with Stringer seem like a mild disagreement between gentlemen. Omar is as over-the-top as ever. Although his appearance is generally more moderate than in previous series, he still goes to the shop for cereal (and to collect his tribute) wearing a comically lurid but expensive silk pyjama ensemble.

Obviously this is just a taste. There are too many plot strands, of course, to bring up more than a few here and I’ve done it in a way that makes it seem dull. It isn’t. It’s still great. It has got to go on mainstream TV here in the UK sometime. Then you’ll understand what I mean.

To get away from the trend of putting in less useful entries, here is a serious one. Symantec site points out that a “build your own trojan kit” can be had for about $20.

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2006/08/buildyourown_trojan_starter_ki.html

I don’t believe this is really “news”, in the sense that’s it’s been well known for  a long time, but they give a fair amount of detail and even a screen shot. And this kit seems to come with full instructions so the complete newb could be up and trojanning within a short time.

It’s still hard to understand why these things are so widespread. I could understand that people might get a sense of intellectual achievement from creating their own trojan from scratch. I can understand actual fraud. Beyond that, messing up people’s pcs by making them install pre-pack malware doesn’t even seem to provide malicious pleasure, in that the people who do it can’t even see you tearing your hair out and having to sell the family dog to a pie company to buy a new hard disk.

On a scale of 0 to 10 for lameness, this post is clearly at the low edge of being mobility challenged. Nevertheless, does anyone else find they are getting half their music choices from the adverts?

My first foray into the demonic underworld of people who choose music on the basis of consumer promotions was the Joanna Newsom “This side of the blue” from an IBM advert – IBM no less. Soon followed, on the sort of downward path normally associated with Faust, by Jose Gonzales’ “Heartbeats” (Sony Bravia.) Now, it’s Bedouin Soundclash “When the night feels ” (T-Mobile)

Argh.

I find there is even a website devoted to this shameful practice. http://www.tvadmusic.co.uk/ It describes itself as “your number one website for songs from UK television commercials.” It just feeds the problem, by pointing out new adverts you have never seen.

Sorry.

Tonight at 22:00 http://www.rb3tv.com the band including Tom – related to most of the people writing this blog – broadcast from Barfly, Liverpool.

Counter-intuitively, if you click on tune in- don’t click the icon, click the WORDS beneath. You need winamp or Internet explorer (plus a plug in) – surely everyone has them?

The front page of the Guardian on 7th August 2006 says that the much-vaunted new biometric passports can be cloned, as established by some one called Grunewald and reported in wired.com

The article might appear to give some cheer to those of us who seriously object to the belated attempt to turn Britain into Oceania (or whatever it’s called in Orwell’s 1984.) However the Home Office is not deterred. It insists the data is still “safe”- the new biometric passport being one of the “safest in the world”. How many other countries have a biometric passport? Is there a league table of their safeness? Who is top?

The Home Office says that the data can’t be modified even if it’s possible to copy the chip. Well, obviously we have to believe them, because no one has ever spoofed or altered material held on computer, have they? Who would imagine such a thing ws even possible?

THe Register points out that passport fees are going up by a third in october. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/24/passport_fees/. Supposedly the extra charge is “provides enhanced security and reassurance for the holders” according to at the Home Office. Oh, that’s OK then.
The Home Office also announced it was pressing ahead with the hated ID system, according to the Register 11 July.
I feel more secure already…………….