Tag Archives: database

At last a use for the internet

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Shakespeare’s Henry V was a “history play”. At the time the play was written, the events it showed were already over a hundred and fifty years in the past.

Now, anyone with access to the web can go one better than Shakespeare, whose detailed knowledge of the period must have been a bit limited (Well, OK, you can only better Shakespeare in certain specified ways. Nobody’s managed to get the monkeys to tap out the Complete Works yet. )

You can find out the names and jobs of the individual men in Henry V’s armies just by searching on The Soldier in Later Medieval England databases. Plus, you can learn any number of other details about medieval soldiers – such as the archers in the Earl of Arundel’s service.

There are now 250,000 medieval service records online, in a pilot project covering the period from 1369 to 1453.

You can have hours of history nerd fun with this, such as trying to guess which were the most common late medieval peasant surnames.

(Smiths are pretty rare, for instance, although maybe my search-criteron spelling was too specific. There are a mere half a dozen Taylors. Even FitzWilliams seem to greatly outnumber Smiths. There are many more chaps with the Archer surname, suggesting a possible failure of imagination by the clerks who kept these records.)

People with a less frivolous interest in local or family history can search on surnames or dates or leaders and extend their knowledge, rather than their enjoyment of trivia.

There are bits of the database that I can’t work out what to do with, especially the column labelled membrane which has entries like “m4d”

According to the BBC

The website is the product of a research project by Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton and Dr Adrian Bell of the University of Reading.

Bravo, respect to them and everyone who worked on it.

Busybodies in the UK

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Today’s Guardian had an interview with a senior police officer who was predicting a summer of rage. This seems a little like a step in a “police bargaining with the government for more resources” strategy, rather than a realistic prediction. (In any case, surely there must be few powers left that the government haven’t already given them.) But, following a link on the page, I found an old story that seems worth a full-blown rant despite it being a year old

A man was arrested by armed police for being armed with an i-pod.

Armed police arrested a man listening to his MP3 player and took a sample of his DNA after a fellow commuter mistook the music player for a gun. (from the Guardian)

His big mistakes were to have a black mp3 player and to get it out of his pocket at a bus stop. Obviously he also stuck the headphones in his ears and listened to it. That bit must have somehow passed right by the eagle-eyed paranoid person who called the police to say that he’d pointed and aimed a gun.

I’ve only ever seen a pistol in movies and on TV but I am still pretty confident that I could distinguish one from an mp3 player.

But, then, I’ve had a good few mp3 players and that might count as specialist knowledge that was denied to the person who phoned this incident in. So maybe it’s an easy mistake to make.

This morning there was a neutron bomb at my bus stop, but, luckily, someone threw an empty packet into it and I realised that it was just a rubbish bin before I’d called in a surgical strike.

This man (fortunately for him, not apparently Brazilian-looking, I assume) was soon surrounded by police, aiming weapons (real ones, not portable dvd players). He was held in a cell and had photographs, fingerprints and – you’ve already guessed it – DNA taken. (It’s probably still there, unless our government plans to follow the European court’s ruling.)

He now has a record on the police national database that says he was arrested on suspicion of carrying an illegal gun. Try and get a job that needs Criminal Records Bureau clearance (i.e. almost any job nowadays) with that on your informal record. (“No smoke without fire”…)

The DNA etc aspects of this case are just par for the course, by our increasingly authoritarian standards, and you can’t blame the police for taking seriously a report that a man was wielding a gun on a bus.

The most distressing thing about the incident was the way that some members of have public have taken the idea of the state-compliant-sneak-on-every-street-corner from the Big Book of How to Live Under Totalitarianism and have run with it. For instance, you might remember the steel band members who had to leave their flight and spend the night in a bus shelter, because of a false report from a fellow passenger.

These eagerly-reporting fellow passengers seem like ballistic weapons themselves – primed by having their heads filled with such constant fear that their perceptions get distorted to fit.

If I’m ever on a public transport service vehicle and someone pulls a gun, I hope that somebody has the presence of mind to act. But, I also really hope that – when I’m carrying a rucksack and listening to my mp3 player – that no paranoid lunatics get me taken awy at the point of an assault rifle.

The UK is turning into a “nation of narks and bullies”, as Marina Hyde said in the Guardian, a couple of months ago, discussing the XFactor-style plans for rating doctors:

…. we become a vast, swarming tribe of people constantly judging one another – a nation of narks too stupid to realise that we are being usefully distracted; a baying, bullying society of people laughing at the incompetent, sneaking on our neighbours, and undermining anyone with the temerity to work themselves into a position of expertise with a press of our red buttons.

My own blacklist

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It’s going beyond boring to keep plugging this “1984 in the 21st century” stuff, so I’ve been willfully blanking lots of it, but this story is too chilling to ignore.

Just think of every shitty boss you’ve ever worked for. Every dishonest co-worker. Every work dispute you’ve ever had. Every manager who’s made you take the rap for their own corruption or stupidity.

Now, just imagine that the aforementioned shitty bosses could get a lifelong revenge on you at no inconvenience or risk to themselves.

The BBC story says:

Workers accused of theft or damage could soon find themselves blacklisted on a register to be shared among employers. It will be good for profits but campaigners say innocent people could find it impossible to get another job.To critics it sounds like a scenario from some Orwellian nightmare.
An online database of workers accused of theft and dishonesty, regardless of whether they have been convicted of any crime, which bosses can access when vetting potential employees.
But this is no dystopian fantasy. Later this month, the National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR) is expected to go live.

Note that you don’t get on this database by being convicted of a crime. That would see you on the Criminal Records Bureau computer, which – for all its shortcomings – requires there to have been a prosecution before you find yourself unable to work ever again.

You can get on this database just because someone suspects you of doing something untoward in their employment. Or, obviously, just hates you for any number of reasons.

The Trades Union Congress spokesperson said:

Individuals would be treated as criminals, even though the police have never been contacted

Precisely, thus overturning centuries of law based on the “innocent till proven guilty” premise.

For once, the comments on this story on the BBC website aren’t dominated by the “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” battalion. Most commenters were understandably horrified and made some cogent arguments against it.

I’m still going to hammer a few of the arguments home.

  • A dispute with an employer can now permanently ruin your entire working life, even if you are completely in the right.
  • In many industries – bar and shop work – unjustified accusations of theft are pretty commonplace. Things get stolen or takings are down and a paranoid boss tends to blame anyone handy.
  • People who are stealing at work can be very good at casting the burden of doubt on other workers, especially if they are new or temporary. (A fortnight’s temporary work as a naive student could leave you so unemployable that you might as well not finish that course.)
  • If you are guilty, you might as well not bother going straight in future jobs because you won’t get any.
  • The private information to be held on these databases must contravene the Data UnProtection Act as it’s obviously not being used for the purposes it is collected for. (For instance, your NI number is supposed to exist to allow your contributions to be credited to you. )
  • The BBC article refers to some remedies under the law. They are too feeble to even merit a mention. And in case, they are purely personal. You yourself have to find out if you’re on the database. You have to ask for your record. You then have to require that errors of fact be corrected.
  • If you have anything against you – legitimate or not – as a UK citizen, you are at a big disadvantage in working in the UK, compared to other EC nationals. You need checkable references, legitimate qualifications and, increasingly, CRB checks. I suggest that you move to another EC country forthwith, so you can make up a few past jobs and some impressive trade qualifications, which no one will be able to question. Imagine you are a builder who has got caught taking home some bathroom fittings (pretty much seen as one of the perks of the job until recently.) That’s it. You’re sacked. You’re also finished up as a worker in the UK. Your job will go to someone with a completely spotless UK record – which probably means someone fresh from Eastern Europe. I can’t believe that free movement of labour in the EU was meant to allow countries – like the present-day UK – to willfully marginalise their own populations.

On a social – but also very selfish level – who wants to live in a world where one mistake – or one falsely attributed mistake – dooms people to a life in which legitimate earnings are just a pipe-dream? That is the way to turn the country into a crime-ridden wasteland. As the UK goes under ever more extreme lock down, life gets ever more desperate for the people outside of Daily-Mail world.

Boycotts are generally feeble tools for achieving anything. All the same, as far as I can see, the only possible recourse against this sort of thing – in the absence of any organised public concern – is to just refuse to buy any goods or services from the offending companies.

So I’m starting my own blacklist.

The BBC mentions Harrods, Selfridges and Reed Managed Services. They’ll do for a start, although that’s too easy. Never having used the services of any of these companies, it won’t make much of a dint in their balance sheets if I decide to boycott them. All the same great oaks, small acorns etc.

When I find out the names of more participants, I’ll post them here.

UK database of all kids

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The spread of the database-driven society proceeds apace. Today’s Times reports that

Senior social workers have given warning of the dangers posed by a new government register that will store the details of every child in England from next year.
They fear that the database, containing the address, medical and school details of all under-18s, could be used to harm the children whom it is intended to protect.

Not being a newspaper writer or a member of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, I don’t have an interest in claiming that the danger of child-abusers getting details is the biggest problem here. (After all, children have most to fear from people they know. ) But still, they have a point. Any database that has an estimated 33,000 users is going to be leaky as a broken sieve.

The database, which goes live next year, is to contain details of every one of the 11 million children in the country, listing their name, address and gender, as well as contact details for their GP, school and parents and other carers. The record will also include contacts with hospital consultants and other professionals, and could show whether the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether he or she needs extra help.

Every child in the country it says. So you have to love this bit:

….. information about the children of celebrities and politicians is likely to be excluded from the system.

National ID database

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For this, go to the source and read it. No more secrets by Steve Boggan is a very very disturbing account of how “joined-up government” and national ID documents will mean the end of anything resembling privacy.

The blurb on the printed page says:

“Tony Blair insists his government is not building a Big Brother-style super-database. But all the talk of ‘perfectly sensible’ reforms and ‘transformational government’ masks a chilling assault on our privacy”

Brilliant article. It’s almost too much to take in and it might leave you feeling very depressed. But, really, if you live in the UK, you should read it.

Compuskills Site Redesign

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I dont know if you have had the chance to read the Compuskills Web Design Blog recently, but as mentioned there we have been working on a fairly large overhaul on the Compuskills site. Most of the work has been to convert the previous pages into a database served CMS, with only minor cosmetic changes.

Everything has gone well, the new site should be live tonight and we can get back to the business of ranting and raving here again 🙂