Quotulatiousness

November 14, 2012

The “manufacturing fetish”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

John Kay talks about the widespread belief that only manufacturing is “real” in terms of what a national economy produces:

Manufacturing fetishism — the idea that manufacturing is the central economic activity and everything else is somehow subordinate — is deeply ingrained in human thinking. The perception that only tangible objects represent real wealth and only physical labour real work was probably formed in the days when economic activity was the constant search for food, fuel and shelter.

A particularly silly expression of manufacturing fetishism can be heard from the many business people who equate wealth creation with private sector production. They applaud the activities of making the pills you pop and processing the popcorn you eat in the interval. The doctors who prescribe the pills, the scientists who establish that the pills work, the actors who draw you to the performance and the writers whose works they bring to life; these are all somehow parasitic on the pill grinders and corn poppers.

When you look at the value chain of manufactured goods we consume today, you quickly appreciate how small a proportion of the value of output is represented by the processes of manufacturing and assembly. Most of what you pay reflects the style of the suit, the design of the iPhone, the precision of the assembly of the aircraft engine, the painstaking pharmaceutical research, the quality assurance that tells you products really are what they claim to be.

Physical labour incorporated in manufactured goods is a cheap commodity in a globalised world. But the skills and capabilities that turn that labour into products of extraordinary complexity and sophistication are not. The iPhone is a manufactured product, but its value to the user is as a crystallisation of services.

[. . .]

Most unskilled jobs in developed countries are necessarily in personal services. Workers in China can assemble your iPhone but they cannot serve you lunch, collect your refuse or bathe your grandmother. Anyone who thinks these are not “real jobs” does not understand the labour they involve. There is a subtle gender issue here: work that has historically mostly been undertaken by women at home — like care and cooking — struggles to be regarded as “real work”.

OED plumps for “omnishambles” over “mummy-porn”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Anna Leach explains just how exciting life can be when you’re working on the Oxford University Press staff:

The UK’s new word of 2012 is “omnishambles”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s compilers.

Selected from a list of several new words added to the gold-standard dictionary this year, omnishambles was chosen by lexicographers at Oxford University Press because it best reflects the mood of the past 12 months. It was first used by the character Malcolm Tucker in series three of the BBC satire The Thick of It and subsequently repeated by the Coalition government’s political opponents.

[. . .]

The OED now defines it as:

A situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterised by a string of blunders and miscalculations.

Other contenders were “mummy porn” (a description of the genre inspired by smack’n’tickle ebook bonkbuster 50 Shades of Grey), “green-on-blue” (to describe attacks by Afghan police or troops on NATO servicemen), the verb “medal” (from the Olympics), “eurogeddon” (from Eurozone crisis) and the acronym “YOLO” (contraction of the trite phrase “You Only Live Once”, mostly used as a justification after someone does something stupid on the internet).

November 13, 2012

Michael Geist on Canada’s new copyright law

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

If you’re not going to read the entire body of the law (and let’s face it, most of us would rather do just about anything other than that), here’s a thumbnail summary of what the new law says:

The good news is that the law now features a wide range of user-oriented provisions that legalize common activities. For example, time shifting, or the recording of television shows, is now legal under Canadian copyright after years of residing in a grey area. The law also legalizes format shifting, copying for private purposes, and the creation of backup copies. This will prove helpful for those seeking to digitize content, transfer content to portable devices, or create backups to guard against accidental deletion or data loss.

Canadians can also take greater advantage of fair dealing, which allows users to make use of excerpts or other portions of copyright works without the need for permission or payment. The scope of fair dealing has been expanded with the addition of three new purposes: education, satire, and parody.

Fair dealing now covers eight purposes (research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review comprise the other five). When combined with the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decisions that emphasized the importance of fair dealing as users’ rights, the law now features considerable flexibility that allows Canadians to make greater use of works without prior permission or fear of liability.

The law also includes a unique user generated content provision that establishes a legal safe harbour for creators of non-commercial user generated content such as remixed music, mashup videos, or home movies with commercial music in the background. The provision is often referred to as the “YouTube exception”, though it is not limited to videos.

Online education is the future of universities (if they have one)

Filed under: Education, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Alex Tabarrok explains why 15 minutes of his time has outweighed the rest of his teaching career:

In 2009, I gave a TED talk on the economics of growth. Since then my 15 minute talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times. That is far fewer views than the most-watched TED talk, Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk on how schools kill creativity, which has been watched some 26 million times. Nonetheless, the 15 minutes of teaching I did at TED dominates my entire teaching career: 700,000 views at 15 minutes each is equivalent to 175,000 student-hours of teaching, more than I have taught in my entire offline career.[1] Moreover, the ratio is likely to grow because my online views are increasing at a faster rate than my offline students.

Teaching students 30 at a time is expensive and becoming relatively more expensive. Teaching is becoming relatively more expensive for the same reason that butlers have become relatively more expensive–butler productivity increased more slowly than productivity in other fields, so wages for butlers rose even as their output stagnated; as a result, the opportunity cost of butlers increased. The productivity of teaching, measured in, say, kilobytes transmitted from teacher to student per unit of time, hasn’t increased much. As a result, the opportunity cost of teaching has increased, an example of what’s known as Baumol’s cost disease. Teaching has remained economic only because the value of each kilobyte transmitted has increased due to discoveries in (some) other fields. Online education, however, dramatically increases the productivity of teaching. As my experience with TED indicates, it’s now possible for a single professor to teach more students in an afternoon than was previously possible in a lifetime.

The counter-argument is that there is an ineffable quality of the classroom experience that raises its value well above the same material taught online. Even after many years of teaching, however, what exactly this quality might be remains ineffable to me. Actually, that is not quite fair. Bringing the most advanced students in any field up to the cutting edge of knowledge and beyond has always required a kind of apprenticeship rather than a more straightforward communication of data/knowledge. Fields with greater physicality, not just sports and dance, but also experimental biology, physics, and chemistry will also require more in-classroom teaching with greater attention from a human being. Even recognizing these exceptions, however, still leaves the vast majority of teaching open to massive productivity increases. Until late college, physics is mostly teaching knowledge known since Newton. Most of the mathematics known or needed by most people has not advanced much beyond Euclid and Pythagoras, let alone Euler. No one expects online education to substitute for apprenticing to a master, but much education at the college level is already mass education taught not by a master but by an adjunct.

Rapidly retreating freedom of expression in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

It’s almost as if Britain is in some sort of demented race to get rid of freedom of expression altogether:

At 9pm last night, with a knock on the door of a 19-year-old man, Kent police hammered another nail into the coffin of free expression in the UK.

Earlier in the day the unnamed man from Aylesham had allegedly posted a photo of a poppy being burned, with a crudely worded (and crudely spelled) caption. He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act and held in the cells overnight to await questioning.

It is of course just the latest in a succession of police actions against individuals deemed to have caused offence: mocking a footballer as he fights for his life on Twitter; hoping British service personnel would “die and go to hell”; wearing a T-shirt that celebrated the death of two police officers; making sick jokes on Facebook about a missing child, the list goes on. A few months ago, these could have been dismissed as isolated over-reactions or moments of madness by police and judiciary. Not any longer. It is now clear that a new criminal code has been imposed upon us without announcement or debate. It is now a crime to be offensive. We are not sleepwalking into a new totalitarianism — we have woken up to find ourselves tangled in its sheets.

News of the arrest was first announced on Kent police’s Twitter feed, and it didn’t take long for users to spot the painful irony of their official avatar, which simply says Kent police 101. The number is taken from the non-essential police phone number, but as we all know, Room 101 was where Winston Smith was taken in George Orwell’s 1984 to be tortured and eventually persuaded to recant his individual beliefs and fall into line with officially sanctioned viewpoints.

Protecting children from online pornography – the impossible dream

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow talks about the actual scale of effort the British government is attempting to mandate to “protect the children from pr0n”:

In order to filter out adult content on the internet, a company has to either look at all the pages on the internet and find the bad ones, or write a piece of software that can examine a page on the wire and decide, algorithmically, whether it is inappropriate for children.

Neither of these strategies are even remotely feasible. To filter content automatically and accurately would require software capable of making human judgments — working artificial intelligence, the province of science fiction.

As for human filtering: there simply aren’t enough people of sound judgment in all the world to examine all the web pages that have been created and continue to be created around the clock, and determine whether they are good pages or bad pages. Even if you could marshal such a vast army of censors, they would have to attain an inhuman degree of precision and accuracy, or would be responsible for a system of censorship on a scale never before seen in the world, because they would be sitting in judgment on a medium whose scale was beyond any in human history.

Think, for a moment, of what it means to have a 99% accuracy rate when it comes to judging a medium that carries billions of publications.

Consider a hypothetical internet of a mere 20bn documents that is comprised one half “adult” content, and one half “child-safe” content. A 1% misclassification rate applied to 20bn documents means 200m documents will be misclassified. That’s 100m legitimate documents that would be blocked by the government because of human error, and 100m adult documents that the filter does not touch and that any schoolkid can find.

In practice, the misclassification rate is much, much worse. It’s hard to get a sense of the total scale of misclassification by censorware because these companies treat their blacklists as trade secrets, so it’s impossible to scrutinise their work and discover whether they’re exercising due care.

November 12, 2012

Kelly McParland: US and French attitudes to affairs differ markedly

Filed under: Europe, France, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:28

In the National Post, Kelly McParland contrasts the French reaction to affairs on the part of public officials with the American reaction:

In Paris they must be busily turning the pages now, looking for the rest of the story. Yes, OK, he had an affair … and? You mean that’s it? He didn’t murder her? Have three children that he kept in a secret location away from the press? Involve her in sex games with crowds of similarly liberated-minded partners? They had an affair and he has to quit as head of the CIA? Mon dieu, these Americans. Four hundred years in the New World and they’ve barely moved on from the Puritans. Look, they’re even shocked that the other woman appeared on television “sporting bare, toned arms”. What did they expect, a chador?

France has moved on marginally from the days when President Francois Mitterrand could have a whole secret second family, and no one mentioned it in public because it wouldn’t be polite. Now the press leaps happily onto news of sexual licence in the halls of power. Unlike the U.S., they just don’t condemn it, as long as no one is physically abused. The latest instance – they don’t even use the world scandal, because in France it isn’t — relates to the former justice minister, Rachida Dati, who is suing one of the country’s wealthiest men to try and force him to admit he’s the father of her new daughter. The case is a bit complicated because, as Ms. Dati attests, she has “a complicated private life.” That would include, according to the attorney for Dominique Desseigne, the alleged father, having eight lovers in the year she fell pregnant, “including a television broadcaster, a minister, a Qatari attorney-general and a brother of the former president Mr Sarkozy,” reports the French newspaper Le Monde.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the president at the time, and Ms. Dati’s boss. He wasn’t likely to be butting into her private life, though, having given up his own wife in favour of singer/model Carla Bruni. Ms. Bruni has recently been offering marital advice – as in “get married for Cripe sakes” – to Valerie Trierweiler, current First Partner-for-a-While to President Francois Hollande, who has four children by a previous Main Partner, Ségolène Royal. (Ms. Royal is only a Main Partner rather than a First Partner because Hollande wasn’t president at the time.) Dumping the mother of your four children for an uppity newspaper columnist like Ms. Trierweiler might offend sensibilities, but M. Hollande never married Ms. Royal either, so no big deal. Nonetheless Ms. Trieweiler has become deeply unpopular since moving into the presidential palace, because she refuses to give up her day job as a columnist and because she’s been rude to Ms. Royal. The messy sex stuff has nothing to do with it.

Compared to the Bacchanalia of French politics, the Petraeus “scandal” is like a high-school tiff over who gets to wear the football captain’s pin to the Prom.

The BBC’s nightmare scenario

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Emily Bell outlines the existential crisis the BBC suddenly finds itself embroiled in:

[BBC director general George] Entwistle’s resignation on Saturday was directly linked to a report broadcast by Newsnight on November 2 that misidentified a public figure allegedly involved in a child abuse scandal. The report, connected to an already broiling scandal, did not make things any worse, theoretically, for Thompson. But the BBC he left is now facing a very serious challenge to its future and independence.

The turmoil at the BBC started with a revelation involving a now-dead TV presenter and public figure, Jimmy Savile, who is accused of molesting possibly hundreds of children. US commentators have tried to explain Savile to the domestic audience, but there really is no parallel here. […] The allegations against Savile were being investigated by Newsnight last year, but its editor, Peter Rippon, decided not to run the investigation on the grounds that the evidence was not sound enough. Subsequently, rival broadcaster ITV pulled together a documentary carrying the allegations against Savile, making the BBC’s decision not to run the original piece seem both flawed and possibly compromised. Just as Entwistle succeeded Thompson as director general, the story of how the BBC had shelved its piece broke.

[. . .]

The most preposterous and fitting denouement to the whole horrible affair happened when, in an attempt to prove itself institutionally robust, Newsnight commissioned a second piece into another child abuse scandal. The show broadcast its investigation on November 2, conducted with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Including details about an alleged pedophile, the report led to the misidentification of a former member of a Conservative government as being involved in a North Wales care-home scandal after the central witness interviewed misidentified his abuser. Failing to conduct a sufficiently thorough cross-checking of the victim’s evidence, or even to show him a picture of the former politician, were basic journalistic errors. To make matters worse, the Bureau’s editorial head, Iain Overton, had foreshadowed the “exclusive” by tweeting about it earlier in the day. So in scrambling to address the perception that it was timid in breaking stories about pedophilia, Newsnight’s overcompensation has led to a potentially ruinous situation of the BBC creating false rumors.

There are two separate issues in play with all this that have become toxically intertwined. One is the existence of an endemic culture of child abuse in a number of British institutions, and the other is about the editorial independence and journalistic future of the BBC.

November 9, 2012

FEMA’s embarrassing record

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Shikha Dalmia on the odd phenomenon that FEMA is just flat-out terrible at doing the job it’s supposed to do — co-ordinating emergency relief efforts — but is still beloved by big-government fans:

Hurricane Sandy hadn’t even touched down when liberals started blowing kisses to FEMA, or Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal disaster relief agency. A New York Times editorial declared that the impending storm proved that the country needs FEMA-style “Big Government” solutions more than ever. Salon, New Republic and other liberal outfits heartily agreed.

Why do liberals love FEMA so much? Certainly not for its glorious track record. Rather, FEMA has been a great vehicle for expanding the welfare state.

FEMA’s tragic missteps after Katrina earned it well-deserved disgrace. The Times blames those on the Bush administration, whose anti-government philosophy supposedly gutted FEMA. President Obama, the argument goes, straightened things out, and Americans should now “feel lucky” that the agency is there for them. Without it, local and state authorities wouldn’t be able to coordinate where “rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.”

So how did the new and improved FEMA perform post-Sandy, a storm for which it had lots of advance warning? Not so well.

It didn’t set up its first relief center until four days after Sandy hit — only to run out of drinking water on the same day. It couldn’t put sufficient boots on the ground to protect Queens residents from roving looters. The Red Cross — on whom FEMA depends for delivering basic goods — left Staten Island stranded for nearly a week, prompting borough President Jim Molinaro to fume that America was not a Third World country. But FEMA’s most egregious gaffe was that it arranged for 24 million gallons of free gas for Sandy’s victims, but most of them couldn’t lay their hands on it.

November 7, 2012

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith explains one of the most significant reasons that the most recent US election didn’t seem to offer much in the way of choice between the two major party candidates:

No matter how hard Productive Class folks may work at trying to put good people into office, people who respect the Bill of Rights, as well as our dignity as individuals, every single time, we end up with a non-choice between two sets of rapacious gangsters, government parasites and their corporate lookalikes who, differing only in the excuses they use to justify it, see us only as cattle, to be herded, branded, milked, and slaughtered. On the rare occasion that someone decent pokes his head up — Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul — it’s cut off by the socialist mass media, pack animals who give prostitution a bad name.

Beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, the game is rigged, with people who actually work for a living assigned the role of perpetual losers, expected to bow down to Authority no matter how ludicrous its demands, required to observe the letter and the spirit of the law no matter how often, or how outrageously it’s flouted by the insatiably power-hungry. Those who object — especially if they get together to air their grievances — are labeled rednecks, racists, or terrorists by the socialist mass media, depending on what’s in fashion at the time. The truth has no place in this process, only the virtual reality created by the socialist mass media at the behest of their thuggish clientele.

To make things even worse, members of the Productive Class find themselves in the role of shuttlecock in a game of political badminton that has been going on for two centuries. Fed up with the failures and excesses of, say, the Republicans, voters will replace them with Democrats, only to be reminded, in short order, that Democrats suffer failures and commit excesses of their own. Four years after that, experiencing political amnesia again, they put Republicans back in power, when what they ought to do is dump “both” major parties (which are really only one entity, the party of endless lies and coercion) altogether.

November 6, 2012

It’s official: Morris Dancers are “offensive”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

Well, they’re “offensive” to a couple of Police Constables in Surrey, anyway:

A group of Morris Dancers were ordered to stop performing in the middle of a routine after police received a complaint that their dancing was ‘offensive’.

The 15-strong group of English folk dancers from the respected Wild Hunt Bedlam Morris troupe were told to ‘stop making a din’ during a performance outside The White Lion pub in Warlingham, Surrey.

The folk dancers were performing in spooky costumes for a free Halloween show outside the 15th century pub to an audience of around 30 customers, but were cut short after just six dances.

The group had planned at least 10 other dances, but were interrupted by two police officers who told them to ‘down’ their handkerchiefs and sticks and ‘move on’ as they were causing a noise nuisance.

Despite pleading with the officers to continue their routine – which includes songs like Thor’s Hammer, Maiden Castle and Half a Farthing Candle, they were told to leave in the ‘interest of community relations’ last Tuesday.

Apparently the campaign against the evil Morris Dancers has been going on for a while:

In August last year a group of Morris dancers from the Slubbing Billys troupe were booted out of the Swan and Three Cygnets pub in Durham after a barmaid said the bells on their shoes broke the bar’s music ban.

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

November 3, 2012

Contract law and brown M&Ms

Filed under: Business, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

What is it about Van Halen and their notorious demand for non-brown M&Ms in their contracts? It’s actually rather clever:

Take Van Halen, for example. On the surface, the group is famous not only for its music but also for stunts such as trashing green rooms over the presence of brown M&Ms, and it’s easy to write off such behavior as simply being symptomatic of a 1980’s rock diva mentality. In reality, however, the brown M&Ms served an important purpose from a contracting perspective.

Think about it- wouldn’t it be nice to have an easy way to observe whether your counterparty has paid attention to all of the details of a complicated contract? As it turns out, the brown M&Ms served exactly this function. [. . .]

Since Van Halen’s (long) tour rider stipulated M&Ms with the brown ones taken out, the group knew that they needed to double check a lot of safety items for the show if they saw brown M&Ms (or no M&Ms, for that matter) in the backstage area. They also knew that they could feel comfortable that the contract provisions had been fulfilled if they saw a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. (I’m pretty sure that trashing stuff was for some combined purpose of making the incident memorable and entertaining one’s self.) This is pretty smart, since it’s far more efficient to use this as a signal (the canary in the coal mine, in a way) rather than go around and check everything at each show. It’s even smarter that the signal was crafted in the fashion of typical rock star douchebaggery so as to not arouse suspicion.

Firefly references on Castle

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

November 2, 2012

The rise of celebrity endorsements is a sign of political immaturity

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

In sp!ked, Patrick West points out that celebrities who push political agendas or social issues are actually a sign of the failure of the political class:

This paradoxical egotism — protesting against ‘selfish’ right-wing people in order to make you appear morally superior — was mercilessly parodied in the 2004 film Team America: World Police. In it, marionettes representing the likes of Susan Sarandon, George Clooney and Matt Damon are shown as self-important dupes of Kim Jong-Il, parroting liberal-left vacuities. ‘As actors’, says Janeane Garofolo’s puppet, ‘it is our reponsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion’. Like all good parodies, it helped to change the way people think. Sean Penn’s intervention on the matter of the Falkland Islands earlier this year generated unflattering comparisons to the movie, and I imagine Matt Damon still fears to speak on humanitarian issues, lest he be met with a collective cry of ‘Matt Day-Mon’.

Still, this hasn’t deterred the likes of Clooney and Whoopi Goldberg continuing to make known their support for the Democrats — who are liberal-left, and therefore Good People — in opposition to the Republicans, who are right-wing and by extension Bad People. Now from the pop world they have been joined by Katy Perry, who last week performed at a Las Vegas fundraiser for President Obama in the forthcoming presidential election, and by Madonna, who on Saturday declared at a concert in New Orleans: ‘I don’t care who you vote for as long as you vote for Obama.’ Having been met with jeers and booing, the Material Girl backtracked. ‘Seriously, I don’t care who you vote for as long as you take responsibility for the future of your country’, she recanted. ‘Do not take this privilege for granted. Go vote.’ Other Democrat supporters include Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Will.i.am and Jay-Z.

[. . .]

In terms of hollow egotism, popstars are not far removed from actors. The latter are fantasists and (literally) professional liars, pretending to be someone they aren’t, displaying emotions they don’t have. Popstars are often likewise insecure, craving attention and praise, to be told what good people they are — and consequently ensure that the world knows it.

They have been up to this sort of thing for years. Consider the self-important proclamations of John Lennon, imagining no possessions but having lots of them, Sting’s crusade to save the Brazilian rainforest and its noble savages and, of course, Bono, the humanitarian tax-avoider. The latter two featured in Band Aid, an ostentatiously big-hearted scheme that raised funds for governments in desperate need of more Mercedes-Benzes and Kalashnikovs. This is what happens when you combine paradoxical egotism and a Something Must Be Done mentality. Today, it’s the same toxic compound — intensified — that’s behind the grandstanding and aggressive ‘caring’ censoriousness you see on Twitter.

October 31, 2012

The science of “shaken, not stirred”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Ah, those dedicated researchers at The Register! This time, they’ve got Gavin Clarke looking into the famous dry martini of James Bond:

“A distressingly large amount of rubbish is talked about cocktails,” Noel Jackson, top boffin at the Life Science Centre in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, tells The Reg.

Jackson, a Cambridge-University-educated chemist, has all the straight-up science on alcohol.

“We do a lot of debunking of things that people think are true,” he tells us. “There’s this business of shaken versus stirred. Once you heard it said from people in the cocktail world that shaking ‘bruises’ a liquid! That’s rubbish.”

The Reg, as part of our ongoing celebration of James Bond’s fiftieth year on film, was talking to Jackson about one of the signature elements of the 007 package: the dry vodka martini. Shaken, not stirred.

Jackson comes on the best of recommendations. We were put onto him by the boffins of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, who have been instrumental in such developments as packet-switched networking and the “Dambuster” bouncing bomb of World War II fame.

“What he doesn’t know about drinks, doesn’t need to be known,” they told us.

We spoke to Jackson about chemicals and thermal dynamics. We start with flavour, and that means talking alcohol.

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