The NSA and GCHQ are watching everything you do. They have all your phone calls, all your e-mails and all your social media posts. You should be very afraid and it is all Obama's fault. This is what the media want you to think.
This story unites the left and the right. The right because that "Liberal" Obama signed the order and this is another example of big government and big brother. The state is out to get you. Well actually EVERY president since Truman has been signing these orders, including Reagan and both the Bushes, you rhetorical he headline making GOP liar. Then the left talk about this invasion of privacy and civil liberties. The liberals are worried that NSA knows what they bought from Amazon last week, who they are having an affair with, that they go to swingers clubs at the weekends and which way they vote. Yes but I don't care and probably neither do the people who collected it. Your lives no matter how interesting they might be to the tabloids are irrelevant in the big picture of national security. You have more to fear from journalists intercepting your mobile phone calls and voice mail.
Reality is they have been collecting data in large amounts since world war two. What makes a difference now is the ability to collect much more much faster and that they have enough computer power to do something with the intercepts - although not much. Films and spy novels have been talking about this level of intelligence gathering for decades. Just watch Jason Bourne or Enemy of the State and see what they suggested the NSA could do a decade ago. That is fictional exaggeration but there are some elements of truth.
Imagine the daily grind of analysing petabytes of data for something interesting. You need a lot of analysts and a lot of computer power. Most of it is irrelevant and unimportant and among all this noise is the real intelligence. So if there were rogue agents or departments they could single out innocent individuals and make their lives miserable. The question you have to ask is why would they? What benefit is it to them? Apart from showing everyone they have this capability, which is the big secret they want to keep it is not something they come in to the office to do. First of all they don't want the enemies to know what they can find out. Apart from the odd nut (like Peter Wright and those who aided Senator McCarthy) who tries to misuse the data for their own personal agendas we are safe from big brother.
We are safe because in general the military and intelligence services are not interested in our lives and they are not interested in abusing their power. I have more faith in the integrity of the intelligence agencies than I do in the politicians and journalists who seek to expose them. Those who want to ban the wide-spread collection of data are those in whose minds its improper exploitation is a certainty. They imagine others doing the things that they would do if they had access to that data and so they feel we need protection. We do need protection, but only from them getting access. The reality is there are very few cases where this data, that has been available for decades, has been misused because most of the people involved have integrity and it is this integrity that we have to maintain. We have to be aware that the information we are given is never the whole story and we have to always question the motives of those involved and so long as we do this we have nothing to fear.
For a more humorous view here is a nice Tumblr of Obama checking our e-mail.
Monday, 10 June 2013
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Here are three totally partial experts I am going to use to prove my point.
I really don't like Damian Thompson. When I say really don't like I mean don't like with a vengeance. He is a perfect example of what is wrong with journalism in the UK and in particular the type of journalism you will find in the Daily Mail. I know he writes for the Telegraph but he is there to try and drag in the high-brow end of the Mail readers. Imagine Quentin Letts with an ever bigger ego and slightly more sophistication, then you get the right idea.
Anyway Damian has his pet dislikes. They seem to be focussed on the common people didn't go to Oxbridge, those who are atheists or non-christians (non-Catholics are rather dubious characters), those that have the wrong sorts of addictions and those who are not members of a modern Gatsby society party that seems to flit from one luxury location to the next. He is an appalling social and intellectual snob whose views of women seem to me horribly outdated.
Anyway in his book the Fix, which I gave a lovely 1 star Amazon review he shows that one of the addictions he hates is the modern obsession with pornography (he didn't read his classics very well as porn is a very old obsession). So he rolls out three experts to show how terrible porn is. Here are their websites:
Sharna Olfman
Gail Dines
Judith Resiman
Now there are a few problems with these people as experts. First is the lack of peer reviewed publications and an extensive research curriculum, which always makes their views suspect and suggests that they might be biased and not based on evidence. Second two out of the three use personal .com or .org sites and not those of the academic institutions they "belong" to. Now I have personal sites but I am also on my organisation's site and that is where you will see my professional work. So why don't they?
You can read up on all three and Dr Olfman is perhaps the expert I would give the most credibility but Judith Reisman is a well known anti-porn campaigner with ideas that have been refuted by the evidence.
So why did Damian pick these three experts and not some with stronger evidence based credentials? Well that would be because there is no evidence for his position. In fact his whole book is short on evidence and is mostly a recycling of newspaper articles written by other non-expert journalists. This is a real example of churnalism.
Anyway Damian has his pet dislikes. They seem to be focussed on the common people didn't go to Oxbridge, those who are atheists or non-christians (non-Catholics are rather dubious characters), those that have the wrong sorts of addictions and those who are not members of a modern Gatsby society party that seems to flit from one luxury location to the next. He is an appalling social and intellectual snob whose views of women seem to me horribly outdated.
Anyway in his book the Fix, which I gave a lovely 1 star Amazon review he shows that one of the addictions he hates is the modern obsession with pornography (he didn't read his classics very well as porn is a very old obsession). So he rolls out three experts to show how terrible porn is. Here are their websites:
Sharna Olfman
Gail Dines
Judith Resiman
Now there are a few problems with these people as experts. First is the lack of peer reviewed publications and an extensive research curriculum, which always makes their views suspect and suggests that they might be biased and not based on evidence. Second two out of the three use personal .com or .org sites and not those of the academic institutions they "belong" to. Now I have personal sites but I am also on my organisation's site and that is where you will see my professional work. So why don't they?
You can read up on all three and Dr Olfman is perhaps the expert I would give the most credibility but Judith Reisman is a well known anti-porn campaigner with ideas that have been refuted by the evidence.
So why did Damian pick these three experts and not some with stronger evidence based credentials? Well that would be because there is no evidence for his position. In fact his whole book is short on evidence and is mostly a recycling of newspaper articles written by other non-expert journalists. This is a real example of churnalism.
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
Boris and the 1 billion passengers
I was on the Circle line train to work and I saw one of the adverts for the London Underground that said that they now have over 1 billion passengers a year. Now that is a lot of passengers and that is their explanation for the problems with service as upgrades are needed to cope with this unexpected capacity.
But 1 billions passengers that really is a lot. That is nearly 1 in 6 of the world's population. That means that sometime during each year 1 in 6 of the people of the world decide to come to the UK and use the Tube. That is a lot of foreign visitors, South Americans, Americans, Canadians, Africans, Chinese etc. That is an average of about 2.8 million people per day arriving in London and using the Tube or 5,000 Jumbo Jet loads across the two main airports and the smaller airports a plane load landing every 20 seconds, 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Do I think each of these "people" is an individual? Do I think that even 1/6 of the people of the UK use the tube every year? The second answer is a possible yes as London and the South East are a huge part of the UK population but how do you count individuals and not repeats? As for 1 billion individuals from across the world I doubt this given the number of people who don't even own a passport and do not have the financial possibility of travelling to the UK. So what it says is not what it means. It probably means 1 billion passenger days - users are counted as individual for each day they use the tube. It is probably too small to mean passenger journeys as there are many small journeys and people go back and forward and is that one journey or two? Anyway the point is there is a misleading difference between the numbers we say and what they actually mean. They are very rarely easily counted.
But 1 billions passengers that really is a lot. That is nearly 1 in 6 of the world's population. That means that sometime during each year 1 in 6 of the people of the world decide to come to the UK and use the Tube. That is a lot of foreign visitors, South Americans, Americans, Canadians, Africans, Chinese etc. That is an average of about 2.8 million people per day arriving in London and using the Tube or 5,000 Jumbo Jet loads across the two main airports and the smaller airports a plane load landing every 20 seconds, 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Do I think each of these "people" is an individual? Do I think that even 1/6 of the people of the UK use the tube every year? The second answer is a possible yes as London and the South East are a huge part of the UK population but how do you count individuals and not repeats? As for 1 billion individuals from across the world I doubt this given the number of people who don't even own a passport and do not have the financial possibility of travelling to the UK. So what it says is not what it means. It probably means 1 billion passenger days - users are counted as individual for each day they use the tube. It is probably too small to mean passenger journeys as there are many small journeys and people go back and forward and is that one journey or two? Anyway the point is there is a misleading difference between the numbers we say and what they actually mean. They are very rarely easily counted.
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Twitoutrage, Blogs and Context.
Chris Evans just made a comment about women and football on Radio 2 and then had to interrupt a song to say he had not meant it and that it was a response to something his female co-presenter had said about Boys and Games rooms.
This is the problem - unless you see the whole conversation then often you can fail to understand what is actually happening. Now the two worst places for getting the wrong end of a conversation are Twitter and Blogs. Twitter with 140 characters gives little freedom for discussion and so the Twitosphere often descends into Twitoutrage. Blogs are also misleading because they are edited and personal. They are not objective and so the author can edit the comments of others to fit the context that they want to present them in.
Lets say I was trying to campaign against sexism at the BBC I could now take Chris Evans' comments completely out of context and write a Blog. It would say - look this is an example of the disgusting sexism that needs investigating with an independent inquiry. Blah Blah Blah - this is political and points scoring. It is obvious in this case that there is nothing there but there are many more cases every day where Blogs are written like this and it gets harder and harder to distinguish the real from the politicised.
This is the problem - unless you see the whole conversation then often you can fail to understand what is actually happening. Now the two worst places for getting the wrong end of a conversation are Twitter and Blogs. Twitter with 140 characters gives little freedom for discussion and so the Twitosphere often descends into Twitoutrage. Blogs are also misleading because they are edited and personal. They are not objective and so the author can edit the comments of others to fit the context that they want to present them in.
Lets say I was trying to campaign against sexism at the BBC I could now take Chris Evans' comments completely out of context and write a Blog. It would say - look this is an example of the disgusting sexism that needs investigating with an independent inquiry. Blah Blah Blah - this is political and points scoring. It is obvious in this case that there is nothing there but there are many more cases every day where Blogs are written like this and it gets harder and harder to distinguish the real from the politicised.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
Page 3 Girls would you take them home to meet your mother?
There is a big campaign against page 3 saying about how it objectifies women and how this leads to violence against women. I think that this is confusing cause and effect but I have other concerns about the campaign.
For me another question is which is a bigger danger to women page 3 or the idea of "that's not the type of woman you would bring home to meet you mother"?
For me it seems that the second is the real danger to women. This is the kind of social stigma that is for me much more dangerous. That is saying that that kind of woman is beneath your level, that they are not fit to be part of the family. Once you think they are worth less than you then abuse suddenly is not abuse, because they are not really a full person. Why should they have the same respect? This is when men are encouraged to think in negative terms about women.
What is important is respect for others and how they live their lives, but this is difficult in this tabloid world. For me the Mail with its shaming campaigns is much more dangerous than Page 3. Why do I care that a woman goes into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot with a tattoo or nose piercing? People should be allowed to live their lives as they wish and that means allowing women to express themselves as they wish, if that means not being a "lady" (as defined by certain journalists) then that is how it should be.
For me another question is which is a bigger danger to women page 3 or the idea of "that's not the type of woman you would bring home to meet you mother"?
For me it seems that the second is the real danger to women. This is the kind of social stigma that is for me much more dangerous. That is saying that that kind of woman is beneath your level, that they are not fit to be part of the family. Once you think they are worth less than you then abuse suddenly is not abuse, because they are not really a full person. Why should they have the same respect? This is when men are encouraged to think in negative terms about women.
What is important is respect for others and how they live their lives, but this is difficult in this tabloid world. For me the Mail with its shaming campaigns is much more dangerous than Page 3. Why do I care that a woman goes into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot with a tattoo or nose piercing? People should be allowed to live their lives as they wish and that means allowing women to express themselves as they wish, if that means not being a "lady" (as defined by certain journalists) then that is how it should be.
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
The evolutionary ratchet
In an earlier post I said that evolution was not progressive. By this I mean that there is no intent or objective of evolution and it is not trying to achieve a goal. There is however an appearance of progress and this is because of natural selection discovering novel solutions to problems.
Once one of these novel solutions becomes available then this can open up a completely new direction for evolution that was previously inaccessible. It is these breakthroughs that create the picture of punctuated equilibria. One of these changes was the production of oxygen and the changes that this brought about in the atmosphere driving the anaerobes from the Earth's surface. Another example is the creation of multi-cellular life.
Once these possibilities have been accessed then short of massive world wide extinctions that eliminate all of the organisms that have exploited these new variations then they will remain part of the evolutionary repertoire. So evolution has a ratchet that does not allow apparent progress to be forgotten, much the same as we cannot forget that we have created nuclear weapons and other inventions we wish we had not discovered.
But this does not mean that some of these steps are not actually more than historical accidents that may actually lead to the long-term extinction of species that utilise them. Oxygen consumption might not be the best solution for the long run, but we are stuck with it while the atmospheric composition remains at its current levels. Trees are a good solution at current levels of carbon dioxide, but they are less successful at lower levels where grasses become preferred.
Once one of these novel solutions becomes available then this can open up a completely new direction for evolution that was previously inaccessible. It is these breakthroughs that create the picture of punctuated equilibria. One of these changes was the production of oxygen and the changes that this brought about in the atmosphere driving the anaerobes from the Earth's surface. Another example is the creation of multi-cellular life.
Once these possibilities have been accessed then short of massive world wide extinctions that eliminate all of the organisms that have exploited these new variations then they will remain part of the evolutionary repertoire. So evolution has a ratchet that does not allow apparent progress to be forgotten, much the same as we cannot forget that we have created nuclear weapons and other inventions we wish we had not discovered.
But this does not mean that some of these steps are not actually more than historical accidents that may actually lead to the long-term extinction of species that utilise them. Oxygen consumption might not be the best solution for the long run, but we are stuck with it while the atmospheric composition remains at its current levels. Trees are a good solution at current levels of carbon dioxide, but they are less successful at lower levels where grasses become preferred.
Sunday, 17 February 2013
4 Million Bulgarians
The Sunday Express ran a story about 4 million Bulgarians wanting to move to the UK. The problem is that this is over 54% of the Bulgarian population. This would leave Bulgaria almost empty. I had thought that it was the usual non-sensical story where the author was unaware of the population of Bulgaria and had just picked a figure out of thin air, but I looked up the story and he is acutely aware of the population statistics. So why do I still think the story is nonsense?
I think it is wrong because of the sample that the story is based around in biased. A sample size of over 4000 is enough to make a reasonable conclusion, but not a sample of 4000 people living in the worst and most impoverished conditions. If you asked 4000 unemployed people from a deprived part of the UK if they wanted to move to place X to get a job you would get the same and perhaps an even higher response. The poll was actually carried out by BTV and there is no idea of the question, nor any idea about who completed it. So I would expect that it is a telephone or online poll. This is self selecting and not representative. This is going to be a survey of those who want to emigrate and it is not an unbiased sample.
Even if the sampling were correct there is still the problem of reality. As people leave the circumstances and opportunities change. Bulgaria has a strong technological manufacturing sector and also the beginnings of a tourist industry. With people moving there might be a reduction in unemployment and poverty. But the reality is that we just don't know what will happen. What we do know is that this story is scare-mongering and that it does not represent the reality.
I think it is wrong because of the sample that the story is based around in biased. A sample size of over 4000 is enough to make a reasonable conclusion, but not a sample of 4000 people living in the worst and most impoverished conditions. If you asked 4000 unemployed people from a deprived part of the UK if they wanted to move to place X to get a job you would get the same and perhaps an even higher response. The poll was actually carried out by BTV and there is no idea of the question, nor any idea about who completed it. So I would expect that it is a telephone or online poll. This is self selecting and not representative. This is going to be a survey of those who want to emigrate and it is not an unbiased sample.
Even if the sampling were correct there is still the problem of reality. As people leave the circumstances and opportunities change. Bulgaria has a strong technological manufacturing sector and also the beginnings of a tourist industry. With people moving there might be a reduction in unemployment and poverty. But the reality is that we just don't know what will happen. What we do know is that this story is scare-mongering and that it does not represent the reality.
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