Well, we know Labour’s 1997 assertion that things can only get better wasn’t all it seemed, but this government has surely gone too far the other way –they tell us only that things can only get worse, & worse …
Forever?
Cuts are one thing while we pay off the debt & rein back the growth in public expenditure. We have stopped spending as if there will be no tomorrow.
All of a sudden it seems as if there really might not be one – or one that has only misery or worse to offer.
Will there be any pension at all? Will I even have a job to keep me in the meantime? What would really be best for the children – a degree & a debt, or a job in the university of life? Who will look after me when I am no longer able to do it for myself - perhaps that’s another reason for keeping the children close to home rather than sending them up & off.
The government will really have to play this one more carefully – especially with women. This is not an old fashioned strike led by union dinosaurs; those teachers, care assistants are the hard working mums we all know.
Shops are closing because we are being more economical – bringing yet more worry to other mums who (used to) work there. It’s awful, but what else can I do?
Gordon Brown lost ‘that woman’. Mrs Thatcher won in 1979 in part at least because she offered a vision of a better future to women of the working & middle classes. This government, especially the Conservative part of it, will lose to all ‘those women’ if it carries on unable to find the right tone.
Francis Maude will not win any sympathy by complaining that some union leaders are earning more than he is getting paid in his current job. And Big Society just seems more & more like a way to get women back to doing for free all those caring jobs that they have begun to be paid for.
Mrs Thatcher won against the miners in the 1980s, despite widespread sympathy for their case, because people thought that Scargill’s tactics were just plain wrong &, above all, because the electricity stayed on, in stark contrast to what had happened during the 3 day week of 1974.
So far all I have noticed is a library overrun with teenagers let off the leash on a Thursday afternoon, but if it gets much worse …
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Bad news can be no news
The Times report on the ‘chaos’ caused by a new ruling about how bail rules apply to suspects for questioning contains the following:
Murder? Routine? Unreported?
Does that say more about us or about journalistic values?
In a routine murder case that would probably have gone unreported, police were applying for the extension of a detention warrant
Murder? Routine? Unreported?
Does that say more about us or about journalistic values?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Dam busters
Such a lovely Sunday, wallowing in Light Music on Radio 3. Not an unalloyed joy – you can have too much of a good thing.
Private Passions was a compilation of the light hearted bits chosen by guests during its 800 learned episodes to date. The programme went out on one of my firm favourites, The Dam Busters March, chosen by Al Murray who spoke as if he had expected the piece to be unfamiliar to the erudite listeners. I wonder if Stephen Fry, (who was first up on this programme with his choice of Herb Alpert’s Black Forest, which he finds hilarious), will be using this music from the original film in his remake, or will that, along with the name of Squadron Leader Guy Gibson’s dog, have to be changed to Digger, as the original is unsuitable for modern ears.
In a fit of overambition & with a slight crush on Richard Todd I used some of my pocket money to buy the sheet music for piano; a very tasteful navy blue cover, with a black & white photo of bombers against the night sky.
What I cannot remember is if there were ever any official lyrics to the piece, or whether my conviction that one part goes “We who have won fame & glory” is just something inserted by my own brain, or somehow encoded into the music so that all listeners hear them.
I suspect that Sunday was a dam busters day also in the sense that tears trickled down many a cheek as memories of childhood came flooding back
Inflations
Darren Williams, European economist in the Global Economic Research division at AllianceBernstein has put some interesting (& alarming) flesh on the bones of the argument about relative inflation in asset & consumer prices.
In the 10 years 1997 to 2007 consumer prices in this country rose by an average of 1.6% a year, say 17% in total.
But the increase in stock market prices was 48%, in broad money 111%, in bank lending 155% and, in house prices, a whopping 197%.
In the USA, between 1921 & 1929, money supply rose by 51%, bank credit by 46% & the Dow Jones rose by more than 300%, while consumer prices fell by 4%.
In the 10 years 1997 to 2007 consumer prices in this country rose by an average of 1.6% a year, say 17% in total.
But the increase in stock market prices was 48%, in broad money 111%, in bank lending 155% and, in house prices, a whopping 197%.
In the USA, between 1921 & 1929, money supply rose by 51%, bank credit by 46% & the Dow Jones rose by more than 300%, while consumer prices fell by 4%.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Assorted memories
I have quite vivid memories of a concert which closed the proceedings of a sixth form conference organised by the Council for Education in World citizenship; a large part of the entertainment consisted of dances from various eastern European countries – the first, & I think perhaps the only, time I have been able to appreciate how very intricate & difficult these can be.
So a video link on Floating Sheep Software Sorting Algorithms and Hungarian Folk Dance immediately invoked those memories
A second memory flashed back too; a conversation with a colleague in the early 1980s soon after Amstrads first PWC home computer had become available. He was surprised that I did not have one; I said it was a dust trap which didn’t really do anything useful enough to justify giving it house room.
His final suggestion, after I had continued to turn up my nose at Christmas card lists & games, was You could investigate some of these interesting new ideas about sorting.
I was tempted, but stubborn with it. Well, if I do that I’ll probably just get too interested & spend all my time doing that instead of the things I'm supposed to be doing.
Now I can just sit back & enjoy the full range of exercises in the visualization of opaque software processes created at Sapientia University on the AlgoRhythmics section on YouTube.
So a video link on Floating Sheep Software Sorting Algorithms and Hungarian Folk Dance immediately invoked those memories
A second memory flashed back too; a conversation with a colleague in the early 1980s soon after Amstrads first PWC home computer had become available. He was surprised that I did not have one; I said it was a dust trap which didn’t really do anything useful enough to justify giving it house room.
His final suggestion, after I had continued to turn up my nose at Christmas card lists & games, was You could investigate some of these interesting new ideas about sorting.
I was tempted, but stubborn with it. Well, if I do that I’ll probably just get too interested & spend all my time doing that instead of the things I'm supposed to be doing.
Now I can just sit back & enjoy the full range of exercises in the visualization of opaque software processes created at Sapientia University on the AlgoRhythmics section on YouTube.
Link
YouTube AlgoRhythmics Channel
Related posts
The right to a nationality
Rolf Harris
YouTube AlgoRhythmics Channel
Related posts
The right to a nationality
Rolf Harris
Indian telegraph
The sad news is that, since May, it has no longer been possible to send an international telegram from India.
The good news however is that the internal, domestic telegraph service is still in business, albeit that messages are transmitted from one telegraph office to another via e-mail. The telegram still has legal value because the sender’s receipt is admissible proof that the document has been sent (if not necessarily that it has arrived at its intended destination).
The good news however is that the internal, domestic telegraph service is still in business, albeit that messages are transmitted from one telegraph office to another via e-mail. The telegram still has legal value because the sender’s receipt is admissible proof that the document has been sent (if not necessarily that it has arrived at its intended destination).
Monday, June 27, 2011
First catch your goose
I reproduce in full a NIB in The Times from Reuters:
So many questions. How many committees sat, how many options were considered? Was cost benefit analysis employed? Why Pennsylvania? How will the meals be served or delivered to the poor?
Will the geese be rounded up & assessed individually for their danger potential? Or will just being a goose in New York be evidence enough of guilt?
Geese that pose a danger to aircraft on take off will be sent to Pennsylvania to be cooked as meals for the poor. City officials revealed the plans after a US Airways flight had to ditch in the Hudson River after it struck a flock of geese in 2009
So many questions. How many committees sat, how many options were considered? Was cost benefit analysis employed? Why Pennsylvania? How will the meals be served or delivered to the poor?
Will the geese be rounded up & assessed individually for their danger potential? Or will just being a goose in New York be evidence enough of guilt?
Trouble with the law
I have just been reading Val McDermid’s Trick of the Dark, a very long (over 500 pages) tale of murder & mayhem among Oxford’s dreaming spires, the Isle of Skye, Spain, & Northumberland.
Not at all my cup of tea really, far too Gothic, but I kept going out of sheer curiosity because of promises of a ‘fascinatingly rich & complex mystery’ & ’a workout for the grey cells’ which would keep me ‘guessing until the last page.’
Well, not guessing about whodunit, but what is it for? Until very near the end I thought its main value might be as an awful warning, to girls in particular, of the reasons for not going to Oxford, for not submitting oneself to that intense, enclosed, possessive place, with teachers who see it as their job to mould you in their own image, a place which, even without the mayhem, can crush & destroy those who need a less rarefied atmosphere with more space in which to breathe.
Or at least a place which could do that as recently as the early 1990s when there was still such a thing as an all female college with bitchy girls & scary, snobbish, disapproving but scholarly spinster dons.
I was however struck by the unusually explicit way in which ‘the moral of this story’ was expressed, in particular:
That seems only too apt a point for her readers to ponder & ruminate upon at a time when there is an unusual amount of discussion & doubt about our law, or at least around the workings of our legal system.
This week’s outrage has been over the cross-examination of Milly Dowler’s parents at the Old Bailey trial of Levi Bellfield, a man who was already serving life for two other murders & one attempt & has now been found guilty of killing Milly.
It is not at all hard to regard the parent’s ordeal with horror, to think that it should not have happened, or at least not in open court in the full glare of publicity. Until you start thinking about the alternatives.
Milly was a thirteen year old girl who disappeared suddenly nine years ago on her way home from school one sunny afternoon. Despite the fact that this happened on a busy street, minutes after she had left her friends in a station café, there was very little for anyone to go on, no witness to an abduction, no cctv, no body. One obvious line of enquiry, though by no means the only one, was whether Milly could have run away of her own volition, which involved police questioning the family closely. One really could expect nothing less.
There is also the point that, statistically speaking, the father/husband/boyfriend is a main initial suspect in the death of a family member.
I remember hearing another father speak of the long term effects of his daughter’s murder on the family – another notorious case in the leafy suburbs south of London, the girl had been murdered in her own bedroom while the family slept. The father fully accepted the reasons why the police had to go through the process of eliminating him as a suspect, rather than just assuming that of course he didn’t do it, & the case was ultimately solved with the real murderer convicted, but the scars were still there.
The problem in the Dowler case lay in the fact that the police uncovered evidence of the father’s sexual predilection which Milly had also found out about, & other written evidence of Milly’s teenage angst. In these days of careful record keeping & full disclosure, the defence also knew about this.
We have full disclosure because there have been too many past cases of miscarriage of justice where police & prosecution kept to themselves important evidence considered irrelevant to the case they eventually brought to court against the accused.
Milly’s body was finally found six months after she disappeared, but sadly in a condition which provided little in the way of evidence about how she died.
The case which was finally put before the jury was entirely circumstantial, consisting of little more than the fact that Bellfield lived close to the point at which she disappeared & had behaved oddly in the days immediately following her murder.
So his defence, which in part consisted of arguing that Milly must have run away & come to harm somewhere else, not at his hands, is a reasonable line to take in a system where the prosecution must prove its case.
There remain questions of whether the evidence about personal sexual peccadilloes should have been heard in open court & whether counsel for the defence were over-aggressive in their questioning.
Sexual privacy – the right to a private life - is another much debated issue which some say is bringing the law - & judges – into disrepute. Some have claimed that it is ridiculous to humiliate a grieving father in this way when the system grants a privacy injunction to a footballer anxious to keep his infidelities confidential. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, is weighing this against another privacy argument still wending its way through the European judicial system, in which the press is claiming the right to publish details of a man’s sexual proclivities merely because of who he is & who his father was. In other words the press seem close to saying that they have the sole right to decide who gets the pointing, wagging finger of ridicule & blame & who gets left alone as an ‘ordinary person’
The argument seems further to be that if Levi Bellfield refused to do the decent thing & keep quiet about this, his lawyers should have – well what? Told him he could not invite the jury to consider evidence which had been considered by the police? Confined themselves to asking a mealy-mouthed question about whether his daughter had been upset by an unspecified discovery?
Of course you would never be in the dockbut if you were, knowing yourself to be innocent, what would you want your barister to do?
There is also, if we are honest, a way in which we simply do not want to know, to be told, all this. It doesn’t fit the story we want to tell ourselves about good, decent families living uncomplicated, decent, hard working lives, raising happy children who never suffer secret agonies, dark thoughts or struggles coming to terms with growing up & the meaning of life.
A happy story which can be disrupted only by evil people, who will be dealt with by the law.
As indeed has, finally happened in this case. Levi Bellfield is guilty, a jury has said so, & we are entitled to judge the conduct of his lawyers in the light of that finding.
There is an even more nasty possibility lurking in the background of this story.
It is being suggested that Levi Bellfield may have committed more murders, before he murdered Milly. Should these be investigated with renewed vigour, should he face yet more trials?
In particular, should he, possibly, if evidence becomes available, be tried for a crime of which another man has twice been found guilty?
Another story of a family whose idyll was brutally shattered, two even younger girls attacked alongside their mother in the English countryside. Another father who had, at least briefly, to endure coming under suspicion until his alibi could be checked, then making a life for himself & a daughter who miraculously survived.
The evidence against the man who was found guilty was also circumstantial; he was in the vicinity, he had more than his share of untreatable psychiatric problems; to say the least he was a scary nuisance.
But he had a sister who loved him & made the case that he was not capable of that particular evil, to no avail.
Suppose he is, after all, innocent. Where does justice lie here?
I started this by calling Val McDermid’s tale too gothic for my taste. Her book does at least end with closure of a kind, but what sort of reception would be given to a new book which reinterprets all the evidence, shows us that the Oxford-trained expert psychiatric profiler & her high flying policeman friend got it all wrong?
Added 28 June: There is a very useful & balanced summary of the legal underpinnings to the Dowler trial at Justice: RIP?
Not at all my cup of tea really, far too Gothic, but I kept going out of sheer curiosity because of promises of a ‘fascinatingly rich & complex mystery’ & ’a workout for the grey cells’ which would keep me ‘guessing until the last page.’
Well, not guessing about whodunit, but what is it for? Until very near the end I thought its main value might be as an awful warning, to girls in particular, of the reasons for not going to Oxford, for not submitting oneself to that intense, enclosed, possessive place, with teachers who see it as their job to mould you in their own image, a place which, even without the mayhem, can crush & destroy those who need a less rarefied atmosphere with more space in which to breathe.
Or at least a place which could do that as recently as the early 1990s when there was still such a thing as an all female college with bitchy girls & scary, snobbish, disapproving but scholarly spinster dons.
I was however struck by the unusually explicit way in which ‘the moral of this story’ was expressed, in particular:
There’s a price we pay for being part of society. You don’t get to make rules that apply only to you … The law isn’t always fair … But it’s the best we’ve got
That seems only too apt a point for her readers to ponder & ruminate upon at a time when there is an unusual amount of discussion & doubt about our law, or at least around the workings of our legal system.
This week’s outrage has been over the cross-examination of Milly Dowler’s parents at the Old Bailey trial of Levi Bellfield, a man who was already serving life for two other murders & one attempt & has now been found guilty of killing Milly.
It is not at all hard to regard the parent’s ordeal with horror, to think that it should not have happened, or at least not in open court in the full glare of publicity. Until you start thinking about the alternatives.
Milly was a thirteen year old girl who disappeared suddenly nine years ago on her way home from school one sunny afternoon. Despite the fact that this happened on a busy street, minutes after she had left her friends in a station café, there was very little for anyone to go on, no witness to an abduction, no cctv, no body. One obvious line of enquiry, though by no means the only one, was whether Milly could have run away of her own volition, which involved police questioning the family closely. One really could expect nothing less.
There is also the point that, statistically speaking, the father/husband/boyfriend is a main initial suspect in the death of a family member.
I remember hearing another father speak of the long term effects of his daughter’s murder on the family – another notorious case in the leafy suburbs south of London, the girl had been murdered in her own bedroom while the family slept. The father fully accepted the reasons why the police had to go through the process of eliminating him as a suspect, rather than just assuming that of course he didn’t do it, & the case was ultimately solved with the real murderer convicted, but the scars were still there.
The problem in the Dowler case lay in the fact that the police uncovered evidence of the father’s sexual predilection which Milly had also found out about, & other written evidence of Milly’s teenage angst. In these days of careful record keeping & full disclosure, the defence also knew about this.
We have full disclosure because there have been too many past cases of miscarriage of justice where police & prosecution kept to themselves important evidence considered irrelevant to the case they eventually brought to court against the accused.
Milly’s body was finally found six months after she disappeared, but sadly in a condition which provided little in the way of evidence about how she died.
The case which was finally put before the jury was entirely circumstantial, consisting of little more than the fact that Bellfield lived close to the point at which she disappeared & had behaved oddly in the days immediately following her murder.
So his defence, which in part consisted of arguing that Milly must have run away & come to harm somewhere else, not at his hands, is a reasonable line to take in a system where the prosecution must prove its case.
There remain questions of whether the evidence about personal sexual peccadilloes should have been heard in open court & whether counsel for the defence were over-aggressive in their questioning.
Sexual privacy – the right to a private life - is another much debated issue which some say is bringing the law - & judges – into disrepute. Some have claimed that it is ridiculous to humiliate a grieving father in this way when the system grants a privacy injunction to a footballer anxious to keep his infidelities confidential. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, is weighing this against another privacy argument still wending its way through the European judicial system, in which the press is claiming the right to publish details of a man’s sexual proclivities merely because of who he is & who his father was. In other words the press seem close to saying that they have the sole right to decide who gets the pointing, wagging finger of ridicule & blame & who gets left alone as an ‘ordinary person’
The argument seems further to be that if Levi Bellfield refused to do the decent thing & keep quiet about this, his lawyers should have – well what? Told him he could not invite the jury to consider evidence which had been considered by the police? Confined themselves to asking a mealy-mouthed question about whether his daughter had been upset by an unspecified discovery?
Of course you would never be in the dockbut if you were, knowing yourself to be innocent, what would you want your barister to do?
There is also, if we are honest, a way in which we simply do not want to know, to be told, all this. It doesn’t fit the story we want to tell ourselves about good, decent families living uncomplicated, decent, hard working lives, raising happy children who never suffer secret agonies, dark thoughts or struggles coming to terms with growing up & the meaning of life.
A happy story which can be disrupted only by evil people, who will be dealt with by the law.
As indeed has, finally happened in this case. Levi Bellfield is guilty, a jury has said so, & we are entitled to judge the conduct of his lawyers in the light of that finding.
There is an even more nasty possibility lurking in the background of this story.
It is being suggested that Levi Bellfield may have committed more murders, before he murdered Milly. Should these be investigated with renewed vigour, should he face yet more trials?
In particular, should he, possibly, if evidence becomes available, be tried for a crime of which another man has twice been found guilty?
Another story of a family whose idyll was brutally shattered, two even younger girls attacked alongside their mother in the English countryside. Another father who had, at least briefly, to endure coming under suspicion until his alibi could be checked, then making a life for himself & a daughter who miraculously survived.
The evidence against the man who was found guilty was also circumstantial; he was in the vicinity, he had more than his share of untreatable psychiatric problems; to say the least he was a scary nuisance.
But he had a sister who loved him & made the case that he was not capable of that particular evil, to no avail.
Suppose he is, after all, innocent. Where does justice lie here?
I started this by calling Val McDermid’s tale too gothic for my taste. Her book does at least end with closure of a kind, but what sort of reception would be given to a new book which reinterprets all the evidence, shows us that the Oxford-trained expert psychiatric profiler & her high flying policeman friend got it all wrong?
Added 28 June: There is a very useful & balanced summary of the legal underpinnings to the Dowler trial at Justice: RIP?
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Perceptive childhood
This poem brings back memories of those dreaded visits to the great aunts. If only I could have been as perceptive & had the empathy of a Frances Cornford
Childhood
I used to think that grown-up people chose
To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose,
And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,
On purpose to be grand.
Till through the banister I watched one day
My great-aunt Etty's friend who was going away,
And how her onyx beads had come unstrung.
I saw her grope to find them as they rolled;
And then I knew that she was helplessly old,
As I was helplessly young.
Childhood
I used to think that grown-up people chose
To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose,
And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,
On purpose to be grand.
Till through the banister I watched one day
My great-aunt Etty's friend who was going away,
And how her onyx beads had come unstrung.
I saw her grope to find them as they rolled;
And then I knew that she was helplessly old,
As I was helplessly young.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Hesychasm
Correspondents to The Times have been having some obscure fun recently with an argument over the habit of reading silently to oneself.
Somebody introduced the word hesychasm, purely to make the rest of us feel inadequate & ill-educated.
I finally succumbed & looked it up. Not after all very interesting, not as much as the fact that St Augustine found it necessary to remark upon Ambrose’s strange habit of reading without saying anything.
I can remember the day one of our primary school teachers said that, now everybody in the class could read fluently & silently to themselves, we should concentrate on, & practice, practice, to get up as much speed as we could. The faster you read, the more you could learn.
He said that in order to read fast it was important, not just not to move your lips, but not even to say the words to yourself in your head.
I tried dutifully to read by simply staring at the page; I might just as well have been staring vacantly into space.
By the end of the week I had given up all pretence of trying to read this way.
And yet I don’t read by saying the words to myself – in fact the definition of really good writing, in my book, is that you are not even conscious of reading at all. There seems to be a direct connection from the author’s neurons.
It is just the act of deliberately not talking to yourself which sabotages the process.
Somebody introduced the word hesychasm, purely to make the rest of us feel inadequate & ill-educated.
I finally succumbed & looked it up. Not after all very interesting, not as much as the fact that St Augustine found it necessary to remark upon Ambrose’s strange habit of reading without saying anything.
I can remember the day one of our primary school teachers said that, now everybody in the class could read fluently & silently to themselves, we should concentrate on, & practice, practice, to get up as much speed as we could. The faster you read, the more you could learn.
He said that in order to read fast it was important, not just not to move your lips, but not even to say the words to yourself in your head.
I tried dutifully to read by simply staring at the page; I might just as well have been staring vacantly into space.
By the end of the week I had given up all pretence of trying to read this way.
And yet I don’t read by saying the words to myself – in fact the definition of really good writing, in my book, is that you are not even conscious of reading at all. There seems to be a direct connection from the author’s neurons.
It is just the act of deliberately not talking to yourself which sabotages the process.
Links
THE SILENT READERS
The Hesychast system
Related post
Keep your nose out of it
THE SILENT READERS
The Hesychast system
Related post
Keep your nose out of it
The statistical significance of height
Suppose we could organise a global census. A very simple one, to collect only one piece of information about each person: their height.
So we could calculate the height of the average human being. Say it is 160 cm. That is a simple fact – we have measured everybody.
As a scientist or statistician, would you want to put confidence intervals around that average: ‘we are 95% certain that the true average human is between A cm & B cm in height’? What would be the point, & how would we do it?
Suppose we repeat the exercise in ten years time. The height of the average human being is now 161 cm. Can we say that humans are getting taller?
Well again, we have a simple fact.
Or do we? Just how accurate are the estimates – how great is the measurement error on the estimate of height? Has something happened to the technology of tape measures which makes the number bigger so that people only seem to be taller?
We can perhaps set up experiments to establish the degree of measurement error in the estimate of height of an individual human today, & conclude that a difference of 1 cm in the measured average is not ‘statistically significant’. But how sure can we be that the errors were the same with the technology we used ten years ago?
And does any of this matter anyway? Would any decisions, any behaviours, any global politics, change if we are sure that people are now, on average, 1 cm taller? Or any scientific laws about human growth & development? Would we believe that in one hundred years the average human will be 10 cm taller & start to plan accordingly? And if a small number of obsessive people keep working away at this, how likely do we think it is that one day they will uncover some very important & widely applicable Law of Nature?
Let us go back to our first census. If we are going to go to all the trouble of measuring everybody it surely makes sense to record other information at the same time, so that we can make accurate estimates about the size of differences between various groups.
Well human beings come in two basic models, so it makes sense to record, alongside their height, whether they are male or female in form.
Of course we all know that men are taller than women, we do not need a census to tell us that, but it would be useful, for all sorts of reasons, to be able to put an exact number on the difference, which we expect to be round about 5 cm.
But – when the figures are compiled we find that the world’s average woman is 1 cm taller than the average man.
Somebody, somewhere in the process must have made a terrible mistake. Politicians, the press, ordinary people everywhere are delighting in the discomfort of the so-called experts.
Except it might actually be true, & if we could decompose, or analyse the figures in more detail, we could explain, if only people would listen, how it is that, even though it is true that in every age group, in every country, men are taller than women; the observer in outer space would be able to see that, taken altogether, earthling women are taller than the men.
We know that average heights vary according to which country & era you were born & raised in, for reasons which may be partly genetic & partly environmental. But the age structure, the proportions of men to women or even sheer numbers of people are not evenly distributed across the globe. We cannot decide, by reason alone, whether the relative contributions of tall women in countries conducive to growth, or tall young people in countries where recent birth rates have been higher, or superior survival of women in rich environments, have in fact led to this seemingly perverse result.
But is it ‘statistically significant’?
So we could calculate the height of the average human being. Say it is 160 cm. That is a simple fact – we have measured everybody.
As a scientist or statistician, would you want to put confidence intervals around that average: ‘we are 95% certain that the true average human is between A cm & B cm in height’? What would be the point, & how would we do it?
Suppose we repeat the exercise in ten years time. The height of the average human being is now 161 cm. Can we say that humans are getting taller?
Well again, we have a simple fact.
Or do we? Just how accurate are the estimates – how great is the measurement error on the estimate of height? Has something happened to the technology of tape measures which makes the number bigger so that people only seem to be taller?
We can perhaps set up experiments to establish the degree of measurement error in the estimate of height of an individual human today, & conclude that a difference of 1 cm in the measured average is not ‘statistically significant’. But how sure can we be that the errors were the same with the technology we used ten years ago?
And does any of this matter anyway? Would any decisions, any behaviours, any global politics, change if we are sure that people are now, on average, 1 cm taller? Or any scientific laws about human growth & development? Would we believe that in one hundred years the average human will be 10 cm taller & start to plan accordingly? And if a small number of obsessive people keep working away at this, how likely do we think it is that one day they will uncover some very important & widely applicable Law of Nature?
Let us go back to our first census. If we are going to go to all the trouble of measuring everybody it surely makes sense to record other information at the same time, so that we can make accurate estimates about the size of differences between various groups.
Well human beings come in two basic models, so it makes sense to record, alongside their height, whether they are male or female in form.
Of course we all know that men are taller than women, we do not need a census to tell us that, but it would be useful, for all sorts of reasons, to be able to put an exact number on the difference, which we expect to be round about 5 cm.
But – when the figures are compiled we find that the world’s average woman is 1 cm taller than the average man.
Somebody, somewhere in the process must have made a terrible mistake. Politicians, the press, ordinary people everywhere are delighting in the discomfort of the so-called experts.
Except it might actually be true, & if we could decompose, or analyse the figures in more detail, we could explain, if only people would listen, how it is that, even though it is true that in every age group, in every country, men are taller than women; the observer in outer space would be able to see that, taken altogether, earthling women are taller than the men.
We know that average heights vary according to which country & era you were born & raised in, for reasons which may be partly genetic & partly environmental. But the age structure, the proportions of men to women or even sheer numbers of people are not evenly distributed across the globe. We cannot decide, by reason alone, whether the relative contributions of tall women in countries conducive to growth, or tall young people in countries where recent birth rates have been higher, or superior survival of women in rich environments, have in fact led to this seemingly perverse result.
But is it ‘statistically significant’?
Why don’t people generally talk about height as being a political identity? … at any given time in any given place, we would not know where to find people of our own height & would not know how to find us … it is not entirely clear what we would talk about … our [shared] experience simply is not substantial enough to warrant a special meeting … for now they do not represent any kind of group from which one could claim a viable social identity
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Tube in Translation
Under the question ‘Ever wondered what life would be like if Germany had won the war?' The Times today reproduced a new translation of the famous London Tube Map. They offer a link to the full version on their website (behind the pay wall), but it is freely available through this link which I found on The Magistrate's Blog yesterday.
The translation is an avowedly ‘idiosynchratic’ one based on the pioneering work of Cyril M Harris in his book What’s in a Name?
This new map was lovingly compiled by Horst Prillinger, who works at the University of Vienna & has his own blog at The Aardvark Speaks
The translation is an avowedly ‘idiosynchratic’ one based on the pioneering work of Cyril M Harris in his book What’s in a Name?
This new map was lovingly compiled by Horst Prillinger, who works at the University of Vienna & has his own blog at The Aardvark Speaks
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Hedgehog names index: LI to LY
This is an (intermittently) on-going experimental project. No links are provided. If you want to follow any of them up, use the BLOG SEARCH box above↑
Abraham Lincoln
David Lindley
Elizabeth Linington
Lipson
Marcus Lipton
Jerry Livingston
Ken Livingstone
Clive Lloyd
David Lloyd George
Carl Hans Lody
Gaby Logan
Nicky Lom
Mark Lomas
Robert Lowe
Percival Lowell
Joana Lumley
Charles Lyell
Mike Lynch
Humphrey Lyttelton
Lady Lyttelton
Lucy Lyttelton
Bulwer Lytton
David Lindley
Elizabeth Linington
Lipson
Marcus Lipton
Jerry Livingston
Ken Livingstone
Clive Lloyd
David Lloyd George
Carl Hans Lody
Gaby Logan
Nicky Lom
Mark Lomas
Robert Lowe
Percival Lowell
Joana Lumley
Charles Lyell
Mike Lynch
Humphrey Lyttelton
Lady Lyttelton
Lucy Lyttelton
Bulwer Lytton
N=22
Is the hedgehog responsible for curly hair?
Somehow my Googling around brought me to Hair cycle regulation of Hedgehog signal reception with a blurb which read:
Well I can’t pretend to understand what that really means but it immediately made me wonder if it could possibly mean that hedgehogs produce corkscrew-shaped follicles which do after all provide the explanation for curly hair (as we were taught in O level biology more than half a century ago).
And how, if at all, does it fit with the idea that (in dogs at least) it’s a variant of KR171?
I thought I had not come across the idea of a gene called hedgehog before, but it was one of those mentioned in a very enjoyable programme on Radio 4 about the namimg of genes.
Proper patterning of self-renewing organs, like the hair follicle, requires exquisite regulation of growth signals. Sonic hedgehog (Shh) signaling in skin controls the growth and morphogenesis of hair follicle epithelium in part through regulating the Gli transcription factors
Sonic hedgehog homolog (SHH) is one of three proteins in the mammalian signaling pathway family called hedgehog, the others being desert hedgehog (DHH) and Indian hedgehog (IHH).
Well I can’t pretend to understand what that really means but it immediately made me wonder if it could possibly mean that hedgehogs produce corkscrew-shaped follicles which do after all provide the explanation for curly hair (as we were taught in O level biology more than half a century ago).
And how, if at all, does it fit with the idea that (in dogs at least) it’s a variant of KR171?
I thought I had not come across the idea of a gene called hedgehog before, but it was one of those mentioned in a very enjoyable programme on Radio 4 about the namimg of genes.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Guy Boas reincarnated
I have just come across the YouTube site poetryreincarnations (formerly known as poetryanimations)
A recent addition is a version of The Omniscient Vet in which an image of the face of Guy Boas has been animated so that it looks as if he is actually reading the poem. Very clever, it is the work of Jim Clark.
I also learned that the poem was published in the Punch Anthology for 1935.
As well as being a poet & contributor to Punch, Guy Boas was a teacher & headmaster of Sloane School in Chelsea (whose old boys include Alan Johnson).
It is perhaps not totally inappropriate that a Google search today for “Boas” is likely to bring up a large number of sites related to Chelsea Football Club – only a short drive down the Fulham Road from the site of the old Sloane Grammar School.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Good news – no news
Radio 3 seems to have stopped inflicting its listeners with regular on-the-hour news bulletins. At least I haven’t heard one, even though I am listening more frequently now.
The schedule doesn’t mention regular news at all, but then the hourly headlines are not mentioned for Radio 4 either.
Perhaps I was just imagining that it used to be impossible to avoid these hourly inflictions, that Radio 3 never carried them at all, it was just my imagination. But I have found one website which confirms that they did.
What is more the BBC is releasing light music from its ghettos & redoubts - even allowing it back on Radio 3
Lugubriosity vanquished.
The schedule doesn’t mention regular news at all, but then the hourly headlines are not mentioned for Radio 4 either.
Perhaps I was just imagining that it used to be impossible to avoid these hourly inflictions, that Radio 3 never carried them at all, it was just my imagination. But I have found one website which confirms that they did.
What is more the BBC is releasing light music from its ghettos & redoubts - even allowing it back on Radio 3
Lugubriosity vanquished.
Related post
Radio 3
Radio 3
The good salad
I had forgotten about this recipe for salad dressing from the Reverend Sydney Smith (a man I should really like to have known for his wit & his ability to lift the spirits) until I heard it again on Poetry Please.
This despite the fact that I have actually used his recipe – albeit without the anchovy sauce & the double helping of salt.
Works well with hot English mustard, or wholegrain or Dijon.
Other kinds of oil are available.
Recipe for a salad
TO make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca brown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcion of anchovy sauce.
O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."
This despite the fact that I have actually used his recipe – albeit without the anchovy sauce & the double helping of salt.
Works well with hot English mustard, or wholegrain or Dijon.
Other kinds of oil are available.
Recipe for a salad
TO make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca brown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcion of anchovy sauce.
O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."
Monday, June 20, 2011
While the going is good
There was no sign of the usual holiday rush of families using the bus to get to the airport for the traditional Whit holidays this year – probably a mixture of no money & not wanting to get stranded by, if not a volcano then by something else unforeseen in this suddenly unpredictable world.
What is notable however is the exodus of couples, without children but not necessarily past retirement age, who have been setting off on a foreign holiday which started in the days after the end of May bank holiday Monday. Even the bus drivers have been remarking upon it.
That’s one unexpected advantage of end-year exams. Holiday prices are lower because not even those parents who would be willing to take their children out of school to avoid the misery of travelling at the same time as everybody else would do it just now.
What is notable however is the exodus of couples, without children but not necessarily past retirement age, who have been setting off on a foreign holiday which started in the days after the end of May bank holiday Monday. Even the bus drivers have been remarking upon it.
That’s one unexpected advantage of end-year exams. Holiday prices are lower because not even those parents who would be willing to take their children out of school to avoid the misery of travelling at the same time as everybody else would do it just now.
Nudging our rubbish habits
One day recently the bus was held up by a bin wagon on its rounds. Heart sink moment – we’ll be here for a while, there are not many places on the A6 where anyone, let alone a bus, can get round one of those; there are not even that many places where a bus can get round a cyclist - but that’s a rant for another day.
I was wrong about the bin wagon – it moved quickly on to the next stop, then the one after that where the bus had chance to go round, but not before I had chance to appreciate the efficiency of the operation these days.
Only two men, plus driver who had no need to get out of the cab to help as the wheelie bin was moved the few feet across the pavement by one man, onto the hoist, up, tip, down, back to the garden gate. Quiet, too. The second man had already moved on to the next house.
I could also see why an overfilled-bin with half open lid could disrupt the smoothness of the operation.
Which gave me an idea. Dustbins are a very touchy subject at the moment, hedged about as they seem to be by pernickety or incomprehensible rules, no more weekly collections of the smelly stuff, and possible fines for getting it wrong.
If everybody could see why overfilled bins are a problem, make life more difficult for everybody else, they would be less likely to grumble & instead take pride in doing their bit for the greater good & a reduction in our council taxes*.
We don’t need lectures, especially not from politicians (who produce more rubbish than we do & probably use their expenses to pay someone else to get rid of it) or over paid council officials with gold plated pensions, or yet more leaflets to put straight into the recycling bin.
But a funny video on YouTube might do it.
A bin man hero who remains philosophical & can smile through the trials & tribulations of a round, speeded up like that London to Brighton in 60 seconds film that the BBC used to use to fill the space between programmes & which everybody of a certain vintage will remember even half a century after they last saw it. Made, not by some hotshot director from a high priced ad agency but, in the spirit of the Big Society, by bin men possibly working with a group of college students.
If it was popular enough – especially with the young – it would do a lot to turn the scathing around to be directed at those who selfishly think that it is for others to deal with the thoughtless way in which they make their mess into an unnecessary problem for somebody else to cope with.
*In our dreams
I was wrong about the bin wagon – it moved quickly on to the next stop, then the one after that where the bus had chance to go round, but not before I had chance to appreciate the efficiency of the operation these days.
Only two men, plus driver who had no need to get out of the cab to help as the wheelie bin was moved the few feet across the pavement by one man, onto the hoist, up, tip, down, back to the garden gate. Quiet, too. The second man had already moved on to the next house.
I could also see why an overfilled-bin with half open lid could disrupt the smoothness of the operation.
Which gave me an idea. Dustbins are a very touchy subject at the moment, hedged about as they seem to be by pernickety or incomprehensible rules, no more weekly collections of the smelly stuff, and possible fines for getting it wrong.
If everybody could see why overfilled bins are a problem, make life more difficult for everybody else, they would be less likely to grumble & instead take pride in doing their bit for the greater good & a reduction in our council taxes*.
We don’t need lectures, especially not from politicians (who produce more rubbish than we do & probably use their expenses to pay someone else to get rid of it) or over paid council officials with gold plated pensions, or yet more leaflets to put straight into the recycling bin.
But a funny video on YouTube might do it.
A bin man hero who remains philosophical & can smile through the trials & tribulations of a round, speeded up like that London to Brighton in 60 seconds film that the BBC used to use to fill the space between programmes & which everybody of a certain vintage will remember even half a century after they last saw it. Made, not by some hotshot director from a high priced ad agency but, in the spirit of the Big Society, by bin men possibly working with a group of college students.
If it was popular enough – especially with the young – it would do a lot to turn the scathing around to be directed at those who selfishly think that it is for others to deal with the thoughtless way in which they make their mess into an unnecessary problem for somebody else to cope with.
*In our dreams
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Tyranny of Choice
Choice or decision, tyranny or tease, the limits of mathematical probability.
Tyranny of Choice
Pick a card, any card
You’ll say. I love this trick –
The tease and tyranny of choice –
The dove’s tail tender
On your fine and hidden fingers,
And the thumb I’m under.
You know my Queen of Hearts
By the dog-ear on her top-left
Bottom-right corner;
By the voluptuous sad mouth
Which will not smile,
Whichever way you turn her.
Tyranny of Choice
Pick a card, any card
You’ll say. I love this trick –
The tease and tyranny of choice –
The dove’s tail tender
On your fine and hidden fingers,
And the thumb I’m under.
You know my Queen of Hearts
By the dog-ear on her top-left
Bottom-right corner;
By the voluptuous sad mouth
Which will not smile,
Whichever way you turn her.
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