broadstuff

The Liberal Democrats, Britain's long ignored 3rd Party, scored a coup in the first televised debate between the party leaders as Nick Clegg, their leader, outshone Labour's Gordon Brown and Tory Tony...I mean Dave - Cameron.

The result, just before the second debate, is that the Big Two have gone for the Liberal Jugular in the Trad Media, warning We The People of all sorts of Dire Consequences if we would be so dumb as to vote Liberal Democrat. Sadly for the MSM's Party Apparatchik Attack Dogs, it has been so over the top as to be laughable. So far this morning its been economic, political and social collapse, putting in a good bit of smear and innuendo to boot (see picture above), and we eagerly await global warming speeding up too.

The riposte in the New Media has been satirically brilliant - a Twitter Meme called #nickcleggsfault which blames all ills on Nick Clegg. Here are some of them:

- The BP Garage near my house running out of Double Decker bars. #nickcleggsfault

- Samantha Cameron's pregnant #nickcleggsfault

- The volcanic eruption? That was #NickCleggsFault too

- Third World Debt #nickcleggsfault

- Schrodinger's cat is dead!! apparently it's #nickcleggsfault

- The New Daleks - #nickcleggsfault

- Nick Clegg was on the grassy knoll on November 22nd 1963 #nickcleggsfault

- Nick Clegg ate my hamster #nickcleggsfault

- #nickcleggsfault disappointing hotel porn

- Have laddered my tights #nickcleggsfault

- I'm pregnant > No, I'M pregnant! #nickcleggsfault

- Oh dear the new bath end panel is chipped at the edge #nickcleggsfault

Update - quick lunchtime peek:

- San Andreas #nickcleggsfault

- Heather Mills just fell over. Apparently it was nicked legs fault. #nickcleggsfault

- Increased interest in otherwise boring election between two hopeless parties is definitely #nickcleggsfault

- If someone asked me "Why are you proud to be British?", I would point them at #nickcleggsfault.

- Ha! Yes, yes, it is all my fault! All of it! And YOU CAN NEVER STOP ME! #nickcleggsfault

- Can no longer keep track of everything that is #nickcleggsfault ... definitely #nickcleggsfault

You get the picture......... this will run and run (update - its now the leading meme on Twitter)

But what it has done is make the MSM attack dogs into a laughing stock only 2 hours into the working day, and because of the MSM news cycle times it won't be able to respond in print before tonight's second debate (Update - it finally hit the BBC blogs at 16:03... 5 hours after I wrote this in my morning coffee break). They have thus handed the #nickcleggsupporters a priceless advantage, as the ham fisted attack and rapier sharp twitter ripostes will now also be reported tomorrow irrespective of the debate outcome.

Another update - apparently some Twitter sentiment mining company has reported most twts today about Nick Clegg are negative (says the BBC). Let me bet thats becaus eof #nickcleggsfault - computers clearly don't do irony yet

Went to the London TED Salon on Monday night - series of interesting talks but the one that stood out for me (in terms of new technology strategies) was Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy. For two reasons:

(i) He is always an entertaining speaker

(ii) He has taken on Behavioural Psychology for Advertising almost as a Pauline conversion. ( We shared a stage in Nice last year and Rory uttered not a peep on it then )

Anyway, as part of his talk he put up an interesting slide (see above) about ways of Making A Difference, a good old 2x2:

High Cost, High Impact - Getting Strategy Right - despite being rude about strategists, he noted that getting the strategy right has a huge impact.

High Cost, Low Impact - Consultancy - A cheap (or is that expensive ) laugh here, but the point is well made - often consulting work is not useful or is ignored. for a whole variety of reasons (a thought - is strategic consultancy therefore marginally more valuable than an other? )

Low Cost, Low Impact - Trivia - aka all those campaigns on Twitter, for example

Low Cost, High Impact - ? - Rory's point was this is the area of the cumulative impact of lots of little things. He had no name for it and asked the audience for ideas (trying to avoid calling it a Nudge then, Rory? ).

His view is that real organisational success is actually far more due to getting thsi arae right than what the Big Dogs decide, but is downplayed as otherwise said dogs couldn't justify their gravity defying salaries. He called for organisations to have Chief Detail Officers (they are often called COO's, you know.....)

What interested me most though was Joanne Jacobs pointing out later that, in theory, social media and social networks are really optimal for delivering this level of impact. We kicked around why that might be, and conclusions were that Social Media:

(i) Lowers the transaction costs of receiving data about what is required

(ii) Ditto, makes it cheaper/easier for many of these small detailed things to act in collaboration (think of the the very simple algorithms that do complex tings like make a flock of birds or school of fished turn in unison), thus amplifying the impact

(iii) Execution is simplified as it is cheap and fast to communicate actions and get feedback.

So, what to call this quarter then - how about Social Services?

This afternoon McAfee sent an update that closed down all my client's XP machines. In essence DAT update No. 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file which then tries to continually re-establish itself and nails the computer and network.

One expects virusses to do this, not one's security company. This also has impacted many other companies it seems!

Now, lets talk money - its taken several hours to get the machines back up. We're not talking the IT department sorting it, we're talking the people whose machines are going haywire having to pass memory sticks around to each other and bring their own machines up (a few of us had non McAfee machines - there is a lesson for you in efficient redundancy). Now, High End Consultancies charge several hundred dollars per hour, so wasting several hours per consultant is tens of years worth of McAfee licences in fees lost - each. And I'm sure those economics translate one way or another for many other companies too.

Security software is the sort of thing that is a commodity price item, one wants to pay once and never have to worry about - certainly not find it costing many times its price in hassle. There are many other competitors. So how does McAfee handle the situation? On the website they say:

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3...

....McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

And the fix is ok, but manual and technically non-trivial.

In other words "We Apologise" is not nearly enough.

It will be interesting to see how McAfee handle this.

From David Weinberger:

Here are the things that I could not do over the Internet when, just as we were about to go through passport control for our trip to New York, the Barcelona Airport closed:

We could not find information about the closing posted on the Web when we needed it at the airport.

Email notifications from American Airlines about the flight delay and then cancellation came about an hour after the news was spread in the airport.

It was not possible rebook a flight using the American Airlines web site. That required a two-hour phone call to AA.

The Spanish train service’s site would not take orders for tickets. It contained no information about how to proceed, or about the multi-hour wait-times at the Barcelona station where tickets are sold.

There was no updated information about ticket availability for various trains. Nor was that information accessible at the train station except by waiting on a three hour line.

There was no obvious way to get information about the availability of rental cars, buses, cabs, or people willing to drive you to Madrid in their own car.

As far as I can tell, only three online services actually helped the stranded traveller: Twitter (see the #ashtag hashtag), Skype, and good old email.

This was not the Internet’s fault. It was moving bits faster than Icelandic volcanoes move ash. But the services built on the Net were tested by a non-lethal international crisis and crapped out. Oh, I’m sure there are cool and useful sites ‘n’ services, but I’m a fairly sophisticated Net user, and I didn’t find them, and what I did find seems not to have been built to work during times of crisis. ,p>Makes you wonder about the implications for national security…

Some of the comments to the piece were interesting, like this one:

I was thinking yesterday, that if I were an airline, I would have deployed Twitter, Facebook etc. and a bank of social media-trained customer service reps. I would have had widgets and other “immediate” content on my webpages with up-to-the-minute information about airport closures, delays, and links.

Would have fed that dynamic content to airline gates, ticketing agents, and other locations.

The complaint seems to be a lack of information. It’s not that the information is lacking, it’s that companies such as airlines (and governments) haven’t learned how to disseminate the information they do have as nimbly as they could.

I recall similar after 9/11 (I was there) - no power, no water, all the mobile nets were down, sporadic fixed line telephony, no traffic after a few hours, and no sensible information on what was working or happening (but speculation on all the media channels abounded). Made me realise how thin the veneer of modern civilisation is even in the most sophisticated places.

This is the sort of stuff the Collapsonomics crew think about, i.e. what do you do when these sort of rare - but predictable - events occur. Not so much "Black Swans", these are "Black Elephants". Volcanoes are known to spew ash every so often and we know its crap for jet engines. Its such a good disaster story I'm amazed that Michael Crichton or someone didn't see it coming

By taking down air transport its taking down the great physical "real time" comms medium we have on the planet. Now what is even more interesting is that volcanoes like this one can sputter on for months, years even. Imagine if Europe was aircraftless for 2 years! How would its economic development compare vis a vis other parts of the world that were not?

The answer, of course, would be propeller planes. In the disaster movie someone will no doubt write, the hero and heroine discover an old WW2 aircraft that operated in the desert and had proper dust filters on, and make good their escape while the Bad Guy's jet fighter flames out due to too much dust up his turbofan.

As movie buffs will know, the P-40 is obligatory in these sort of Future History moves, so that is what they will use - the one above is a South African Air Force P-40, and they had to use sand filters on their planes in the Sahara Desert and Italy - and still do even today with their modern aircraft in the dusty bits of Africa.

This rather fascinating article looks at the way you should use make-up to confuse automatic face recognition systems.

Preliminary makeup patterns to hide from face detection.

- Images with a red square tested positive, a face was found
- Images without a red square tested negative, no face was found
- Images under the section “TEST PATTERNS” are made according to results of the Haar deconstruction
- Images under “RANDOM PATTERNS” are random doodles made without the anti-face detection patterns in mind
- Images underneath the “NO PATTERNS” heading are left untouched to show that the face detection works well on simple line drawings
- Line drawings are from Figure Drawing for Fashion Design

So - Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (or was that maybe Aladdin Sane) may still stand out a mile in 2010 Britain, but their faces will be unrecogniseable

We wondered what was going on when photogenic Ning CEO Gina Bianchini moved off the hot seat, now we know. Today brings news of the demise of Ning as a Free state - first the blah, then the punchline:

As many of you know, we made a decision yesterday to focus 100% of the company on enhancing the features and services we offer to paying Ning Creators. The tens of thousands of you who already use our paid service represent over 75% of our traffic, and we’ve heard repeatedly from you ways that we can deliver a killer service to help make your Ning Network more effective. Some examples of things we are working on that you’ve asked for include new APIs, a new mobile experience and new advertising and revenue opportunities.

As part of this change, we’ll be phasing out our free service.

If there was ever a sign of the receding freeconomic tide sliding back down the beach, this is it. Ning was the poster child social media site hosting network, backed by Marc Andreessen and fronted (and how!) by Gina Bianchini, it dripped Web 2.0' ness. If anything was going to make it, this was, we were told.

The company managed to raise $119 million in venture capital backing over five rounds, including $15 million last summer at a $750 million valuation. Now the CEO has gone upstairs to be an Executive in Residence at Andreessen's new gig, leaving the Ning COO to deal with the sh*t - like firing 40% of the staff yesterday (you'd have thought she could have done that before leaving,thus giving the new boy a decent chance!)

There is a harsh lesson in VC selection bias here by the way, as many were sceptical (including us) about it in concept, but with a backer like Andreessen and a model CEO it was always going to get funding.

But, as we pointed out 2 years ago - Ning and many of these similar projects were funded by hopeful capital, not ongoing revenue, and the idea of FreeConomics - now mutated into Freemium (the many free customers being supported by the few paying ones) - is, in most cases, a dream.

Well, the third committee looking into the science used by Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, led by Ron Oxburgh, a former chair of the UK House of Lords science and technology select committee, has whitewashed the research of course, but in a very "damned by a faint praise" way - as New Scientist points out:

"We found absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever," said Oxburgh at a press briefing in London today. "We are absolutely satisfied that these people were doing their job fairly. I don't think they even minded what the outcome [of their research] was, as long as it was as close to truth as possible," he continued.

That will have been a comfort for the CRU team. As Oxburgh put it, they were "unlikely to have worked as scientists again" had the inquiry panel found them guilty of professional misconduct.

Misconduct, mais Non! But as for competence......

The panel found that the statistical tools that CRU scientists employed were not always the most cutting-edge, or most appropriate. "We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians," reads the inquiry's conclusions.

However, "it is not clear that better methods would have produced significantly different results," the panel adds.

The biggest error - as you can guess was that hockey stick of climate change rises. David Hand, president of the UK Royal Statistical Society and a member of Oxburgh's panel, found that:

....the strongest example he had found of imperfect statistics in the work of the CRU and collaborators elsewhere was the iconic "hockey stick" graph, produced by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

The graph shows how temperatures have changed over the past 1000 years

Hand pointed out that the statistical tool Mann used to integrate temperature data from a number of difference sources – including tree-ring data and actual thermometer readings – produced an "exaggerated" rise in temperatures over the 20th century, relative to pre-industrial temperatures.

That this was blindingly obvious to anybody with a modicum of maths or scientific training, and became embarrassingly clear when the actual data used was released (see my post on the matter here). But despite causing a multi-billion dollar global goose chase:

But whereas [Climate Sceptic Blogger] McIntyre claims that Mann's methods have "created" the hockey stick from data that does not contain it, Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann's original graphic suggests. "More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick," he told New Scientist.

Well that's alright then, isn't it

Marvellous - Tory "Call me Dave" Cameron comes up with "The Big Society", one of those nebulous Big Political Ideas that promises something for everyone (cf Labour's The Big Tent etc etc). This Big Society is a Tory Do it Yourself Utopia, and its up to everyone to self actualise for themself - in summary, though, its really promising control over very little - such as this piece in the Guardian notes:

David Cameron has invited us to "join the government of Britain". He pledges to put us into "the driving seat, to take the decisions that affect the life of our families and our communities ... We'll give you the power, so you can take control".

But control over what? His idea of the "big society" is pitched at minimising the power of the state, while doing nothing to give people the power to control the private, "free" market and the inequalities it produces.

This is of course far too good to leave unpoked, so the journalists and comedians had a go, and there was an article in the Grauniad on all this, about a UK comedian setting up your own town police force (no, I didn't think that was funny either, but hey he's a famous comedian)

So far so predictable.

What then happened is brilliant - the commenters, that is, YOU! - got involved on that article and the comments are brilliant - here goes:

- I have decided to set up a school in my shed.

- I've written my own manifesto in excrement on my neighbour's front door.

- I have a hosepipe so I can be the fireman for my street

- I'm going to collect tax on everyone who passes my house

- Insurrection indeed - inside every Tory there is a repressed little anarchist trying to rewrite the rules just for himself, his family and his beloved tax affairs.

- With my eyes on the big society prize, I'm going to set up a chain of dentists.

- I've decided to form an official chauffering service for when opportunistic wannabes cycle to parliament for photo op purposes and need some saddo to follow behind with their bags

- I've also come up with a Shit Tax: "Every time you poo, you pay..."

- And I'm franchising the Bullingdon Club for wannabe Sloanes and oikish social climbers from the provinces

- I've always thought Twitter was crap, but this is excellent.

- I don't like my neighbour so I'm going to deport him.

- I'm planning to get state funding for my Revolutionary Socialist Secondary School, Witney.

- I have created my own religion to help re-awaken broken britains spiritual side. Hopefully Cameron will join once he commits some heinous crimes against humanity and find his salvation. As leader of this religion I will half apolgise for crimes commited by my brotherhood in about 20 years time, obviously after assisting in covering them up.

- Could they really not see this coming? I'm going to be Minister without Portfolio, because as luck would have it I sold my last portfolio on e-bay last week

- I shall do my bit for broken Britain - I am going to organise a special mending evening. Those who don't want to be mended will be broken a little bit more.

- I'm tackling Britain's immigration policy by installing Total Wipeout - style obstacle courses at all our borders.

- I'm currently organising my community to sort out our roads. We will be installing toll booths on the roads in and out of the village in order to fund repair works. In the interim Mrs Harris has kindly volunteered to provide us with batches of her infamous rock cakes with which to fill our pot holes.

- I'm helping to teach self-sufficiency and IT skills by going home from my Helpdesk job an hour early.

- I have put in to be Ambassador to Belize

- Oh, this so reminds me of this. Strong communities, normal folk stepping up, doing the job of government! People who hate people, come together!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvM-WQP7SOw

- I'm setting up alternative CiF boards devoted to trolling.

- I'm going to catch myself in my own benefits trap.

- I am disgusted that most of these comments are mocking Mr Cameron's attempt to drag our society out of the gutter, where it has lain blind drunk and senseless in a pool of its own vomit, faeces and urine for the past 30 years. Forget crucifying an old lady for eating her own biscuits in an M&S cafe, you people are now on the list for flaying alive on 6th May. You will all learn, no matter what it takes. The purges of Stalin will look like a tea party and May will forever be known as the month of blood, cleansing and renewal.

- I'm going to rack up some huge debts. Then you can all bail me out so I can do it again.

- I am going to tax all foreigners living abroad. The only people living abroad exempt from tax will be UK citizens with incomes in excess of £1 million pa. Its the Tory way!

- Re: I'm going to collect tax on everyone who passes my house < Glad to hear Goldman Sachs are still hiring.

- RE: I've also come up with a Shit Tax: "Every time you poo, you pay..." < Surely that should be Pay Per Poo?

- So far I've managed to arrest a teenager for showing his pants above his trousers, a middle ages women for talking about Eastenders and the state of her hair, and our local priest for being a nazi sympathiser and suspected paedophile. Vote for me.

- I'm going to allow you all the chance to sex up some dossiers.

- I don't know why you lot are so sarcastic and bitter, i'm going to help david (call me dave) to fix broken britain with some hollow rhetoric.

- I'm going to set up a school that charges £30,000 a term and call it a charity [ie a public school - Ed]
.
- I've set up my own dole office and have sent myself 24 P45's today allowing a twenty minute waiting time between seeing myself, may reduce wait to fifteen minutes tomorrow to improve targets although paper shortage imminent.

- As of Friday lunchtime we are driving on the right-hand side of the road.

- I'm setting up a co-operative to float the local library on the FTSE. Of course these digital times mean we'll have to diversify so we'll be tendering for the tramp storage and cold OAP contracts. Should be plenty of opportunity in the coming months.

Social media doesn't get better than this

One should never believe what one reads on Teh Internetz, but it would appear that the Library of Congress is going to store all twts, ever - including those drunken ones you did in January 2007 (Spotted by Kosso)

Wow - if this is public access by all to the whole twtbase, over the internet.......

More Later, as they say!

Update - More Now - from the Twitterblog:

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.

Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets every created.

Result - bonanza for dataminers! As for your privacy, kiss it a fond goodbye.

OK, so would you have made half the tweets you did if you'd known it was all going to be totally public, searchable etc with very low transaction costs? Big lesson for Europeans using US services without a thought - they have different views on privacy, and the Data Prevention .

This, combined with that pesky spam advertising, will kill or cure Twitter.

My bet is on kill, but not before they have had a "liquidity event"

Things we found on Teh Internetz - Original Source over here