Odds and Sods

There has been a lot of hand wringing in the UK press about a Conservative (US: Republican) party with 47% of the seats getting together with a Liberal Democratic party (US: Democrat-ish) with 9%, but as the above chart shows the game theory of the situation shows there is only one situation which has a good outcome.

In essence this coalition means that c 60% of the seats and c 60% of the voters are in its camp. A Liberal/Labour coalition would have been 52% of the vote and 48% of teh seats, which means a minority government. A Tory-on--its own (largest single party) minority government would have c 1/3rd of the voters and c 48% of seats - again an unsustainable minority.

There is a question about the Liberal Democrats being better off going it alone, but its hard to see how they could have carried on in that position as the press would have hounded them to form an alliance, as they have done over the last few days

So Google is planning to remedy its strategic Achilles Heel......... GigaOm:

Google says it’s willing to accept its shortcomings on the social web and bring in a “Head of Social” to set it on the right course. The company has hired an executive recruiter to fill the position, and is currently in the process of casting its net as widely as possible.

Though competition from Google sends shivers down spines in just about every sector — from news and book publishers to phone makers to venture capital — the company’s dominance has a gaping hole on the social web. Google has tried to introduce social sites, from Orkut to Buzz, but they’ve had limited appeal, hampered by a misunderstanding of user needs. In recent months Google has added a social layer onto its existing products, like search and maps. And it does have powerhouse publishing and communication properties in Blogger and Gmail on the outskirts of the social web. But there’s no formidable master plan to speak of.

Acquisition is no answer either. From Dodgeball to Jaiku.... the list of leading products it has bought is a litany of opportunities missed (YouTube being a - very expensive - success but still loses millions), and Buzz's introduction was a trainwreck in slow motion, and an object lesson in how to design antisocial media. Also, the list of Social Media Luminaries who nosily enter (and then later, quietly leave) Google is measured in revolving door revolutions. Still, a start is to admit on has a problem.

Question is, will a "Head of Social" have the necessary clout to get stuff through an algorithmic culture, which is - we have been told - just a tad arrogant. This probably won't fly without some top down air cover.

In a way its a sign that Google is all growed up, as now they are having to deal with changing themselves to face new and dangerous competition. Evidence from companies that have been here before (Fixed Line Telcos for example, who had to develop Mobile and Internet businesses) is that what works best is to:

- Carve the Social operations out to one side and let them report in to one of the most senior people in the company (or else they will be squashed politically).

- Best if they are even on another campus to develop their own culture and attract the sort of people they need

- Give them a Serious - and we mean Serious - budget to run their own thing (otherwise the Big Battalions that run the infrastructure and the money making services will just nix any project that threatens their hegemony.

Of course, one option is to acquire something successful, but here Google faces the problem that the proven successful ones are hugely overvalued and they tend to break what they acquire - but if it was bought, added to, well funded, and largely left alone (see 3 steps above) it may work.

One of the fascinating things about Social Media (of all types) is you can see theories about how humans work being played out in highly numerate (ie measurable and thus calculatable) ways. Take the game teory of "dating". Sociobiologists long ago cracked the theoretical maths (to universal opprobrium from more sensitive but less numerate "ology" disciplines) - and game theorists have now descended into the details of sperm war - but actually seeing it in play (as it were) from dating site data is fascinating - here is OKCupid's analysis.

The key slide is the one above - relative attractiveness potential of men and women as they age - in essence women are far more attractive than men in their 20's but then their attractiveness declines while men's rises and then declines more slowly. This drives nearly all the game theory of the "battle between the sexes"

The reason, as evolutionary and socio biologists and various similar disciplines will tell you - is the whole issue of reproduction - younger women are more likely to bear and be able to bring up healthy kids, older men more likely to have the resources to pay for them. I won't get into the functions of infidelity here, go read sperm wars instead

The key analysis on what happens because of this disparity is this piece of game theory - the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox

If we imagine the search for partners as an auction, some of us are more confident of our long term prospects than others. People with brains, looks, social capital, money, or any combination of any of them can afford to be selective. Men and women who are traditionally thought of as desirable partners can be thought of as strong bidders. People who are less confident of their prospects are known as weak bidders.

In the marriage market, there is an enormous incentive to get it right the first time. Consequently, weak bidders will move into the market very aggressively, while strong bidders stand pat, looking for a really good deal. Those who are most confident of their prospects are most likely to prolong their search for the perfect partner.

Our traditional model, where the male makes the marriage proposal and the female gives the thumbs-up or thumbs-down, places most males in the position of a weak bidder (especially when young - see above graph). If his proposal is rejected, his social capital is devalued, especially if word gets around, and it certainly will. Therefore, more men are weak bidders than women. For a suitor, success is defined as getting a positive response, and he would rather get an acceptance from a marginally desirable prospect than a rejection from a very desirable prospect.

In short, the outcome is that the pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders."

Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Incidentally, Robin Dunbar (he of the Dunbar number) has also been looking into this area, and here is a BBC writeup of his worK:

Dunbar found that the vast majority of words used by people to describe themselves in ads could be lumped into five different categories.

He asked 200 university students to rate the appeal of ads containing different categories of words. When Dunbar analysed the results, he found that men and women attached very different levels of importance to the five categories:

Men's preferences Women's preferences

1. Attractiveness 1. Commitment
2 Commitment 2. Social Skills
3. Social Skills 3. Resources
4. Resources 4. Attractiveness
5. Sexiness 5. Sexiness

Far from being conditioned to regard these things as important, Dunbar argued that men and women had evolved these preferences over millions of years of evolution. These were crucial qualities that enhanced the fitness of children, and, lest we forget, children are the key to the survival of our species.

As to the all important quesion of "when to put out" consider this:

The research in the Journal of Theoretical Biology uses game theory to analyse how males and females behave strategically towards each other in the mating game. The mathematical model considers a male and a female in a courtship encounter of unspecified duration, with the game ending when one or other party quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. The model assumes that the male is either a ''good'' or a ''bad'' type from the female's point of view, according to his condition or willingness to care for the young after mating.

The female gets a positive payoff from mating if the male is a ''good'' male but a negative payoff if he is ''bad'', so it is in her interest to gain information about the male's type with the aim of avoiding mating with a "bad" male. In contrast, a male gets a positive payoff from mating with any female, though his payoff is higher if he is "good" than if he is "bad".

The study looks for evolutionarily stable equilibrium behaviors, in which females are doing as well as they can against male behavior and males are doing as well as they can against female behavior. It shows that extended courtship can take place, with a good male being willing to court for longer than a bad male and the female delaying mating. In this way the duration of a male's courtship effort carries information about his type.

By delaying mating, the female is able to make some use of this information to achieve a degree of screening. Because bad males have a greater tendency to quit the courtship game early, as time goes on and the male has not quit it becomes increasingly probable that he is a "good" male.

But leave it too long and they are in Eligible-Bachelor Paradox territory, and risk being passed on.....

One of the things I've been wanting to see is the impact of female economic emancipation, as that changes the game hugely and is very recent in earth's biology - ie if a woman no longer needs the resources of the man to bring up the offspring, her choice of optimal male will change (did someone say Cougar.... ?). I haven't seen much data analysis of that game, apart from this piece arguing that men enjoy marriage and women don't.

Still, the OKCupid article is still a very interesting article, give it a read. (Hat tip Hadley Beeman for the pointer)

It was quite interesting watching the Twitterstream during the UK's 3rd debate between the 3 main parties. As always with Twitter it was a chaotic maelstrom of stuff - serious, scurrilous, funny and dull - leading Tweetdeck 's founder Ian Dodsworth to say:

90% of #leadersdebate search tweets are essentially moronic - this is pointless

My response to Ian is that we need a cr*pfilter to cull 90% of your twtstreams . But I must say it was - as always - a brilliant experience watching the realtime commentary as the event unfolded. We believe this is because it allows a broadcast media process to have a feedback element.

And of course, after the event the Spin Doctors come into the studio to try and tell us their man has won - and as usual the YouGov instant poll showed the Tory leader, David Cameron, in front (please note though that YouGov's CEO is a Tory MP candidate, but the Meedja never say that..... ) But the Twitterstream was clear - most felt the Mr Clegg (LibDem) and Gordon Brown (Labour) had edged it, typical twts being:

Also, an online poll - @youdecide2010 - "ITV Instant Poll Scores: Who had the best debate tonight?" showed (as of 1 hour after the debate) that was on Clegg 54%, Brown 39%, Cameron 11%.



Update (as of 8.30 am) - in fact, the whole polling question is becoming quite interesting after this debate, as there is quite a wide disparity among the polls. A quick summary looks like:

- The Tory press (ie Tory sympathetic papers , especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Sky as well) have Cameron as a clear winner. This is being reported by the MSM media, with little analysis of where the data comes from

- Internet based "You vote" polls like the one above, on Facebook and those in the online sites of the newspapers (eg the Grauniad here) have Clegg a clear winner. These are largely being ignored by the mainstream media

- Most independent "mainstream" polls (and this interesting sentiment analysis) have it shaded between Cameron and Clegg to no great statistical benefit. These are being underplayed by much of the mainstream media - not clear why.

For the record I'm fairly apolitical on all this (I 've voted Green for 20 years fwiw), but it seems as if some sort of concerted effort is going on in the MSM to push Mr Cameron ahead - clearly in the hope that the Floating Voter gets the feeling that that is where all les autres are going. But I think they've missed the ark, I think a lot of the Floating Voters are on the Online media and are picking up different messages, or at least seeing the feedback loops o the rebuttals (see my article on this here)

The evidence - from what I can see at the moment anyway - is that the Floating Voters are more strongly Lib Dem in flavour right now, and the MSM organs are pretty much preaching to their own choirs.

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.

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

In the UK the Digital Economy Bill (#DEBill on Twitterstream) has been rushed through Parliament in the dog days of this Government's term, in a process known as the "washup" - where legislation still waiting to be enacted is rushed through without scrutiny and debate to become law.

Washup is fine for well developed or non controversial law. However, this law is very controversial - in essence it tries to legislate for the traditional rightsholder to a degree which is in some ways more than they can get today in the non digital world. Its is also far from clear that it is yet well drafted. At the very least it would be better to debate it properly early in the next parliament

There are various conspiracy theories floating among my Twitterfriends around as to why this is happening, centreing around a combination of:

- Labour MP's looking to feather (out of office) nests in the Media industry. Doesn't hurt the Tories traditional support base either
- Tories don't want thsi debate on their watch, Labour does a favour and pushes it through now
- Labour MP's doing a sop to Murdoch, to stop his papers Sun being too mean to them in the election campaign?
- Peter Mandelson (Labour's Businesss secretary) kneecaps are for it if he doesn't?
- Its a cabal of Olde Fartes getting together to kibosh the Rise of the Internet
- Money

Be all that as it may, I have a sinking feeling in my stomach - the last time the two main parties colluded like this we found ourselves fighting a war in Iraq, much against most of the UK people's wish, on the basis of very dubious intelligence information.

That was the day I stopped believing in British Democracy, but this just proves how badly perverted it has become.

I suggest those of us who object to this law make it clear to both main parties that we will not vote for their candidates if they supoort this, and will instead vote for another and use all our new media access to back up the view.

Not so much Tea Party as DE Party, but some form of concerted action, aggregated via Social Media, is in my view required now to drive (Un)civil disobedience.

That will probably have more impact than a quick moan over Twitter..........

Today is Ada Lovelace day when we celebrate, well, female geeks. Tonight is the Finding Ada Unconference, where people talk for about 5 minutes on a heroine of their choice. Mine is the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene (Comnena in Latin), who lived in "interesting" times and was a serious polymath to boot.

Finding Anna

Anna was born in 1085, into the purple (ie into the Byzantine royal family) in Constantinople (now Istanbul, for the real tech geeks among you). To recap, in 1071 Byzantium fought and badly lost the battle of Manzikert, which resulted in them losing most of their Asian provinces to the Turks. To recapture them, the Byzantine Empire decided to take the very risky step of writing to the barbarous (by Byzantine and Arab standards of the time) Western nations for military assistance. Thence starts the Crusades which kicked off in 1091.....

I first met Anna via The Alexiad, the history she wrote at age 55 of the efforts of her father (the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I)'s attempts to rescue Byzantium from the results of Manzikert, reconquer their Eastern provinces from the Turks, and to "manage" the Crusaders to ensure they fought the Turks (Saracens) and didn't pillage the still wealthy Byzantine Empire instead.

Educating Anna

Although, she was carefully trained in the study of history, mathematics, science, and Greek philosophy, Anna’s parents banned her from studying ancient poetry (whose glorification of lustful gods and unchaste women they deemed inappropriate and even dangerous for a young woman of her class to study). Despite her parents' attempts to restrict her, Anna furtively studied the forbidden poetry with one of the imperial court’s eunuchs. Thus, Anna received an extraordinary education that undoubtedly made her one of the most educated women of her time. (From Wikipedia)

A Byzantine Plot

In her youth Anna took part in the standard Byzantine plot and counter plot to get her husbands (both of them) onto the Throne as her father aged. Her knowledge of medicine was of a level such that she was choosing the treatments for her father when he died. She was finally sent to a nunnery when her second husband withdrew from one of her plots to depose her brother for him. Anna said that "nature had mistaken their sexes, for he ought to have been the woman." Today we'd probably say she had balls, whereas her husband....wanted to live (failed emperor pretenders lives were generally nasty, brutish and short)

Get thee hence to a Monastery - Anna as Nun

Take one very intelligent and high energy woman and give her not a lot to do, and what do you get?

Firstly an excellent history of the times - the Alexiad - which is accurate, insightful, gossipy and human at the same time and also gives you an excellent insight into women's mindset then.

Secondly, in the Alexiad she writes a lot about the technology, science and medicine of her day - it is invaluable firstly as a record, but also its clear she had a very good grasp on how it all worked. Take her views on Astrology (she was very interested in Astronomy ).

The discovery is fairly recent, and the science of it was not known to the ancients. For this method of divination did not exist in the time of Eudoxus, the greatest of all astronomers, neither did Plato have any knowledge of it, and even the astrologer, Manetho, had not brought it to perfection. Now these (astrologers) observe the hour of the birth of the persons about whom they intend to prophesy, and fix the cardinal points and carefully note the disposition of all the stars, in short they do everything that the inventor of this science bequeathed to posterity and which those who trouble about such trifles understand. We, also, at one time dabbled a little in this science, not in order to cast horoscopes (God forbid!), but by gaining a more accurate idea of this vain study to be able to pass judgment upon its devotees. I do not mention this for the sake of boasting, but to prove that during my father's reign many of the sciences made great progress, as he honoured both philosophers and philosophy itself, but towards this teaching of astrology he showed some hostility, I believe because it tended to make people of a guileless nature reject their faith in God and gape at the stars.

Anna and the Crusaders

Anna's views on the corruption, depravity and rapacity of the Crusaders is a joy to read and a good counterpoint to received Western views, she was deeply sceptical of the wisdom of involving the West and the Pope in the fight against the Turks. (Though there is a clear subtext that she fancied the Norman leader Bohemond). She was eventually proved right as in 1204, 50 years after she dies, the 4th Crusade decided to sack Constantinople rather than fight Turks, which did far more damage to Byzantium than Manzikert did

There is a very approachable book on Anna Komnene called "Anna of Byzantium" by Tracy Barrett, that's the picture above.

No sooner do Toyota have an unexplained bug in their cars acceleration, than we get this classic from Wired:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

This illustrates another of the downsides of simple mass interconnectness without robust security and risk mitigation systems (a similar example is computer trading systems that go into a downward sell spiral).

I recall reading a Sci Fi story many years ago (70's) about a "wired" world in which a country guy with an old petrol engined, non computerised car drives into town and is nearly killed by enraged townies who se him as eco-unfriendly, but then something goes wrong with The Grid in a levee flood and all their electric cars stop with them stuck inside, and they get drowned.

The dream is to hook up all cars so they can speed seamlessly along and optimise traffic flows. The reality, unless systems are very secure and resilient, will be massive pile ups and carnage.