Layer 421 . . . People Power, By-Election, Miliband, Obama, America, Wikipedia and Intelligence

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Tunisia

"A lesson in people power - from the Arab world!" said the Channel 4 correspondent. Non-violent demonstrations "led by the secular middle class" have deposed the President, who has now left the country.
The protests were over unemployment, rising prices, lack of proper democracy, and State repression.

Interesting lesson . . .

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By-Election Non Shock
So the Oldham and Saddleworth result turned out pretty much as expected. So what?

I watched the studio discussion after the results came in. The Tory talking head was decent, but witless, and said nothing of interest or impact. The Labour guy was also uninspiring. This was worrying - the fact that Ed Miliband thinks so highly of Sadiq Khan and yet he seems callow, unprepossessing and lacking in style as well as substance. Of course Ed thinks that Khan, being of minority ethnic origins, is a good choice to speak after an election in an area such as O & S. He's not. He's another young politico burning with ambition and guile, and not much else. At least that's what comes across from the TV. Not an attractive personality. Not a good speaker. Not convincing.

The LibDem guy was the most interesting in that he simply twaddled on about the LibDem vote holding up - which was clearly not the case. Why let him get away with it? It's perfectly obvious that it was tactical Tory voting that kept the LibDem vote somewhat respectable. Why bullshit about this? Why not just admit that  thousands of Labour voters who either abstained or voted LibDem in order to get rid of Brown and New Labour are now back in the fold? Why not admit that thousands of people, including lots of first-time voters, who voted LibDem in order to break the Lab-Con monopoly are appalled at what the LibDems have done within the coalition, and will never vote for them again?

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And then there was Ed Miliband giving a few comments this morning. Not good, Ed! Talking about voters being against the coalition on account of the VAT increases and tuition fees. For fuck's sake - these are the minor issues! He should be hammering the coalition at every opportunity about the vicious budget cuts, and their determination to shrink State spending at a moment when it's vital it should be broadly maintained (apart from legitimate cutting of waste and crap projects). He should be hammering them about their failure to do something about the bankers and their bonuses. He should be hitting them hard about their deliberate use of unemployment as a cost-cutting measure, and about the illegitimacy of this - especially as unemployment reduces the national income tax take, and requires more state spending on individual and family support. He ought to be beating on the Tories for their illigitimate radical changes to the NHS and the education systems - their Shock Doctrine do-it-all-in-the-first-six-months-without-any-consultation neo-conservative slash and burn tactics.

Wake up, Ed! You were right to stand for the leadership in order to draw a line under New Labour, and you're a bright and decent guy - but you really have to be better prepared for interviews and say the things that are really important, the things that are most likely to make an impact. Compared with highlighting the really big issues this emphasis on the VAT increase and on the decision to ensure students pay higher fees are just pinpricks in the coalition's thick skin.

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Simon Jenkins on Obama and America

The USA, as we know, is a monster. Who'd be the President of such a huge, violent, unmanageable country? What kind of people even want to be Senators and Congressmen?

Free speech can't exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order

If America is to speak in a way that heals, as Obama wishes, it needs the curbs and regulations that make freedom of expression real

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/13/free-speech-us-politics-obama

The ugly American is back. Can the handsome one do anything about it? When Barack Obama addressed a shocked nation in Tuscon, Arizona, yesterday, he deployed the only weapon left to a crippled presidency: the power of rhetorical cliche. He deployed it brilliantly.

The vitriol and inaccuracy of the campaign against Obama's public health reforms last year were like those against abortion and homosexuality. To many Europeans, the echo across the Atlantic came from a people isolated from the outside world and unable to handle today's social and scientific progress. The debate was infused with nastiness and xenophobia, as if the US was a land composed of tribes bred only to hate the outside world, and often themselves.

I was asked some time ago by a university-educated Texan, in the nicest possible way, what it was like to live in a country of "baby-killers" about to be "overrun by Muslim bad guys". I inquired where he had gained this bizarre impression of Europe, which he had never visited. It turned out his sole information about the world beyond America's shore came from Fox News. He was not stupid. But he and millions of people like him considered this source of news a sufficient window on the world. He genuinely thought American troops would soon have to save Europe from "the Arabs".

Fine. But how different is this from all those in Britain who  get their news exclusively or mainly from the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express, etc? There are lots of people here who apparently believe that BBC news and current affairs are hopelessly biased towards the left wing. And who tells them this? Those newspapers, of course. Turn on any phone-in radio programme and just listen to these morons.

When the art historian and TV presenter Sir Kenneth Clark was asked what quality best defined civilisation, he did not answer with liberty or wealth or equality. He answered with courtesy, the framework of rules governing people's tolerance of each other, so their discourse might be creative. Most of the time, it is best for that courtesy to be informal. The best rebuttal of the politics of hate is a torrent of love – or, if not love, at least of facts.

But sometimes, as Obama said, there is a yearning "to try to impose some order on the chaos". If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order. It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains.

Obama's full speech available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbJmXQDIGA

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Intelligence

I've finally got round to watching the recent BBC4 Horizon programme about 'intelligence'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00x7cb3/What_Makes_Us_Clever_A_Horizon_Guide_to_Intelligence/

On the website the "key talent" for this programme is listed as the presenter, Dallas Campbell. Dear oh dear.

Dallas Campbell delves into the Horizon archive to discover how our understanding of intelligence has transformed over the last century. From early caveman thinkers to computers doing the thinking for us, he discovers the best ways of testing how clever we are - and enhancing it.

How "clever", eh?

No. Throughout this programme there's absolutely no attempt to differentiate 'intellect' from 'intelligence'. The script is so stupid it continuously uses the word intelligence when it actually means intellect.

IQ is of course the starting point - "the benchmark".

IQ testing brands us with "a single mark".
IQ testing was introduced in 1912. Almost a century ago, and we're still doing it.
How has our understanding of intelligence changed?
Sternberg was introduced and talked about "the testing 'industry'". Well we know all about that!
Someone called Gould talked about animal and insect 'instinctual' intelligence as being "automatic responses to cues"
Is this intelligence?
The presenter clearly thought not. He's obviously not even considered instinct as a true intelligence.
He was only interested in 'ability to solve complex problems'.
Chimps and bees were described as 'Intelligent enough to cooperate' - so there's some sort of inkling there about social intelligence, but it was quickly glossed over.
'When did we learn to think?'
"Humans alone plan ahead, dream and think. Other animals live from day to day."
How do we find evidence of the first recorded expressions of intelligence?
'Only humans create and can make sense of art.'
"Paintings and abstract art are expressions of thought."
The ability to store something outside the human brain.
Galton was convinced that intelligence is inherited.
He was a hero for Cyril Burt. Ah, yes. Dear Cyril. The Bogus Man.
He believed in Eugenics and 'good birth'.
Believed the poor should be prevented from having children. Hitler agreed.
Burt was responsible for the development of IQ tests and the introduction of the 11+.
He claimed to have tested separated twins - and claimed that genetics is responsible for 80% of IQ.
Only after his death were his results properly scrutinised.
'Clearly something was drastically wrong.'
Probably he never saw a single separated twin.
Robert Graham believed the gene pool was deteriorating. He hoped to use the 'sperm of clever men' to breed 'intelligent kids' with 'outstanding genes'.
His sperm bank was operational for nearly 20 years.
Three Nobel scientists were persuaded to donate sperm.
So are there inherited components of intelligence? No specific genes have ever been identified.
But a large part of intelligence IS inherited, according to recent research with twins. According to this programme.
Should we be engaging the minds of children in "something useful" ALL of the time?
Can other behaviours predict academic success?
Kids who defer gratification apparently do better at school.
Other variables? Parents? Upbringing? Wider environment?
"IQ tests seem to show we have an all-purpose thinking skill that can be measured."
Memory/intellect seems to be an all-round ability. (?)
What about a broader spectrum of skills, abilties and aptitudes?
Howard Gardner and his Multiple Intelligence Theory were eventually mentioned.
Gardner says we have at least 8 separate intelligences.
But there's NO agreed system for measuring them.
Writer and dramatist Bonnie Greer scored highest of a bright bunch of people when 'a wider range of skills' was considered. Joint top with a quantum physicist. But we never got to find out which skills she did well on.
Is a high IQ a predictor of longevity?
Can we use microwaves to alter the structure of the brain?
Could this be the dawn of a brave new world?


Lawks. Most unenlightening. Such a waste of a programme.

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Wikipedia

We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility

For all its shortcomings Wikipedia, now aged 10, is the internet's biggest and best example of not-for-profit idealism

by Timothy Garton-Ash

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/12/wikipedia-us-pioneer-global-idealism

If Wikipedia's principal architect, Jimmy Wales, had chosen to commercialise the enterprise, he could now be worth billions – like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Putting it all under the not-for-profit umbrella was, Wales quipped to me, at once the stupidest and the cleverest thing he ever did. More than any other major global site, Wikipedia still breathes the utopian idealism of the internet's heroic early days. Wikipedians, as they style themselves, are men and women with a mission. That mission, upon which they boldly go, is summed up in this almost Lennonist (that's John, not Vladimir) sentence from the man they all refer to as Jimmy: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

To suggest that this utopian goal could be achieved by a world wide web of volunteers – working for nothing, editing anything and everything, with the words they type immediately visible for the whole world to see – was of course a totally barmy idea. Yet this barmy army has come a remarkably long way in just 10 years.

We do not yet know if the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, was a direct product of the vitriolic incivility of American political discourse, as heard on talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News. A crazy man may just be crazy. But America's daily political vitriol is an undeniable fact. Against that depressing background, it is good to be able to celebrate an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility.

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I was intending to finish this blog with a piece on another TV programme about children under pressure, but that'll have to wait till tomorrow. Y'all come back now.

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Layer 207 . . . Free Speech, Privatisation, Annual Elections and Parallel Universes.

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Some things the Guardian gets wrong, but there's a very great deal which it, and its writers,  get absolutely right.

George Monbiot, for example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/19/eady-libel-tourism-free-speech 

How our senior libel judge stamps on free speech – all over the world

This is a very important focus on this country's appalling libel laws, and how they serve mainly the interests of the rich and powerful. Starting with the Guardian's clash last week with Trafigura and its solicitors' attempts to prevent publication of information that ought to be in the public realm -

“Trafigura's super-injunction is weird for lots of reasons. But the strangest fact is this: it has nothing to do with the Honourable Mr Justice Eady. The company's lawyers injuncted the Guardian, injuncted their injunction, and tried to injunct reports of parliament's proceedings. And they did all this without enlisting the help of the hanging judge of the Queen's Bench Division, the legal censor who appears to be fighting a one-man battle against freedom of speech. That's quite an achievement.

But even as the Trafigura case was being discussed in parliament, the court of appeal was handing down yet another damning ruling on Sir David Eady's judgments.

Eady [appears]to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing.

In another case

"The law lords decided that Eady was "hostile to the spirit" of the public interest defence and that he had "rigidly applied the old law" in a way that was "quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading". In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady's approach to that of the Communist party censors in the Soviet Union.

But perhaps the gravest judgments against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws, and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgments, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.

Monbiot then goes on to say

Eady's clerk tells me that the judge doesn't want to comment, but I expect he would answer that he was merely applying the law. And, though his interpretation is draconian, the sad truth is that he would be right. Long before Eady's reign of terror began, gangsters such as Robert Maxwell were using the defamation laws to sue the backside off anyone who tried to investigate their crooked affairs. Such are the perversities of this law that the English courts can be used by criminals to prevent exposure of their crimes. With average costs 140 times higher than those of other European countries, libel proceedings here can be defended only by people . . . who have a lot of money and a lot of guts. Until the law is changed, men like Mr Justice Eady will continue to hold free speech to ransom.

Perhaps the real target of this column should have been Straw, whose determination to preserve this bookburners' law means that all of us are forced to share his terror of upsetting the rich and powerful. Through 12 years in power, a government of frightened little men has done nothing to reform the democratic world's most illiberal laws, which permit an old-fashioned judge to punish us for holding power to account.

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Polly Toynbee, meanwhile, says

Beware the zealots selling miracle cures of privatisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/beware-zealots-selling-miracle-cures

"Harsher, deeper and faster, comes the call from the CBI, licking its lips as it eyes up public services cuts. Yesterday's report from the business lobby group urges an eye-watering extra £120bn to be cut two years earlier than the government proposes. Whatever remains of the public sector after all these cuts should, they say, be subject to outsourcing and privatisation with "wider use of co-funding" – the polite word for making people pay for services that are at present free.

Less for more is what happened when Tony Blair rushed out independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) to inject private sector values into NHS surgery. In 2003, Blair and Alan Milburn commissioned 36 centres with a few mobile and diagnostic units to add extra surgery beds for rapid-throughput, simple routine surgery, mostly on hips, knees and cataracts. Some more capacity was needed to speed up waiting times: old people were waiting up to eight months for cataract operations. Some consultants who kept long lists to promote their private practice needed a sharp prod.

But ISTCs were ideologically designed to part-privatise the NHS, with no level playing field for fair competition with existing hospitals. All were centrally commissioned by diktat without local consultation. The priority was "to increase private capacity" so even the most flourishing foundation hospitals were banned from bidding for the contracts. Some companies that won contracts, such as United Health, later employed key Blair health advisers. To prevent competition with the NHS, only foreign doctors were employed, many of them unfamiliar with British practice.

The contracts were disastrous from the start. They guaranteed higher prices per patient than the NHS tariff, though it should be cheaper to treat routine surgery patients in brand new units with no untidy emergency cases or old people with complex broken pelvises.

Ignoring local need meant many beds stayed empty – but the ISTCs were paid anyway. By the time many units opened, the NHS had already cut waiting lists to target levels, and there was no work to be done. When Gordon Brown came in he took one look and cancelled most of the second wave: Alan Johnson found one centre with bed occupancy under 10% and closed it at once, though cancelled contracts cost the NHS £37m. The Tories, egged on by private health companies, unfairly accused Brown of being the roadblock to Blairite "reforms" for ideological reasons. The truth is that the Department of Health finds ISTCs still cost 11% more per operation, and government sources say bed occupancy falls as low as 78%, far below the NHS which is well over 90%.

How is the quality? Officially, it's good, but a two-year study published last month in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery casts doubts: examining patients sent from Cardiff to the Weston-super-Mare ISTC, two-thirds of hip replacements showed evidence of poor technique, with 18% needing repair surgery. That is 20 times the normal NHS rate for revisions and each costs about £15,000. Leading orthopaedic surgeons report similar evidence, pointing out that ISTCs should perform better, since they are never sent complex cases.

Weak public managers are often even worse at drawing up private finance initiative, public-private partnership or even bog-standard procurement deals with the private sector. The danger is that canny companies will run rings round civil servants with neither the knowledge not the greedy motivation to squeeze out every penny's worth.

I have a small example: researching my book Hard Work, I took an agency job as a hospital night cleaner and it was plain that far too many hours had been assigned to a simple routine. The hospital manager who drew up the contract had long lost touch with cleaning and was clueless as to how long a job should take. There are worse examples, where hospital cleaning companies undercut each other and skimp on the job, with disastrous consequences. Either way, ward sisters have lost the power to manage cleaners to their own standards, as they used to in cleaner pre-contracting days.

There is no one-size-fits-all. The lesson of the ISTC debacle is that politicians who dash for eye-catching quick fixes, "modernising" and "reforming" with an ideological zeal for the private sector will come a cropper. Blair did it often with his "scars on my back" political distaste for the public sector; Brown's worst case was his botched PPP for the London tube, done to spite Ken Livingstone. Beware politicians of all complexions who defy complexity to opt for political, not pragmatic solutions.

One of the main reasons for highlighting so much of this is that my own mother was one of the victims of those badly performed hip replacement operations.
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft this week writes a good column about the need for annual parliamentary elections -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/chartists-electoral-reform-annual-parliaments

Now more than ever, Britain needs the last Chartist reform

"The expenses scandal has prompted a panoply of ideas to fix politics. But the strongest of all is missing: annual elections

Although the expenses scandal has prompted various schemes for constitutional and electoral reform, here is one that has gone missing. And yet it was among the radical Chartists' demands for parliamentary reform more than 150 years ago, and is the simplest and potentially the most effective of all.

But repellent as the MPs' impenitence is, institutional reform of parliament is desirable in its own right – and should be achievable. Looking over our political history, it's striking how daring radical demands once seemed, and how almost all were met, and quite soon at that.

The People's Charter in 1838 demanded six reforms, only one of which has not been achieved to this day. Universal suffrage took less than 80 years to accomplish, and property qualifications for voting were finally ended . . . The secret ballot was introduced as early as 1872.

Successive reform acts slowly addressed the Chartists' demand for "equal representation", in the sense that all constituencies should have electorates of roughly equal size.

As to the fifth demand, payment of members began in 1912, and has had an unintended consequence, not to say a lamentable one: the emergence of a new class of permanent, if often mediocre, professional politicians. This was further encouraged by a system of expenses that, even when it wasn't flagrantly dishonest, rested on the assumption that politics was a full-time profession. That has now met its nemesis.

And the sixth demand? This was the one never achieved, rarely mentioned now, but simpler than any of the others: annual parliaments.

To those Victorian radicals it was axiomatic that the best way to make the government accountable to parliament was to make parliament accountable to the electorate – every year. The objections to this are themselves revealing. Too expensive? But elections don't need to involve enormous sums of money spent by parties, and we would be much better off without that. Governments would be less stable and weaker? Well, yes, that's the point. Electing parliament every year would keep our rulers on their toes. More than any other possible reform it answers the simplest call of all: power to the people."

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A very lucky universe

There's a fascinating column by John Gribbin on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which has “suffered a series of mishaps preventing it from commencing its search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/cern-higgs-boson-particle

As I understand it, Gribbin is saying that in a parallel universe this collider did actually work when it was switched on, and it immediately caused that particular universe to unravel and disappear. The reason we're still here and still trying to get the collider to work is because it refuses to work each time we press the switch, in our particular universe at least. However, several other parallel universes have probably already disappeared owing to the thing actually working (in them) each time we've tried to switch it on. Lucky us! All we have to do now is stop trying to make it work.

PhillipD comments -

As Niels Bohr once (more or less) said: 'If you don't get a headache thinking about this stuff, you don't understand it'.
Fortunately, I don't understand it so just maybe I'll sleep tonight :-) If I could really grasp this stuff I suspect it would drive me nuts!

AllyF says -

I read about multiverses, time-travel, particle transportation and all this stuff. I think hard about it.
Then I return to the conclusion that you're all making it up as you go along.
But good luck to you. It's more entertaining than sociology.

ThurrockHunt says -

Future ripples and multiverses my arse, it doesn't work because they've ballsed up the wiring. Same thing happened with our boiler.

DomC -

This is all very well but both Blue Peter and Tomorrows World promised me Jet powered rocket pants by now... where are they? That's what I'd like to know

ChanceyGardner -

Computer says No.

delphinia -

Schroedinger's blasted cat wakes me up at 3 am on alternate mornings.
Did you know he ( Schroedinger, not the cat) is buried in Alpbach, Austria, with a minging little plaque?

Butwhatif -
If 8 out of 10 of Shroedinger's cats prefer Whiskas, what about the other 10?

Haliborange -
Parallel universes?
You can buy one here for a quid.
http://www.youruniverse.co.uk/

Bristol Boy -

excellent artic .  .  .  .  .
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