Manchester says No to congestion charge

Given that I'm a highly opinionated person, I express surprisingly few of my opinions on this blog. But I'm going to make an exception in this instance. Today I'm pretty proud to be a Mancunian, even though I knew really that the congestion charge vote would go to a No as I didn't know a single Mancunian who was voting in favour.

Some of the comments in the Guardian demonstrate the kind of contempt for the views of ordinary people that I've come to expect from this government. One very astutely draws parallel with the Irish referendum over the summer that rejected the European Lisbon treaty and as a result drew ugly responses negating the validity of democratic mechanisms when you don't get the result you want. Responses along the lines of "those ungrateful Irish after all that Europe has done for them" and "we'll carry on run the vote again until we get the right result" are not guaranteed to bring universal harmony across national and social divides any time soon. However, they're extremely likely to bring out the inner rebel in quite a lot of people, certainly those with any self-respect.

I don't agree with people who are saying, albeit sympathetically, that it's about reluctance to vote for extra taxes at the start of an economic downturn. And it's certainly not true that the No vote is a vote against public transport; Mancunians are justly proud of their tram system. I really think it's about people getting fed up of being told what to think (where was the No campaign, for example?), and that is a good thing, surely, for everyone, no matter where they live.

Thai green fish curry

Way back in October, Rob Styles tagged me to get me to blog a recipe. It's a token of the esteem that I hold for Rob that I'm prepared do divulge my favourite and most admired recipe.

So here's how you make the best Thai green fish curry ever, for 2-3 people. It's on the soupy side, and it's fragrant and flavoursome rather than red hot. But that's the way I like it.

Besides the fact that it tastes great and everyone loves it, the beauty of this recipe is that you can make the paste well in advance, and then the rest of the curry can be made in a matter of minutes.

Ingredients for the paste:

2 stalks of lemon grass finely chopped

3 hot green chillis, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and chopped

1 shallot peeled and finely chopped

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only

Half a level teaspoon of ground cumin

Half a level teaspoon of ground coriander

1 tablespoon of lime juice

1 tablespoon of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Half a level teaspoon of ground black peppercorns

Ingredients for the curry:

500g haddock fillets, skinned, cut into wide pieces

200g bag of frozen, cooked and peeled extra large prawns

1 tablespoon of groundnut oil

250ml coconut milk

250ml fish stock

8 lime leaves

15g fresh basil, leaves only, torn

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only, torn

Method:

Put all the paste ingredients into a food processor and blitz into a rough paste, stopping to scrape down sides with rubber spatula as necessary.

Fry paste in the oil for 1-2 minutes, stirring so it doesn't colour.

Pour in coconut milk and add stock, lime leaves, haddock and prawns.

Simmer until fish starts to turn opaque, stirring regularly so the sauce doesn't catch - 7-8 minutes.

Add basil and coriander leaves. Check seasoning.

Remove lime leaves before serving.

That debatable time of year...

Can it really be a year since I drove over to University of Aston one autumn evening in 2007, and had the most terrifying and also rewarding evening in years?

Once again the opening rounds of the national schools competition Debating Matters are taking place across the land, and this year the venue for me, as one of the judges, was Wolverhampton High School for Girls. The competition has presumably grown so much in the past year that there are now two opening rounds in the West Midlands instead of one. Which is utterly fantastic, as Debating Matters must be one of the finest cerebral experiences you can have, either as a sixth former or as a judge.

This year the three subjects for debate in the opening round were

• Space Travel - Manned or unmanned?
• Privacy
• Congestion charge

The passing year had not dimmed the memory of the sheer tedium of ecotourism and the various arcane offsetting schemes that I had to ingest for last year's competition, so naturally I avoided the congestion charge like the plague. This was a shame because it produced the liveliest debate of the night. Having done quite a lot of the recommended reading on space travel and privacy, then, and considered some tricky questions to ask the hapless debaters, I drove off to Wolverhampton and managed to arrive on time by some quirk of luck entirely unrelated to the degree of journey planning carried out.

In fact I felt like crap; I had done all day, so I'd worked from home, secure in the belief that the sight of me rocking back and forth in physical pain might cause some consternation among my colleagues. But by the end of the evening, I felt great, and just like last year, the whole experience gave me a boost of energy that lasted for days. I think I wrote words to this effect in my blog posting on this subject last (academic) year, but it bears repeating. When you are privileged enough to share a room with these 17 year olds who are unbelievably well prepared and arguing so passionately and skilfully, all your anxieties about our dumbed down society just fall away and you remember that the very best of humanity can prevail in the most unlikely of circumstances.

All of this was underlined by the content of the Space Travel debate. I plead guilty to having been completely ignorant about the manned vs unmanned debate prior to preparing for Debating Matters, whereas I am now a veteran of over 3 articles from The Space Review!! The arguments in favour of manned space exploration are unapologetically humanist. It's not even a pro-science versus anti-science thing. Right now, to take a purely pro-science stance involves arguing for unmanned not manned space travel - the progress that robotic and other forms of unmanned exploration have made in a number of fields vastly outweighs the scientific achievements of the Apollo missions. But apparently, as a result of those Apollo missions, admissions to undergraduate science courses doubled in the US, as did PhD applications. The very existence of Silicon Valley is testimony to the inspiration that the moon landings created among us earth-dwellers. Manned space travel is also extremely unsafe and bloody expensive! So it's pretty difficult to argue its case, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances (not to mention the prevailing mood of risk-aversion) that we're all experiencing right now. But sometimes you've just got to take a long term view. Because if a bunch of British 17 year olds, brought up in an era of Reality TV and ubiquitous corporate branding, can demonstrate rigorous and passionate debating beyond their years, just think what they might achieve if human space explorers once again go beyond what was previously considered to be unachievable.

Meanwhile, Debating Matters goes from strength to strength, as indeed it should. It was recently announced that The British Council will be bringing the competition to India, using its network of schools and educational institutions, and the plan is that the contest will gradually be developed into "a real-time television reality show" according to India edunews. Time to revise my opinions of reality TV? Let's have a debate!

Emerging Economies Question Time @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:

• John Dovey – acting president, UK Corporates BT Global Services
• Jim O’Neill – MD Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, creator of the acronym BRICS
• Stuart Simpson – Financial Analyst and journalist
• Dr Linda Yueh – Oxford University, author of Macroeconomics and globalisation and economic growth in China
• Professor Slavo Redosovich, LSE
  

Main arguments:
What will be the foreign policy consequences of the crisis for China and India?

• Linda: India and China are grappling with the potential foreign policy consequences of the global downturn. China sees itself as an emerging economy, focusing primarily on the growth of its own economy.
• Jim: Next week France will formally propose that the G7 be expanded to include the BRICs. This is long overdue, especially in view of the crisis. It’s going to be important that the Chinese economy be led by internal consumption rather than export, as there won’t be a US economy to export to .
• Stuart: We need to differentiate between China entering the world stage, and China as a global manager. China is not yet a rich country.
  

Why so much talk about China and India, why so little attention to Brazil and Russia?

• Jim: India has 1.1 bn people; China has 1.3 bn. Russian and Brazilian populations are small in comparison. With urbanisation a key driver for both China and India, the scale of their potential is of a different order. It is wrong to focus on India and China though. Brazil and Russia are much more powerful economically than in the past. Brazil keeps good macroeconomic stability, and in 30 years time could be one of the biggest 7-8 economies of the world. Brazil has handled itself very well in the crisis to date. Russia is far too dependent on oil. It needs to reduce this dependency to reach its potential.
  Traditionally economic downturns have impacted the developing world disproportionately. Is this still true?
• Stuart: The decoupling issue. China et al are becoming more self-reliant. Unless some solutions are arrived at, though, some countries will really suffer. Some countries can’t rely on national banks, foreign exchange reserves, i.e. those mechanisms currently being widely used across the globe to deal with the crisis.
• Jim: The BRIC economies are still developing in the classical sense. Now they’re an integral part of the world economy with their own multinationals and so on. The consensus is that the BRICs will continue to grow in the next 30 years.
• John: The world is a lot more complex. The average price in Chinese designer shops is a lot higher than in the Western equivalents. And most of the shoppers there are Chinese not tourists. So there’s a significant middle-class emerging.
• Linda: Are they themselves in financial crisis? All markets are interlinked. One potential problem is protectionism. The view that opening the borders for trade isn’t helpful is a bit dated. Brazil has brought actions against US and Europe and won. Virtually no country in the world truly has free trade and open borders. In the NGO world, protectionism will be strongly under consideration. The IMF will have to provide bail-out packages for Pakistan, but they shouldn’t be telling them how to run their own country. The IMF is weaker than it was 10 years ago, in any case.
• Jim: There is a difference between modest protection for countries in an emergent phase and the aggressive protectionism of the 1930s. Germany has been sustained over the past 2 years by exports to China and Russia. IMF seems strongly pro-international trade at the moment. The Norman Foster partnership, with 1400 employees the biggest employer in Wandsworth, is almost entirely dependent on China.
  

Could international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF become obsolete?

• Linda: IMF has just appointed its first Chief Economist from an emerging economy – China. So it’s trying to reinvent itself although it may be too slow.
• Slavo: World Bank started this process earlier with its “Learning from the 90s” document. It’s trying to fashion itself as a developing agency.
• Stuart: The IMF doesn’t have the resources to perform the same role as before. Partly because of BRIC growth - the reserves of China dwarf IMF reserves. Years ago, South Korea needed IMF help. So the IMF came in and dictated how South Korea was to be run. China saw this and decided the same would never happen to him,a nd built its foreign exchange reserves.
• Jim: The world has blown up. This is a very powerful and scary crisis. Without powerful responses by multiple countries, it would be a lot worse. The IMF is currently back in business because a couple of developing countries have been very irresponsible. But the IMF and the World Bank need to become institutions reflecting the complexity of the modern world. So Western nations need to agree to substantial structural changes. The IMF and World Bank are currently well past their sell-by date.

To what extent is the crisis due to under-consumption in China?

• John: Are the financial sectors of the West clearly at fault? Complex financial derivatives have produced a classic bubble.
• Jim: Indirectly, part of the crisis is caused by China saving so much. The global savings glut has led indirectly to the overheating of the US property market.
• Linda: In macroeconomics, these are just identities, rather than causes and effects. Americans were consuming too much way before China started saving too much. China needs to look internally and determine why is its consumption so low. Culturally, they have fears of catastrophic health events, and worry about their children’s education. It’s not a blame thing.
• Jim: Global economic crises happen. Human behaviour goes between greed and fear. The Chinese authorities wanted the decade to be dominated by an export strategy, and only now do we see that it was unsustainable.
• Stuart: US consumes 72% of its GDP. [Jim: This is way too much.] A lot of capital goes to the US in the form of debt, with China buying US Treasury bonds. There’s a lot of saving in the Chinese corporate sector as well. US business didn’t take advantage of the cheap credits. The money didn’t go into production. Why not?
• Linda: Usually, if there are low savings, it should be expensive to borrow.
• Jim: This is not a static environment right now. This year US’s current account deficit is starting to disappear. US is selling more cars abroad than it is importing. Surpluses in the emerging economies are slowing down – Russia, India and Brazil now have deficits. Countries will no longer be able to depend on exporting to the US.
• Jim: The current situation feels bad. But it is reality. Global growth is forecast at 3%. Last year it was 3.2%, so it isn’t the end of the world. Price mechanisms work themselves through – both sides of the US election are committed to exploring alternative forms of energy. China has done more for globalisation than the US in the past decade. Countries like Nigeria are intellectually very energised by the example of China and how they’ve raised themselves from poverty without behaving like the US.
• Stuart: There is much more political freedom for developing countries now with China in the picture.
• Linda: 56% of the Chinese population is still rural. We should be wary of learning too much from a country whose path is not yet set.
• Jim: The last decade shows that international trade is one of the few win-win games that exist. Global inequalities are no declining rapidly. In the next 30 years, there will be an additional 30 billion new members of the middle class.
  

But in Africa, aren’t some countries still undeveloped?

• Stuart: Development since the industrial revolution has been characterised by divergence between developed and developing countries. Only with China has that changed. China shows the way out of poverty – with massive infrastructural projects and engagement with the global economy, rather than the small-scale projects proposed by NGOs.
• Linda: Political reform is happening in China, but in a quiet slow way because the Chinese government wants to be responsive and stay in power. So it does it by focus groups etc. but rejects the Western model.
• Stuart? Yes! It’s following the anti-democratic practices of Western political forces like New Labour!

Growing pains: the pros and cons of economic dynamism @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:
· Daniel Ben-Ami, finance and economics journalist
· Dr Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge
· Paul Mason, TV broadcast journalist
· Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times

Takeaways:

• Dynamism is the most profound concept for our civilisation. It matters because it transforms people’s lives. It underpins our life expectancy, food, the expectations of the next generation reaching adulthood. It both signifies and generates change. It generates a range of opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. In agrarian societies, serfdom was normal, and the prosperous had to live from their labours. It has also transformed the position of women, with labour devices, contraception and so forth. Political democracy is both a natural expression and a concomitant of economic dynamism. A positive sum society – with the total number of goods and services rising over time.
• In the early 1950s the life expectancy of people in the third world was 41, whereas today it’s 63-4. This is a measure of the huge benefits of growth for developing countries.
• Ha-Joon Chang was born in South Korea in 1963, and has experienced phenomenal changes in the standard of living during his lifetime. It’s not just about having more money and things – it’s life expectancy, reductions in infant mortality and so on. In one and a half generations, South Korea has acquired the life expectancy of Switzerland! But this is unachievable without brutality and dislocation. Nevertheless, in undeveloped countries, there’s a lot more violence and destitution. Child labour was abolished in South Korea in the early 1960s, so there are labour rights and freedoms in place now. So the main problem with today’s liberal democracy is that growth is not executed well enough.
• Paul Mason maintained that it’s correct to question the conditions of growth. In early capitalism, it was believed that capitalism would collapse without the labour of 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. Then we saw that after the Factories Act, regulated capitalism was actually more dynamic. This is inimical to the Ayn Rand principle – that only selfishness can act as a dynamo for growth. A mature debate is needed around the distribution of wealth.
• Martin Wolf argued that the pursuit of GDP per se is meaningless. The biggest change in economics over the past 30 years has been the integration of Asian labour into the global economy.
• Up to the 1980s, a great proportion of the gains of capitalism went to the working classes of industrialised countries. This is partly because of the internal politics of those countries. The interests of the UK and Chinese working classes are directly antithetical. Paul countered this by saying that labour movements have been a fundamental part of capitalism since the first strike in Lancashire in 1818. China has just passed its own Factories Act – The Contract Labour Law was passed this year. Some factories have moved to Cambodia as a result, but the Chinese government is firm that labour regulations will be enforced.
• Local pollution will ultimately be fixed by local political processes. But are there global constraints, and if so how will they be handled? Drinking water is a real constraint to growth in both India and China. Ditto petrol. India can’t afford oil at $100 a barrel, and it’s forecast to rise to $500. Paul argued that the issue of water in China isn’t about quantity but quality. Why is the Yangtse so polluted? It’s because of a succession of paper factories killing everything in the river. Daniel argued that there is no inevitability of water shortage in India. They need infrastructural investment, that’s all. There’s always desalination if all else fails – look at Dubai, Arizona etc. There is a classic Malthusian confusion of infrastructural issues and god-given problems. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of Stone. Martin argued back that over-dependence on fossil fuels is a problem – the water problem in India is exaggerated, but the fuel problem isn’t. India’s challenges are unique but unbelievably exciting.
• Daniel Ben-Ami argued that the problem with the term “sustainability” is that it’s used in so many ways. He opposes the idea that entire generations should hold themselves back because of the risk of damage to future generations. The real problem is unbalanced growth that is insufficiently productive.
• In Germany in the 19th century, the average number of working hours per week was 90, whereas now it’s 35. US work about 20-30% longer than us.
• In all countries, as soon as women start having a choice, they stop having the children they don’t want.
• In India and China the benefits of growth are ceasing to spread among the population – this is a significant problem.

The Credit Crunch Demystified @Battle of Ideas

This session was an on-stage debate between:
· Phil Mullan, director of Business Transformation, Easynet (in a personal capacity)
· Dr Michael Savage, Investment Banker (in a personal capacity)

God this session was packed! Standing room only in the biggest room of the building. As Phil Mullan pointed out, you can usually house the economics session in the broom cupboard, with room to spare. As an aside, at the meeting of the CILIP Update Editorial Board on Friday, the icebreaker at the start of the meeting was to state what you’re reading, and at least 2 people said they’d stopped reading novels in order to be able to follow the news and gain an understanding of the economic situation.

The essence of the debate was:

• What is the severity of the current crisis? Well, it’s very severe! But although it’s being described as the worst financial crisis ever, the human dimension is muted – having said that, it’s so far had a limited effect on the economy – unemployment isn’t as bad as it was in the 1980s for example. But there’s a lot of misery and hardship to come.
• Phil: The most important thing is that the crisis isn’t just about economic recession: it reflects a fundamental atrophy of economic activity in the West. This is very serious, with politicians unable to cope, it will be more difficult for them to contain the consequences.
• Michael: Right across the board, everyone failed to see this coming. In terms of steps taken by governments, allowing Lehmann to fail has proven catastrophic, but that this couldn’t have been foreseen. The British banking system was within hours of failing.
• Phil: The past 14 months had been characterised as panicky paralysis with intermittent firefighting. George Soros had said that governments have been consistently behind the curve, displaying oscillation and lack of imagination. We’ve lived with an economic paradigm of “There is no alternative” [to the market] for a quarter of a century now, with a very technical as opposed to political approach to running the economy. But the people elected democratically failed to see this coming. There’s been no attempt to date to grasp the fundamentals.
• Michael: Some of the growth and dynamism in the West has been false, but this has nevertheless been a period of great consistent growth and innovation, although we should have picked up on the issues in the financial sector earlier.
• Phil: This position amounts to a fetishisation of numbers – growth looked good but what about the quality of growth? In reality, the West has experienced prosperity based on growth elsewhere. Economic activity in countries such as the US and UK has been based on a. Property and retail, and the interactions between the two b. Financial services c. Public sector. So a huge amount of activity has been based on circulation and services around it, while the productive economy has shrunk. Manufacturing in the US now only represents 12% of the economy. 30 years ago, financial activity comprised only 20% of the average US corporation, whereas today that figure is 50%. Back to the drivers, only c. public spending now remains. This introduces a very real risk of a state deficit crisis. The economy has been hollowed out. When an economy doesn’t make much, and the financial, property and retail sectors implode, what’s left? Apart from making money out of the East, of course.
• Michael: US still makes up 25% of the global economy. The East is still led by the US – the only country with the financial depth and breadth to manage the crisis. The current crisis is driven by additional money in the system, not just because of bank lending, but money from Asian and oil-producing economies. Simply put, US, UK et al have been spending more money than they’ve made. Other countries, by contrast, have been saving masses of money and pumping it into the West. This has led to low interest rates in the West. The West has then made money where it can – for example from property.
• Phil: China has been keeping the West afloat. Value production continues in the West, but it’s not new value creation, but creaming off value created elsewhere in the world. China is going to have a hard time in the next two years with the spillover from this. US is the most indebted country in the world, and yet presumes to be the world leader. The economy pre-crisis was characterised as SAD – stable; anaemic; durable. The West has been able, since the 1980s, to cope with its difficulties; political stability and credit availability have together removed the need for economic restructuring. This was like a hiatus period of muddling through. The West has now had its comeuppance, and needs a long period of regeneration. Everyone is going to feel a lot of pain, but at the moment there’s a strange feeling of denial in society about the future repercussions of the downturn.
• Michael: The recent period has been characterised by consistently high growth and employment. It hasn’t been SAD at all – actually it’s been a great period in the economy. The banking sector had to be bailed out, though, because there was a blunt choice between bail-out or generalised depression. We now need to think fully about how to manage the economy, the banks and restructure society.
• Phil: 40% of GDP in China is based on economic investment. They create more values than they can use. This is much more than an economic / financial problem. Intellectually, the most important point is the hollowness of economic life, and the imbalances between economics and politics globally. We’re closer to barbarism than we were 10 years ago; we’re at a tipping point. There’s a potential to restructure using the East as an engine, but how likely is that?

Caught in the web: who controls the Internet? @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session of the Institute of Ideas' annual Battle of Ideas festival were:

• Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship
• Dr Tim Jordan, Open University, author of Hacking: digital media and technological determinism
• Rob Killick, CEO, cScape
• Cassandra Wilkinson, author of Don’t panic: nearly everything is better than you think

Key takeouts from this session were:

• An important question is – does the internet render the fight for free speech unnecessary? Or, in fact, is the internet at risk of becoming even more regulated than real life? Certainly, the great libertarian godfathers of the internet didn’t bargain for new forms of censorship to emerge. There is more potential for control and regulation in cyberspace than there is outside. Compare browsing in a library with browsing on the web, where the act of opening a page is exposable to other people or organisations.
• The new censors of the internet aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, they’re like a layer of middlemen. A great example is Smart Filter by Secure Computing in California. Used by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes and also in the US, its list of blocked sites is so secret that even the countries using the software are kept in the dark, and can affect more sites than you might think – for example gay and lesbian sites wrongly interpreted as being porn. The list of blocked sites is the intellectual property of Secure Computing and is protected by copyright.
• This week Yahoo and Google signed up to a voluntary agreement to protect freedom of speech in their business practices. This code of conduct took 18 months to formulate, and they’re now trying to persuade hardware suppliers to sign up. Cisco were invited to the discussions, but declined to participate. They argue that in transactions such as the supply of hardware to the Chinese government, the application of the technology they supply is not their responsibility (I’m sure I’m not the only anti-censorship activist who’s broadly sympathetic with this position).
• On “takedown notices” and their censorship implications – a group of researchers put up a fake JS Mills Appreciation Society website containing quotes from the 19th century philosopher and freedom advocate, quotes which, of course, are now out of copyright. The same researchers then sent a takedown notice to the UK ISP on the basis of a copyright contravention, who immediately obliged, taking the site down even though the text is out of copyright. A significant global trend is how easy it is to get ISP to remove material on the basis of defamation. One ISP employee in the audience added that the number of takedown notices issued is actually quite low, around one per fortnight, so it is quite easy to investigate each one. His ISP has a policy of only taking down sites if the notice has the weight of the law.
• The breakdown of anonymity, an important principle in the early days of the internet, points to a fundamental problem of the internet as public space – namely that the very digital nature of the space makes this contentious, as the web operates on privately-run networks and we leave traces of pretty much everything we do on it. With social websites such as Facebook, we’re putting personal data in the hands of Facebook who can then do anything they want with it. Rob Killick called for Facebook’s ownership of all your data on the site to be an opt-in.
• In relation to the global economic downturn, we need to recontextualise much of the discourse. When governments experience threats which they don’t know how to deal with, they tend to react with authoritarian measures. So trends towards regulation are likely to accelerate in the coming period. As individuals, we feel more isolated and individuated in these conditions, and are therefore more likely to take accepting positions of this authoritarianism. However, the deep nature of the recession we’re facing, and the absence of political solutions means that as a society we actually need more freedom to debate than less.
• Nearly everything can be said, but almost anything can be recorded and is keyword searchable. The gap between production and consumption is radically altered by the internet, and this has important consequences. Free speech hasn’t gone away with increased surveillance, but the conditions have changed.
• Tim Jordan talked about Torpark servers, a system accessible via Firefox designed to ensure anonymity on the web. Interestingly, they were impounded by Google during a recent paedophile investigation. Users of Torpark servers, which are located in Europe and the US, and were in fact designed by the US Navy and the Free Haven project, are perceived to be in authoritarian regimes. They are OS, and this raises very interesting questions – in theory the code is open to all of us, but in practical terms it’s only open to that small minority of people who can understand code. This is important in this context for determining whether there are any “back doors” i.e. ways in which users can be identified and reported. So the OS geek subculture offering an opposition to regulation is in fact not straightforward.
• The paradox of the web is that it is simultaneously outside control and under control – free speech and surveillance cohabit in cyberspace.
• Freedom of speech only means something if it’s offensive, and it is an absolute. I agreed with this, but not all panellists did.
• The difference between private speech and free speech has been eroded by the internet. We say all sorts of things in private that we may or may not really mean. But online this can be a problem. This is a very interesting dimension. At the moment, people tend to know that everything seems private whereas it is in fact recorded, but don’t really care. To an extent, of course, it doesn’t matter right now, but it may matter in the future if what you’re doing becomes politicised in some way.
• An interesting case is coming up in the UK, with the prosecution of a civil servant who wrote violent porn about what he’d like to do with Girls Aloud. This is a potentially groundbreaking case that will come up in 2009.
• An interesting debate arose around the issue of incitement. Rob Killick argued that incitement shouldn’t be a crime, although it now is one. So child rape is a crime, for example. If you see it, you should report it. But the act of seeing it should not be a crime. There are difficult issues around this – are people who are paying to see child rape actually colluding?

Re. the previous post

The bibliographic details are:
http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=3&ti=1,3&Search%5FArg=hill%2C%20robert&Search%5FCode=AUTH%5F&CNT=50&PID=GKRvCD3V0nP9Tp0gaKxmmUe2Rw&SEQ=20081029175731&SID=1
There are copies of the book at British Library, Oxford University Bodleian Library, Worcester Cathedral and Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, District of Columbia (source of bib record).

Preserving the book

At the weekend I finally got around to ordering some acid-free packaging (corrugated cardboard boxes) in which to store my antiquarian book. I desperately hope that in the time I've been procrastinating on this task I haven't caused irremediable harm to my wonderful family prayer book, my most precious possession.

Printed in 1617, the various owners of this book, presumably all direct ancestors of mine, have written their signatures, poems and quotations and sometimes have simply doodled on its now decaying pages. The oldest "contribution" that I've found is the signature of one Gabrielmus Evans, dated 1686. Was he a choir boy? That's how I see many of them, especially Joseph Donnaldson who, in an undetermined century but I'd place my bets on the 18th, filled an entire empty page with ornately written ramblings beginning with "Heavens quickning grace exalts the zealous mind, And therefore be to pious ways inclined. Joseph Donnaldson aught (sic) this Book and god give him grace on it to Loook (sic) both to Lark and understand never ..." and it gradually becomes less legible. Some other anonymous wag wrote "A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds" over and over again. More recently, James Carson of Cheetham Hill, 1861, is someone of whom I feel I should know, yet I've no idea where he fits into my family tree.

I remember very clearly staying at my Granny's house. I must have been in my early teens, and I was lying in the big bed in the spare room when my Granny came in and took the prayer book out of a drawer. I'd never seen it before and she let me browse its contents until I fell asleep. Next day I assiduously transcribed all the entries of the book, like the librarian bibliophile I was destined to be. Before she died my Granny, who herself wrote an entry in the book on her wedding day in 1939, entrusted the book into my care, but I do wonder whether the book has deteriorated under my custodianship, as I feel sure that the handwriting was clearer when I was a teenage girl than it is now.

In any case, who am I going to hand it down to? I have no children and neither does my brother. I'm sort of hoping that the recipient isn't alive yet. My cousin Ann, who's as interested in our family history as I am, has just had her first baby, but he's a boy, and I feel that a girl might look after it better, even though my Granny is still the only woman to have signed the book in nearly 4 centuries. That's just put an idea in my head - I'm going to have a party in 2017 to celebrate 4 centuries of our prayer book, and I'm going to get all my relatives to sign it.

In the meantime, it has to be consigned to the acid-free cardboard box, if only to enable me to assuage my conscience for my less than dutiful care to date.

So farewell to Gabrielmus Evans, Joseph Donnaldson, James Carson, Edmund Williams (love your bird sketch), William Evans, George Jones, David Harry, Daniel Jones (1693), Edmond Wiliams, Thomas Jones, and of course Joyce Newall nee Vosper.

See you all in 2017.

Kenan Malik at Birmingham Book Festival

Last Thursday Birmingham Book Festival played host to Kenan Malik, journalist and author of Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate. I went along with my colleague Nad (Nadeem Shabir), an exceptionally open-minded and inquiring individual who is consistently good company. Kenan ran through a number of key arguments, some of which have been covered in earlier works such as The meaning of race. One such key argument is that 85% of human difference occurs between individuals in a single population, whereas only 30% of difference occurs between so-called racial groups. Such arguments and findings have helped to demolish racial theories particularly in the post-war period, and have led to an understanding that in fact there is no evidence of race existing (between different groups of humans) in terms of clearly delineated characteristics.

Kenan then turned his attention to the politics of anti-racism, pointing out that when he was a young anti-racist activist, "black identity" was seen in political or cultural terms, rather than in terms of race itself. It was thus seen in opposition to "white" - acknowledging a broad commonality of being non-white and therefore being subjected to racism in the UK and elsewhere. Whereas in my experience, it is now common for Asians to refer to themselves as "brown", and in fact, referring Asians as blacks now seems to jar slightly.

For me there were two really important arguments that Kenan made, both of which clarified stuff that I've been turning around in my mind.

The first of these was around multi-culturalism - Kenan put forth the idea that the politics of multi-culturalism actually undermine multi-culturalism as a lived experience. In the road where I live - Burnaston Road, Hall Green, Birmingham - there is, I would say, an exceptionally good mix of ethnic groups. Crucially, this is a very dynamic mix, and as the groups intermingle, we learn more about each other and start to change as a result. This can only be a good thing, and is one of the finest aspects of Birmingham life. However Kenan argued that what multi-cultural politics does is to preserve those groups in aspic, emphasising the differences over the universality, and slowing down the process of assimilation as a result.

The second argument that really chimed with me was around differences between France and the UK with respect to racial policies. France has very different approach to the UK: it demands in quite an inflexible way that its immigrants assimilate immediately and simply become French. Although this avoids the problems attached to a more multi-cultural approach as described above, the problem is that this ignores the reality of racism. I knew as soon as I heard this argument on Thursday, that I was going to be able to hold it in my head and use it as a tool to apply to other situations, such as people arguing that gays should stop "going on about it".

Strange fruit - food for thought.

How I won my husband in a bet

Six years ago today I met Dave for the first time in the Watershed Bar, Bristol, so it seems appropriate to relate the tale of how I won my husband in a bet not so very long ago.

Summer 2002 was not an easy time for me. I was knee-deep in my Masters dissertation on citation analysis (not the easiest area of Information Science) and working full-time for Talis, so my social life was thin, to say the least. On one of the few occasions that I did go out, to a party in Moseley, I came to the tragic realisation that everyone had somehow become younger than me, and that in relationship terms, I was almost out of options.

Into this greyish existence stepped an entertaining new friend, Manish. He'd just started going out with my friend Samira, and was about to embark on a 6 week round-the-world trip with his two teacher colleagues, Fraser and Dave (yes, the hero of this rom-com has made an early appearance). The snag was that he was so smitten with Samira that he was destined to spend a good deal of the trip missing her desperately. What better way to relieve the emotional longing, then, than to go tinkering around with the personal lives of singletons such as myself and Dave. It proved pretty easy for Manish to generate some degree of mutual interest, given that I had no life to speak of and Dave (by then nicknamed Short Fuse Dave by Samira) was surrounded by Bangkok prostitutes and lady-boys. We all tentatively agreed that in Autumn, when I'd finished my dissertation, I'd go over to Bristol and we'd meet.

In September, then, the date for this auspicious meeting was set at Saturday October 12th, and over in Birmingham, considerable interest was generated. At the Patrick Kavanagh pub in Moseley one Friday night, I announced to my friends that I was sure I could get to snog Short Fuse Dave on the same night I met him for the first time. The bets rolled in until there was £35 on the table from various friends.

On Saturday October 12th 2002, 3 days after submitting my groundbreaking dissertation (which no-one has ever read apart from my supervisor and the external examiners) I drove down to Bristol with my friend Ashley, and that evening, Ashley, Samira, Manish and I went down to the Watershed bar to meet the famous Short Fuse Dave. Dave is very easy to spot, as anyone who knows this 6'8" man will testify, so I had the benefit of prior scrutiny. What I saw was the man that I'd wanted all my dates over the past 5 years to be.

Straight away I hit a barrier - acute shyness. As I spoke with Dave and Fraser for the first time, I was so nervous that the cocktail stirrer I was twiddling with flew right out of my hands and into the hood of a man a few feet away. Dave and Fraser thought this was hilarious, but I was mortified. Tactics were formulated on the fly, consisting of avoiding Dave like the plague until I'd drunk at least 4 vodkas and could be relied on to operate in the manner of a grown-up woman.

Four vodkas later we were in bar number 2, and I wish I could remember its name, because that was where I finally mustered the courage to approach Dave and start a conversation. Our first conversation consisted of me (ever the sophisticated seductress) telling Dave how much I was looking forward to having cosmetic surgery on my nose, and Dave replying that he wished he could have part of his legs chopped off so he would be 6'4". But we just kept on talking and talking, so everyone left us alone, and suddenly we were in a gay club snogging. And at 2am, we all caught a taxi to Manish's house so I could pick up my bag and take it to Dave's.

By 5am, I knew I was onto a good thing. And then I remembered about the bet, and realised, not without some degree of trepidation, that unless I handled the issue delicately, Dave could easily misinterpret my reasons for being with him and the whole deal would be off. I turned to Dave and said "Dave I've got something to tell you", and mentally prepared my defence. But Dave just looked at me and said "Is this something to do with a bet?" I exclaimed "What? How did you know?" and Dave explained that after we'd snogged for the first time in the club, Dave had bumped into Manish who said "Damn, looks like I've lost £10."

The next day we got up at around 3pm, met everyone in the Watershed for a very late lunch, and then I drove Ashley and myself back to Birmingham. Next day I had 2 text messages from Dave (he later said he knew how much I liked him when I gave him THREE phone numbers, my full postal address and email). After a few days, I wondered how I'd feel if I got home from work one night and there wasn't an email from Dave waiting for me. But that never happened until Dave got a job in the Midlands and moved in with me 6 months later. 6 months after that we were engaged.

And that is how I won my husband in a bet.

As for my winnings, Dave and I drank the £35 at a party a few weeks after meeting.

Good grief

It's October 8th, so Happy Birthday to my wonderful Dad who would have been 71 today. Dad set off on Bank Holiday Monday, May 1999 with his best friend, cousin and cousin's best friend, for a game of at North Manchester Golf Club and never came back. He collapsed suddenly and died at hole number 7 (see pic) in spite of the best efforts of everyone who was on the course at the time, notably two heart surgeons who had been playing just behind him, and who opened him up on the spot.

We still miss you, Dad. And we still hate anything to do with golf.

Michael Frayn at Birmingham Book Festival

I've just got home from an evening out with Sandra, seeing the playwright Michael Frayn speak with David Edgar, as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Michael Frayn is an elegant self-effacing man who proved to be a reasonably engaging speaker. Sandra and I have seen at least two of his plays in the past. We saw Copenhagen, which is a dramatic representation of the meeting of two nuclear physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohrs (thanks Wikipedia) in Copenhagen in 1941, at Malvern a few years ago. We unfortunately drank enough white wine to fog our already questionable intellectual powers, and both fell asleep during the first half hour, destined never to master what is quite a demanding play. We saw Noises Off, described this evening by David Edgar (who was interviewing Frayn on stage) as the world's funniest play, at the Birmingham Rep, and yes it was very very funny. So that's why we were there this evening.

On Copenhagen, Frayn made the point that according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics there is a theoretical barrier to knowing everything about a moving object, and that this reflects broader intellectual currents, in the sense that we now acknowledge the impossibility of understanding everything about the motivations of another individual (tell that to educational technologists). This is important to Frayn as a dramatist, and he went on to elaborate that in plays we don't know what is going on in the heads of all the characters. And this makes plays more like life itself than novels. Novelists like Philip Roth (most successfully, imo, with American Pastoral) have constructed sophisticated narrative structures to get over the problem that it's no longer acceptable for the narrator to delve confidently into the inner mental machinations of all its characters. In the 19th century, on the other hand, novelists like Tolstoy did just that. To what extent is this change attributable to the breakdown of intellectual confidence during the course of the 20th century? Frayn made the point that although quantum physics paralleled this broader trend, they did in fact have divergent causes, though Frayn didn't actually elaborate further on that point. Six years ago (actually the night before I met my husband for the first time), I went to see Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) speak at the Orange bar in Birmingham, again as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Eugenides stated that the generation of writers to which he belonged rediscovered the great novels of the 19th century, jealously realising the narrative powers of those novelists with their untrammeled access to their character's thoughts, and that was why novelists like Roth were so inventive in terms of narrative structure, as they would want to somehow position himself to get similar access, but in a more credible way.

We left the event at around 9pm, both feeling that the festival as a whole would benefit from improved promotion and communication, and that the organisers are clearly missing a trick, as venues such as the Birmingham Conservatoire Recital Hall will realistically only attract the usual suspects (like me and Sandra) when they could be holding events in city centre bars or out in the suburbs, attracting new audiences. This is all the more pitiful given the stellar lineup of this year's festival compared to more lacklustre events elsewhere.

This morning's conversation

Dave: Did I try to have sex with you in the middle of the night?

Sarah: Yes! It was great! And then suddenly you just stopped.

Dave: I thought you were asleep.

Fiona is 40

This morning Dave and I are well and truly wrecked. How we imagined Fiona's 40th turned out to be sharply at variance with the way the night turned out.

What we imagined: a restaurant table full of posh party girls from the publishing industry quoffing sauvignon blanc, making polite conversation, and pretending to be interested in a couple of middle-aged middle-achievers (us). Home by midnight.

What really happened: Got the train into Birmingham and met up with everyone at the bar of Hotel du Vin and the small select gathering was genuinely friendly. [In passing, if you ever feel that impeccable service has gone out of fashion, head down to the wine bar at Hotel du Vin, Birmingham. The adjective "attentive" doesn't begin to cover it.] We knew Lindsay, Eamonn and John Bennett already as they all used to work at Talis. We didn't know Ros and Ben, but that was about to change.

Walked down to St Paul's Square, and the eight of us dined at The Rectory. Fairly standard bistro food reasonably well executed. Lots and lots of wine. No real surprises so far.

At around 11, six of us decide to go onto The Jam House. Manage to grab a table, belatedly realising that we've gatecrashed into a private party but not caring. Table quickly becomes a morass of beer and sambuca shots. Live music act is playing an eclectic mix, and Fiona quickly rediscovers her inner rock chick, which to be honest is always close to the surface. Apart from one fairly involved conversation with John, I don't recall doing much beyond dancing (in heels) and drinking, until 2 when the place closed. I do recall marching to the bar to complain that my cointreau had been cleared away by one of their staff. When this was denied I shouted "OH THAT'S BOLLOCKS AND YOU KNOW IT" and stormed off. An hour later I watched Fiona's friend Ros (former Marketing Manager for Ministry of Sound and one-woman party-generator) indiscriminately slamming down all the drinks within her reach including mine. I also remember Dave turning into a disco diva at around 1am. Dave is binary when it comes to dancing - it really is all or nothing. Last night he gave it his ALL. Last week at Boogie Shoes he was in NOTHING mode, and went home early on his own without dancing a single step. Everyone who was with us last night will remember Dave's flamboyant disco-fuelled staircase dance act. I have no idea where this comes from.

At 2am, at the taxi rank, we were invited back to Fiona's in Harborne for more drinking and dancing. I watched incredulously as Dave readily agreed. Perhaps Dave's best mate Manish would like to add a comment to this post confirming how out of character it is for Dave to want to do anything at all after midnight apart from sleep. So off we went. Dave then spent two hours bonding with his new best friend for the night, Ben, Ros's husband, while Fiona, Ros and I alternatively chatted, danced, drank and all five of us vied for supremacy in the past sexploits stakes. Fiona flirted with Dave; Dave flirted with Fiona. We all loved each other.

It all had to end at some point and at 4am we bade farewell and taxied back. Feeling slightly nauseous I reached out for that well known hangover prevention treatment - Heinz tomato soup, and finally hit the pillow at 5.

No headache today, miraculously, but my feet have never felt so sore.

By a country mile this was the best night so far of 2008.

I heart Boogie Shoes!

Boogie Shoes at the Moseley Dance Centre. For the uninitated, Boogie Shoes was the epicentre of dancing in South Birmingham for most of the 1990s, especially if you were a 30 something Moseleyite like me. When my brother went to a rave in about 1990 and had to be ambulanced out due to an adverse reaction to Ecstacy, I knew that I was biologically unsuited to anything more hardcore than vodka and disco. This was confirmed at a party in 1999 when I managed to get high on Tizer - it must have been the sunset yellow.

Featuring a playlist of mainly 1970s tracks, some more leftfield than others, Boogie Shoes attracted a very broad clientele, and I personally had some of my best nights there of the decade. I lost track of the number of men I snogged in what was basically a glorified community centre.

My best friend Sandra, from school, was living with (now married to with a couple of kids) Andy Collins, and Andy together with his brother Sid, were the DJs from the beginning to the end of the Boogie Shoes decade. I was still living in Manchester when I came over to Birmingham with Bill for the first time to Boogie Shoes. And I loved it. In September 1994, I met a psychopath called Mike there, and following a destructive but thankfully short-lived romance, I moved to Birmingham and that's how I came to be living here. Two months later, on November 5th 1992 Boogie Shoes, our romance came to a spectacular end as Mike poured petrol all over his back garden then set fire to it, and later that night, after Boogie Shoes itself, threw out all my belongings onto the street at 2.30am, leaving me (pregnant) and my friend Jo with no obvious place to go. [ A few years ago I told this story - on request - when out eating with a group of people, and my husband Dave ended up in tears listening to it, so hey, happy endings do happen.]

But all of this is just a self-indulgent digression.

Last night Boogie Shoes reformed, for the second time, at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. Definitely scaled down compared to the cavernous MDC, the new 21st century Boogie Shoes did alright on the night, and we had a great time. A lot of people I knew were out, which is always an agreeable surprise when you're washed up and in your mid-40s like me. I danced myself dizzy like Liquid Gold (not on the playlist thank god) and here is my top 10 of all the tunes Andy and Sid played (not in order):

1. Last night a DJ saved my life - Indeep

2. You've got the love - Candi Staton

3. The Night - Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

4. I feel love - Donna Summer

5. Step on - Happy Mondays

6. I believe in miracles - Jackson Sisters

7. Superstition - Stevie Wonder

8. Everybody dance - Chic

9. Thinking of you - Sister Sledge

10. Is it love you're after? - Rose Royce

Thanks everyone for a great night. Knees were twinging by the end though.

My favourite things

I've just been onto Amazon and I've ordered everything I want at the moment - that is the following three things:
- Bartok's Viola Concertos
- The Wire Series 1 on DVD
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.
I am officially happy, and I'm off for a run.

I've got the fantasy football blues

Andy Collins has just sent out the first fantasy football email update of the season and it's bad news for me. I'm currently positioned 18th out of 22 in our league. And there was me thinking that my finely-tuned research methods were infallible. This is my worst start since I can remember and in 2 or 3 weeks, when the season has settled down a little, I'll have to do a bit of analysis to see which players are letting me down. In the immediate term, hopefully Gerrard's goal yesterday will have made a bit of a difference.

Both the initial selection of players and transfer decisions in fantasy football would be a lot easier if the data were open. I've been arguing, at an informal / social level, for some time within Talis that the biggest semantic web opportunity out there is not education, but is in fact sport. Sport is something that loads and loads of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, are interested in, and certain sports in particular, e.g. football; cricket; baseball, lend themselves to both statistical and qualitative analysis. Crucially, it's not just the sports professionals that engage in that analysis, but lay people as well. The ongoing success of fantasy football / cricket / baseball and so on demonstrate a widespread hunger for active engagement in professional sports, and many many people like myself are part of leagues that may be organised by the media, notably the Telegraph and the Times in the UK, or more grassroots e.g. the league that Andy organises for his friends. It's easy to see that there would be considerable demand for semantic data services around sports, but equally, there's a significant number of people who would be willing to contribute data, in my opinion. Neither the Telegraph nor the Times provide APIs for people such as Andy, and as a result he has to perform a lot of the calculations manually, and the data is nowhere near as rich as it could be. The semantic web could enable relationships to be discovered in the performance of individual players, clubs and countries that aren't immediately apparent, as well as making statistics more accessible. My friends and I each pay £23 a year into Andy's league, so monetisation possibilities are readily apparent.

To the "player" who successfully develops a semantic platform for sports lovers, then, the spoils.

New running shoes!

This morning I've been out to "test drive" my new running shoes - Mizuno Wave Rider 11. I bought them yesterday at The Birmingham Runner Shop and they cost my £80, which for some reason is cheaper than my last pair of Mizuno running shoes.

Earlier on in the week, I went onto www.physiosupplies.com, and ordered some new insoles (in common with 70% of the population - apparently - I have dropped arches and need support when I'm running to avoid over-pronating, which is when your feet sort of roll inwards, causing tendonitis and shin splints in my case). My friend Graham, who's a physiotherapist in Manchester, recommended the site. He also has dropped arches and pointed me towards the Orthaheel Sports Orthotic Insole. A snip at £20. Incredibly they arrived less than 24 hours after ordering, on a standard delivery charge. These people should be running the country.

So out I went this morning on a 2.2 mile run. A pathetic distance I know, but I'm building up my fitness again and I'm very overweight. Well the Mizunos gave me the comfort that I'm used to now (the first time I tried a pair of Mizunos on, it felt like my feet were enveloped in a combination of air and cotton wool) but the insoles were the real stars. My feet feel properly supported for the first time ever and it's so reassuring. Maybe I'll never suffer the agonies of shin splints again? Who knows.

Overall, though, I felt like shit. It's hard to believe I'm the same person who ran the Manchester 10K race effortlessly as recently as June. But thankfully it's like childbirth (not that I'd know) - by the time the next run comes along, I've forgotten how awful the last one was. Time for a shower.

Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir

Like most hispanophiles of my generation, I’ve always been struck by the utter appaulingness of Spanish pop music. Basically it’s poor quality heavily derivative soft rock, as John Hooper notes in the latest edition of The New Spaniards. I spent 6 months studying in Santiago de Compostela in 1985, and the only pop music I liked, apart from British stuff, were records that reminded me of great nights out – so that was a handful of Alaska y Dinarama tracks and the very acceptable (at the time at least) Colecciono Moscas (I collect flies) by Golpes Bajos. [I wouldn’t mind betting that if I played Colecciono Moscas on Youtube I would be horrified, so I think I’ll let the good memories lie.]

I reflected on this most disappointing aspect of Spanish culture over the summer as Dave and I spent a happy 3 weeks touring around Galicia – the first time I’ve been back to that part of Spain for 23 years. I needed to listen to the radio to try to “retune in” to the Spanish language, but the music nearly drove us both insane. This came as a genuine surprise to me, as I’d assumed that globalisation, and the internet in particular, would mean that previously heterogeneous countries would be levelling out culturally. After all, France has produced Air, Daft Punk and more besides, whereas in the 80s French pop music was more or less as dire as that of Spain. Spain clearly hasn’t moved on though, even though it’s a strikingly musical nation.

So why is this? When trying to understand why it is that British music is so effortlessly superior to any of its European counterparts, the conventional wisdom seems to highlight the urban concentrations of Britain’s population. But does that really explain the chasm-like gap? Spain has, since Franco’s death in 1975, become almost overwhelmingly urban, and this is particularly true of the younger generations. Spain’s got loads of cities and the vast majority of them are growing at an impressive rate. Admittedly it’s not always easy travelling between them, simply because Spain is incredibly mountainous, but that doesn’t strike me as a defining factor, especially in this day and age.

What I think might be the case is that there is almost too much continuity in Spain between its old traditional musical forms and the present. My friend Bill and I went to a fiesta in Granada in the early 1990s and flamenco was clearly in vogue among young people, for example. British teenagers and pop artists, on the other hand, aren’t constrained by the past, for reasons that will be culturally and historically complex but probably have a lot to do with the rapid industrialisation that Britain underwent and the rupture with feudal traditions that resulted. It’s only an idea and I may be wrong, but I do think I’m onto something.

Towards the end of the trip though, I finally heard a Spanish pop record that I liked. In fact, I absolutely love it. It’s called “Pretendo hablarte”, it’s by Beatriz Luengo, from the album Carrousel – yes, thanks to a combination of http://www.google.es/ and Youtube, I’ve managed to track (sorry) it down. It has the heart wrenching chorus “Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir”, which doesn’t translate well but basically means “You want to want me; I don’t want to suffer”. It’s the perfect articulation of the painful yearning of love so if you’re feeling lovesick, or if you’re simply curious, go enjoy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prfdtq3_EXs. Apparently they love her in France as well.

Books books books

Got this from Nadeem's blog, so I'm following suit.

The rules are:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE (can't underline with this editor so I'll put them in red)
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated (by implication it's all the rest and I can't strike out either!)
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (many, many times)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Debating Matters

I spent today at University of Birmingham, judging in this year's regional finals of Debating Matters. Debating Matters is a national schools competition that has been running for a few years now. I got involved this (academic) year for the first time when I attended a meeting of the Manchester Salon about social software last year. It was there that I met Helen Birtwhistle, and she invited me to judge in the first round of the competition.

To be honest, I wondered what on earth I'd agreed to. You see, my life is rather grown-up, extremely so in fact. I work in an office, Dave and I are childless, and I wouldn't dream of going swimming outside adult-only sessions. Dave and I occasionally take my friend's son, Ben, out on a Saturday morning, but definitely not as often as we should.

One of the great things about Debating Matters is that they put together excellent subject guides for the judges and debaters. In fact, I used one of them at work, on public libraries, a couple of years ago. They produce a summary of the principal arguments, and then provide an exhaustive list of URLs linking of good quality free of charge web resources.

The first round, which took place last October at Aston University, proved to be highly enjoyable, and was definitely my most rewarding experience of 2007. The quality of debates is staggeringly high. I still find myself wondering how it's possible, in such a dumbed-down society, that these sixth formers are able to navigate through complex debates such as stem cell research, and switch easily from abstract concepts to detailed examples and back again. That's really why I like Debating Matters so much - it gives me hope for the future. And to be given the chance to further develop the talents of those sixth formers by offering feedbacks baseed on my own life experience is simply a privilege.

So now when I sit in my Hall Green grown-up enclave wringing my hands about intellectual decline, I remind myself of the resilience of humanity, and that even at dusk there is still light.

What I learned about China this weekend

Spent a bit of time learning about China this weekend. I've been fascinated about China since attending a series of meetings in Manchester in the early 1990s about the emerging Asian economies, prompting me to visit Beijing in 1995. So through a few hours reading on the China area of The Economist website, followed by a telephone conversation with my very good friend Dave, this is what I've ascertained. BTW the following points may not be all consistent, but my priority is merely to record key points at this stage:

• China's economy is three times the size of India's. And Sino-Indian collaboration has been over-estimated.
• There has been a recent re-evaluation (downwards) of China's GDP, by applying what the World Bank and IMF call "purchasting-power parity" i.e. factoring in the price differences between the two countries. China is generally happy to be considered "poorer" as it provides a negotiating tool with US over exchange values etc. This revision downwards doesn't change the fact that China's growth has been nothing short of phenomenal.
• 8% of China's exports are to the US. This compares with Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong (20% apiece), Brazil (just under 20%) and perhaps surprisingly India (only 2%).
• Although Asian markets have not "decoupled" from the US economy as predicted, they nevertheless have acquired a degree of insularity that will stand them in good stead in the coming period as world markets react to America's woes. This is true even though this recession is more severe than the last, and Asian economies are more integrated into world markets.
• Domestic demand will remain strong in Asian economies and Governments now have more flexibility.
• US has been applying pressure for the Chinese yuan to be devalued. And indeed the Yuan has been climbing against the dollar since October, but this may not be a direct result of US pressure. Chinese policymakers now believe that the benefits of a stronger currency outweigh the risks. To date, a weak currency has benefited China, helping to grow exports further. But a stronger currency will reduce the costs of imports, especially food and raw materials, and curb the build-up of foreign exchange reserves. And the costs of holding the Yuan down are rising. China has to date held the Yuan down by purchasing foreign currencies very cheaply. And as a result a lot of people have a lot of dollars with very restricted options as to what to do with them. The resulting liquidity in the economy has been absorbed to an extent by selling Government bonds.
• If China were to let their currency inflate more, they could afford more imports which would in turn improve their international standing. Every time they increase their currency, though, their exports have suffered and their own internal economy isn't sufficiently broad and robust for them to stand on their own two feet at the moment. Compare this to US at the end of WW2 - with a huge powerful internal economy, they were in a position to assume global hegemony, which China certainly isn't at this point in time.
• China has had a dilemma regarding what to do with their considerable foreign exchange reserves. These have tended to be invested in Western banks, which has been welcomed as Western banks need capital right now to shore up their positions e.g. UBS which lost so much money on sub-primes.
• Is the Chinese phenomenal economic growth dependent on exports? Some commentators are saying this might not be the case, and that in fact, the growth is more dependent on investment.
• Asian markets recently went down as a result of the US crisis mainly because of the general fear of a global recession. China's companies are small, public-owned and therefore quite unstable. Plus, if we say that a big part of the global crisis is down to over-complex financial instruments which spread risk right across the market, then we can say that China is a part of this - it's part of the same markets so those same over-complex instruments also find their way there.
• Is there a case for saying that China is being over-hyped? Is the discourse slightly reminiscent of the way the Japanese economy was being discussed around 20 years ago?

The Horizon Report 2008

The Horizon Report for 2008, looking at emerging technologies predicted to hit mainstream take-up in the next 5 years in education, is out.

It looks at six technologies which are spread along three "adoption horizons" over 5 years.

It predicts that grassroots video and collaboration webs will hit the first horizon which is in the next 12 months. Grassroots video is almost a non-brainer - already easy to create and edit, videos are being nudged into mainstream use in education with services such as YouTube which eliminate the need to invest in expensive infrastructure. Collaboration webs are small inexpensive tools which facilitate collaboration in terms of exchanging information, data and ideas. Of these two, collaboration webs are more interesting in their potential to disrupt and transform educational practice. Grassroots video is arguably only an additional medium which will leave the basic structure of the HEI untouched.

The second adoption horizon brings in two further technologies predicted to achieve mass educational takeup in 1-2 years. These are data mashups and mobile broadband. Mobile technology is about as significant than grassroots video, in the sense that it still doesn't threaten the fundamentals of HE, but it does make education more portable and ubiquitous. Data mashups may clarify some ideas and enable some imaginative re-presentation of data, but again no real change.

The third adoption horizon, a couple of technologies about 4-5 years away, is quite different though. First up is collective intelligence, knowledge and understanding derived from large groups of people, which may be explicit (stand up wikipedia and community tagging) or implicit (such as search behaviour online by large groups of users, or purchasing behaviour on sites such as Amazon over time). And secondly, and more controversially, I think, are social operating systems, sort of next generation social networking. The underlying premise is that networks of the future will be people-centred rather than content-centred. I'm struggling to see how true this is for scholarly output, and I don't think (I hope) that I'm being some sort of luddite.

For example, the report states:

“Every idea, paper, experiment and artefact is, in reality, attached to a person or group of people who helped to bring it about. Imagine the impact of tools that place those people and relationships at the center of any research inquiry: concepts clearly linked to people; connections between those people and others clearly indicated; a much more complete picture of the topic would emerge.”

How much value is this really expected to yield over and above a traditional content-based approach? Isn’t it the idea that has primacy, rather than the underlying relationships. For half a century now we've had citation data. The beauty of citation networks is that they remain idea-centred whilst allowing for the deep and meaningful links that only humans can create. In fact, most of the criticism of citation data is focused on the subjective relationship between the citer and the cited, which is usually seen as a drawback of citation in information retrieval terms. Nevertheless they are more about the academic subject than they are about the surrounding human relationships. I can only see limited applications for such as relationship-based approach. I can appreciate the fact that to have access to more human-based intelligence would have its uses in the collaborative research arena, in terms of helping to make judgements around trust. But surely, even in this intellectually-impaired era in which we live, the idea still has primacy in scholarly life? Or am I missing something?

Control

First of all, what the hell am I doing blogging at 03:40am when I've got work tomorrow morning?

And on the subject of mental anguish, Dave and I went to see Control - the film of the life of Ian Curtis - on Sunday afternoon. That screenshot on the left is pretty much how I feel right now.

As a Mancunian in exile, currently living in Birmingham, the film was a reminder that there is still a lot of Manchester within me. But the film also demonstrated to me that I'm very much of my time. It was absolutely brilliant hearing Joy Division again, leaving aside the over-played "Love will tear us apart". I always did love the echoing minor chords that characterised the indie / alternative guitar bands of the late 70s and (particularly 80s), but there are a small number of bands that really stand out. For my money, they include Joy Division and Magazine - both years ahead of their time. New Order was never going to live up to Joy Division; I think in retrospect that their sound was too thin to stand the test of time.

The film was wonderful. The cinema was packed on a Sunday afternoon, mostly with 40-something saddos like me and Dave. The performances were amazing. How the hell did Sam Riley get the voice and body language so close to the original Ian Curtis? And John Cooper Clark was breathtaking. The only character who didn't come over well was Tony Wilson. Tim at work says that the actor in question was basing the role on Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson in 24 hour Party People rather than on Tony Wilson himself, and the diluted secondary nature of the interpretation really showed.

I didn't realise until the end that it was co-produced by Deborah Curtis. I did a Google image search and she now looks incredibly conventional. She said in interview that she didn't really recover from the Ian Curtis years until she met her current partner who's never heard of him. As she said, when someone takes their own life, they are effectively having the last word. The residual anger must have been almost intolerable.

I found the film's ending to have an almost genius-like beauty. It showed smoke coming out of a crematorium chimney against a backdrop of Macclesfield hills, reminiscent of the chimneys of the holocaust, to which the name Joy Division was a deliberate reference.

It's now 04:15 and time to renew my attempt to get some sleep...

My fab new running gloves

As you can imagine, the cold weather is a bit of a problem for us runners at the moment. And never more so than first thing in the morning when you can actually hear the howling wind before you even step out of bed. So I've treated myself to a pair of Vangard lightweight gloves. I did a Buy Now on eBay, for £9.49 and gave them a test run yesterday morning.

They're fantastic. or at least that's how they seem, though the test run did coincide with a particularly good performance from me, especially for a morning run (must have been the pasta I had the night before at Sophie's).

I'm pretty sure they're designed for cyclists - at any rate I bought them from an online cycling store. Well I think they work just as well for runners if not better. When you're running in the UK, even on the coldest wintry days, most people will only really need gloves for the first 1o minutes or so. Because my limbs are constantly moving, I'm pretty warm all over after that. Whereas cyclists arms and hands are more stationary, so maybe these only work as liners for them. However I only need these lightweight gloves, and because they wick properly, I don't overheat later on in the run. Previously I was wearing fleece gloves and then finding that I had to take them off mid-run.

So that's £9.49 well spent. Vangard lightweight gloves highly recommended and not just another gimmicky running product that we don't really need.