Taking Out The Trash

Sheik it all about

The News of the World's 'Fake Sheik' investigative reporter has written a book. He's interviewed by the BBC here.
Along with the decline of the Sunday Times Insight team and Donal Macintyre's ego trips, Mahmood's dubious antics sum up much that is wrong with mainstream investigative journalism. Safe targets, headlines first, ethics last.
Nick Davies is very good on this.

How the other half live

What have Lewisham, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire got in common?

According to a report commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society, they are places where women are best treated by council planners.

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics local government blog here.

Economic cow theory

A beginners guide to economics using cows. Made me laugh ... thanks Bob Piper.

Watch the skies

Copehill Down, on Salisbury Plain, is a mock-German town that spends most of its time pretending to be a Middle Eastern village for troop training sessions in urban warfare. But for three days in August it has had robots on patrol.

You can read the rest of my article on how today's defence equipment becomes tomorrow's civil surveillance (which is published today in the New Statesman) here.

Update: Ooooh, The Guardian's been looking and they've printed an extract from a previous post of mine on this topc in today's technology section(well it's easy to find in the print edition). Meanwhile the paper's green technology correspondent Alok Jha's latest podcast also discusses the Grand Challenge.

Don't mess with the Sudoku

The latest edition of my county council newspaper has dropped through my letter box and the first thing I checked was the Sudoku on the back page.

I'm not a quiz fan but the last edition carried an error (not the council's fault) which made the Sudoku impossible to complete.

The magazine is pretty good - I write some of the articles for it, but it has won an award from CIPR so it's not just my opinion.

However, the torrent of abuse from residents this error sparked was astonishing.

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics site here. And then you read above that a plea from Hazel Blears for good ideas for redress for residents when things go wrong with local services.

A small country far away of which we know little

There's a good piece in the latest edition of Mother Jones on the fight by the Chagos islanders to return to their homeland.

For once, it seemed, the former inhabitants of the British atoll of Diego Garcia might get a break. It was the last day of June, and the Chagossians, a Kreol-speaking people named for the island chain encompassing their homeland, were packed into Britain's highest court to challenge Her Majesty's government over their expulsion.

The author is Dr. David Vine who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Washington and you can read the fulll piece here.

Thanks to Celia at the UK Chagos Support Association for the tip on this.

Quite how Britain can look other countries in the eye when it talks about the rights of small nations and the bullying attitude of great powers while this injustice continues is astonishing.

I interviewed some Chaggossians and wrote a piece for the Big Issue in the North on this which you can Download here

You need coolin', baby I'm not foolin'

Looking forward to the theme from Top of the Pops introducing Britain's start to hosting the 2012 Olympics later today.
Do we get Boris Johnson doing air guitar as well?

Last orders (and shooting the Tory fox)

For a village of around 2,500 we’ve got a lot of places to drink. There are two pubs and two members clubs all within a few minutes staggering distance of each other on the high street.

It could be that we’ve got some serious issues of alcohol abuse to address, but I like to think it’s a sign of a vibrant community.

While the fate of rural post offices has been widely debated, the future of rural pubs has not received as much attention. The Pub is the Hub initiative is an excellent exception.

Peter Wilby wrote well on the future of rural pubs recently and I was recently sent a copy of a report from the Social Issues Research Centre called The Enduring Appeal Of The Local.

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics local government site here - and/or you can read the new Alex Salmond interview which is causing a stink in Scotland.
There's another, slightly older, interview on the site which caused me more of a fit. Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas.
She seems very pleased with herself and I still can't understand how she is gainfully employed with her vacuous and self-aggrandising 'Institute'. If proves if you're willing to make yourself available and say something contrary (but not too contrary, this is the sanitised awkward squad) then the media will give you a berth.
Fox says:

I joined the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early 80s. I’d be in it still but it was wound up at the end of the nineties.

Or put it another way: her magazine Living Marxism thought it could get away with smearing journalists exposing ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and was bankcrupted out of existence.

Fox says her political hero is Trotsky:

because he had the courage to write The Revolution Betrayed, admitting that everything he had fought for had been compromised and explaining how and why

good answer.
She also says the smoking ban:

drives me mad with its petty, draconian assault on liberty

You know who the smoking ban helps? People who work in pubs and clubs. They had no choice but to breath in carciogenic fumes. (Lots of info here) Staff in restaurants and casinos and bookies and bingo halls all faced having their health affected through the actions of others. You wouldn't expect a builder to handle asbestos without the proper safety equipment so why expect a barman to swallow your smoke?
And the majority of people working in pubs and restaurants and casinos and bingo halls are working class - not much point in the RCP leading the the proletariat to victory if half of them are struggling with emphysema. Trotsky would not have deployed such woolly arguments.

And as for her political hate figure

Al Gore or any one of today’s self-styled eco-warriors who preach apocalypse and restraint. Gore embodies a particular brand of ‘greener than thou-ism’ that I despise, as he finger-wags at those of us who dare argue people are more important than the planet and development is more crucial than carbon-counting

Well Gore'sa bit of a pain sometimes, true, and his wife was responsible for the parental advisory labels on albums which did sooo much to stop people swearing on rap records.
But for cockeyed statements this is great. So is climate change happening or not? Fox seems to suggest it is but it's more important (as per an earlier answer she gives) that we enjoy our cheap Ryanair Flights.
Quick digression: Fox actually says

thank you Ryanair

That's Ryanair, one of the most vicious companies around in how it treats its staff (this release is a little old but will suffice for evidence). Fox, is your head seriously that far up your own whatsit?
Sorry, back to the main programme. Where were we. Oh yes, finger-wagging greens. Um, if the planet is becoming a less pleasant place doesn't that kind of affect people? And which people do you think get affected most? Is it, um, those less able to buy themselves a ticket somewhere safer? Or is climate change not happening and therefore you are at odds with the majority of scientific opinion? (And what's your evidence).
Come on Fox, make it difficult for us - let's try and put together a semi-coherent argument that doesn't  scream: "I have no scruples and will do anything for wonga".
Fox is asked about her most memorable time in politics:

The miners’ strike. The striking miners on picket lines in the Midlands read the FT, grilled me about international politics, the economy, culture etc and taught me never to underestimate or patronise working class people.

Good answer. Bugger, it's much easier to hate.
I got a military escort in Bosnia a couple of years ago when I was on an assignment. I jumped into this Landrover and there was a copy of Wilde's Salome on the dashboard. So I turned to the well-spoken captain accompanying me and asked what he thought of it and the driver, a private, quiet bloke, said that actually it was his. If it makes you cringe, how do you think I feel.
Fox is right: never underestimate and never patronise - but I would add, any class.

Trenchcoats R Us

The MoD must be very, very pleased.

Its Grand Challenge, which I've blogged about previously, has won tremendous coverage. (robots, urban warfare, Salisbury Plain - you remember). This piece in today's technology section of The Guardian is very good. Not least because it doesn't go for the obvious let's-talk-to-the-winners angle.
I asked the helpful MoD press officers for a list of who attended the final day (that's not being ironic - without exception the PROs were very helpful and they hadn't just swanned on over for the day like us hacks.)
The list I was given is below. Don't dismiss this as no more than some glorified Robot Wars event:

You were asking for an idea of some of the visitors to the Grand Challenge competition. They included:

- Various MoD, DE&S and Dstl staff inc. Prof Phil Sutton (MoD Director General Science & Technology Strategy), Chris Mace (MoD Director General Science & Technology Operations), Sir Ian Andrews (MoD 2nd Permanent Under Secretary), Paul Stein (MoD Science & Technology Director) and Dr Frances Saunders, Chief Executive Dstl)

Prof John Beddington, Government Chief Scientific Adviser

Tom Killion, US Army Chief Scientist

And reps from:

US Army International Technology Center

US Soldier Battle Lab

US Air Force Research Lab

Various foreign embassy representatives and defence attaches

German Research Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FGAN-FKIE).

PS: if you want to spot the government scientist at these events look for the trenchcoats. One of the tables at the breakfast beforehand was like a Harry Palmer convention.

Starting with a bang

One of the reasons I went freelance was to do more jobs I found interesting rather than bog standard ones assigned by the newsdesk.
This last week's been a good example of that and I'm about to start writing a feature for E&T on double glazing.
No, please come back.
I interviewed Lee Coates who is the technical director at Wrightstyle in Devizes. They make the frames which double glazed windows are set in and they specialise in making them very, very strong so they can withstand bomb blasts and bullets.
It was very odd to be standing in a workshop in the Wiltshire market town looking at a length of steel with a bunch of bullet holes in it and a door with a spray of holes from an Uzi 9mm . This is how they test their stuff - the shoot it until bullets stop getting through.
See, you think bullet proof glass is all about the glass but actually it's the frame which counts. The glass is pretty much the same but the damage comes when it and its frame part company. So Wrightstyle have pioneered these ultra-tough frames and are selling them on to the Middle East, Israel and, increasingly, America.
How tough? The  picture on the left is one of their frames getting 500kg of TNT at 500m which pretty much simulates a car bomb. On the right is how it looked afterwards.
The gentlemen from Qatar who watched this demonstration signed on the dotted line shortly after.
So, bullet proof glass isn't about the glass - it's about the frame. Taking out the Trash: a blog that is entertaining and informative.