Olympic Logo Firm Nails It
The London Games Organizing Committee asked Wolff Olins for a logo that was:
- dynamic … check
- different to previous Olympic logos … check
- flexible … check
- instantly recognizable … check
I think Wolff Olins delivered.
Sadly the Committee forgot to ask for number 5:
5. Attractive.
Duh!
MTAS: Inadvertantly Hilarious
I once wrote a simple to-do list web application. It took me a few hours, and it was for my own amusement and understanding. No one but me ever used it or even knew it existed. It was online for all of a few days.
Yet still, that to-do list application was better secured than the MTAS system.
Tim Worstall has a good explanation of how security works in web applications. It might seem complicated to a lay person, but let me assure you that it is not. Tim is not joking when he says it is Day 2 of a script-kiddy cracker course. It is Day 1 of a web application design course.
Gross incompetence is putting it mildly.
4874 Spam Comments
I just deleted 4874 spam comments from the database. Wordpress crawled under the table and whimpered when I tried to use the normal interface, so I had to use PhpMyAdmin and figure out the database layout. Fortunately it wasn’t hard.
DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘0′
did the trick. I have now activated Akismet.
It’s an abuse of language to call this profit.
According to the BBC:
Network Rail, which runs Britain’s railway tracks and signals, is expected to announce it has made a profit for the first time in its history.
There is no sense in which we can call the excess subsidy that has been showered on this body a ‘profit’. Profit refers to your value added, to the amount by which you have made your customers’ lives better. Profit is not: compare your costs to the made up number which is what the government thinks it can get away with giving you, and if costs are smaller you win!
The very fact that subsidies are given to Network Rail means that it is NOT in profit. It would be in profit if it could fund itself by voluntary payments for services rendered to its customers. It CANT, so I have no idea where they get the cheek to say they are profitable.
Slight Error
Civitas has released a new set of ‘balanced’ student worksheets on the EU. Great idea, but what about this line in worksheet 4, paragraph 1:
The EU represents one of the greatest experiments in political history.For the first time nations have chosen to surrender aspects of their national sovereignty to a central body that has a responsibility to ensure that they act for the good not only of themselves but of other nations as well.
Aside from the tranzi sentiments (this is the pro-EU worksheet), is the EU really the first time that independent nations have pooled sovereignty to a central body? Seems like it might have happened before.
UPDATE: In a similar vein, Tim Worstall has problems with the same worksheet.
It’s Arrived!
It’s beautiful.
Oh To Have Your Problems
The Americans are getting worked up because of a new law, McCain-Feingold, that makes it a crime to screen certain political ads before elections. As a Brit, I’d love to have their problems. Here in Britain it’s basically illegal to screen any political ads at any time by any one.
Parties can’t screen ads for their candidates (they get a few `official’ broadcasts that each last 5 minutes in the run up to elections, you can imagine how much they get watched). But also, independent groups can’t screen ads that in any way touch on politics. In Britain, you can’t run an ad that supports or opposes a bill, just as you can’t run issue ads that say, call for lower taxes. Nope, all against the law.
We also have speech codes, produced by the regulator Ofcom, that require `impartiality’ and no `undue prominence of views and opinions’ from broadcasters. Note that this is ridiculous since in Britain, the media are without question left-wing to varying degrees. In practice, `impartiality’ means adhering to the dominant centre-left line of the BBC. This makes things like partisan talk radio a punishable offence. No Howard Stern or Hugh Hewitt over here. Both illegal. Certainly no FOX.
I’ll reiterate that this isn’t just during election season, this is ever.
To American conservatives, think how much more dominant the left-wing MSM would be now if your parties and organisations had been banned from ever screening ads, if talk radio was banned, and if FOX news could never have been founded. Here in Britain, all those things can never happen, by law.
So by all means criticize the new bill, because for God’s sake don’t let your country end up like this one, but at the same time, you guys are lucky. And free.
Stupidity of Ethnic Quotas
The recent news that employers may face ethnic quotas is even stupider than you think.
I created a simulation of the hiring process for firms to estimate the chance of falling foul of these quotas even if you are perfectly non-discriminatory.
Assumptions: the population is completely homogenous in terms of skills, and ethnic minorities form 10% of the population.
Let’s suppose that your application for government work will be considered unfavourably if ethnic minorities make up less than half the percentage of your workforce as in the population.
Results:
- If you have 100 employees, and are absolutely completely non-prejudiced against minority applicants, there is a 2.3% chance of breaking the rules anyway.
- If you have 50 employees, there is an 11.3% chance.
Youch! Not the kind of risks a business should be taking. What to do, what to do?
I know, discriminate in favour of minority applicants! What are the statistics for that?
Result:
- If you have 100 employees, you’d better start giving around a 55% greater weight to job applications from ethnic minorities if you want your chance of totally innocently being denied contracts to fall below 1%.
Well at least its clear what you have to do. If you have ten applicants for a position, nine white, one black, you should pick the black guy about 15% of the time.
Of course, this is just what firms should be doing in the long run, obviously if you are below the line right now you need to work a bit harder at being diverse, and give a really much bigger weight to minority applications.
Do I sense a business opportunity here? Do you think firms would pay money for statistical analyses of this type? After all, it’s only good risk management. It could work out the exact ‘affirmative action’ quotient your business needs at any given time.
Of course, since racism certainly exists, for many it won’t be an ‘affirmative action’ quotient, so much as a counterbalance for prejudice that actually exists.
Needless to say, it hardly seems as though policies of this sort are going to end racism as we know it.
(If you want the code for my simulation, ask in the comments. It’s in Ruby)
How about a right not to be married?
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of The European Union (PDF) is a very confusing document. Reading it, I begin to understand why there is so much confusion about human rights in this country.
For instance, it is not spelled out on whom human rights are obligations, but we can infer from the text that the rights apply to private citizens as well as governments.
As support of this claim, Article 3, “Right to the integrity of the person” states that in the fields of medicine “the free and informed consent of the person concerned” must be respected. This must be a right that is binding upon private citizens since it only applies to relations between doctors and their patients.
In addition Article 29 says that “Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service.” This either means:
- that law cannot restrict a citizens right to consult a free placement service, or
- that by law, some other people must have an obligation to provide or at least fund this service, free of charge.
Since I think that it means number 2, we discover that indeed, rights in this document place obligations not only on governments but on individuals.
Therefore, we can only conclude that Article 9, “The right to marry shall be guaranteed”, implies that should you wish to marry, a man or woman must be found and compelled to oblige. *
Applying this conclusion to Article 24, which says that children “may express their views freely”, must mean that parents have a duty to allow their kids to speak exactly as they see fit.
The only meaning of Article 13 - “The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint.” - which is consistent with the rest of the document is that it is a breach of the charter to obstruct a scientist in the execution of his duty. Financial budgets - no matter how large - are a constraint upon research. Therefore, we could provide scientists with all the money in the world, and even then, we wouldn’t succeed in removing the constraint.
As I said, it’s a confusing document. I assume that there are some other documents, perhaps obscure legal opinions, that explain why the text doesn’t actually mean what it says it means. It would be nice if the learned gentlemen who decide (presumbly from inside their own heads) what rights we actually have, could in some way feed this esoteric knowledge back into the text. Otherwise the Charter will remain the obstacle to the understanding of human rights that it is now.
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* Incidentally, if it’s important to give people the right to marry if they wish, isn’t it just as important to give people the right not to marry? If it’s possible that at some point in the future the government could require you not to be married for whatever reason, and therefore we need to guard against that possibility by creating a human right, isn’t it just as plausible that the government could require you to be married, and isn’t that just as much something that we should be protected from with a human right?
Coming out as a Conservative
Coming out as a conservative to my family was an interesting experience. (I did it a little bit before Cameron arrived.) Reactions varied widely. Some were simply astonished. Others, I am sure, considered it (and still consider it) a betrayal. The most memorable comment has been
I just don’t think you can be a conservative and a christian at the same time.
Hmmm. Well, since I’m not christian I suppose that’s ok.
It is interesting that when compared to some in my family, I am very liberal. There are members of my family who believe in bringing back the death penalty and sending all asylum seekers home to be tortured. (I don’t think they are too hot on the gays either.) But it’s my supporting the Conservative Party that’s really scary.
In my head I get the chance to thoroughly explain why I am conservative and through a kind of Socratic dialogue bring my relatives onside. In real life there are no such opportunities.
One time someone did ask me outright, in shocked tones, “why are you a conservative?!”. I replied, ducking the question entirely, “because I hate poor people.” This was hilarious because for about 5 solid seconds everyone just looked shocked. It took the one other guy in the room who I know to be Tory to start laughing before they picked up I was joking. Sheesh.
That was from The West Wing of course. The hot Republican guy is asked by the hot Democrat babe, why is he a Republican?
Because I hate poor people. They don’t have jobs, some of them smell bad. I hate them Donna.
Fortunately I had this in my head when I was asked to defend myself, and I think it’s an effective way of unloading the question.
Of course this is less necessary now that Cameron has done such a good job of decontaminating the brand. In a way it makes me sad. There’s nothing like being a real Radical.