Murder in George Street

The conclusions will come after all the facts are available, but here are some early thoughts:

First, quibble with the headlines. For the benefit of Times readers, half past seven is not rush hour in Luton town centre. The only people around are those few of us with early starts in London (I aim to reach Canary Wharf for 08:30), and preparation for the business day: cleaning windows, stocking shops, etc. The most coherent account of what happened was that a window cleaner who had been working at M&S was attacked while using the ATM at the Town Hall end of George Street.

The (premature) conclusion is that this was a freak. It’s extremely rare for a police officer to be fatally stabbed while dealing with day-to-day street crime. I wouldn’t like them to go into life-or-death mode every time there’s a fight in the high street. If firearms are around they go into full combat mode and that’s a different matter – it’s a whole lot more dangerous for them and they have to be extremely cautious, which is unpleasant but reasonable. But I would hate to see them acting more “militarily” and less humanly whenever someone has a knife. It would cut them off further from the population and perhaps in net even make them more at risk.

Of course, if I in my comfortable safe job say that the risk of this happening is so small that the police ought to continue to run it – that is, that there should be no reaction of a general kind (changes to procedures, etc.), I must – and do – accept that the specific reaction to this death can be large. After all, if it’s so rare, then we can afford it. I will make sure I remember the name of Jonathan Henry, and remember that he left a family who deserve special respect in Luton, for years to come. Attacks on the police are more serious crimes because they threaten to separate the police from the public in the way I discussed above.

I don’t know whether the large-scale investigation taking place of what seems a straightforward event is just overkill, or a routine response to the use of the baton round, or a routine investigation into how an officer came to be killed. In any case, it is OK. The figure I saw on the ground at 7:35 looked pretty comprehensively disabled, but having been under-cautious the police would have had to jump to being over-cautious.

If the figure on the ground was PC Henry, then there was a screw-up, because one ambulance was already leaving, and another waiting. But I’m over-speculating now. I’ll continue to follow the story as the facts come out.

Air Power, Mithril and National Self-Confidence

ekr asks why the fellowship (in The Lord of the Rings) is not better equipped for the job.

A commenter correctly points out that the mithril coat worn secretly by Frodo is actually incredibly scarce and valuable – more than Frodo himself realises. (It came from the hoard of Smaug in The Hobbit).

As to the fellowship, I think an important point in considering the geopolitical situation of Third-Age Middle Earth is that the elves, after previous catastrophes, are in a kind of Vietnam Syndrome. They do not believe that any good can come of military action. The Fellowship includes nobody from Rivendell. Aragon was a ward of Elrond but is engaging in the operation as part of his project of uniting the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Men. Legolas is a visitor from Mirkwood. Elrond explicitly considers and rejects the idea of sending elvish warriors.

Rivendell is not a city-state or city, but a house – “The last homely house West of the mountains”, as it is described in The Hobbit. It is something like a medieval manor house, inhabited by the Lord’s extended family and a few guests and retainers. It is not adequate as a base for military operations.

As for importing supplies from Lothlórien, as suggested by ekr, that is absurd. Not only was there no Fed-ex, long journeys were extremely rare and dangerous. Elrond’s wife Celebrían (Galadriel’s daughter) was captured by Orcs on a journey from Rivendell to Lórien, and the wilderness only became more dangerous since. There is no mention of merchants in LOTR (the gathering of supplies to Isengard is the only trade I can think of), and the idea that the roads will be used by “messengers of the King, not bandits…” is a prediction made by Frodo after the fall of Mordor, in contrast to the past.

Possibly ekr was confused by the film, where Elrond and Arwen apparently teleport around Middle-Earth at random, and a mysterious Elvish army arrives from nowhere at Helm’s Deep. This was due to the filmmakers writing and rewriting the story, and having to use already-filmed scenes after changing their minds about the plot.

The only plot difficulty I saw along the lines of ekr’s objections was the low profile of the eagles. In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the eagles appear as Deus ex Machina at the end to save the day: first in the Battle of the Five Armies, and then to rescue Frodo and Sam after the fall of Barad-dûr. In both cases it appears that they could have done a lot more good by getting involved earlier.

Even this problem I am no longer too worried by. Just because there is no air-to-air combat in Tolkien, one should not assume that air superiority is not a consideration. For most of the period of The Hobbit, there is a dragon in the Lonely Mountain, and the eagles only show up after it is killed by Bard. It seems highly probable that eagles would not wish to hang around where there was a dragon flying about. Similarly, they only approach Mordor after Sauron, and with him the Nazgûl, have been defeated. An air defence system consisting of a Palantír-based DEW line plus winged nazgûl would probably be impenetrable. True, the winged nazgûl are only introduced once the fellowship have already sent out, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sauron had other airborne assets, and that the air at least in Eastern Middle-Earth was as dangerous as the ground.

It is explained by Gandalf, in The Quest of Erebor, that his involvement with Thorin’s expedition in The Hobbit was motivated by concerns over air-power — specifically that in a war, Smaug could be used to attack Lórien.

If you have a life and therefore are ignorant of these matters, Wikipedia is staggeringly comprehensive.

What's a Website?

thelondonpaper today ridicules Judge Peter Openshaw, who “stunned a London court by admitting he did not know what a website was.”

Judge Openshaw was hearing a trial of three men accused of “internet terror offences”, whatever they are, and told Woolwich Crown Court “The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a website is.”

I would like to hear the journalist John Dunne give his definition.

“Website” is a pretty vague term. What website are you reading this on? Is it Blogger? Is it blogspot.com? Is it Anomaly UK? Is it bloglines or some other aggregator?

Let’s say it’s Anomaly UK — not on the basis of any technical definition, but because that’s what it says at the top of the page.

Whose website is it? I guess it’s mine, because I “created” it, although that (fortunately) did not involve supplying any physical material, paying a penny, or interacting with any human being. Most of the content came from me, but some of it from Google, some of it from various unidentifiable commenters, some bits from Sitemeter or technorati or whoever “NZ Bear” actually is. The content actually resides and reaches you from Google, except for the bits that don’t, or the bits that are put in or changed by some system I know nothing of between you and it. (“Bits” in the non-jargon sense, that is.)

A judge – or a legislator – who thinks he knows what “a website” is, but in fact only knows what the average web user knows, could make some horribly bad decisions: think about the Danish court that ruled that deep linking is illegal, for example. No politician who had thought to ask the question “what is an email address” (and got an accurate answer) would have planned to require sex offenders to register their email addresses, as John Reid did.

Since the “internet terror” cases in question involves an “extremist web forum” (and perhaps nothing else), making sure lawyers and witnesses are very precise about what was “on the internet” is probably essential to reaching a correct verdict. Judge Openshaw’s question was penetrating and important.

Quote of the Day

“it is true that there are Frenchmen coming here because their bureaucracy prevents them getting jobs but they are matched by Brits going there because our bureaucracy prevents us building houses.”
– Neil Craig

It reminded me slightly of Gavin Lyall in The Secret Servant: “The French let their buildings flourish but keep the trees very much pruned and in their place. In Britain it’s the other way round: it’s an offence to enlarge your house or cut down your trees. What a basis for entente.”

Insane Whackos

Tim has a go at some creationist.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like being so rude or dismissive of creationists. Not because there is any truth in their conclusions, but because their arguments, while incorrect, are not actually stupid or insane.

What are the arguments for evolution? The primary evidence is the widespread existence of signs of relationship between different species, existing and extinct. But that evidence is spread pretty widely. It takes considerable time and research to find enough of it, or considerable experience of the workings of science as an occupation to see it in the literature. It is not reasonable to expect everyone to be able to make certain of themselves that evolution happens, when most people couldn’t explain how a fridge or CD player works.

So that leaves the secondary evidence, that just about everyone who has studied biology seriously for the last hundred years is in no doubt. To be sure, that’s a strong argument. But it does mean, more or less, that most people are being asked to take evolution on trust. Given that, the more we pressure people to accept what we tell them about natural history, the more they will reasonably suspect an ulterior motive.

Labelling creationists and ID’ers as “insane whackos” is therefore not just counterproductive, but wrong. More precisely they are ignorant, but no more ignorant than the many who “take our word for it” about natural history because they don’t have sufficient knowledge of the subject to make themselves sure. Creationists may be ill-educated, but they are not exceptionally ill-educated, just exceptionally disobedient to academic authority. I am not prepared to condemn their disobedience.

My sympathy with their disobedience has been enhanced by the global warming issue, where I have found myself in disagreement with the scientific mainstream, in a debate which appears to me more political than scientific. Possibly the two questions are similar, and if I knew more about climatology I would agree that global warming is almost certainly anthropogenic, and the dirty tricks, bad arguments and dogmatism of the other side would be beside the point. Conversely, if I am right about AGW, then when the whole IPCC steam train goes off the rails, any other politically significant scientific “fact” which is aggressively asserted on the basis of “we’re the experts” is going to take a popular battering.

Of course the difficult question is how to handle education. Should we permit children to be taught things which we are sure are not true? I’ve gone on too long so I’ll come back to this later.

Radio Times

The Radio Times had a very good website for TV listings. One thing I particularly liked was that they did not bother to require a password to store personalised information. All I had to do was log in with an ID and it would remember which channels I selected to put on the programme list. If anyone who knew or guessed my ID wanted then they could change my list of programmes, which it is impossible to believe would ever be a bigger problem than needing a password to see what was on television on any given day would be.
So today, they have changed their system to require me to choose a password to have my channel selections remembered. They have also changed their grid-view browsing format to show less information in the same amount of space.
I will now check out the first ten or so TV listing sites I find on Google and only if they are all very bad will I ever return to Radio Times

XML again

For the second time today, I’ve seen an assertion of mine on this blog made by someone much more authoritative.

Me, October 05:
XML is a text format for arbitrary hierarchically-structured data. That’s not a difficult problem. I firmly believe that I could invent one in 15 minutes, and implement a parser for it in 30, and that it would be superior in every way to XML.

James Clark, Friday:
.. any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML.

via Tim Bray, who explains that James Clark “was designated Technical Lead of the original XML Working Group and is the single largest contributor to the design of XML”, and also points out the reason XML is a poor data format is that he and Clark and the rest designed it as a document format, not an arbitrary data format.

Mass Destruction

I made the point some time ago that Chemical and Biological weapons are much less effective for mass destruction than high explosive. I don’t have any special knowledge, it’s just obvious.
Today in The Register, a former bomb disposal officer makes the exact same point.

I’m not saying that a chemical attack would be a completely trivial matter, but it would almost always be preferable to being hit by the same weight of high explosives.
So, if your aim is to kill and injure as many people as possible, you’d be a fool to use chemicals. And yet chemicals are rated as WMDs, while ordinary explosives aren’t. So too are biologicals, even more amazingly. Biological “weapons”, in the modern sense, have yet to be even demonstrated.

Unexpected Sense of Proportion

I think my fears, expressed on Friday, that too much of a fuss had been made over the captured boarding party in Iran, were misplaced.
Certainly there was a lot of media attention, but on reflection, the attention was not so much the result of an unhealthy over-sentimental concern whether they lived or died, but was just the latest Reality TV spectacle.
The Sun caught exactly the right note with the headline “We went to Iran and all we got were these lousy suits”.
On the same basis, I think the authorities are right to allow them to sell their stories. Treating global conflict as “I’m a Lieutenant, get me out of here” might make us look decadent, but, let’s face it, we are decadent, and it’s going to be very difficult to appear otherwise.
On the other hand, it also makes us look strong in a strange way. The Iranian regime is fighting for its life, and perhaps hit on the desperate tactic of kidnapping a British naval unit in international waters. If, rather than panicking, we treat the whole affair as a joke or a bit of cheap entertainment, it really drives home the fact that we’re not really even trying. Just imagine how much damage we could do if we actually gave a shit!

Deskilling and Overskilling

For anyone who works for a living, the biggest threat to his livelihood is that his job will be made easier. For if it is made easier, someone else might be able to do it.

On the other hand, making jobs easier is the main effect of technological progress. It is the process that has given us the wealth that we now live in.

When is it then a bad thing for a job to be made easier — to be deskilled?

First, when it doesn’t work. That is, in my experience, the most visible form of bad management — an attempt to codify a job with a set of procedures, in the hope that the particular skills of the worker can be replaced by the written procedures. If it worked it would be socially beneficial, but all too often it just means that a the job is just as difficult as it was, but there is then an added difficulty of pretending to follow the procedures.

The other time is when it would be better to make workers more skilled. After all, workers becoming more skilled is equivalent overall to jobs becoming less demanding. However, the incentives are different, as the benefits of deskilling a job stay with the employer, whereas the benefits of improving a worker move with the worker.

Historically, I think efficiency has come much more from deskilling jobs than from improving workers, but it would be wrong to ignore the other process.

Of course if a job isn’t done quite as well by relatively unskilled workers, that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. A handmade shoe might be better than a mass-produced shoe, but the general replacement of handmade shoes with mass-produced shoes is surely a huge improvement in efficiency.

In the market there is a constant pressure to improve efficiency by using fewer or cheaper workers. At the same time, workers want to become more skilled, and to use their skills. The task of improving efficiency and getting it right is difficult, and seems to me to depend mostly on the managers actually in touch with the workers, not the top of the hierarchy.

Back in the 1980s, the big thing was deskilling those middle managers. In a static situation, that would make sense: the workers know how to do their jobs, the senior management to strategy, and the middle managers are a waste of space. But to actually produce change, skilled middle managers are needed.

In the public sector, the process does not operate the same way. There is an unending trend towards workers becoming more skilled, and more expensive, and not the steady pressure to find ways to do the job with slightly less skilled workers. Instead, we see skilled public-sector workers like doctors, teachers and police officers becoming steadily more trained and scarcer, until senior management (the government) is forced to try to fill gaps by dragging a whole new layer of worker in to do the job which the original workers are now too skilled and too expensive to do. That is the story of the Nurse Practitioner, railed against so steadily by Dr Crippen. It is the story of the Police CSO and the Learning Assistant to the class of 40 pupils.

The case of teachers is particularly striking, because it is necessarily a skilled job, and because the system needs so many teachers. As of 2003 the country had over 400,000 teachers (full time equivalent). As more pupils stay in education to 18, the demand will rise. There are certainly worries about the standard of some of the teachers. But we aren’t going to get better teachers than we’ve already got – not 400,000 of them. Any improvement in schools can only possibly come by making it easier for actually existing teachers to teach effectively — by, whereever possible, deskilling their jobs. The solutions that actually come down from government, however, always seem to involve demanding extra skills from teachers. If you can teach well, but you’re not good at writing formal lesson plans, you’re now not a good teacher. If you can teach well, but you can’t impose discipline on a gang of rowdy teenagers, you’re now not a good teacher. If you teach well, but you refuse to pay lipservice to the many political nostrums handed down from on high, you’re now not a good teacher.

If we had a surplus of good teachers, we could get away with all this, but demanding more skills from a profession that numbers in the hundreds of thousands can’t be done. If you employ 400 people, you might be able to get better workers to do a more demanding job. If you employ 400,000 that’s out of the question.

As I said, in the private sector attempts at deskilling jobs often fail. The only way we will see any improvement in these public sectors, without a large risk of catastrophe as possible improvements fail, is to allow variety. And that, of course, is the one thing this government more than any other has stamped out.

This discussion has been slightly aimless, but it’s a huge question — the driving force of human progress — and there’s a great deal more that needs to be said. It was brought to mind by Theodore Dalrymple’s piece on the medical student problem, and by chris dillow’s comments on it.