The view from the Metropolis

Sometimes I despair even of my beloved Guardian. I was annoyed a few years ago when it declared gastro-pubs 'over', before one had even opened here in the Land of Pork Scratchings. Yesterday's (otherwise positive) review of the Super Furry Animals' gig similarly got me.

Especially this bit.

The reunion marks the 15th anniversary of their Welsh-language album Mwng, and a mid-set four-song slab of its experimental accordion jazz and Pink Floydish echoes feels an indulgence.

OK. So a band whose members speak Welsh as a first language, singing some of their Welsh-language songs in Wales to a Welsh audience on the anniversary of those songs' first release is 'an indulgence'. I see. Or rather I don't, because I don't assume that I am the intended audience for absolutely everything because I'm from London.

Luckily the Super Furry Animals have a song for that and it's not in Welsh so the reviewer will understand it perfectly.



Meanwhile, have a track or two from that 'indulgent' album.

The oracle speaks!

The Guardian Higher Education Network is having an online chat on the subject of 'Surviving Your First Academic Job' on Friday, 1 onwards. All the experts are away for the summer, so I'm on the panel, trying not to be facetious. Join us!

A new Low

Wonderfully, the Guardian is streaming Low's new album, C'Mon, in its entirety. It's - brilliant. Much more upbeat than I was expecting from the Masters of Misery.

Never mind the journalists

I'm hooked on the Guardian's and BBC's coverage of the nationwide student protests. All over the country, university, college and school students are protesting in their thousands - a magnificent spectacle and a little heated in a few places.

What's striking about the BBC coverage is how reactionary and judgemental it is - comments like 'a complete rabble' 'a bit crazy', and surprise that Cambridge students (imagine) are protesting and are angry. There's a concerted effort to focus on the incredibly isolated bits of violence and to praise the 'peaceful' students: the discourse clearly separates 'nice' from 'nasty' with virtually no discussion of the rights and wrongs of the situation. There's no historical context - of education or of student protest - and more than a hint that all these Oxbridge-educated commentators (particularly on the BBC) are revolted by their successors. Certainly the interviewers are parrotting Clegg's and Cameron's lines as though there's no debate to be had.

I like this dispersed protest. The massive London demo was excellent, and certainly caught the media's attention, but concerted efforts in virtually every town in the country from Bolton to Bristol to York means that a much larger proportion of the population have a chance of meeting and listening to them. It's like a mini-general strike. Shame there's nothing happening in The Dark Place, unlike all these towns (rolling updates here).

Manchester, Bristol and Leeds students seem to be doing a magnificent job - as is Simon, the very articulate student talking at length to the BBC, despite their little attempts to bully him ("you condemn the occupation at the previous demo, don't you?", "we only report what we see" - he points out very calmly that news organisations frame all stories, and they choose what that frame is).

Fame at last

Letter from Vole in the Guardian today, about the government's abolition of school sport funding. Obviously I can't direct you to the great work - that would ruin my carefully cultivated anonymity!

To whom should I write next? I'm thinking an epistolary revolution.

This is what the internet is for

No, not porn, racism and football.

There's a story in the Guardian today about vascular surgery death rates in different hospitals - a really serious piece of investigative work, given that hospitals don't collect statistics reliably, and certainly don't like releasing them.

The thrust seems to be that bigger hospitals do more complicated surgery, so their surgeons are more experienced and so survival rates are higher. Though there are complications - small hospitals might have high survival rates by passing difficult procedures to bigger hospitals.

Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science) took the figures the Guardian made available and queried the way the statistics have been processed. Then lots and lots and lots of statisticians have reprocessed the figures in different ways. The journalist who wrote the piece is engaging in the discussion and putting Goldacre in touch with the medics who collected the data.

This is the kind of thing which occurs.

Simple linear regression is not appropriate in this case as pointed out above. You are not accounting for the fact that there is lots more random error associated with units that do fewer operations. A glm will take into account the fact that there is more precision in the rates estimated for larger units. I have performed a glm in Stata with a rather simple categorization of the number of operations into 0-50, 51-100, 101-200 and 201+.

Categorizing is generally ont a good thing to do, but as there appears to be some confusion and thus help to illustrate what is going on.

. recode ops (min/50 = 1) (51/100 = 2) (101/200 = 3) (201/max = 4), gen(ops_group)

(99 differences between ops and ops_group)

. glm dead i.ops_group, family(binomial ops) link(log) eform nolog

Generalized linear models No. of obs = 99

Optimization : ML Residual df = 95

Scale parameter = 1

Deviance = 186.5015817 (1/df) Deviance = 1.963175

Pearson = 181.6864657 (1/df) Pearson = 1.912489

Variance function: V(u) = u*(1-u/ops) [Binomial]

Link function : g(u) = ln(u/ops) [Log]

AIC = 4.721745

Log likelihood = -229.7263858 BIC = -250.0348

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

| OIM

dead | Risk Ratio Std. Err. z P>|z| [95% Conf. Interval]

-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------

ops_group |

2 | .8576235 .1563294 -0.84 0.399 .5999815 1.225901

3 | .6705549 .1181781 -2.27 0.023 .4747 .9472169

4 | .5466476 .1057056 -3.12 0.002 .3742054 .7985549

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The mortality rate is 33% lower in units with 101-200 operstions that those with 0-50 and is 45% lower in those with 201+ operations compared to those with 0-50.

The result is highly significant.

I don't understand the stats (not much call for it in Welsh literature studies) but the gloss is useful and I'm learning all the time.

Offline, or in old print media, this wouldn't happen. No paper would be open to critique like this, and you wouldn't be able to marshal the resources of all these slackers who should be working on their day jobs. Between all these people, a fascinating (nerdy) and better story is emerging. Open data is really important, as is the wisdom of informed crowds (including the critics who've engaged with Goldacre's approach).

Good for NHS users, good for the Guardian and good for the web!

Just keep calm…

Morning everyone. Well, it is here, just about. It's a brave new dawn of teaching instead of marking, but the hangover is hard to shake off - I was too tired even to go swimming this morning, despite being in bed by 9.30.

What a day it's going to be - students collecting essays, some teaching, and I have a piece to write for the English lecturers' newsletter: a chance to give my colleagues nationwide a broadside of full-on Vole. I think the key is to avoid trying to be funny: it's not my métier. Pomposity, on the other hand, I can do… but perhaps not. Any ideas?

Meanwhile, the keel of my cultural ship is broken: none of the Guardian's links are working for me, so all I can see is the front page and lots of 404s. Aaaarrrggghhhh - deprived of guilty liberal-centrist views and Steve Bell. It's going to be a long day.

NO ATTACHMENTS OR VIDEO STOP ART OR OBSOLETE STOP

An amusing columnette in the Guardian on the (slight) return of telegrams, terse little haiku which can overturn a life. My favourite of the ones quoted is childish but funny:

When Lord Lovat led a massively destructive commando raid on the Lofoten Islands in 1941, he sent a telegram from the local post office to one A Hitler in Berlin: "LAST SPEECH SAID GERMAN TROOPS WOULD MEET BRITISH WHEREVER THEY LANDED STOP WHERE ARE THEY".

'When ideas fail, words come in very handy'

So wrote Goethe, in Faust.

I mention it only because the VIPs in suits waffled that they'd 'accepted responsibility'. They might suspend performance related pay this year (performance of hundreds of job cuts, misleading the government, withdrawing from league tables, imposing a vacuous new curriculum and reducing staff morale to zero) but then again they might not. They set the agenda, they talked a lot. The nature of the new curriculum wasn't even reached. I did ask the aforesaid VIPs to resign - declined! Clearly 'responsibility' means something else on their pay grade.

The most interesting bit was when it was claimed that all universities have been caught out by an 'arcane' rule change about what a completing student means (e.g. the university gets paid when a student completes (hands in the final piece of work, not necessarily passes) the year's modules.

?

This has been public knowledge for a very long time. Peter Knight wrote about it, with examples, in the Guardian Education section in 2006! He was V-C at UCE, so if he knew about it, why didn't our lot?

Let's see what Professor Knight said, three and a half years ago:

The committee has ruled that the university is funded for a student if, and only if, the student completes every aspect of the year's work in that academic year. Any postponement of a final assessment, any resit, will almost certainly result in the student being regarded as a "non-completer" and not fundable, even if the academic decision is that the student can proceed to the next year of study.

Astroturf of the week

Astroturfing, in PR, is the practice of creating fake grassroots (get it?) pressure groups to alter the public debate on a given topic. One of the groups I've long suspected is the Taxpayers' Alliance, which is always popping up on serious news, critiquing the government (never the Tories). They've always stunk of low membership, lots of money and a dedication to no tax, rather than efficient government spending.

The Guardian has run a small and useful investigation: one of its directors harasses the UK government despite being resident in France, all its funding is from seriously rich Tory donors, and there basically isn't a membership. Instead, it's a particularly selfish Tory front. When you see them on screen, remember that they're just sock puppets for the worst Tory elements.

Workers of the World, Throw Off Your Labels

Let me tell you a story.

During the first half of the century, people looked at their schools, hospitals, transport systems, mail companies, prisons and a whole host of other services and realised that if they all got together and paid for them to be run by the state, they'd be more efficient and distributed/run fairly. So we gradually acquired state railways, a National Health Service, pensions and other benefits and government-run schools.

Then governments stopped investing in such services properly, because while taxpayers demanded top quality services, they didn't want to pay for them - except in genuinely civilised countries like Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. These services declined - not terribly, but appreciably.

Then a new bunch of lying, smart-suited gits came along and said that 'efficiency' was the preserve of capitalism, because 'competition' would drive prices down. The Conservatives fell for this hook line and sinker, because they don't believe in all of us pulling together anyway - they want competition between citizens. So the rich can buy better services and the rest of us have to put up with whatever we can afford. If you think that's fine, look at the American health service, which takes up far more of the national income than the British one, yet leaves 46 MILLION people outside the healthcare system, on top of a decline in wages since the 1970s. So much for efficiency. The drive to make a profit contradicts the desire for quality - you only have to look at private prisons, 'outsourced' school meals and hospital cleaning or privatised railways to see that profits are derived by cutting corners.

The little things get to me on a daily basis - not being able to afford dental work, Coke machines in schools, 'sponsored' roundabouts, adverts on everything. Prisoners given no chance for rehabilitation because education, drug treatment and pyschiatric help are expensive - and now my institution never mentions the social and intellectual benefits of education: instead, we have a 'business' model in which 'efficiency' conquers all. How 'efficient' is opening a new world to a student through a good book or a fiery discussion? Not at all - so let's get rid of it. O Brave New World.

Think of this: imagine a world without the BBC. No licence fee, you might think. Brilliant. Then you notice that the news is a bit lightweight. Fewer overseas correspondents. Less politics - your advertisers don't want you upsetting the government. Then perhaps the consumer investigations will disappear - your advertisers certainly don't want you criticising them. Perhaps Top Gear, already a whore for the car industry, stops saying anything negative at all. Your soaps start featuring little plugs for products. The weather report tells you to get down to B and Q to buy a barbecue - and suddenly your world has no space not festooned with adverts.

You kick in the TV and lacerate your foot. You dial 118 999 and after a while, it's answered somewhere in Southeast Asia. After some negotiation, a private ambulance arrives, meter running. You look through the brochures, trying to decide which hospital you should go to - the ambulance driver's suggestions carry a hint of 'on commission'. They all look the same - reassuring doctors, smiling nurses, TV in every room, but there's no price list and you can't tell which one's best. You give up and pick the first one on the pile. Oh dear - 15 miles is expensive, and your insurance doesn't cover the ambulance trip. Nor, when you arrive in a state of considerable delirium, does it cover self-inflicted wounds, and treatment will max out your credit card, so you accept an expensive, branded aspirin from a tired doctor wearing a Boots the Chemist white coat and a bandage and hope you get better. Oops - the hospital cleaning has been outsourced to a company which provides inadequate numbers of ununionised, untrained cleaners who, unmotivated by the recently-reduced minimum wage and long hours, don't make the best job of it. So you pick up MRSA.

Time off to recover? No chance - benefits have been cut and privatised, and you're not 'deserving' - you hobble back to minimum wage work and never walk properly again, and lose your job as a postman for one of the private services. You turn to minor crime and end up in a privatised cell for 23 hours a day, losing your skills, getting ill on no exercise and the worst, cheapest food available and picking up a drug habit and some useful criminal skills. On your release you find that your kids, having departed Coke High with no qualifications but a conviction that fizzy drinks help the world to sing 'in perfect harmony', can't support you or even themselves.

All this is because you don't want to pay taxes. Of course, it will only happen to other people. Poor people. You and your kids can go to private schools, elite universities and professional jobs - unsullied by the predations of companies owned by your pension fund and encouraged by the governments you vote in because they talk about 'hard-working families' needing tax-breaks, about 'choice' and efficiency. Not your fault. When they steal from you, smash up your SUV, rob your mobile phone, it's because they're evil, feckless scum who don't want to work or better themselves. Isn't it?

(I gather the US isn't far from this dystopian vision already).

All this, actually, is just a plea for you to read John Harris's piece in today's Guardian, in which he warns us all of what to expect over the next few years. It's grim. Here's a little bit on hospital cleaning:

Not long ago, I met two hospital cleaners whose jobs in Bury St Edmunds had been outsourced to a company that blithely cut the workforce in half. "We were always on about infection in the hospital," one of them said. "Instead of four cleaners on the ward, they said, 'We're going to put it down to two people, but you won't have to hoover.' Effectively, they were saying, 'clean less'."

Don't vote Labour - they love this stuff because it's not socialism and they're all joining the boards of private service providers. Don't vote Tory. They love this stuff because it's not socialism and they own the private service providers. Oh dear.

Sorry. I seem to have become suddenly rather angry. The sooner I move to Norway, the better.

This place is full of selfish dumbasses

There's a piece on Chinese power generation in today's Guardian: it says that China has very inefficient stations at the moment, but that they're massively altering their economy and industry to make it green.

Cue some idiot called Birdyboy in the comments section, who encapsulates the selfishness of (I suspect) quite a large proportion of the country. This is why we're going to hell.

Yes, and you guys want to stop us flying and eating meat, so we have miserable little lives while the rest of the world keeps on turning. people are not going to stop existing, so stop trying to ruin our fun with pointless new taxes and bans. if we are screwed, then we mat as well enjoy the time we have left. Any anyway, if any a country could do with being 2 degrees hotter it is surely us?

Ashes Fever

The first Ashes match has just started - follow it live here on the Guardian's wonderful 'over by over' coverage. If the play gets boring (unlikely), contributions from viewers are always fun. Also tomorrow, Ireland play Kenya in the first one-day international, which used to be the high-speed version until Twenty20 was invented.

(In case some of my readers are confused, I'm talking cricket. Googlies, Chinamen, silly mid-off and all that).

If you believe… they put a man on the moon

Sorry for the REM reference

Today, as the Guardian's special section reminds me, is the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings. How do you feel about it? Ten years ago, I had nothing but awe for such an amazing achievement - and I still feel that way for the most part. However, in between, I've done a lot of reading. I've learned how the space programme was motivated solely by a need to dominate the Soviets, about how it was manned by pretty unrepentant Nazi rocket scientists drawing on the skills developed in the 1940s, about how it cost a massive chunk of the US GNP, and how its scientific benefits have been massively overexaggerated by NASA spinners.

The Soviets took a pragmatic approach: near earth orbits are great for science, there's nothing on the moon. So did the Europeans for that matter - manned space flight is like getting a taxi down to the shops. We might make Mars but that's as far as it goes, so let's put our energy into satellites, telescopes and probes.

And yet - the romance lingers, perhaps even intensified by the failure of our space race. Once the cold war ended, it turned out that the motivation (and money) dissipated. Instead, we're in the post-space age. Will our grandchildren remember that men walked on the moon? Will they have the energy to care, inbetween long treks for water and trying to eke out a subsistence living on a ruined earth? Perhaps the dominant mode will be anger, at the waste of multiple billions on a giant penis when millions of people starved.

Perhaps, though, the dominant mood will be melancholy. J. G. Ballard's Hello America and Myths of the Near Future depict a California and Florida of abandoned space centres, emptied pools, men and women spiritually hollowed out by the loss of technological purpose.

Everybody's a critic

The Guardian's reviewer didn't like Kröd Mandöon and the Sword of Fire (BBC2) very much. Did you watch it? I did, and thought it bearable - some funny one-liners and a decent enough idea, as though someone had gone through Terry Pratchett's bin. However, it paled somewhat because a couple of days previously, I'd listened to Radio 4's parody of sword and sorcery tales, Elvenquest. Like virtually all of that channel's 'comedy', it's pretty weak, but it's a hell of a lot better than Krüd (though the presence of Julius from The Thick of It helped).

Luckily, the next show was the new series of Mitchell and Webb, which was much stronger than the last, and, as you'll expect if you know that Mitchell is my physical and spiritual doppelgänger, it was a strange experience. I particularly enjoyed the Mitchell talking doll, which uttered lines extremely similar to those I use in seminars ('that was a particularly banal contribution…').

Fame at last

One of my rants (not a very focussed one) about mobile tracking, is excerpted in the Guardian! I don't live in a Faraday cage with a foil hat on really.

Happy Birthday, old man (2)

Friday night saw a party for Mike Cunningham's 50th birthday party, held at the rather wonderful Café Maxsim's in Wolverhampton. For those of you who don't know Mr. C, he's a dry, witty politics lecturer, an inveterate author of witty letters to the Guardian, and (on the debit side), a Crystal Palace fan. Photos here

O Brave New World

I blogged recently about a Digital Media lecture on social networking I went to - and asked for your responses to the new social formations promised by the information age. One of the participants has certainly responded to our suggestions that social-networking trains us to surrender personal information to any authority, commercial and public: the gentleman behind Unluckydip.com is closing down many of his accounts.

If you're bothered, matey, read this: 'Facebook users unwittingly reveal details' and this: 'Mobiles could spell the end of privacy': basically, Google et al. are tempting you to run location-sensitive applications - so that they (and whoever is tapping in to your account) and all the world's advertisers, know where you are for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, if you think technology can be fun, you'd be right. You can now use free Guardian APIs to do odd stuff, and one fan has tracked the history and characteristics of swearing in the Guardian. According to the graph, 'wank' is much underused. To the comment boards!

So sleepy

I'm utterly exhausted. It was boys' epee today, and they all did brilliantly in a very high standard competition, so congratulations to you all. I've put more photos (of fencers, and of Stalinist tower blocks in moody black clouds) here.

I am rather missing the Guardian and Radio 4 now. Oh, and sleep.

Sometimes I feel the need for a killing spree

The Guardian points out that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts in this recessionary time. I'm not surprised: a lot of evil, greedy, fascistic, selfish people crawl out from under their rocks (Rand described altruism as 'evil'). What's really annoying is that the people buying this insane (and awful) novel is that they're the ones who've caused the current disaster.

Atlas Shrugged is about the collapse of America which follows the withdrawal of capitalists from American society, into a compound. Eventually the rest of the country ('parasites') have to beg them to save the nation.

Quite frankly, I'd like the capitalists to hole up in a compound. We could call it, er, um, a PRISON. Then the rest of us could look after each other and clear up the mess. The real-life capitalists are upset that Obama wants to help ordinary Americans. Haven't they noticed that a) greedy selfish capitalists caused this mess and b) that they've been helped first: untold billions to bail out banks and failed industries?

Most haven't noticed this glaring error. Rick Santelli's rant on CNBC summed up Randian philosophy perfectly. He's a former derivatives salesman turned 'journalist'. Asked for his opinion, he streamed forth this garbage from the trading floor, exhorting the traders (all working for bankrupt, taxpayer-saved organisations) to boo the 'losers' who saved them, and need help with their mortgages. The telling moment is towards the end when he describes the traders as a representative cross-section of America - despite them all being white, middle-aged men.

According to the Guardian, Republican Congressmen like John Campbell are giving out copies of the book because we're living in the early stages of the Atlas Shrugged situation. Not exactly: a combination of capitalist greed and capitalist selfishness has caused this. The central conundrum is this: efficient Randy capitalism demands selfishness - which damages the economy but enriches the individual. I don't think that co-operative capitalism would help, but the individualist version guarantees that it destroys itself. There's no motivation for keeping the system running smoothly. We need the effective capitalists to withdraw their efforts - then we can go about creating a society which believes in community rather than get-rich-quick, beggar-thy-neighbour greed. Very depressingly, one of my sisters had a copy of Atlas Shrugged. I realised then that there was an unbridgeable philosophical gap between us that made further serious symbolic pointless.

Rather than us begging the 'achievers' to save us, they've begged us to save them - and then stabbed us in the back when we've done so. No gallows are high enough for these bastards.