There’s a good list of some of the worst examples on the Journalist Wall of Shame. Really quite shocking what’s being said, which is a real shame because it just feeds on people’s misunderstanding of all things Nuclear and will distort the Nuclear debate for years.

In addition, this is a nice example of Crowdsourcing to hold “professional” media to account, and an interesting use of Google Docs to allow multiple collaborators produce and update a single document (see second half of the page).

Update: The guy who started it has explained his reasons with a link to a list of good Journalism on the subject.

This excellent post gives some perspective. Some quotes:

… to an extent, anyway. See, the thing that people don’t realize is that Honshu is massive. It is larger than Great Britain. (A country which does not typically refer to itself as a “tiny island nation.”) At about 800 miles long, it stretches from roughly Chicago to New Orleans. Quite a lot of the reporting on Japan, including that which is scaring the heck out of my friends and family, is the equivalent of someone ringing up Mayor Daley during Katrina and saying “My God man, that’s terrible?—?how are you coping?”

[snip]

The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.

[snip]

The tremendous public unease over nuclear power shouldn’t be allowed to overpower the conclusion: nuclear energy, in all the years leading to the crisis and continuing during it, is absurdly safe. Remember the talk about the trains and how they did exactly what they were supposed to do within seconds? Several hundred people still drowned on the trains. [snip] When you hear news reports of people exposed to radiation, keep in mind, at the moment we’re talking a level of severity somewhere between “ate a banana” and “carries a Delta Skymiles platinum membership card”.

[snip]

Japan’s economy just got a serious monkey wrench thrown into it, but it will be back up to speed fairly quickly. (By comparison, it was probably more hurt by either the Leiman Shock or the decision to invent a safety crisis to help out the US auto industry. By the way, wondering what you can do for Japan? Take whatever you’re saying currently about “We’re all Japanese”, hold onto it for a few years, and copy it into a strongly worded letter to your local Congresscritter the next time nativism runs rampant.)

The amount of preparation the Japanese have done is amazing. It is a pity that in Europe and US you can’t really get people to take contingency planning seriously – but I guess Japan gets a lot of practice.

There’s also a couple of posts on the Nuclear thing in more detail:

• Bob Cringley, who worked as an investigator for the Presidential Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island on the thinks most of the 11 reactors will be a write off.
• Here’s a detailed post on why we shouldn’t worry about the Nuclear Reactors.

The comments on these articles are worth a read.

I do fear that one of the biggest casualties of this whole thing is going to be common sense in the Nuclear Power debate.

As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it.

[snip]

So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f— you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine.

“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is -­? a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

The awful thing is that the TSA guys want to do a good job, the traveling public want to be safe… and yet we’re here… with no one happy, or indeed safer. Tragic – and I’d like to blame the TSA management, or their political oversight… but they got elected. Our political masters are just doing what they think will get them re-elected.

People need a better appreciation of risk, and security tradeoffs. Perhaps the best place to introduce this is in sports commentary? Because spectator sport is at least one place people will reliably pay attention. (yeah, I know – but I’m being pragmatic here).

With more understanding of statistics, we might get a more refined view of everyday risks, and from there a better perspective on what “security” is – and then perhaps we can stop the terrorists scaring us into creating our own prison.

Why is it that people will watch what we eat, but not what they read or watch? Why is it they will go to the gym for a workout, but won’t read a book or a blog post which exposes them to new ideas?

How did we get to a place where taking care of our mind suddenly became unfashionable?

It is going to be a really difficult next few years, and we are all going to have to figure out how to add value in a world where money is harder to come by. Jobs-for-life went ages ago, and the kind of jobs where you turn up day after day doing the same thing are getting scarcer by the day – and with the cutbacks in progress, the competition for those jobs will be immense.

Sadly, the people who choose not to keep on top of current affairs (and particularly the economy) are living in a happy little bubble and won’t know the world has changed until the change arrives on their doorstep, in probably quite a painful way. Which is a real pity.

Final word from Seth’s blog post:

Let’s assert for the moment that you get paid to create, manipulate or spread ideas. That you don’t get paid to lift bricks or hammer steel. If you’re in the idea business, what’s going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.

As for the deliberately uninformed, we can ignore them or we can reach out to them and hopefully start a pattern of people thinking for themselves…

Over the past few decade the political parties in the UK have almost merged into the centre ground. This segment really shows the difference between left and right – and wherever you are on that spectrum it is good to see the views expressed so clearly.

They’ve just mad freely available an analysis of the Afghanistan situation which is well worth a read to understand some of the complexity and depth that is involved. To whet your appetite, here’s what made me go “Ohhh”:

• Of course the Obama administration had an internal debate about Afghanistan tactics, they’re meant to.
• “Generals must think about how to win the war they are fighting. Presidents must think about whether the war is worth fighting.”
• The Taliban like any Guerilla force have a built in advantage, they pretty much just have to wait for us to go home and they win but that’s OK because the US has shown it has the stomach to stay in the fight where it’s strategic interests say to do so.
• But remember, we got into Afghanistan to route out Al Qaeda – and Al Qaeda are playing the Guerilla game on a global basis.
• Obama probably can’t withdraw because he’s a Democrat and people would accuse him of being too soft.
• But what he can do is get the Pakistanis to take a more active role in the war, because it is very much in their interests to do so.

Fascinating…

Anyway, I saw this  a week or so ago and have to say I do somewhat agree – when I look at the energy and passion people put into being football supporters, I can’t help but be saddened. Why can’t that be put into something more personal and productive? The men who don’t know their wive’s perfume but do know every move of Manchester United? The boy who dreams of meeting Beckham to get his autograph, rather than being on the pitch himself?

It isn’t that I don’t like football, I just don’t see the point. And I am saddened when people view me as weird when I say that – what have we come to when you are weird if you want to make your own path, rather than watch a bunch of other people have fun and then argue pointlessly about details in the pub later?

As an aside, Jo and I turned up in Basel during Carnival (we wondered why we couldn’t get any hotel rooms… should have been a warning sign!) and it really was quite special. I wonder why we have nothing like that in the UK?

This article titled “Football: a dear friend to capitalism” was written by Terry Eagleton, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th June 2010 20.00 UTC

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts.

The game also mixes glamour with ordinariness in subtle proportion: players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you revere them is because they are alter egos, who could easily be you. Only God combines intimacy and otherness like this, and he has long been overtaken in the celebrity stakes by that other indivisible One, José Mourinho.

In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman. The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game’s history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht‘s theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.

This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique. There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless. Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they’re not working?

Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe, while providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings – defiling religious images and mocking their lords and masters – could be a genuinely anarchic affair, a foretaste of a classless society.

With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

My main newspapers are The FT, The Economist and The Week. I used to read The Sunday Times but it was increasingly pointless and whilst I might try it for a month I can’t really see me paying for The Times. However, I can see me increasingly reading The Guardian despite it’s left-of-center reputation being slightly out of whack with my normal repertoire.

Anyway, I’ve installed the plugin and shall see how it goes. I often find myself pointing colleagues to various articles, so the plugin might prove useful.

All I need now is for The Guardian to produce an iPad app, and for the FT iPad app to support emailing links to articles…

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens. We are seeing the puny forces of man vs. the awesome forces of nature. We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win…and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will.

Interesting analysis, scary conclusions.

That article also pointed to this introduction to drilling offshore wells which answered a lot of basic questions I had.

Anyway, here’s the video

I read something about the big freeze in 1962/63  - it didn’t thaw until March! Here’s some more info:

• Wikipedia Page
• A film on YouTube
• A page on the BBC

Of course, in those days they didn’t have:

• Cars with funky electronics to stop us sliding around so much
• The Internet (imagine how isolated you’d feel now without it?)
• Multi-channel TV to keep us sane
• The Wii, to keep us fit

And now I shall go back to work, counting my lucky stars…

It’s a brief post so I’ll quote it entirely:

Set up a torrent tracker, get fined, go to jail.

Join a bank, destroy the economy, profit.

Let’s draw out the distinction.

The Pirate Bay guys were criminally prosecuted for….violating (largely obsolete) copyright. Almost no one in finance has been held even civilly liable for vastly more economically damaging actions.

On the one hand, we have damages worth maybe (maybe) a few million. On the other, a few trillion.

On the one hand, innovation and better music is stifled – benefits are foregone. On the other, reform of a broken banking system is stifled – losses are incurred.

That’s everything that’s wrong with the economy in two sentences: the ongoing inability of today’s leaders to deal with 21st century economics.

Indeed….

Which is all true, but it neglects the second and more important point – Amazon have done themselves no favors in how they’ve responded to this. If they’d got out in front of it as Dominos did,it wouldn’t have been a big thing. Truly just an embarrassing “glitch”.

But instead they gave out confusing messages from low-level operatives – no one took control, so the Twitterati made their own mind up. First mistake – they should have been all over this from the outset.

My colleague Dave Droar made the observation that they’re probably so internally focused they thought the thing to do was fix the bug in their systems; however the real problem wasn’t a minor bug in the display of books, it was out there in their customer base and their relationship with them.

How different would this have been if a few of the Amazon techies had come out on their blogs with detail on what happened, why, and how it was being fixed. Open the curtains, let some sunlight in, and show there’s nothing fear. An apology from someone senior, problem solved. Instead silence. There was one off-the-record chat but that’s it, which feels rather shallow – you’d expect more sources for that kind of stuff.

This is all the more crazy from a company that’s quite good at getting out there and being visible in the community – when things are going well!

Even now, there’s no one from Amazon out there talking at a senior level, engaging with the community. Twitter is still making the conversation.

I wonder why this is? – I can think of a few possible reasons:

• Amazon’s leadership have failed – they either don’t understand it’s an issue or they haven’t got the guts to step up. Either way, heads should roll, because when the time came they weren’t up to the job.
• The explanation we’re currently being given isn’t completely accurate and they’re trying to figure out some damage control. Ohhh dear. (I note a search for “Homosexuality” still doesn’t return sensible results – how long does this “glitch” take to fix?).
• The company is just structurally unable to respond to this kind of issue. Maybe it isn’t joined up in the right way, maybe no one has the authority – who knows?
• Despite being a child of The Internet, Amazon is firmly Big Business 1.0 and finds the whole thing bewildering. “We keep doing what we should do and nothing works – let’s just ignore them”.

That the Twitterati might have jumped to the wrong conclusion is regrettable. That Amazon left them to it is indefensible.

Amazon – we want to love you, we do. Please don’t be a case study in how not to do this. You’re currently being outclassed by a Pizza chain.

Update 1: fuel for the “It wasn’t really a glitch” fire.

Update 2: Good advice for what Amazon should have done (albeit from a company that would happily provide them with a service!).

There’s a lot of content written trying to compare our current problems with events of the 1970′s or 1930′s. For example, in the comments to this post.

I wonder – the people who were there in the 1930′s – what did they compare to?

Was that comparison helpful? Did it help them understand what was happening and act in a way that created the best possible outcome? Or were their comparisons unhelpful – perhaps even worse than useless?

Are these comparisons to historic events just a futile attempt at bringing certainty to a very uncertain time? Let’s face it, we haven’t had many of these kinds of events in history, and there are so many variables involved. There’s nothing to say we can draw any parallels from the past.

Perhaps it’s time to admit the map we were looking at for the past 20 years was inaccurate, and the only thing we know for sure is that conventional wisdom wasn’t all that wise.

So we’ll spend the next few years developing a new understanding. Which will be at the very least “interesting”, but we can’t avoid it, so best get on with it. At the moment the bad news keeps on coming, let’s figure out how to create good news.