If it’s not safe to breathe…

There are lots of reasons why it might be safe to eat something, but not to breathe it. These are all conjecture, but not fanciful:

1. Some things are safe to ingest, but not safe to inhale. Airborne mould spores might be a good example. (Edit: A better example, suggested by David Edwards, is flour, eg, Bakers’ Asthma)
2. Someone breathing a spray will absorb whatever is being sprayed in much greater concentration than someone who eats some of the liquid after it’s landed on a surface. You would not inhale the spray from an air freshener, but you probably wouldn’t throw away the apples just because a little of it landed on them.
3. Inhalation is a much more direct route to the bloodstream than ingestion. Ingested substances are acted on by numerous things (saliva, stomach acid, bile, etc) before being absorbed.
4. The substance being sprayed might be hazardous to health, but might break down into harmless substances by the time it’s harvested. This is the way some of domestic cleaning products work, which are sometimes quite harmful to aquatic life but which are designed to break down before they reach watercourses.
5. The substance might not be absorbed into the plant, and might therefore be washed off the produce by the time it is eaten. A bit like airborne particulate pollution from burning fossil fuels.
6. The substance might be absorbed into the plant, but not in sufficient concentration to be dangerous. A bit like green potatoes  which contain (poisonous) solanine. But not so much that using up the odd old potato will do you any harm.

There are probably more. I haven’t thought about it very much.

There are definitely serious, legitimate questions about the way modern agriculture works and how we should produce enough food to feed everyone. But pictures like this one oversimplify the issues, superficially appeal to people’s misconceptions about science and technology, and do not help to advance the debate.

I am certain that there are some things that it would be unethical to tell children. For example, it would not be ethical to tell things to a child in order to obtain obedience by inducing a permanent state of fear, because (I am reasonably sure) that would be very likely to have a lasting and damaging influence on their emotional and intellectual development, which would cause them to suffer, without any countervailing benefit.

I think, but am not certain, it is unethical to tell children things which are objectively false (as best we can tell) and which (unlike the ordinary healthy fantasies of childhood) are likely to lead to long-lasting and systematic belief in falsehoods. This is partly because I think it is important to understand what is true and what is not. But also because, for systematic belief in falsehoods to be maintained, one has to adopt ways of thinking which reduce cognitive dissonance, and allow the truths which challenge that belief to be rationalised away.

By way of example: it would not be ethical to tell children that the world is flat, and that contrary views are part of a huge conspiracy. This (manifestly) would be a false thing to tell a child. And maintaining that belief, in the face of the evidence to the contrary, would probably necessitate telling the child an even bigger falsehood: that such conspiracies exist in the world, that all of the contrary evidence is fake or wrong, and that a vast swathe of people in the world are either stupid or are liars seeking to keep the population ignorant.

And it would probably also necessitate systematising damaging ways of thinking, like confirmation bias, communal reinforcement, deliberate avoidance of new information or dissenting views, and myriad other fallacies and bad habits. Mental acrobatics of that sort would be necessary to hold the falsehood up.

There are many examples of this sort of thing in everyday life. Things which (I stress) I would not want to shelter a child from, but would strongly want to avoid being told to a child repeatedly, unquestioned, as fact, over time. The odd bit of wrong here or there is of no consequence at all. And bits of wrong which are asked about and explained are positively valuable.

Some of these sorts of things I mean are:

• The idea that modern medicine (and vaccination in particular) does more harm than good, is mostly about money, and that alternative medicine is more effective (an idea whose adherents are responsible for many premature deaths)
• The idea that some groups of people, different from the child in some irrelevant way, should be treated differently and should not have the same civil and human rights as everyone else
• The idea (perhaps obviously at this point) that there exists a personal god with an interest in human affairs, who can influence our lives, who has set rules to govern our conduct, and to whom we should supplicate ourselves

These things don’t occupy my every waking thought, by any means, but they do occasionally crop up in challenging ways. Partly because all three of the above examples are represented in my family and friends (to varying degrees). But also because of the existence of people and groups who proudly espouse these views, systematically, to children and everyone else.

People like Rev Dr Mark Griffiths, author of One Generation from Extinction, and recently a guest on All Things Considered, whose contributions contained more euphemisms for “indoctrinate” than I could keep track of. People like the Child Evangelism Fellowship, the Coalition 4 Marriage. Campaigns like JABS. Perhaps worst of all, state-funded faith schools and laws requiring acts of collective worship in all schools.

Certainly, I would not want to overreact to this kind of thing. There is an abundance of nonsense in the world for anyone who wants to seek it out, and by and large, the best reaction is to ignore it all (or make fun of the silliest things). But I do find myself angered by people who proudly describe the ways in which they indoctrinate children who are too young to discern truth from fiction.

I’m not sure where the boundary lies between behaviour which I find distasteful but is nonetheless acceptable in a free society, and behaviour which is categorically wrong and should be prohibited along with corporal punishment and child abuse. I am sure it is in the wrong place now. And I am sure there is a vast grey area sitting in the middle.

Mostly, I am concerned about these things, and a little unsure of how I should chart the waters. And I find myself concerned about the kinds of environments in which I’d be happy to leave my child to her own devices.

Or more importantly, to other people’s.

From a friend, on Facebook:

It’s a horrible story and a touchy subject, but there is both a legal and a religious element to this and I have more of an issue with the former.

While that part of the constitution, as originally drafted, did have strong Catholic influences that would have probably been a good reflection of the beliefs of the people at that time. However, although there have been a number of referenda about the topic since then, I am not sure that it currently reflects the ‘will of the people’ and that’s the failure that I would be more angry about.

While you can debate whether it is right to make the rules about this matter on simple majority view, given the complexities, I’m inclined to think it’s the best option. So, I think the real issue is not the religious label, but whether these are in fact the rules that the majority buy in to or not.

There may well be a majority of anti-abortion sentiment (which may or may not be motivated by religious beliefs). However, if there is a silent majority that would be in favour of abortion being legal and if that opinion is not heard because the political system prevents that view from being expressed, that’s bad.

I believe that governments should try to enact policies which will produce the greatest good for the greatest number.  Taking that as a starting point, the question isn’t so much “does the majority support X”, but “does the majority support X, and if they do, why?”

If there is a majority view in favour of a public policy for which there is supporting evidence, or a history of positive outcomes, or a lack of negative ones, all is well.

However, if there is a majority view in favour of a public policy which is largely supported only by dogma, and which results in injustice or bad outcomes (or just waste), all is not well. Popular support does not make a thing right. A majority view supporting some policy is not, by itself, enough. The policy also has to be by supported by evidence or experience showing that the policy is more likely to produce the greatest good for the greatest number than some other policy.

Elective abortion is a complex issue and that is the main reason that I am pro-choice. I think that it is possible for pro-choice and anti-abortion positions not to be religiously motivated, although it’s certainly unusual to find secular opposition to abortion. But the case for abortion as a medical procedure to save the life of the mother is surely a different issue. In a situation where the baby and the mother will probably die, but the mother could be saved by aborting the baby, it is clear that the greatest good is accomplished by performing the abortion. (I think in that situation abortion is in fact legal in Ireland? Not sure why it didn’t happen here?)

Assuming that the case in question was such a situation, it seems to me that:

• The legal and constitutional prohibitions of abortion in Ireland are the result of organised lobbying by religious groups and the popular support of religious people
• Those prohibitions apparently do in some situations prevent abortions that are not elective
• The doctor in this case is a Catholic who allowed his religious views to influence his medical decisions; or that
• The doctor in this case felt unable to offer his patient an abortion because of the law or because of prevailing public opposition to it
• The patient died (at least in part) because of a public policy that is in fact dogma, enacted on the support of religious people and motivated by religious principles.

If all of that is right (and I certainly make room for the possibility that this case is some grotesque exception) then I do hold this up as an example of the way religion and religious views distort people’s understanding of reality and impede our progress towards the realisation of a society that is optimally good.

For the most part, I find that ensuring my business complies with all the Government’s requirements to file and pay things is a huge pain in the arse. I do most of it myself, I try to get it right and mostly succeed, and when there have been mistakes they’ve always been genuine.

So, when I get letters threatening me with penalties if I cease to do something I’ve been doing all along, I get annoyed. It’s unnecessary. I wouldn’t ever send a letter like this to a client or a supplier unless sorely provoked. So why is it HMRC’s default tone of voice?

Why can’t Government talk like a human?

I think the site is great, for much the same reasons as have been discussed already in numerous blog posts about both the alpha and the beta — unrelenting focus on user need, simplicity in design, appropriate formats for different kinds of content, and so on. But I did find some fun things while I was poking about, so I thought I’d write some of that up.

Firstly, and excitingly, the site has structured data baked in. This is the first example I’ve seen of a government website that really lives up to the “Your website is your API” principles of restful design that were all the rage a few years ago, neatly explained by Jeni Tennison in 2009. (Edited to add: Other than Jeni’s work, of course!) You can take just about any page on the beta, append .json to the URL, and get the page’s content in nice, structured, reusable form.

So, if I want to display the current VAT rate on my website, I can grab a JSON file from https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates.json:

{
"slug": "vat-rates",
"updated_at": "2012-01-31T17:06:00+00:00",
"alternative_title": "",
"body": "{::highlight-answer}\r\nThe standard VAT rate is <em>20%</em>\r\n{:/highlight-answer}\r\n\r\n## VAT rates for goods and services\r\n\r\nRate | % of VAT | What the rate applies to \r\n- | - | - | -\r\nStandard | 20% | Most goods and services\r\nReduced rate | 5% | Some goods and services, eg children's car seats and home energy\r\nZero rate | 0% | Zero-rated goods and services, eg most food and children’s clothes\r\n \r\n^Some things - eg postage stamps, financial and property transactions - are exempt from VAT.^\r\n\r\n*[VAT]: Value Added Tax",
"overview": "Check the current VAT rates for goods and services",
"title": "VAT rates",
"type": "answer"
}

This could be improved. In the case of VAT, for example, it would be very nice if there were some extra fields that just contained the current rate. Something like this at the bottom of the data given above:

"standard_rate": "20%",
"reduced_rate": "5%",
"zero_rate": "0%"

I’ve put this up on Get Satisfication as an idea, so follow that answer if you want to see what the team think.

I was also curious to see what sorts of content are on the site. I had already scanned most of the site to look for 404s and other errors, so I had the titles of (almost) all the pages on the site already. So I put them through Wordle to get a quick-n-dirty visualisation of the subjects it covers:

Click the image to get a bigger version. For the most part, this is more or less what I’d expect: the most prevalent things are things users will often want to do (apply and pay for stuff, report things) and topics that people will often want to know about (driving, tax, work).

I was interested to see “test” show up so prominently — in fact, almost all of those references do relate to driving tests (theory and practical), with a couple of other references to drugs and alcohol tests. Similarly, almost all the references to licences relate to driving, with a few about alcohol and fishing robs. When you combine driving, test, licence and vehicle into “cars”, the Wordle looks like this:

It’s immediately clear that “cars” overwhelms everything else. This is, obviously, not reliable or meaningful without combining keywords that apply to other topics as well. But at a glance, it might indicate that a great many of the top user needs apply to vehicles — something which might be backed up by the fact that the very first thing on Direct.gov’s list of topics is motoring:

Make of these totally arbitrary wonderings what you will! Curious to know what a wordle for the whole site would look like? Me too. I made this one out of a hacked-together word list from all the .json files I could find:

Photography, film and protest in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square Gardens

Dear Carl,

I’ve just seen the draft byelaws for Traf Sq and Parliament Sq, which have been blogged about, and widely reported on Twitter.

On my (admittedly amateur) reading of the draft byelaws, it appears that they would require any person to obtain permission before protesting or taking photographs or filming in the squares. Surely, such a sweeping restriction cannot be possibly be proportionate.

Please could you consider making these rules more permissive (for example, by not requiring permission for photography/filming/protest other than when there’s a reasonable chance that it will cause disruption), or, at the very least, make available some explanatory notes that give context to the proposed regulations?

Many thanks.

Harry Metcalfe
(Concerned amateur photographer)

CC: The Mayor, the National Union of Journalists, The Association of Photographers, Amateur Photographer

Why not take a moment to send an email as well? The more, the better:

Any objection to the confirmation of the Byelaws may be made by letter addressed to Carl Schnackenberg, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2-4 Cockspur Street, London SW1Y 5DH, or by email to:Carl.Schnackenberg@Culture.gsi.gov.uk.

I’ve never worked as a civil servant, and I’m not a legal expert. The only experience I have of procurement is that of a small supplier to Government trying to get things done. So, this post is neither comprehensive, nor a solution. More a statement of principle.

There are many problems with the contracts under which Government currently works with SMEs (at least, all the ones I’ve seen). They’re too long. They’re not really being used for the purpose they were designed for.

But, on a much more practical level, they’re so long and abstruse that no one reads them. I really mean that: neither the client, nor the supplier, nor, I often suspect, the procurement staff. They are universally regarded as an unavoidable bit of bureaucracy on the route to starting a project. They are almost never challenged, because they have existed throughout the aeons, having been handed down from on high.

These contracts contain lots of detail that — theoretically —  defines the working relationship between government and it suppliers. And I suspect that they do exactly that when Government takes on big projects with big suppliers. But those processes are totally inappropriate for a working relationship with an SME — and the smaller the SME, the less sensible they become. For a company like dxw, they’re absurd.

We very rarely deal with change requests, serving written notices, purchase order amendments, management information, audit requirements, getting permission for staff changes, or any of the myriad other things that these contracts tend to require. Because when we’re working on a project, there are generally two or three people at dxw working with two or three civil servants. And the biggest project we’ve ever had was worth about £30k.

When you’re talking about that number of people, and that value of contract, most of the working arrangements in these contracts become ridiculous. Because they’re designed for much bigger teams, working on much bigger things.

When the teams are small, these arrangements are worse than a waste of time. If we were to follow the letter of these contracts, we’d spend more time on management than on delivering useful things. We’d have to charge lots more money to cover all that time, and the client would get next to no value out of that extra spend.

So, we don’t. And the client doesn’t ask us to. And we all play out the charade, going through the motions of a procurement process that everyone knows is overcomplicated, and that no one intends to think about after the project starts.

Strangely enough, this is ok, in practice. Because in practice, these projects involve a small number of people who are like-minded, and who share a common understanding of a project and its goals for success. The contracts we all agree to aren’t ignored out of malice. No one is being duplicitous. It’s just that they’re obviously unnecessary, and everyone gets by just fine without thinking about them.

Most of our clients no longer even require us to write a formal proposal. Instead, we write a short letter explaining what we’re going to do, by when, and what it will cost. This works best for everyone, because it’s short, readable and useful. But it still sits within a framework contract and a procurement process that aren’t fit for purpose. That are designed to shape a complex working relationship that doesn’t exist, and to facilitate litigation that will never happen.

Because of the efforts of right-thinking clients who just want to get the job done, and who understand the relationship, we’ve ended up with day-to-day working practices which are quite good. But they’re not formally recognised, or enshrined in any process. And that’s a missed opportunity: because the civil servants who need to commission a digital project for the first time, or who work within a more traditional government department, will turn to the process for guidance. As they should. And the process is maddeningly, hopelessly wrong.

So, I think there should be a new process. Since I only know about digital and SMEs, I’ll say that that’s what the process should be for. But these ideas probably apply more widely. I think we need a new framework contract and process which:

• Values brevity and simplicity above comprehensiveness, ignoring unlikely scenarios in favour of increasing usefulness and readability
• Has a primary, core purpose of leaving all the parties better informed about the project, what they’re supposed to do and what’s expected of them, and what success looks like
• Is written for the benefit of the staff actually delivering the project (SME and government), and not for lawyers, procurement staff, or as a tool for litigation
• Is written using language and styling that makes it likely that those people will actually read and absorb it

At its root, the process needs to recognise that in digital projects (and probably other ones too) success far more often emanates from the close and effective personal relationships of people acting in good faith than it does in detailed specification of process, requirements or outcomes.

Those bullet points accurately describe what almost every project we’ve ever worked on has ended up smelling like, despite the procurement process and legalese.

For dxw, procurement will be “fixed” when the process we follow is designed to facilitate and enhance that relationship. I hope we get there soon.

Since writing this, I’ve also found this post from the BJP, and Stefan has kindly posted a link to a post by Bruce Schneier. Also, the BJP have filed a Freedom of Information request asking for information about the policy. All good stuff!

I visited Aldwych tube station recently. I had been looking forward to it for some time, and turned up camera-in-hand, ready to take some interesting photos — which, frankly, was most of the reason I went.

When I got to the queue, my bag was searched. And my suspicions roused by a security man who said I couldn’t take my camera in, because it had a zoom lens. I thought this was rather odd. I offered to put on my 50mm prime (non-zoom) lens, and he said that was fine. But I was still suspicious.

Then, when we got into the station, one of the London Transport Museum staff said “No digital SLRs” — and there were signs dotted about, to the same effect. Suspicion started to turn to irritation.

Eventually, I managed to ask one of the LTM volunteers about the rule, and he said it was because they wanted to “limit the amount of high-quality footage of the station” — a statement later confirmed by others. At this point, irritation turned to outright anger. And I took this picture, as a minor act of rebellion.

So: what on earth do the London Transport Museum think they’re doing? It seemed a odd rule to begin with, and its justification, even stranger. Why would they want to limit high-resolution pictures? And even if they had a good reason to do that, why would they think that banning DSLRs accomplish it? Does. Not. Compute.

I had a look about, and found LTM’s mission statement:

By conserving and explaining the Capital city’s transport heritage, London Transport Museum offers people an understanding of the Capital’s past development and engages them in the debate about its future.

We adopt the highest standards of curatorship and communication, and aim to be the world’s leading museum of urban transport.

So. Do LTM really think that restricting the availability of high-resolution pictures of Aldwych accords with the highest standards of communication? Do they think that preventing people seeing and learning about Aldwych is the kind of thing the world’s leading museum of urban transport should be doing?

Is it not more likely that their role as a museum should be to encourage more people to see Aldwych? To engage with it, photograph it, learn about it, share it, discuss and understand it, spread the word about it and generate interest in their mission and their subject?

I am utterly baffled that in the digital age, there  still appear to be museums who think that these kind of restrictions are necessary. Or sensible. Or even, heaven forfend, good.

Museums are the guardians of our cultural heritage, not the owners of it. Museums should want photographs of their collections coming out of their ears, and getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

If you agree, why not send them a message, and let them know?

As promised we want to keep our stakeholders up to date with the latest progress on the Public Data Corporation project.  You may well have seen the Chancellor’s announcement within today’s Autumn Statement but I thought that it would be helpful to set out what this means in practice.

The Government has today announced that:

To support the growth of high-value data businesses and make access to data easier for startups, the Government is making available for free a range of core reference data sets.  In addition it is announcing the creation of a Data Strategy Board and a Public Data Group which will maximise the value of data the public sector buys from the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Companies House.

What this means in practice:
Delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation, Government has announced the establishment of a Data Strategy Board (DSB) which will seek to maximise the value of data from the Public Data Group (PDG) of Trading Funds for long-term economic and social benefit, including through the release of data free of charge.

Sending a clear signal of the DSB’s mandate, Government is announcing the release of additional core reference datasets for unrestricted use from the PDG, including, for the first time, weather observation and detailed weather forecast data and core data from the Companies Register.

The PDG currently includes Ordnance Survey, Met Office, HM Land Registry and Companies House. The Group will identify and deliver efficiencies and synergies to reduce the cost of data for users and re-users of data and provide additional funding for making data freely available.

This change clearly separates the commissioning and provision functions of public data, rebalancing the incentives to release more data for free, as well as strengthening the capability of Government to commission data for its own needs.

This announcement signals a significant step towards making additional core reference data from the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry and Companies House available and free at the point of use.

For further information on the wider announcement please see the following link:  http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/open-data-measures-growth-review

I do hope this is helpful and we will of course keep you informed of further progress.

There’s some more detail from page 10 of this PDF — sadly, though, nothing very substantial from Ordnance Survey.

I think we’re a short way into a process of redefining what “privacy” is and means, and which parts of it are important, and which are less important.

I think that the benefits of a more open approach — where things that once would have been considered private no longer are — are widespread, in all sorts of ways — from personal convenience to companies figuring out how to sell us more stuff.

Ultimately, most people value some aspects of their privacy so little that they are willing to let Facebook pillage their address book, for the convenience of it, or just out of curiosity. And because there are lots more of those people, the rest of us are going to be pulled along with them.

And while it may be the case many of those people only make that decision because they are ignorant of its consequences, not all of them are. And many will put the risks into the same kind of category as leaving their bike unlocked outside the corner shop, or hiding the house keys under a pot-plant — small risks, but with potentially big consequences.

I’m certainly in the group that is concerned about data privacy, but I don’t see a way out of this. All the “education” in the world is unlikely to help, because it’ll sound like nerds preaching about pedantic trivialities.

And even when really bad things happen really publicly, people won’t change their behaviour — at least, not beyond some initial hand-wringing and media panic. Because human beings suck at making rational decisions where the taking of a series of small risks for a series of small rewards carries with it the potential for big bad consequences… later… maybe.

So, since I’m going to be dragged along with this croud anyway, I feel like I may as well leap in feet-first and enjoy the benefits.

Because I’ll be exposed to the risks either way.

It’s true. Ok? I did it. I stopped at a junction 3 metres in front of a stop line. Not in the junction, of course, and without upsetting any crossing pedestrians.

I did it because the opposing traffic often turns across the road dangerously quickly in an attempt to turn right before our column of traffic gets going.

I did it because people who do dangerous things dangerously quickly often don’t notice cylists.

I didn’t wait for the dangerous people to go first because to do so would obstruct the traffic on my side of the road by preventing them from turning left.

So, in order to substantially reduce the chances that I’ll die on the road, and to reduce the extent to which I obstruct busy traffic, and while having due regard for the rules of the road, and for the safety and convenience of other road users, I will occasionally stop in front of a stop line. Or turn left on a red light. Or use the pavement. Or anything else that I, acting in good faith, think is safer.

Because, frankly, the prospect of getting a ticket from you on a sunny Thursday morning doesn’t seem terribly important when stacked up against the possibility of becoming dead.

ttfn,

Harry

In fact, Honeycomb is leaps and bounds beyond Gingerbread generally. The interface is seriously shiny, as well as being quick and responsive. They’ve dumped the physical buttons in favour of on-screen buttons in a bar across the bottom of the screen, which also incorporates a notifications area. There’s a new button for accessing recently-used apps as well as the normal ones for the home screen and back button. The built-in apps are lovely too — web browsing is pretty much the same as Chrome on the desktop. And Email is considerably improved.

The camera is decent, and video is really nice – 720p, and looks great in full-screen playback. I’d love to have tried the front camera with a video call on Skype but Skype for Android still doesn’t support video — seriously! Wtf?

So far, I’ve been able to do everything I knew that I’d want before I got it: show PDFs and documents to people, check email, write quick documents & browse the web. So as far as the essentials go, the app support is great. But it is certainly the case that there are fewer apps for the Xoom than there are for the Android, and that some of the apps that are designed for Android phones don’t work terribly well on the Xoom. But I’m fairly convinced that that’s temporary. In fact, I distinctly recall iPhone apps running in a teeny box in the middle of the first iPad’s screen — and it didn’t take long for that to change. And before anyone gets too much into on the Xoom vs iPad2 argument, I’ll just say that I installed Flash as soon as I got it, and it works great. And also that Hitler was an Apple fanboy, so Android must be better. Man it’s easy to win arguments on the Internet.

There are some downsides: One serious annoyance is that the Xoom has its own charger. It doesn’t charge from USB. This may not matter if the battery can withstand heavy use, as it wouldn’t then be necessary to carry the charger around. It’s been fairly widely reported that the battery life is excellent, so I have high hopes, but I’ll wait to see for myself.

Another irritation, though very minor, is that the power button is on the back of the tablet next to the camera. So when it’s lying on the table, you have to pick it up to turn it back on. It’s also a little heavier than I expected. I’d be curious to know how much the iPad2 weighs. The Xoom is 730g — not exactly heavy, but I suspect that’s a little heavier than one might like if you had to hold it on a long train journey.

Overall — it seems like a lovely bit of kit. I’ll be putting it to the test over the next few weeks, and we’ll see if more experience bears out my first impressions.

Which, really, I seriously love.

But all my subsequent attempts didn’t really produce anything as good. This was the best one:

Now, I took both of these in London. So light pollution will certainly have reduced sharpness, and it’s entirely possible that the atmosphere was a bit clearer for the first shot than it was for the second.

But actually, I think it’s more to do with the position of the sun. The full moon is much flatter and duller than the waxing moon, which is rather to be expected — relative to the camera, the sun illuminates the waxing moon from the side, and a full moon from behind. If I was shooting people with flash, I’d expect much the same thing to happen. So — if it’s not too much to ask — it would be excellent if the universe could contrive to stick gigantic remote flash in high orbit around the moon.

Or, failing that, all practical suggestions on how to do a better job for the next supermoon (14th November 2016) gratefully received. Already on the list:

• Longer lens, or an extender
• A thermos, a warm jumper, and a nice hill in the middle of nowhere

I’ve now had a chance to read it. I’ve heard a number of opinions on the project over the last few months — I have to say, mostly not very complimentary ones — so I was glad to see what they finally decided.

On the whole, I think it’s quite good, as far as it goes. It’s definitely saying the right kinds of things about the sort of change that’s needed: notably, choosing commodity options when they’re available, and using agile processes to innovate and develop bespoke solutions when they’re necessary. Good stuff. The report includes a now very-well-rehearsed explanation of the problems with government’s traditional approaches which is spot on, and some good recommendations for Government – it will be interesting to see how they respond.

On a minor point (at least, for me) it is very technology focussed and doesn’t much discuss the wider social context that technology needs to serve.

More importantly, I would have liked to see more detail, in general. There’s a lot of discussion of open standards, buying commodity services, and coordinating activity between departments. But it feels a bit like the report skips over the fact that these things are really hard.

Agreeing standards is hard, as is implementing them correctly. Standards for the web have taken >10 years to develop and mature, and in many respects are still not very well embedded: Microsoft have really only just got there with IE9, and that remains to be seen. And this is in an industry where the incentives to make everything work are huge. I’m really not at all sure that the incentives to use open standards for the NHS spine and people’s tax records are even nearly as strong, where suppliers may be reluctant to facilitate the involvement of others.

Commodity services can of course deliver immense value, and the success of Amazon’s Web Services is a testament to their usefulness. But even the private sector is only just getting there. Computing resources are now effectively commoditised, as is — perhaps — the purchase of hardware… and that’s… it. There’s no commodity market for VOIP services that I’m aware of. There’s no commodity market for payroll, workflow management or document storage. For all of these things, we’re still in a world of competing products which are mostly not interoperable. The report actually highlights Microsoft Word as an example of a commodity application, which made me choke on my coffee: it’s quite the opposite. In fact, it’s a dominant product in what is all but a monopoly, and — as anyone who’s tried to use OpenOffice in anger will know — it’s a long way from being interoperable with anything.

Sensibly coordinating activity between departments has been advocated as good for so long that it’s practically axiomatic, and we still aren’t anywhere near it.

Perhaps more importantly still, the report really doesn’t address procurement nearly carefully enough. It does present some interesting suggestions about how to squeeze agile projects though existing OJEU and OGC processes. But I think procurement is at the root of the whole problem, and needs wholesale reform. The main reason that Government’s incumbent suppliers are so dominant is that the barrier to entry for new businesses is immense. And procurement constitutes a very large portion of that problem.

The report even advocates the use of framework agreements as a cost-cutting measure, when — in fact — the use of framework agreements is one of the prime culprits for the lack of any agile suppliers in the market able to compete for the large projects that are currently solely delivered by the Usual Suspects.

In summary – I think this is a good start. The direction of travel is spot on, and I hope it is warmly received and acted upon by government. But it does skim over some terribly difficult problems which we’ll have to confront if we want this to work.

But today I thought I’d spend 5 minutes seeing if they could be improved — as it was a cheapy point & click camera hired from the dive company, and all the pictures were really flat and horrible. I am amazed how much better they are after a few minutes clicking about in picasa. Here’s a before & after:

Before

After

Click through for bigger versions.

I made some progress just using the I’m Feeling Lucky button, but what really made them come alive was the Tint effect: using a white tint and dragging the bar almost all the way to the top really made everything pop out nicely.

If you have any similar tips, I’d love to hear them…

This story provoked a rather predictable outburst on how Government spends far too much money, and doesn’t get value for money*. It’s a perspective that’s expressed frequently — most recently for the police.uk’s £300k price-tag.

Often Government does pay too much. We all wonder why BusinessLink costs £36m a year. But this isn’t one of those cases. Reading Room charged £585 for the ICO’s favicon, and most people seem to be objecting to that figure on the basis that it would have taken them 5 minutes to do it, and therefore, that Reading Room must have charged £585 for 5 minutes work.

But, as anyone familiar with the delivery of actual government projects will know, absolutely nothing ever just takes 5 minutes. Not when you have the client, two government organisations and two or three other contractors to deal with. Not when you’re working within a delivery framework that requires multiple levels of approval before anything goes live. Not when government has deliberately taken a “belt & braces” approach to contracting — ironically usually done to aid accountability, but which invariably creates procedural bloat and extra cost.

There’s a huge difference between making a favicon and making one for a big organisation, with lots of people who need to give input and approval. There’s a huge difference between making an informational website that you think is good, and making one for an entire country, maintained by an entire government. There’s a huge difference between your website and your Government’s website: because in any activity, time and cost increase with the number of people who are involved.

The real question here isn’t why this specific favicon cost £585. That’s pretty clear: Reading Room charge £600/day (which is competitive), spent a few minutes making the favicon, and the best part of 7 hours making sure everyone was happy with it. Which, I strongly suspect, is exactly what they were asked to do by their client.

We absolutely need to work on making government more agile and getting better value for money. And it is starting to happen, as dxw’s success over the past three years illustrates. But blind invective won’t accomplish that.

Suppliers need to help government understand the true (small!) nature of the risks that online technologies present. And we need to show government how it’s possible to do things quickly and cheaply on the web.

And I think that practical help and understanding will get us there much more quickly than premature outbursts of uninformed anger.

Edited to add: @threedaymonk has an excellent writeup on this too.

*I have to admit to partaking in that in a small and light-hearted way.

In fact, having now spent 20 minutes staring at those two sentences, I’m finding it a bit hard to know where to begin. We spent quite a lot of time on the plane, but in between, we met a sparkling array of very interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds, visited places from the firmly affluent to the strikingly poor, and learned some valuable lessons about technology, democracy and civic engagement.

My bit of the trip was the hack day that we did at Google with some Indian developers. Rohan Silva, Liam Maxwell, Edmund von der Burg, Tim Green, David McCandless and I turned up at Google India, not quite knowing what to expect. After a very delicious curried breakfast we piled into a meeting room for a big chat with lots of Indian developers. I’ve written about the hack day separately, and David’s also done a piece on the Guardian Data Blog.

The Prime Minister

After a hurried lunch, we all piled back on to the plane for our flight to Delhi, which took several hours. Upon arriving we were briskly sent off to an evening reception, where the PM did a short speech (and where I just-so-happened to wander over and mention Dextrous Web, which he seemed excited about). The reception was fairly short, and we were soon back at the hotel, where — after a brief spell in the indescribably humid Delhi evening — we all went off to bed.

South Asia Foundation

The next morning, we went off to learn about the Panchayati Raj. It’s a system of elected village assemblies which receive money from the Indian government to spend on local services. It’s an interesting approach, and embodies many of the current government’s Big Society principles: radical decentralisation, with local decision-making and accountability. After a briefing from the British High Commission and a panel session at the South Asia Foundation, we left the city to visit several village Panchayats and see the work that they do.

Paved, with gutters

For me, this was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip. We visited several villages, saw how people there live, met elected Panchayat members and saw the improvements they were making to their villages. One had managed to pave all its streets, with proper gutters, and had built a school. Another was making a proper dirt road between their village and the next. We visited the workers as they were leveling the ground, and the difference between the completed road and the rest was remarkable — I doubt our minibus could have traversed the lumpen, muddy path that they were following.

Periodic Table

More than anything else, though, I was moved by the extraordinary welcome that we received. Every village gave us garlands and flowers, and sat us down for tea, water and spiced nuts. One processed us through the streets with music. They were warm, generous and proud. At one village we were drinking Chai in the local school when I spotted a periodic table on the wall and took a picture. The principal of the school came over and told me about how it had been made by his 11-year-old students. The chief civil engineer for the district accompanied us and told us all about the roads and schools that they were building. In the first village, we walked past an incongruously well stocked pharmacy, and one of the kids came over to tell me about it.

Of course, my impressions are skewed. I’m sure it’s unusual for westerners to visit these villages, and that that provoked a certain level of excitement — especially with one of the PM’s senior policy advisers leading the group. I would like to know what day-to-day life is like in these places. One of the officials we visited later said that he thought 80% of Panchayats probably experienced some degree of fraud or embezzlement, which I don’t doubt. But the improvements in these villages were clear, and the villages’ sense of pride was palpable. So fraud is, perhaps, an acceptable cost of doing business.

Eventually, and reluctantly, we got back on our minibus and headed for home. Upon arriving back in the city, we went to a plush reception thrown by BBC Worldwide at the hotel — wherein, incidentally, a 24-hour wifi pass cost the same as 7 days’ pay for one of the labourers building the dirt road we’d been standing on not two hours earlier. It was a stark contrast. India is definitely a country of extremes.

At the South Asia Foundation, the Minister leading the Indian delegation said that Indian governments had a history of promising people the world, and then failing to deliver. That India is just so big, and so populous, that central government couldn’t even make most of the people happy, most of the time. It’s this reality that he said the Panchayati Raj are there to fix. He said that radical decentralisation is the only system that can work in a country as big as India, and that it is vital to make it work to prevent people losing faith in democracy as a system of government.

This argument seems plausible to me. But it made me wonder how the UK could learn lessons from India, given that we don’t have the same problems of scale. We also don’t have the same degree of engagement in civil issues — or anything even close to it. But that is, perhaps, to be expected. India has more to do. And in fact, I suspect that the motivations for Indians to become involved in civil issues are much the same as those of Britons. You can bet that if London had no roads, schools or hospitals, a vast number of Londoners would be doing things about it. And, in fact, most people do get involved in some way when things happen that affect them directly: like school and hospital closures, or objectionable planning applications.

And that, I think, is the lesson. In these villages, everyone knew the Panchayat members. And when the members walk down the street, people go up to them, and air their concerns. As more than one person told us, politics in India is very personal. People know who to ask, and how the system works — primarily because it is simple, and they are close to it. At least, when it comes to Panchayati Raj*.

But that is the polar opposite of the UK, where almost no one knows their Councillors, and where engaging with local government means climbing a nigh-impassable mountain of tedious bureaucratic complexity. Where, unsurprisingly, most people decide it’s not worth the effort. And whence the chattering classes are born: that particular breed of people who enjoy traversing the peaks and valleys of big bureaucracies.

If that’s the problem that the Big Society is supposed to solve, I’m all for it. And I think the Indians are probably lighting the path.

*The rest of Indian government is notoriously bureaucratic!

Hoffman Voltameter Mark II (it's a bit better)

This version has smaller bottles, reducing the amount of electrolyte needed, and goes back to using silicone sealant to attach the PEX piping to the bottles.

The glue gun was just too leak prone. Although it was much quicker to work with, the glue is very rigid when dry, so handling the apparatus (eg when filling or emptying) tended to create leaks. So I decided to be patient, and use sealant, which is much more flexible when dry. I also sanded the area around the holes in the bottles, and the ends of the PEX pipes, so that the sealant would adhere more effectively.

This version works much better! It’s leak-free, and I succeeded in generating about 100ml of hydrogen and collecting it by releasing the clamp and using a makeshift gas bubbler. I passed it over a flame, and heard the squeaky pop — perhaps the best one I’ve *ever* heard, considering the effort it took!

Unfortunately, I had a little less luck with the Chlorine. A small quantity of gas was generated at the anode, but I could not discern any particular colour. Conversely, the electrolyte in the anode bottle had a definite green tinge. I suspect that the Chlorine is largely dissolving in the water, and that the gas I collected at the top was probably a small amount of Oxygen. This feels more plausible than it otherwise would given that the electrolyte was not a saturated solution. I’ll test this out later.

However, this version isn’t without its problems. There’s some visible corrosion around the join between the electrode and the wire, which I tried to insulate using heat shrink. As it’s clear that the steel connection is being oxidised, that’s obviously not working. I also don’t like that the electrodes are dangling from cables. It feels… bad. So, I’m going to take the plunge and mount them permanently to the bottles from the outside, which will remove the steel connection from the electrolyte entirely as well as making it all a bit neater.

Another very strange problem is that the water level in the three containers is not always the same, even when the tubes are open to the atmosphere. This is a bit baffling, to say the least. I think that the tubes are probably at fault: their internal diameter is very small (about 2mm) and I think there’s some kind of capillary effect at work. I’m going to replace these with some normal 5mm PVC tubing and see if that solves the problem.

This version is much better than its predecessor, and I’ve experienced some success. But I think there’s better to come.

Anyway. For a fun project, and to start understanding electrochemistry better (which, as soon as you scratch the surface, becomes rather complicated), I’ve been building a Hofmann Voltameter. They’re made for electrolysing things, typically water, in such a way that one can easily collect the gases. The proper ones look like this:

A Hofmann Voltameter

And are rather expensive. I figured I could make one. So, I set about it last weekend, and this was the result (forgive the clutter!):

My Hoffman Voltameter, Mark I!

The two bottles at either side are 500ml diet coke bottles. They’re joined by a push-fit T-junction and some PEX pipe to the central bottle, an M&S orange juice bottle, which is used to add the electrolyte. The base has a shaped grove to hold the bottles in place with a pole at the back to support the central bottle so it doesn’t swing forwards and spill. The lids of the coke bottles each have a tube which is used to collect the gases, and a cable to which is connected the electrode. The electrodes themselves are made of carbon fibre — somewhat cheaper than platinum and, unlike graphite, does not readily fall apart. Unfortunately, this didn’t work so well. There were problems:

• This leaked, quite significantly, where the pipes enter the coke bottles. Eventually I managed to get the major ones but even when it appeared to have stopped leaking it would grow new ones.
• The gases were not effectively collected. The electrodes sat at an angle and tended to produce a circular current within the electrolyte which drew a large proportion of the bubbles back into the bottle rather than letting them rise to the surface. The bubbles were also very small, which — combined with the textured surface of the bottles — tended to make the bubbles stick to the inside of the bottle.

The combination of a slowly leaking system and a relatively small amount of gas reaching the top meant that no gas was ultimately collected at all. To compound the problem, my glue gun broke, so I couldn’t deal with the leaks. At this point, slightly frustratedly, I decided that it wasn’t really worth fixing anyway — as it would take a very, very long time to produce a usable amount of anything.

So, on to Mark II: I’ve built a new version using square 330ml Copella bottles. These are much less textured, and as they’re square they’re easier to glue to the pipes than the round coke bottles. They’re also smaller, therefore requiring less electrolyte than the 500ml coke bottles, and allowing the height of the central bottle to be reduced. As I write, the Mark II is bing leak tested: sitting in my kitchen full of bright red water on a bed of white tissue paper!

I’ll post again when I’ve had a chance to test it.

Jeremy Corbyn (Lab, incumbent)

Pros

Corbyn is an excellent constituency MP. He is responsive and personable. We seem to agree on most of the issues I’ve written to him about — primarily civil liberties things. He voted against the Digital Economy Bill. Though Labour, he is an arch-rebel: so I trust him to vote with his conscience rather than his party, most of the time.

Cons

I’ve been looking forward to voting against Labour for quite a long time. ID cards, Blair, wars, etc — Labour haven’t been all bad but they’ve been on the wrong side too often for me. Also, Corbyn is very old labour: a hard left socialist. Though I’ve been grateful for his votes against some of Labour’s worst legislative follies, I suspect we’d disagree more often than not.

Rhodri Jamieson-Ball (Libdem)

Pros

I’ve been very impressed with Clegg over the last month. I think he’s really held his own. If we could vote for a head of state, he’d have my vote in a flash. Unfortunately, though, we can’t. So Jamieson-Ball is my only choice if I want to support them. He’s been a councillor for some years, and is clearly active on lots of local issues. I do think it’s about time someone else had a go — since neither the Conservatives nor Labour are terribly inspiring — and the Liberals seem a natural choice.

Cons

I swing wildly from one extreme to the other with the LibDems. Sometimes I think they’re wonderful (Clegg in the first debate, good civlibs rhetoric) and other times, awful (utterly incompetent web-blocking amendement on the Digital Economy Bill). I do get a general sense that they just aren’t very organised (as I do with the Greens).

The thing that’s annoyed me the most, though, is a graph from this letter delivered last week:

This graph is a lie. The numbers are correct, but they bear almost no relation to the heights of the bars. It gives the impression that Labour and the Liberals are very close in the running. The text is also bigger and more prominent in the Liberals’ bar. I’ve produced a corrected version:

Which tells a rather different story.

If these people can’t even be honest in an election leaflet, why should I trust them to be honest in government? This is leaflet is deliberately designed to deceive people. And I think it’s cost them my vote.

Adrian Berrill-Cox (Con)

Pros

I am very impressed by the Conservatives’ technology policies. They’re saying the right things about the web, reforming procurement and making government IT better. But that’s about it.

Cons

Well. They’re the Tories. I remain to be convinced that “Progressive Conservative” is not a contradiction in terms. I’m not at all convinced by Cameron. Marriage incentives make me want to barf. And, if recent revelations are to be believed, they still shelter a veritable menagerie of homophobes. Not to mention people who still rue the demise of the British Empire. I don’t think they’ve changed much, no matter how hard Cameron has been trying.

Emily Dixon (Green)

Not really a possibility. I would probably vote Green tactically if I was in Brighton Pavillion. But I’m not, and their manifesto continues to contain “mad things”, like totally unworkable emission cuts, the mother of all tax rises and the abolition of nuclear power. No thanks.

Dominic Lennon (UKIP)

Lol. No.

So: what do you think? Very grateful for your thoughts!