The Bewilderness

Surf's up swamped

Nicholas Carr in the Guardian argues that democratisation and transparency  through the internet destroys the incentives for adventure.  His examples are GPS and surfing, so the depth of argument is  explanatory:

There is, of course, much to be said for the easy access to information that the internet is allowing. Information that was once reserved for the rich, the well-connected and the powerful is becoming accessible to all. That helps level the playing field, spreading economic and social opportunities more widely and fairly.

At the same time, though, transparency is erasing the advantages that once went to the intrepid, the dogged and the resourceful. The surfer who through pluck and persistence found the perfect wave off an undiscovered stretch of beach is being elbowed out by the lazy masses who can discover the same wave with just a few mouse clicks. The commuter who pored over printed maps to find a shortcut to work finds herself stuck in a jam with the GPS-enabled multitudes.

It does nothing of the sort, of course. The internet allows people to see more, experience more and try out more activities than ever before. Adventure and its accompanying qualities require a widening of opportunities and greater access to information. The majority of those with access to the internet will not act upon this option, or will sublimate their wishes into an online equivalent, such as a virtual world. Will the existence of online equivalents remove the incentive for adventure?

Carr's argument suggests otherwise. More people want to share the adventure of surfing. This annoys an elite who are looking for that greater challenge. Underneath the rhetoric of adventure, this is just another complaint from a threatened elite. Surfers detest the effects of the great unwashed.

If they are so annoyed, they can buy the beaches, rather than destroy property. The answer for Carr is a fence.

Cuts

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned that taxes will have to rise under the current budgetary rules.

The IFS calculates that taxes will have to rise by £8 billion by 2013 in order for the Chancellor not to break the borrowing and spending plans he has imposed.

Between 2008 and 2010 borrowing will have to rise by £40?billion in each year, it says.

The institute, which uses the Treasury's own figures in its calculations, says that while the £8 billion tax rise - equivalent to around 2p on income tax - would be "prudent", the Government is likely to shy away from it, forcing it to borrow even more or spend less.

According to the report, by 2012 families will earn £5,500 more on average, but £2,900 of this increase would be taken in taxes if the Chancellor was to stay within his targets.

This should give sufficient warning of the government's untenable budgetary position, especially if Northern Rock's debt is added. This is a stark warning to George Osborne: cut spending and taxes.

Repo men take Brown down

Returning my eye to the economic outlook, Brown must wonder if he will survive the coming downturn with his reputation for economic competence intact. My own thoughts on his contribution towards the fragility of the British economy has been expressed elsewhere. The result is a testament to his longevity: a career that has lasted long enough for the man to be held accountable for his policy decisions.

On housing, owners are finding that they are vulnerable to increases in mortgage rates as their favourable deals terminate and  the withdrawal of liquidity from the market has started a drop in prices. Forecasts have begun to reflect this, although they have not fully taken the gloom into account.

Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at Global Insight, says the data provides striking evidence that the housing market "is now being substantially undermined by both stretched affordability and tightening lending practices.".....

Global Insight now forecasts house prices to drop by 5pc this year against earlier predictions of a 3pc fall and remain stable next year.

Consumer borrowing has also halved between November and December, dropping precipitously over the autumn. This will feed into the arguments on affordability as taxpayers confront a scissors crisis of rising prices, taxes and mortgage payments whilst wages stabilise or drop. Without debt to prop up affordability, they will look more closely at how much tax they pay and what they get back for their money. Concepts like 'fiscal drag' will acquire renewed publicity as penurious circumstances lead to greater attention at that line on the payslip where the money you earn does not stay in your hand:

City analysts and Opposition parties said that Gordon Brown had turned the 40 per cent tax band into a "stealth tax" by increasing the threshold in line with inflation instead.

This process - known as "fiscal drag" - has meant that many hundreds of thousands of middle earners, such as higher-paid teachers, nurses, police officers and many civil servants, had been trapped into paying 40p to the Exchequer for every pound they earned over £39,825.

Millions of home owners have also been affected by the Treasury's reluctance to raise stamp duty and inheritance tax thresholds.

In the past five years the number of people paying the higher band of income tax has risen by 700,000 - 20 per cent - according to analysis by tax experts.

Stealth taxes required debt and rising asset prices to blindside taxpayers with a perception that they were wealthy enough to bear these extra costs. In a downtown, they will acquire extra scrutiny and will start to bear a political cost. Thus, accountability will come to bear, with a dividend of dishonesty as Brown will suffer more unpopularity in the coming throes of economic instability.

Brown's reputation for economic competence has been repossessed by the bailiffs of recession, and his political standing cannot be remortgaged in New Labour's credit crunch.

The true choice

Would it be churlish to suggest that New Labour has motives beyond class war (read "social justice") for attacking and, perhaps ultimately, abolishing private schools. One possible motivation is their appalling custodianship of our public education system. Now, educationalists are attacking any reforms that facilitate parental choice. They argue that choice is adopted by the middle classes and has widened the divide between the middle and the working classes.

Prof Stephen Ball, from the IoE's department of educational foundations and policy studies, said it would fail to bridge the educational divide.

"In some ways it is a very old-fashioned response," he said. "Since the 19th century, politicians have tried to address underachievement by creating different qualifications but it has proved unsuccessful. Little can be achieved by labelling some children as slow learners or underachievers."

In a book, The Education Debate, he says that education has never escaped from class divisions, insisting that most university students are still from middle-class families.....

Prof Ball said the growth in faith schools, academies and "trust" schools simply provided "new opportunities for middle-class parents to seek social advantage".

The implicit conclusion that the Left revives is a monolithic provider, the comprehensive, that guarantees equality of opportunity by taking advancement away from all. As we can see from the United States, choice through education vouchers forces competition in public sector education and allows the poor blacks to give their children the possibility of a better education. New Labour's tinkering only proves that choice requires individual action accompanied by institutional diversity.

Quote of the day

Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth...but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.

Friedrich August Kekule

Islam's long siesta

The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:

After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.

We know that Islamic philosophers acted as a conduit for preserving part of antiquity's heritage and transmitting mathematics and other forms of ideas from India and the Orient to Europe. Some of this work was achieved by non-Islamic philosophers working within the Caliphate or Moorish kingdoms. There is evidence of scientific innovation up to the late Middle Ages and one can see equivalents to the natural theology; one of the drivers of the Scientific Revolution in Europe:

He [Muzaffar Iqbal] points out that the Arab scientific movement in the eighth century pre-existed the translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to a curious genre of literature that developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically testing or refuting Greek ideas.

But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the “Quran itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive concept of the natural world, and this played a foundational role in the making of the scientific tradition in Islamic civilization”. Faith impelled rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran commands man to study Allah’s creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: “Sight was made the medium so that [man] traces among the living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from the created things to the Creator”. At a more practical level, astronomy and mathematics were studied and further developed to assist in such matters as the orientation of mosques, the determination of prayer times and the division of inheritances according to Islamic law.

Islamic science appears to have a developed a heliocentric system before Copernicus and continued its mathematical traditions up till the fifteenth century. We should debate the causes of the decline in these traditions during the Middle Ages and their replacement by religious traditions and debates. Robert Irwin, the author of the review and Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement provides his own big picture around complacent empires, education and a lack of resources.

Only part of this rings true.

I would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or religious teaching college, throughout the Middle East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While scientists continued to do research and publish, they do not seem to have founded scientific societies of the sort that proliferated in Western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The Ottoman Empire, as a strong state, did not allow  the flourishing of a civil society as we see in Europe during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Scientific societies could publish journals off printing presses and contribute to an increasingly literate population, supplemented by the Republic of Letters. There are no equivalents in the Middle East, as permanent institutions of polymaths would be viewed as dangerous innovators; perhaps similar to the attitude that Oxford took to Locke. Through comparison, we can understand some of the general causes of Islam's path, but greater detail is required to comprehend whether we see a continuation of a long-term approach to knowledge in current Middle Eastern attitudes to science. Perhaps we over-emphasise religious factors at the expense of poor education, parasitical elites and populations raised on Nasserite nigtmares rather than capitalist dreams.

"You will be recognised..."

The Guardian reports from a paper in Science that researchers from the University of Glasgow have developed software that increases the efficacy of facial recognition software to one hundred percent. The experiment was based on comparing faces with celebrities....

Jenkins and his colleague Professor Mike Burton tested the averaging approach using FaceVACS, a system that is being tested at Sydney airport.

The website MyHeritage.com uses the software in a celebrity lookalike service. Surfers submit images of themselves to the site, which matches them to the nearest celebrity picture on its database of more than 31,000 photographs. Jenkins and Burton submitted images of 459 celebrities they knew were on the database. The system matched them to the correct celebrity 54% of the time. When the pair created average celebrity faces from 10 images and resubmitted them to the website, the software was correct 100% of the time. "That's the first time anyone's reported anything like that level of accuracy on such a variable set of images," said Jenkins.

To make the test even tougher, they created averages using only those images that the software had been unable to match in the first test. In this test the software recognised the averaged faces correctly 80% of the time. "We have fixed the baseline at zero, so any improvement we can attribute just to the averaging process," he said.

This represents an important escalation in the efficiency of facial software and the capability of the authorities to track individuals in a surveillance society such as the United Kingdom. It does not require any upgrades to surveillance infrastructure. The improvement in software also serves as a reminder that restraints upon surveillance depend upon the laws governing the use of such cameras. The current incursions into our privacy will be worsened by the enthusiasm of government.

Global Leviathan?

Yehezkel Dror, writing on the humanisation of the Earth-Moon system, invoked the Hobbesian vision of a global leviathan as a necessary precursor to the working out of this destiny. Dror, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has outlined this concept as a potential requirement for treating the security dangers engendered by new technologies.

A global leviathan is a global government: It would act as a magistrate, holding a monopoly of force at the expense of the nation state and demanding obedience from all citizenry. Given the diversity of politics and culture across the globe, the structure of this global leviathan would not be democratic or accountable in a form familiar to us. Just as the European Union, a potential precursor, suffers from a democratic deficit in the scrutiny and implementation of policy.

This radical approach has been used as a guide to the current structure of international relations and the question of the American Empire. The United States has formed an open and rules based structure, which is mediated through a number of complex institutions, some of which have proved to act as constraints upon sovereignty as the concept of international law
has strengthened and deepened. G John Ikenberry comments:

No one disagrees that U.S. power is extraordinary. It is the character and logic of U.S. domination that is at issue in the debate over empire. The United States is not just a superpower pursuing its interest; it is a producer of world order. Over the decades -- with more support than resistance from other nations -- it has fashioned a distinctively open and rule-based international order. Its dynamic bundle of oversized capacities, interests, and ideals constitutes an "American project" with unprecedented global reach. For better or worse, other states must come to terms with or work around this protean order. Scholars often characterize international relations as the interaction of sovereign states in an anarchic world. In the classic Westphalian world order, states hold a monopoly on the use of force in their own territory while order at the international level is maintained through the diffusion of power among states. Today's unipolar world turns the Westphalian image on its head. The United States possesses a near-monopoly on the use of force internationally; on the domestic level, meanwhile, the institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global -- that is, American -- scrutiny. Since September 11, the Bush administration's assertion of "contingent sovereignty" and the right of preemption have made this transformation abundantly clear. The rise of unipolarity and the simultaneous unbundling of state sovereignty is a new and volatile brew.

It is this 'unbundling' of state sovereignty that has alarmed all states yet the  dynamic is  embedded within the system itself and does not rely upon  a drive towards US imperialism. The United States has  become alarmed at the inroads into its sovereignty that a rules based global governance requires and has responded by asserting its power. This, in turn, has triggered a Westphalian response from the other great powers outside of Europe.

The United States may have presided over the "creation and extension of international institutions that have limited and legitimated U.S. power". But, in turn, these acquired a momentum of their own, and proved an opportunity for other powers to acquire influence through their manipulation of this game. Yet, nation states will tolerate certain limitations and, whether the response is to the system itself (USA) or to the unipolar power reasserting itself, (China, India and Russia), international relations are entering a Westphalian phase that leaves the self-styled 'postmodern' approach of the European Unions outdated and impotent.

No officers in the dock

A report has just been published by the Ministry of Defence on the treatment of detainees in Iraq during and after the war. There were a number of incidents resulting in torture and death although it was unclear if anyone will ever be prosecuted to the difficulties in obtaining evidence. Soldiers were acquitted of the death of Musa Baha, who suffered 93 separate injuries, as the prosecution were unable to make a case.

In the worst abuse case, Baha Musa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist, died after suffering 93 separate injuries while being held in detention for 36 hours by soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment; and eight other Iraqis suffered “varying degrees of abuse” at the same time.

The cause of this abuse has been traced to the lack of procedures on interrogation techniques. The army banned five techniques in 1972 during the Ulster insurgency; five techniques that were deployed in Iraq. Such a policy should have been communicated and disseminated to the troops. Yet, this was not implemented as the Army was expecting a peacekeeping situation rather than a violent insurgency.

Although Brigadier Aitken emphasised in his report - an investigation into cases of deliberate abuse and unlawful killing in Iraq 2003 and 2004 - that measures had now been taken to redress all the weaknesses he had uncovered, he said those responsible for preparing the troops for Iraq seemed to have had a “lack of awareness of the operational context” of the campaign.

Brigadier Aitken also said that the plans for post-conflict in Iraq had focused on humanitarian relief but not on the likelihood of a violent insurgency. “One consequence of that was that we had insufficient troops in theatre to deal effectively with the situation in which we found ourselves; peace support operations require significantly larger numbers of troops to impose law and order than are required for prosecuting a war,” he said.

This is the only admission that the Army will make on postwar operations in Iraq, leaving the infantry ill-prepared to cope with an unexpected insurgency, in terms of equipment and numbers. Such factors will have contributed to stressed forces, who had little guidance for their relationships with the indigenous population and whose rules of engagement did not expressly forbid dehumanising actions to obtain information.

This is a salutary lesson in how rules of engagement are necessary to guide the actions of the infantry in combat, since the stresses of war understandably undermine the constraints imposed by civil society. Officers, especially NCOs, provide the necessary leadership in retaining these constraints. One muct ask why the Ministry of Defence is not investigating this failure of policy, given the large number of 'staff' and civil servants that must have been involved in the planning. Dennatt's responses appear glib:

Both Brigadier Aitken and General Dannatt highlighted the importance of soldiers having a loyalty, not just to their mates, but also to the operation in which they are serving. In the Baha Musa case, the judge accused the QLR of “closing ranks” and of maintaining a “wall of silence” when the death was being investigated by the Royal Military Police.

General Dannatt said: “I think people have got to fully understand that just saying nothing and being part of a conspiracy of silence actually is disloyalty and not loyalty to anyone.”

Brigadier Aitken said some soldiers, and commanders, had failed to live up to the Army’s core values of selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity, loyalty and respect for others. “Courage includes having the moral courage to challenge unacceptable behaviour whenever it is encountered,” he said.

What about the responsibility of the planners in ensuring that rules of engagement were applied properly? Who undertook this role? Until we hear the Ministry of Defence sack the civil servants and staff responsible for this management failure, we should regard ethical references in the report as an insufficient response, and perhaps a tangential defence: blaming the infantry without putting any MOD officers in the dock.

It's a school for scandal

The government is "clarifying" the law on charities. This is similar to the way that they "clarified" the law on electoral reform, opening up the system to  electoral fraud. The new law will allow charities to campaign on behalf of political causes (including parties) and gain donations.

The planned changes, which will be published in draft form today and considered by the board of the Charity Commission next week, come after Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Minister responsible for charities, said that guidance on when charities can lobby politically was unclear and confusing.

News of the planned changes will fuel the wider dispute over secret political donations after it emerged that the campaign team of Peter Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary, had siphoned £50,000 of the £100,000 undeclared funds via a think-tank to his campaign to become Labour's deputy leader in the summer.

There are suspicions that the loosening of rules barring charities from political activities has been pushed through to get Mr Brown off the hook of a controversy involving his own favourite think-tank, the Smith Institute.

Another pattern of this government: using bureaucratic obfuscations and clarifications to ease rules in their favour whilst reducing the quality of governance. Prepare for a Charities reform bill in a few years time when scandals hit, although we should expect no indepth investigation of the Smith Institute.