The Bewilderness

A messy and bloody summer for the Arabs

The 'Arab Spring' has not been transformed into an Arab summer. Moves towards democracy in some places have been countered by counter-revolution, civil war and repression. A stalemate has developed as the Islamist movements creep out from the wings and take centre stage. With the strength of their social movements underpinning democratic mobilisation, they are preparing to ride the revolutionary wind and obtain an influential position in post-upheaval elections. Economic quagmires only increase their attraction.

At a further remove, the Islamist movements have taken advantage of war to seize territory and influence. Al-Qaeda adherents have moved to obtain a territorial base in South Yemen. They have seized and maintain a toehold on the towns of Zinjibar and Jaar, despite bombing and shelling by government forces. Internecine tribal warfare has not dislodged them either.

In Libya, Islamists have killed the military commander of the rebels. General Younes, a defector from the Qaddafi regime, was murdered a few days ago. However, the retelling of his death draws out the arbitrary and brutal nature of the fanatics. It appears that a militia undertook an opportunistic revenge killing against one of their old oppressors. It confirms an impression of lawless instability in the rebel ranks and encourages more sceptical parts of the British press to speculate whether partition is on the cards.

A messy and bloody instability, which allows extremists to gain more visibility, though it is not clear if this is a temporary confluence, or a long-term trend. 

A genome sequencer coming soon to a hospital near YOU!

This may be more than a month old: a strikingly pure example of the convergence play: nano, bio and info. Genome sequencing is decreasing in price, but the next generation prototypes depend upon complex instrumentation and suffer from the constraints embedded in their processes. A simpler and more effective process is nanopore genome sequencing:

For over a decade, researchers have been working on nanopore sequencing, which could eliminate these problems by directly reading off the sequence of long, unprocessed strands of DNA. The principle is to identify each base in the sequence as the molecule is threaded through a nanoscale hole (or nanopore) outfitted with a sensor.

Nanopore sequencing has been developing for a decade: a useful reminder of how long the road from pure research to commercial viability. The goal is to transfer genome sequencing into hospital labs, the next step towards making this capability a viable and permanent expectation of the patient.

 

Free at the point of death

Hear hear for the Liberal Democrats. Through their principled stand on behalf of producer rights, they allowed the National Health Service to live up to its greatest principle: free at the point of death! The Telegraph has highlighted a new report studying the actions used by health service trusts to eke out their resources. Lengthen the time patients stay on the waiting list and they may lose patience and turn to the private sector. If not, then hopefully they will die if sick enough.

Some managers insisted that longer waiting times would lead to overall savings as “experience suggests that if patients wait longer then some will remove themselves from the list”. Interpreting this statement, the panel noted: “We understand that patients will 'remove themselves from the waiting list’ either by dying or by paying for their own treatment at private sector providers.”

Such results are achieved when you are a burden on the budget, rather than a customer who deserves service. Such professional practices have probably been embedded in this institution since 1948. Sixty years of the death panels and counting....

Labour: the economic harlots of Britain

The economy grew at 0.2% in the second quarter, a stagnant result and indicative of the huge debt burden spread across the public and private sector. Even worse, the size of the public sector is far vaster than 2005 following uncontrolled expenditure during the Brown administration. Whatever problems faced by Britain were culpably magnified by the members of that government.

Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a member of that government, an unrepentant member. There is an irony in his responses. He accuses the Chancellor of "breathtaking complacency" and being "in denial". Such accusations could have been and were flung at Gordon Brown, with cause. One could ask Balls whether this describes his own accountability for the previous government's actions. The selective choice of memories and facts do little to commend Labour as an alternative. But, at least, Balls is more coherent (if wrong) than his paymasters:

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said: "It's hurting, but it isn't working. Ministers told us that deep rapid cuts would get the economy back on course and leave the private sector room to grow. But the treatment has turned out to be worse than the disease, and with the government borrowing more last month than they did a year ago they are not even tackling the deficit effectively. The detail in the figures is even more worrying. There is no sign of an export-led recovery with productive industries falling by 1.4%. And the cuts are now beginning to bite as the government made no contribution to growth last quarter."

Barber attacks the government strategy on cuts, then acknowledges they have not begun, and eats his own cake with a blindside on not getting the deficit under control. Not a coherent narrative.  

The government should be criticised for its inaction, its failure to commence supply-side reforms and for continuing the burdensome taxes of its predecessors. Tax less, cut harder, deregulate more and free markets. It isn't rocket science. And ignore the harlots of Westminster, who still look back on their red boxes as a time of power without responsibility.

Monetize the crowd

Where does the conversation lead? What does the Cluetrain Manifesto look like these days? The answer is profit paradise for the chosen few and a graveyard of failed business models for the many. In the days when we are beginning to see another bubble in net companies, what do reviews of successes and failures tell us.

Probably that the Holy Grail remains difficult to grasp. Three simple words "monetize the crowd!" can be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Attaining a critical mass for a participatory network is an Everest; making money from it, even harder work. The article in Strategy and Business outlines some commonalities, but cannot really explain profitable success beyond the "wisdom of crowds". Voluntary participation as a collective enterprise is necessary but not sufficient; and the leverage required depends upon the market niche.

You may wish to monetize the crowd, but that depends upon parting an individual from their cash. The first is yet one more technique to achieve the second. 

Bailout sequelitis

Is the Eurozone nearer a resolution to the crisis of debt, default and devaluation. These are the three stages that all countries could potentially go through. The future of the € is mired in the political future of the European Union. The paymasters and the supplicants will need to sort out if they want a transfer union (a political union de facto) of if they wish to kill the Project off. Afterall, most of the political class in Europe love the travelling to an undefined destination but never wished to actually arrive.

Germany, naturally, balks at consigning its financiers (the German taxpayer) to a future of misery, bailing out other Member States. Yet we hear opinion after opinion from analysts, the ECB and endebted beggars that decisive action is required. Otherwise, contagion ensues. When examined closely, the actions demanded involve more money and institutional reform that will guarantee that flow of money. Will such actions prevent contagion or merely stave off the inevitable? The latter. All the actions desired appear to be bailout sequelitis. 

SO when Deutsche Bank argues that € hitting the wall = a 30% drop at least, we should prepare for the inevitable. Since the inevitable is here and earlier than expected.

Bin Laden as an extinction event

When Bin Laden was brought to justice, one retrospective view could have corroborated the findings of a geographer (or maybe not). UCLA geopgrapher, Thomas Gillespie, and a team of undergraduates had undertaken an academic transposing the methods of "island biogeography" to Bin Laden's whereabouts. They theorised that,

Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be. Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called “island biogeography”: basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.

Therefore, Bin Laden was probably hiding out in a large town, rather than a small one. The correlation with Bin Laden's actual location has led to 20/20 vindication of these results. Since such extensions of theory are rarely satisfactory, why is this result statistically significant.

If we are just beginning to understand how individuals react to general economic behaviour, How convincing is it that a theory could explain the success of one of the biggest manhunts in history. Is it not more likely that Bin Laden was unable to move too far from his base of support and original location due to teh fear of being found and caught?

I do agree that Bin Laden met an extinction event following a personal catastrophe for him (a satisfying outcome for the rest of us).

Slaying the Dragons of Neurochemical disaster

The Paul Allen Institute for Brain Science has established an online 'Atlas of the Brain'. This map links the biochemistry of our most important organ with the underlying genetic interactions. The field is fast moving, as only four years have passed since an atlas of a mouse brain was completed.

It is hoped that the developing atlas will enable researchers to experience an exponential understanding of neural diseases such as Parkinsons or Alzheimers. The foundation of success is via the linkage of disease to its biochemical and genetic origin. But we shall see whether our mind remains 'Here Be Dragons'.

Turning the lights on dark networks

An interesting correlation between the Deep Web (also known as the Dark Web) and the "unlit social graph". The author draws parallels between Google's need  to dive beneath the surface of the world wide web to map ringfenced sources of information with Facebook's current dilemma that the majority of networks remain beyond its grasp. Truly, this unlit graphic is only available through mobiles rather than the desk. 

Quite staggering is the size of the dark web to the surface web: an estimate in 2008 was 400% of that which is searchable. The size and depth of this subterranean empire remains opaque. Add in language and culture: suddenly the Surface Web of the West may become a very small place.

Now the attention is turning to dark networks.

Babysteps for data

Data is exploding at a rate of thirty to forty percent a year; but not fast enough. A surprising conclusion when one considers this rate of increase. But surges and extrapolations can map their own limits. For those who chart this increase, the limits or buffers are human.

And yet, the researchers say that computers are capable of processing much more information in a much more sophisticated fashion. The problem? There are not enough human programmers to come up with more sophisticated ways to crunch data.

The problem is not hardware, but software. Data analysts argue that the information could be used far more effectively (and with radical consequences) if more sophisticated algorithmic methods were found.

It is clear that when breakthrough software is achieved and implemented, the data manipulation that we currently see appears clumsy and primitive by comparison. We are not yet in the age of data customisation with our own portable menomes.