Ed Dowding

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

Does what it says on the can: http://freedocumentaries.org/

China pays 280,000 commentators to skew online conversations. Their activities were described by Chinese President Hu Jintao as “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance”.

What a great idea, and fantastic use of liberated data:

[The Postcode Paper] gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.

It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time.

It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.

It’s not just data from central government – we also scraped TFL for travel times, and a bespoke spider map of transport options in our area.

And there’s stuff from the NHS and the council.

Source: Newspaper Club

Edited highlights from an LRB article:

‘Figures are down,’ we chortle mirthlessly, as we load the third batch of door-to-door catalogues onto our frames, adding yet more weight to our bags, and more minutes of unpaid overtime to our clock. We get paid 1.67 pence per item of unaddressed mail, an amount that hasn’t changed in ten years. It is paid separately from our wages, and we can’t claim overtime if we run past our normal hours because of these items. We also can’t refuse to deliver them. This junk mail is one of the Royal Mail’s most profitable sidelines and my personal contribution to global warming: straight through the letterbox and into the bin.

[...]

One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised [...] It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts.

Take a look at your letters next time you pick them up from the doormat. Look at the right-hand corner, the place where the Queen’s head used to be. You’ll see a variety of different franks, representing a number of different mail companies. There’s TNT, UK Mail, Citypost and a number of others. What these companies do is to bid for the profitable bulk mail and city-to-city trade of large corporations, undercutting the Royal Mail, and then have the Royal Mail deliver it for them. TNT has the very lucrative BT contract, for instance. TNT picks up all BT’s mail from its main offices, sorts it into individual walks according to information supplied by the Royal Mail, scoots it to the mail centres in bulk, where it is then sorted again and handed over to us to deliver. Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit.

None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all. They aren’t rival mail companies in a free market, as the propaganda would have you believe. None of them delivers any mail. All they do is ride on the back of the system created and developed by the Royal Mail, and extract profit from it. The process is called ‘downstream access’. Downstream access means that private mail companies have access to any point in the Royal Mail delivery network which will yield a profit, after which they will leave the poor old postman to carry the mail to your door.

[...]

The truth is that the figures aren’t down at all. We have proof of this. The Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures. This is how it is being done.

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150.

Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated.

Source: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/roy-mayall/diary

YouTube – Economist “Did you know?”.

Thanks to Martin Anazco for linking to this video about creating custom DNA which led me to this:

The Registry is a collection of ~3200 genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems. Founded in 2003 at MIT, the Registry is part of the Synthetic Biology community’s efforts to make biology easier to engineer. It provides a resource of available genetic parts to iGEM teams and academic labs.

Partsregistry.org and see also: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Protocols

This is rather neat, if a little scary. I just hope we can progress safely without jeopardising billions of years of evolutionary heritage. But nice one science, sharing information so well.

It’s tempting to think that DNA databases are OK, because it’s just a way of uniquely identifying someone, just like a long number which no one else has, which is intrinsically linked to you.

If you believe that, I can see why you think you may have nothing to worry about.

But the problem is that we do not know as much about DNA as we’d like to think we do.

Not only are our ideas about the uniqueness of DNA false, but also we do not know what DNA is responsible for. There have been studies claiming correlations with depression, alcoholism, and homosexuality, and now there’s a new study which shows a correlation with violent crime.

“This gene is predicting gang membership, but it’s really predicting it for the very violent gang members,” Beaver says.

from ‘Gangsta gene’ identified in US teens, 19 June 2009, New Scientist

We don’t have to look too far back in our history (uh oh), or too far in our future, to ponder what kind of rules well-meaning governments will do with this information. It would take a Government with considerably more spine than those we have seen of late to not react to a Daily Mail headline of “Government does nothing to stop violent gang members”

Read ‘6 reasons never to give up your biometric data or DNA‘

I’m not against having a database of all children, but I am against databases of citizens, per se. It just doesn’t seem to be necessary, and is a can of worms waiting to be opened.

• Rethinking the food system – aka Food Security, with Tim Lang
• About 95% of people do not want ID cards
• Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier is completely melted
• What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?
• Prince Charles’ Rainforest Charity – RainforestSOS.org
• Delivering medicines and information via Coke crates in Africa