The Guardian has a series of articles today on the “ethnic minority vote”. This idea of a single block of ethnic minority voters always makes me itchy - it’s very hard to simply lump together the 5 million (or so) non-white people in this country into this single block (aside - do any gay people who read this blog feel similarly narked every time someone mentions the “gay vote” or the “pink pound”?) This point is almost touched on (but not quite) in the cover article:

They’re not from Middle England, nor are they the Basildon man, Mondeo man or Worcester woman

What the author fails to realise is that neither are white people. These ‘typical’ voter caricatures are nothing more than a focus-group built, dumbed-down approach to crass generalisation. No such depiction exists for non-white voters (maybe political correctness has saved us from any pollster doing so), nor should there be. Rather than trying to come up with a similar construct for “ethnic” voters, any attempt to address the particular needs and agendas needs to look beyond simple catch-alls. The vast spectrum of opinions that accompany the piece show that it’s next to impossible to come up with a single unitary policy.

Undaunted, but bound by this silent restriction, the Guardian has come up with a manifesto which has plenty of good ideas (except the one about all-minority MP candidate shortlists in minority areas, which is absolutely stupid - what we need is minority MPs for white areas). But it can’t be much more than a high-level strategy, a set of guiding principles which are easy to talk about but much harder to enforce. The under-achievement of black pupils in schools will need a set of different approaches to the ones needed to combat the threat to civil liberties of young Muslim men, or the exploitation of Chinese immigrant farm workers. Problems may span multiple communities, or only a subset of one community; other factors such as gender, class, age, location etc. may play a significant part in addition to race. A manifesto is nice but intelligent targeted policies are nicer.

The staggering incompetence of Labour’s election machinery rolls on and on. I mean, you have a 160 seat majority, you’re leading the polls, the Opposition has hardly ever threatened in the past four years to overtake you, and victory is more or less guaranteed. And what’s happening? The Tories are the ones setting the agenda, again and again. First immigration, now gypsies and travellers, and now we’re heading into territory which have hardly even registered this side of the Atlantic - late-term abortion and gun control.

The Conservatives themselves are utterly barren of ideas (Is “School discipline” really the second-biggest issue facing this country?), but can still run the whip over Labour. A combination of bringing forward marginal issues, with a healthy doses of FUD has done the trick (thanks to no small part by his Aussie campaign rottweiler, Lynton Crosby). Labour’s pathetic response has been to negatively campaign against the Tories’ own policies, forgetting that negative campaigning rarely works when you’re an incumbent that has been in power for 8 years, and that as I’ve already said, the Opposition haven’t really got any policies anyway. Labour can’t even get the negative campaigning right, and have to resort to fiddling the figures.

Any other political party in modern history would be envious of Labour’s strong electoral position (despite unpopular policies like Iraq, tuition fees, terror laws etc. the British people are still happy for them to carry on), and yet they seem more than content to let the Tories take over and piss away as many seats as possible. This is what happens when you put a haircut on legs in charge of the campaign. If Alan Milburn (”Forward not back” - how weak and meaningless a slogan can you possibly get?) can’t run what should be a cakewalk, how can he expect to succeed Blair as PM?

Yikes. A ranty postivist article in this week’s Guardian Life supplement: “Believe in facts not fads”, says Dick Taverne. Taverne argues that the public (bless ‘em) have diverged away from scientific fact in favour of “fads” like homeopathy and organic food.

The word “fact” gets bandied about a lot in this article as if that’s what science is all about. But science is not about “facts” as such. Science is concerned about theory. Theories in science are more strictly defined than in life, what is often called a theory in a normal context is more like a hypothesis, backed up with no evidence; a scientific theory has to have some “proof”, via evidence and observations to back it up. But proof does not mean truth. The evidence, the means of gathering it, and whether the proof is conclusive, are subject to dispute and disagreement about whether they accurately reflect what’s happening.

(It’s a wonder anything gets done in science, once you actually start to investigate how science is actually carried out - I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Niels Bohr about science being like the washing up - dirty plates, dirty water, dirty dishcloth, and yet out of it we get nice clean plates - it’s almost like magic).

Anyway, after having a go at the usual target of homeopathy, he plumps for organic food, which he says has no scientific evidence for benefiting human health, and therefore the public are being fooled. This is only partially true - there is evidence showing organic produce has higher levels of vitamins and minerals essential to health, and fewer toxic pesticides; what is disputed is whether they actually do make you healthier. Pro-organic people will say of course it makes you healthier as it naturally follows, while the sceptics will wait for conclusive (in their minds) evidence that definitely linking organic produce and wellbeing (proving anything is good for you to others’ satisfaction is pretty hard, as there are so many other mitigating factors such as environment and lifestyle - this is why the Daily Mail will permanently flip-flop between “Will tomatoes kill you?” and “Could tomatoes save your life?” every other day).

Taverne asserts that as there is no proof organic food is better for you, then it’s a fact that conventional foods are equally good. Through this leap of logic, he is denying scientific knowledge’s disputable nature; ironically, he does so by taking advantage of its disputability and amiguity and interpreting it as he sees fit. By doing this, he becomes as dogmatic as those he decries.

To be fair, this accusation can be levelled at both sides of the debate, and indeed any debate where cutting-edge science is involved - GM organisms, global warming, the origins of the universe, etc. By focusing on the “science” as if it was “fact”, a separate discipline of pure truth, that neatly rises above other less “rational” concerns, ignores the wider contexts of science. Science and politics are inevitably bound together in a modern society - decisions are often made with both, and other interests, in mind. Under his logic, people who buy organic food are irrational fools, even if they do so because they like the taste, or don’t want the countryside covered in pesticides; those who destroy trial crops of GM plants are scientific philistines without reason, even if they are concerned about the economic & moral implications of seed patents.

Taverne blames past crises in science such as BSE on the “government experts”, as if politics somehow contaminated the purity of science; in fact at the time what caused BSE was openly disputed, by both government and independent scientists. Ten years later, the link between BSE and vCJD was pretty thin and open to question. There never was a straight answer, a single truth that got covered up or corrupted.

If scientists cannot agree amongst themselves about what the right answer is, how can they possibly expect the public to either? Before bemoaning the poor “public understanding of science”, a little introspection into “science’s understanding of science” would be helpful.

I hope I’m not boring/baffling too many readers with all these recent treatises on the sociology of science and technology. I can go back to posting links to b3ta and BoingBoing if you like.

Seriously, feedback on what I wrote is welcome. I would like to provide hyperlinks to some of the claims above, but they’re mostly out of journal articles I’ve read and are not publicly accessible on the interweb - I’ll try and update the above article with some links if & when I can find them. Right, back to the essay writing…

That Doctor Who being leaked thing? Turns out it might be my fault. Well, mine and several dozen others:

To one advertising consultant, the leak is clear evidence the BBC is taking advantage of some recently learned lessons on the power of viral advertising it got from a collection of hired guns known as the Broadcast Assassins.

I took part in the Broadcast Assassins thingy (with many other similarly clued-up geeks), where I discussed the power of p2p with various BBC managerial-types, which was somewhat a revelation to nearly all of them, but they were also quite open-minded and amenable to it at the same time. If they have taken it to heart and decided to use viral adverts, it wouldn’t really surprise me.

I’ve spent bits of today in the library trying to sort out my essay on wind power, and intermittently nudging a Wikipedia article into some form of neutral and unbiased form (which may or may not be successful, yet). Then I come home, and to my joy/horror, I find an article in the great Wikipedia debate that invokes the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), a favourite theory of the technology studies community and the one I’m using in the essay, thus combining the two together.

SCOT is an interesting theory and deserves some thought: using the example of the bicycle in Victorian times, the sociologists of technology Bijker, Hughes & Pinch cite it as an artefact given different meanings by different groups (e.g. young men, women, the elderly). These groups have different problems (want to be boy racers, want to maintain dignity, want a safe vehicle, respectively). There are a variety of solutions for each problem, and indeed a variety of problems for each group - they choose which ones to prioritise and solve. The same technological artefact can be interpreted as a solution to more than one problem - different groups interpret a technology in different ways; boy racers liked air tyres as it allowed them to cycle faster, the elderly as it made the ride more comfortable, women as it stopped people being able to look at their knickers.

Through negotiation the groups come to a common, stable agreement about how that technology should solve their problems - either by redesigning or reinterpreting that technology so that it solves their problem, or by changing the problem, or by changing other artefacts (both social and technical) so the problem no longer matters.

The point is that none of this is predetermined or linear, or even really progressive. The penny farthing, though crazy-looking to us, wasn’t an aberration or deviation of design that was quickly outmoded - though it often looks like that to us. At the time it was designated the “ordinary Bicycle” and competed alongside the “safety bicycle” (which is what we today simply refer to as the “bicycle”) for a number of years, before falling by the wayside, for various reasons. “Progress” only got attached as a label afterwards.

Thus, the very idea of a natural ‘path’ or journey to follow into the future isn’t quite right, as we are not following some journey plan determined by the technology we use. Even the idea of the ‘goal’ isn’t right either, as there are many goals and they get continually redefined and reprioritised; we may not be able to see the goals all the time. If we walk, we are ‘walking’ in an unmeasurable space towards a continually moving target(s). Only when we look behind us do we see a path, and ‘progress’.

Right, that’s SCOT (summed very badly by a fatigued me, feel free to call it, or rather my interpretation of it bollocks). I do have objections to SCOT - closure may not always happen upon a particular technology - groups can agree to disagree, and we can get rival technologies co-existing quite happily. If closure does happen, it is rarely the decision of equals; the role of power is great understated by the authors of the original text; and power has many subtleties.

My work on wind turbines is ripe for this idea of multiple interpretations and dialogues between different groups of different power. There’s plenty of fun to be had analysing the seeming irreconciabilities between how the technology is viewed : a market-oriented investment opportunity (for the DTI), the state’s means of enforcing legal obligations it’s bound to (for Defra), the saviour of the world (for the Greens) or the end of the world as you know it (for local residents). Somehow ‘agreement’ has been reached, so who has the (political) power - the environmentalists, the government or big business? All I know is that it’s not the residents…

As for Wikipedia, it prides itself on not only being a encyclopaedia technology but also a community in itself - which starts to raise interesting questions - what happens when the technology and the community start to mesh? The bicycle in the Victorian era (and the wind turbine of the contemporary era) is a nice neat object of study, as it can be seen as a ‘boundary object’, something attached to but not an intrinsic part of any social group. When the technology and the community start to become enmeshed, then SCOT might start to fall apart - renegotiating interpretations of the technology with others becomes very difficult when your community is inseparable from it.

It’s come to my attention that the election map applet may be occasionally buggy - the load dialog will display an error like “Loading: Infinity%” - some sort of division by zero error, although I can’t see anything theoretically wrong with the the bit of code, and I’ve been unable to reproduce the bug myself.

Hitting ‘refresh’ usually solves the problem (bizarrely). So if anyone does get the problem, then please get in touch, with details of your browser, version of Flash and your connection speed. Thanks.

Update: It seems to have been fixed - big thanks to Oliver Sinden for taking the time out to help.

A friend noted that I haven’t been ranting about eloquently pointing out the flaws in the Government’s anti-terror bill, and another cheekily pointed out how the House of Lords, a body I’m very much in favour of reforming, has (partially) saved the day. So.. a quick post on my thoughts about the law, and the crappy state of our constitution.

As well as the horribleness of real life (lots of essay-writing, well, not really writing, more just researching and trying to come up with a topic focus while nervously looking at deadlines) taking up proper blogging time, the bill was so patently illiberal that there wasn’t much more for me to say, apart from it was another shitty law by a government happy to pass bad law that pisses on our liberties, and then more bad law to fix the problems the previous bad laws created, ad nauseum, than actually come up with something other than the first knee-jerk over-authoritarian reaction. And I’ve said that before.

Still, onto the second question - I do have a lot more respect for the House of Lords, especially reading tales of octogenarian peers catching an hour of sleep in their offices then dutifully getting up at 5am to resume debate. But you can’t let the fact that they got the concessions for this bill, making it a bad law rather than a truly awful one, mask the fact that the Lords does need reform - all but 92 of the peers are appointed - and it’s a grim situation when the hereditary peers are the only ones to have undergone some sort of elective process to get there. It was a fortuitous coincidence that this time the Lords were more reasonable than the Commons, but we can’t trust that such an unaccountable system rigged by the government will save us next time round.

Around Edinburgh there are a few ads in bus shelters proclaiming “Spencer Perceval was the 17th Prime Minister of Great Britain”, in sans-serif letters on a yellow background. I think they’re Edinburgh-only (I didn’t see any on my trip to London last weekend), though if anyone else has seen them then do say so.

No further elucidation has been given about what they’re actually advertising, which has left me rather puzzled. It may just be an educational campaign of some sort, in which case, they’ve not done a very good job, since the job of “Prime Minister” was quite ambiguous in the early days, and it’s disputed whether some early PMs actually were - as a result PMs are generally not given ordinal numbers.

Or it could be a political one - which brings an ominous tone about it. After all, Spencer Perceval is chiefly noted for being the first and so far only Prime Minister to have been assassinated.

Is it a warning to Blair? Or even an incitement? It doesn’t actually need to be one, it could just be interpreted as such. Will the hapless copywriter for the ad be put under house arrest without trial?

Oh well, it’s done it’s main aim, which is to get people talking about it (I’m not the only one to notice them). Like most virals, it probably doesn’t even matter what it’s advertising.