The UK to become Newfoundland?!
This article at the London Review of Books is the longest, funniest and best summary of the credit crunch I’ve yet seen. Highly recommended even if it does mean you’ll be facing a week of sleepless nights.
Wolfram Alpha and cities
As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new kid on the search block: Wolfram Alpha. Search is a bit of misnomer actually. Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine” and although it’s still early days, it does offer a powerful tool – and something notably different from Google. It’s definitely not a search engine.
Alpha’s main advantage is that it contains large amounts of curated data, codified in a robust manner that allows for “computation”. Reasoning might be a better word. If you enter a query like “GDP US vs. France“, it knows that you want to compare the GDP time series, whereas “GDP US / France” works out the ratio between the two values. In other words, Alpha is a demonstration of the potential of the semantic web. If all data is labeled and the relationships between types of data explained in an ontology, then computers can use this information to manipulate data and answer pretty complicated user queries: like “how many UK Premiership footballers come from home towns over 3000m altitude?” (why you’d want to do such a query is another, perhaps unanswerable, question).
At the moment, many of the Alpha datasets are incomplete and so you can only do limited queries. But since I work mainly on cities, I wanted to check what’s available on this topic.
EU Elections
So, on Tuesday I was in London and coming out of Kings Cross station, I encountered a number of people handing out leaflets, blocking the forecourt like pins on a Plinko board. They were asking commuters not to vote for the BNP, which is sensible enough, but I was curious why they were all wearing RMT jackets. Why should London Underground workers be telling commuters who to vote for?
Then on Wednesday, we got some leaflets through the door and I found out that the head of the RMT, Bob Crow, is campaigning with the No2EU party. Ding! So he’s selfishly competing for the anti-Europe vote as opposed to altruistically warning about the dangers of electing racists who exaggerate. (The leaflet stack had one from the BNP claiming that the main parties want to “give 80 million Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain”. A) There are 72 to 75 million Turks and B) I doubt all of them want to come over here.)
But is that really kosher? Having your members, who work for a public body, go out and picket on behalf of their shop steward? Shame the elections aren’t next week – they could have handed out the leaflets during their planned strike instead and saved themselves a day of holiday.