Freesteel

To be fair, there was also a human interest angle in this “working life of a software engineer story” to make it media-noteworthy enough: the software engineer in question was deaf.

Now, there are many activities in the world which it is more challenging to do if you are deaf than if you are not, and programming computers is probably not one of them. Nor is playing badminton for that matter, even though there is a whole squad of competition players, vastly outnumbering the negligable membership of the deaf lug (linux user group) mailing list, for example.

What if it is the case that careers counselling, as it is experienced in our schools and universities, systematically steers students away from free open source software businesses, and into the traditional channel of vocational training, followed by proper old-fashioned employment in a real company that does things the capitalist way where they talk only about how much money they’re making from the start to the end of their annual report? The company directors not even slightly interested in anything else.

I’d be willing to posit that people with disabilities probably get more than their fair share of careers counselling, and this would result in an under-representation of perfectly agreeable deaf programmers in the open source sector, compared to their peer group who will have been allowed to muddle along a bit more at the start of their lives.

Generally career counsellors are going to want you to seek employment with respectable and astonishingly expensive education software suppliers with notoriously bad service, bogus security regimes, tightly closed software, and who combine this with the willingness to convert these major customer disadvantages into financial vitality that makes them qualified to apply through the government’s gratuitously complex procurement systems that at no time take any account of coding quality or long term vision (except the vision to make more money).

So it was that the Guardian’s photography correspondent, Leo Bendictus, interviewed Xander Hurley, who also features on the net as a Deaflymic Badminton champion. The article begins:

So … I pause, because this is a question I have dreaded asking. Erm … what does a software engineer actually do? Xander Hurley stares quizzically across the table. He is a long-limbed young man, with floppy blond hair and blue shirt. He has already explained how he meets clients, discusses with them what they need, and then goes out and makes it for them.

“Can I borrow your pad?” he asks. I slide it over, with a pen. “For example, if I was to create a calculator to add two numbers together.” He pauses, looking suddenly concerned. “I hope this doesn’t sound patronising?” Not at all, I assure him, and probably impossible. “OK. Bear in mind I’m using C#, which is a language, part of Microsoft .NET.” Consider it borne.

Hurley writes “value1 = 10″ on my pad, followed by “value2 = 20″. “This is pseudocode, by the way,” he explains, “not actual code.” I nod fraudulently. “Now I want the code to take these two numbers and add them together.” He writes “int result = value1 + value2″. “Now, ‘int’ stands for integer. It’s a whole number. And that,” he points to the word “result”, “is a placeholder, which is like a bracket for holding numbers. It’s just a name. It could be anything.” He crosses out “result” and replaces it with “Xander”.

“So you add value1 to value2, and that gets assigned into there.” My pen hops about the page in his large hand. “So ‘Xander’, after doing this, will contain 30.” He looks up like a maths teacher who has just made everything clear, and sees, as maths teachers must often do, an expression of poorly simulated comprehension looking back at him. What I am still struggling to decide is whether software engineering is in fact much simpler than I had hitherto imagined. Or far, far more complicated.

Certainly what Hurley does with C# most of the time would be beyond me. He is a member of the data exchange team at RM, a large education software company, in the dowdy bowels of whose Oxfordshire headquarters we are sitting now. Here Hurley spends most of his days building computer programs to help schools manage their information. At the moment he is working on a way of enabling pupils and parents to access their own data themselves.

The reporter went on to explain how Hurley took six years to get through his software engineering course at university because of the difficulty lip-reading the lecturers from 20 metres away, and how he pulled out of exams at the last minute twice to avoid getting a bad marks in his final degree.

Now, I know a lot of programmers, and this is not how any of us learned our trade. Exams in software engineering the butt of jokes. When I used to work for a company and we had to hire somebody, we’d give them a one page coding quiz and that pretty much sorted everything out. Oddly, this was not standard practice in other companies, as though their chosen criteria for the job of being a programmer did not include the ability to programme. I flunked every single job I’ve ever applied for, and one thing I can do well is programme.

Programmers generally teach one another one on one. We practice for hours, sometimes all night long. We debug other people’s code. We search for answers on usenet. And, at the last resort, we RTFM. All this social activity over the decades has given rise to the open source community from which the whole world has benefited.

The ironic thing is that Hurley is permitted to talk about actual in the boundary of a newspaper story, but he works for RM in Oxford, one of the notoriously evil PFI contractors which doesn’t care one jot about code. Check out their web-page and any news. It’s all about money money money money money.

For contrast, you could inspect the website for moodle which is the leading competitor of RM for software to run schools. One click and they’re talking about the code, the features, what they’re trying to do with it, and how you can learn about it and use it. It’s all about friendship, not business. In a business, they occasionally take a break from the money and talk about people. Watch this video where some lobotomized zombies unfortunate enough to have been TUPED across to RM’s PFI business explain how they’re having a wonderful time doing exactly the same job as before for exactly the same pay and conditions while only costing the taxpayers only four times as much for a lot of senseless paperwork and stagnant technology.

The PFI system bundles up the publicly utilized IT infrastructure into a system of bogus shell companies and tax-efficient asset vehicles, such as Local Education Partnerships (LEP), using the same crooked logic of obscuring things illustrated with the sub-prime loan banking crisis. While the job of installing an operating system or wiring a network router is something that fundamentally anyone can do and is only ever going to get easier as the hardware and (open source) software technology improves, the result of packaging this work within the exclusive remit of one particular trade employee of one particular company for the next thirty years is only going to make things cost much more than they should. That’s what big profits are all about — the ability to invoice for much more than something is worth. It used to be that we’d laugh about how many union workers it took to change a lightbulb, because the union was only ever interested in preserving jobs. Now the question is going to be: how much money is it going to cost to change a lightbulb? The act of changing the lightbulb is going to be done perfectly efficiently, but you will pay. That’s because it’ll be declared as an Emergency and this will cause the need for Unprogrammed Maintenance.

It’s all there in the ICT Services Contract for Partnership for Schools:

8.8.8 If, as a result of an Emergency, the need arises for Unprogrammed Maintenance, the LEP may carry out such Unprogrammed Maintenance provided that the LEP informs a member of the senior management of the School(s) affected by the Unprogrammed Maintenance as soon as possible and the LEP notifies the Authority’s Representative as soon as possible (and in any event within five (5) Business Days of the occurrence of the Emergency) of the extent of the necessary Unprogrammed Maintenance and the reasons for such Unprogrammed Maintenance. The LEP shall take all reasonable steps to minimise the duration of, and any interference caused by, such Unprogrammed Maintenance.

8.8.9 The carrying out of Unprogrammed Maintenance shall not be construed as relieving the LEP from providing the ICT Services or as entitling the LEP to any relief from Deductions.

8.8.10 Notwithstanding that there has been no objection to a schedule of Programmed Maintenance submitted in accordance with clause 8.8.3 (Maintenance of the ICT Assets), the Authority’s Representative may, at any time, require the LEP to accelerate or defer any Programmed Maintenance by giving written notice to the LEP, (unless otherwise agreed) not less than forty (40) Business Days prior to the scheduled date for carrying out such Programmed Maintenance (where applicable, as accelerated), which notice shall set out the time and/or periods at or during which the Authority requires the Programmed Maintenance to be performed. The LEP shall, within ten (10) Business Days, notify the Authority of the amount of any additional reasonable costs which it will incur as a direct consequence of such acceleration or deferment (the Estimated Increased Maintenance Costs). The Authority shall, within a further period of ten (10) Business Days following receipt by the Authority of notification of the amount of the Estimated Increased Maintenance Costs, at its option, either confirm or withdraw its request to accelerate or defer the Schedule of Programmed Maintenance. If the Authority does not respond within this ten (10) Business Day period, the request shall be deemed to have been confirmed. The Authority shall reimburse the LEP the direct and reasonable costs actually incurred by the LEP as a consequence of such acceleration or deferment up to, but not exceeding, the amount of the Estimated Increased Maintenance Costs.

The Guardian article ends with a story of how Hurley was once called home by his mother to fix her computer and how he travelled two and a half hours only to discover that all he needed to do was turn on the plug. We smile at this comical situation, because it has often happened to us. It’s a weakness when humans and computers come into contact. The problem of the plug being turned off is common even to a desk lamp, but because there were so many other things that could go wrong with the computer it is easy to over-look it.

As with any other human weakness in our interaction with the modern world, our economic system is designed to reward entrepreneurs who prey on and exploit it to the maximum extent the law allows. We have a bad intuition with probabilities: mega-casinos. Our appetite is satisfied by cheap processed food that will kill us: McDonalds. We get addicted to chemicals and ape what the stars do in the movies: Tobacco. We are greedy to make lots of money for nothing: Ponzi schemes. (There are regulations outlawing overt versions of the Ponzi scheme because it is so damaging to the economy, but they didn’t catch up in time to prevent the current financial crisis.)

These vast PFI service contracts now gobbling up the public sector IT are merely institutionalizing the lack of knowledge at the current state of technology, locking it down as effectively and systematically as Coca-cola targets children, getting them hooked on the brand and the sugar while they’re young and impressionable. The fundamental purpose is to disempower people.

Think about it: any employee unfortunate to work for one of these companies is basically forbidden from talking to anyone about the “company secrets”. What are these company secrets? Well, they’re often on the face of them secrets kept from the customer about how they could do things themselves. It is not in the company’s commercial interest for these secrets to get out, or it will no longer be able to charge people for doing things for them.

This is fundamentally the opposite attitude to open source programming which is why it is doomed in the long run.

It would help, however, if newspaper reporters were able to stoop to the level of talking about what programming is all about with open source people for a change. But they won’t because it’s deemed too boring and geeky.

Unless it is framed in terms of making money.

Or it intersects with something worthy, like deaf culture. Hacker culture just doesn’t deserve respect.

I stayed up last night to scrape and parse the Merseyside Police Force helicopter logs using my new codewiki. (I’ll buy anyone a beer if they find an incident sillier than foot problem at 1:15am 2008-04-30.) The columns in the table are Date, Time, Area, Incident, and Outcome, and there was a typo about every other month in the format of the date or time, often with the delimeter ‘/’ or ‘.’ shifted over one place, but none whatsoever in the over-all table lay-out. This suggests that it’s the output from some sort of a spreadsheet whose entries are not verified. If it was a database you’d have used a DateTime field, and there would never be these sorts of errors in the info-dump.

This is good news, because it probably means they’re not doing graphical analysis and mash-ups of the data, so if I did it, it would be news.

For mash-ups you need GPS positions, and all I’ve got are district names. I can count how many occurances of each name string there are across the logs. Here’s the table of the top 50 Liverpool districts who have sometime been in the small hours of the morning by an incident known as “High visibility policing” whose outcome is “Public reassurance and the prevention and detection of crime” (I’m sure all the other call-outs were equally useful):

506	Huyton	208	Southport	126	Netherton	74	Aigburth	49	Birkdale
489	Kirkby	188	City Centre	119	Everton	69	Hoylake	48	Woolton
376	Bootle	179	Speke	117	Birkenhead	64	Whiston	47	Ainsdale
340	Norris Green	174	Aintree	110	Litherland	62	City centre	46	Rainford
338	St Helens	173	Toxteth	105	Fazakerley	59	Childwall	46	Garston
293	Anfield	161	Maghull	100	Halewood	58	Dingle	45	Haydock
259	Walton	147	Wavertree	98	Wallasey	58	Allerton	44	Netherley
247	Crosby	140	Formby	93	Kirkdale	57	Stockbridge Village	38	Vauxhall
229	Croxteth	137	West Derby	92	Old Swan	57	Seaforth	35	Dovecot
223	City	130	Kensington	88	Tuebrook	53	Prescot	34	Hightown

Converting these names into Lat-Lon locations is a tricky problem, but making them into links into Wikipedia pages as I have done above looks like it will lead to GPS coordinates of 90% of them, thanks to someone’s diligent work out there (I don’t know who). Unfortunately, Wikipedia resists webscraping, but you can download the whole thing and parse it yourself.

Now, I know what you liberal mash-up people are thinking: just do a map of the city and show how those nasty police are tending to buzz the poorer communities more than the wealthier ones.

Well that’s where the crime is, they’re going to say. Someone’s doing drugs? Send the helicopter up in the air to sort them out. What’s it going to do if they don’t happen to be sitting in an open park with no trees surrounding them? Shout at them from above the rooftops?

The compromises that have to be made to account for the physical reality of helicopter flight may mean that what is left-over from this great idea in the pursuit of community policing is of no use whatsoever. But who’s going to prove it when all that would result would be the embarrassment of senior officers and the curtailment of joy-rides throughout the Force? There are some good and hearty conflicts of interests when it comes to assessing the merits of certain pieces of expensive and potentially pointless kit.

Liverpool is a mixed-up in city with the “good” and “bad” areas very intermingled, and they change every couple of years as regeneration continues. I don’t think there’s much at a crude enough resolution for the police helicopter to be able to focus on certain communities who are going to be deprived of their sleep. We Brits put up with it, like busy roads or noisy airplanes.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can do it virtually. For example, Freesteel central (Martin’s house) can be seen at high resolution on the Microsoft bird’s eye view here (I think it’s one of the houses that still has its roof). No expensive and ridiculous glass and steel corporate work-office building floating in a sea of parked cars is necessary for this high-performance machining kernel to be developed. (I wonder which major CAM company will be the first to go to the wall in this recession when they stop making enough money to cover costs. We’re safe: we’ve never made any money in the first place anyway to afford having any expensive costs.)

My freezing cold stone house in St James Cemetery is here, or it can be viewed from above here. The google maps version tries to go for the same resolution, but they haven’t got it, so it’s blurry. I have heard that their street-level view camera car has been sighted earlier in the year.

Which gets us back to the police and their toy factory. Five years ago they installed dense network of CCTV cameras on very tall poles that block various pavements and really offended me at the time. But like most Brits, I’ve had to get used to it. The cameras have little rotating motors and windscreen wipers, and I have never seen them move, so I wonder if they’ve rusted into place by now.

I would suppose that the police should install a nice virtual reality city in their offices using all these google/microsoft/live-maps technologies so they can fly around our houses and dwellings in the dead of the night to their heart’s content without waking us up (or disturbing my latest programming session) to reassure us of their ability to prevent and detect crime from a distant but very noisy gravity-defying vantage point.

Actually, what this will develop into will be a hybrid virtual reality and virtual presence system for flying unmanned drones up and down the streets of the city. The technology that’s being developed and deployed large scale in Iraq, where the people are utterly expendable, will come like so many things to the war in our streets.

You haven’t got a war in your streets?

What do you mean you haven’t got a war in your streets?

Well, we’ll find you one. We’ve got goods to sell here. All it takes is a little bit of fear to get this nationally vital industry going. The mainstream media loves scare stories. We can work with them. Did you know that fear is also an essential ingredient for winning elections? Works almost every time, if you get the mix right. I think we can do business in this economy.

Have you seen how much fun tasers are?

And we would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those pesky kids who also have access to lots of cheap camera equipment and the ability to publish the photos in places for everyone to see, giving their own side of the story.

Who knows? Maybe it will be enough to save this generation from the kinds of crap that used to go down in the good old days.

Background rant (definitely skip this)

The great British newsmedia, on which so much of the nation’s self-evaluation depends, is notable for its unimagination and lack of systematic coverage. It is outrageous that there has never been any notable coverage of leading projects such Open Street Map, TheyWorkForYou, or FarmSubsidy — let alone in enough depth for people to hear about the underlying politics which they represent.

The lowest point in this never-ending news black-out came when Jeremy Paxman found time to interview a very bad political blogger on his own ridiculous terms. But to this day Newsnight has never spared a minute for a representative of mySociety to come on and explain why we exist, in spite of 5 years of sustained technical work to create the most user friendly and serious political website in the land without any cooperation from the inside.

One of the (many) reasons it is in the public interest for these projects to get some publicity is so that professors who need to know about them find out about them and value the data.

The Parliamentary transcripts (Hansard), which have been processed into usable form for the TheyWorkForYou project back to 2001, are interesting because they contain a near-verbatim record of the spoken words for a formal group of people covering long periods of their lives and the life of the nation.

Several years ago I wondered if a certain local university professor would be interested in using this data for running it through their fancy-schmancy grammatical analyzers and doing some research. Perhaps he’d be able to help fund us to parse and prepare the rest of the on-line data that goes back to 1988 and covers all kinds of legislation that was put in place then and affects us profoundly to this day. (Train privatization anyone?) It wouldn’t take much — just a sign that somebody out there actually cared.

So I visited Prof. Paul Watry (of the National Centre for Text Mining) across the road, spoke to him for an hour, met the programmers in the basement, gave them the links to download the Hansard data, and nothing came of it. I tried to download and run their software, but I wasn’t clever enough and didn’t get any help. Being an unpaid volunteer who has to earn money elsewhere, my time in this field is considerably more precious than those who are employed full time job with all the resources — even though our culture rates things the other way round: I am supposed to do all the running, and it’s entirely my fault if there’s no follow-up.

Had this project been shown on TV it would have probably been more interesting to the Professor. Money and celebrity are all that attracts attention these days, not technical results, even to people who should know better.

OCR-ing for Alzheimer’s (skip to here)

I was woken at 8:50am this morning by an interview on the Today Program with Dr Peter Garrard who was reporting some text mining from Hansard in an attempt to diagnose the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease in Harold Wilson and explain his sudden resignation in 1976.

It’s very early research, little more than a conjecture with no control studies — just the sort of half-baked science that the BBC likes to make prime-time.

The companion piece on the BBC website is here:

The study, published online in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, converted Hansard transcripts to digital format using optical character recognition software.

This allowed Dr Garrard to use markers to compare Wilson’s speech patterns, and the number of times he used certain words, with those of his parliamentary colleagues.

The analysis was based on techniques developed by literary scholars for quantifying the stylistic similarities and differences between authors, genres, and literary eras.

The findings showed that the content of Wilson’s speeches was identifiably different from those of other members of the House throughout his career as prime minister.

However, the difference was smaller during the months leading up to his resignation - a sign that he was losing his distinctive voice.

Dr Garrard said that could be a sign of the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s.

The paper is not available on the public internet. It’s been deposited here behind the eternally evil Elsevier’s pay-wall, so only people who work for institutions that pay the steep license fee for their dreadful web-interface have the right to access it.

This has been a long-running issue. In this country we privatize the dissemination science just like we privatize the law. Public money pays for the universities, the research grants, and the salaries of the professors who then write up their work in scientific papers and sign over their entire copyright for free to a no-value-added publisher like Elsevier following the necessary peer-reviewing by other professors (who don’t get paid), so it can be kept archived and inaccessible, and the universities have to buy it back at great expense.

Professors, just like those powerful lawyers in the legal system, don’t notice the problem, because the secretaries and lowly librarians deal with the issue of buying the materials back, and they don’t notice that no one else has access to this paid-for information (and anyway they don’t care because only Professors need to see these documents, and they all can).

Senior professors tend to have been brought up in an era when publishers actually did something expensive and skillful, like typesetting. They don’t notice that they and their new PCs now do this entire job themselves, and all the publisher does is run a web-server with an on-demand printing system while cashing in obscene profits and recycling some of the money back into political influence where it fights against reform of the system, for example by filling the Science Minister’s brain with the most bogus argument against Open Access publishing I have ever seen:

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: What the government does not think is right to do is to promote one model, open-access publishing, in the marketplace. It is not clear that on a like-for-like basis open-access publishing will have a lower cost base, and as it will transfer some of the payments from industry users to the authors, it is likely to lead to higher costs for universities and research institutes. Also, because Britain produces 5.3 per cent of articles in the world’s science journals while accounting for only 3.5 per cent of subscriptions, we would also lose out as a country. (2004-11-10)

Dr Garrard needs to pop over to his colleague Steven Harnad who has been banging away on this since about 1991, and has established the precedent that academics should upload their pre-press (no so-called publisher’s “added value” yet included) articles onto their public websites without any legal consequences.

Garrard’s research on evidence for Alzheimer’s disease in written text was first reported all over the place back in 2004 when he published a paper analysing the language of Iris Murdoch’s later novels. The old dear had just famously died, movies were being made about her illness, and this kind of thing piqued the literary interest of the old British media.

So it’s no surprise they picked up his similar research done four years later on Harold Wilson for the same deal.

Senile authors, senile parliamentarians: lots of text to use. Maybe when we invent life-blogging with microphones pinned to our throats containing reliable speech recognition systems that transcribe our entire spoken corpus from birth to death on a 100Gig memory card the size of a pin-head, it’ll be applicable to the rest of us.

Meanwhile, there are a whole lot more interesting questions to be finding out from this amazing corpus of text data, than looking for boring fragments of senility that don’t give us any clues about where we are going as a people or a nation. Everyone knew that Ronald Reagan was senile. Everyone knew that Tony Blair was a raving liar. The way that the political system is able to ignore and/or use these facts to its advantage its advantage group-dynamic-wise needs some serious looking into by thoughtful scholars. But who’s going to go there when our imagination is capped by narrow uninteresting questions that assume honourability and people trying to do their best. It’s as irrelevant as picking on George Bush’s speech impediments.

From Dr Garrard’s Journal of Neurolinguistics paper:

Transcripts of Prime Ministers Questions that were held while Harold Wilson was Prime Minister (ie firstly between October 1964 and June 1970 and secondly between March 1974 and April 1976) were obtained and converted to ASCII format using optical character recognition software. Markers were added to identify the date at each change of year and month, while the identity and party affiliation of every speaker was recorded at the beginning of any speech or contribution to debate.

The troubling thing, before I got into this whole rant, was that Parliament has already paid to have all the old transcripts scanned and OCRed, and people I know have been putting it online here. And here’s their development blog. Goddammit, if we can’t get these things together, what hope is there?

The Telegraph has the story from a yesterday too:

Last week the Medical Research Council awarded a research grant to Dr Garrard and Dr Celeste de Jager, a neuropsychologist at the University of Oxford.

The research team will collect and examine a large database of spoken and written language samples collected over the past twenty years as part of the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Aging.

Here’s the fancy website of the Medical Research Council. All kinds of stuff there to distract you from the fact that their one and only mission is the delivery of scientific grants to researchers.

I leave it as a difficult exercise for the reader to navigate through the website to the list of grants given.

What would make me really happy would be if the fruits of the vast work done into text mining software by academics were installed onto the TheyWorkForYou servers and ran live so that the results showed up in the Numerology section where it belongs.

Connect scholars to activists not via Elsevier’s dead tree vaults. Progress might then occur.

Angus Macleod in The Times has the story:

Labour’s private Glenrothes poll had shown SNP heading for defeat

The Prime Minister was privy to the results of a mass canvass completed towards the start of last week which showed that voters who had previously said they were “don’t knows” were heading for the Labour camp by a margin of three to one as Thursday’s polling day approached.

The results of that canvass were kept to a group of five party top brass… They made a pact to tell no one else and, other than to say that the result would be “close”, were content to sit back and watch as the premature claims of victory from Alex Salmond and the SNP grew louder and louder, media pundits busied themselves estimating the Nationalist majority…

[So what went wrong?] It was, as the SNP alleged, negative campaigning. But as past masters at such tactics the party should not have been surprised that it became the dominant issue.

It tried hard to answer the Labour accusation that the council was forcing the vulnerable elderly to pay unreasonable amounts for items such as home alarms but never managed to neutralise the Labour propaganda.

…While the campaign concentrated almost exclusively on local concerns, it was played out to the doom-laden background of the global financial crisis and Mr Brown’s role in handling the fall-out.

Fifers are notoriously clannish and took pride that one of their own was being praised around the world for his role.

Meanwhile, back in media Pundit and planted-story land, Andrew Porter writes in The Telegraph:

When the polls closed on Thursday night the Prime Minister had just been told that Labour was likely to lose the seat it had held at the last election with a comfortable 10,000 majority. Mr Brown went to bed thinking Labour had lost.

An ally of the Prime Minister confided to another: “He will take it badly. He always does.”

Instead, in the early hours, the Scottish political narrative was spectacularly spun on its axis. Labour had secured a barely believable majority of 6,737.

But has it changed the political story across the wider canvass of UK politics?

There were some obvious reasons why Labour won. They fought as the opposition to the incumbent SNP. The unpopular policy of care home fees under the ruling SNP Scottish executive was remorselessly played by Labour.

And today the Guardian is literally wetting itself:

• Brown hails Glenrothes triumph as vote of confidence in economic strategy - The SNP spent the four-week campaign ahead in the polls, - [What Polls???]
• Euphoria at No 10 greets stunning Labour win in seat it had written off - Douglas Alexander, the Labour election coordinator - who in Bahrain on Thursday night had received a gloomy forecast of the result from the Glenrothes count as the polls closed - argued yesterday: “This has shown Gordon was right to argue that he had to focus on taking people through this downturn, and it has shown, above all, voters recognise that it is progressives that have the answers.”
• Where did Labour get it right? - Andy Sparrow This was the first byelection since the global banking system came close to meltdown. But in the event local issues seemed to resonate more than national or international concerns. Labour selected a prominent Fife headteacher, Lindsay Roy, as its candidate and focused relentlessly on the alleged failings of the local council, which since last year has been run by the Scottish National party. Home care charges, which for some users have risen dramatically, became the key issue. Although only a few hundred people are apparently being asked to pay under Fife’s new means-testing regime, the charges aroused considerable opposition to the doorstep.
• A good night for Labour - phew! - But coming so soon after some really bad byelections this result may also come to be seen as an indicator that the outcome of the next general election isn’t the forgone conclusion many thought.
• A bounce in the backyard - The result was not just a surprise but a stunner - one for the record books. Glenrothes is the first Labour byelection victory in a Labour-held seat since 1997 in which the party increased its share of the vote compared with the preceding general election.
• Sarah Brown: the real reason Labour won in Glenrothes? - I consulted a senior Downing Street staffer, a cabinet minister who’d recently visited the seat and a couple of party staffers yesterday, all of whom predicted a narrow SNP win — and no, I dont think for once it was expectation management.
• and so on…

It’s not as though the accurate story didn’t briefly get out, before this fake narrative became dominant. Back in October 23 reporter Andy Sparrow wrote for the Guardian: Gordon Brown ‘has been told Labour will win Glenrothes byelection’.

One should never underestimate the mendaciousness canniness of leading politicians in this world. They get there because they know how to work the electoral system with all its flaws. They will do any amount of misleading the public in order to get their vote. This skill does not necessarily translate into an ability for competant governance in the public interest, however. If it did, the entirety of Western democracy wouldn’t spend so much time in the sh*thole, to be honest.

Having trialed a set of tactics in this by-election:

• getting the family into the campaigning
• claiming to be competently solving a financial crisis you absolutely didn’t foresee and which is widely viewed as a consequence of deregulation, expressed in its most extreme form with the Abolition of Parliament Bill
• targeting micro-issues, such as council charges to a small number of old people, that are of no relevance to the office that is being elected
• misleading the media (and therefore the public) about facts — knowing that they are too stupid, disinterest and under-resourced to find the evidence to correct it

… we can expect to see a heavy amount of this crap rolling out over the next two years. Sanity doesn’t stand a chance.

The overwhelming majority of the public’s education about politics and governance comes from leading politicians, channelled through the media. No wonder we don’t know anything and don’t have a clue. Fighting this is like trying to sell athiesm in the time of the dark ages.

And so the Labour Party candidate has “unexpectedly” won Glenrothes — with an increased share of the vote (now at 55%) — and with the only difference from the 2005 election being that all the LibDem and Conservative voters switched to the SNP. Well done, folks. You have elected a new MP, Linsay Roy, who’s action plan is:

• 1. Crack down on anti-social behavoir
• 2. Fight for more opportunities for young people
• 3. Sort out the roads and busses
• 4. Help Fife families through tough times

We can count on the new MP voting for lots of horrible things sight-unseen for the next decade, owing to the fact that he was essentially chosen by the party machine for being a popular head-teacher, who probably has an average understanding about what goes on in Westminster (ie barely any), and will do exactly what he’s told. There has been no report of anyone asking him about where he stands on the controversial issues which have been so challenging to those few of us who have bothered to pay any attention to the ingredients as they are listed on the Bill for materials in Westminster.

Having just now reviewed the Guardian coverage of the campaign, as well as perused the BBC’s less easily navigated reports, one thing is obvious from this “upset” (after many pundits had predicted an SNP victory):

No public polling had been done

This is a complete disgrace. Clearly, the professionally run Labour Party with all its seasoned strategists from overseas and PM (Public Manipulation) companies must have run some polls and knew they were going to win. Polls are quite expensive to run, but are absolutely crucial if don’t want to fly blind.

Meanwhile, our dozy press corps (and this includes the BBC) have been relying on the betting odds down at Ladbrokes, knowing these are bogus on account of the fact that they have even reported the SNP sending out emails to members to place £10 bets on them winning. Not one poll has been taken where the results have been published, therefore giving this critical advantage to the Labour Party machine who can deliberately lie play down expectations to the gullible press and the misinformed public.

Actually, I have found two articles which are almost poll-taking. There’s this one from the BBC on 14 August 2008 which gives Two Labour interviewees to One SNP; and this one published in the Guardian on 5 November (the day before the election) where the reporter stood in the Kingdom Shopping Centre and reported incredulously:

“I spoke properly to about 20 people who could be voting tomorrow. The sample was so random that I don’t think the figures (SNP 3, Labour 6, Conservatives 2 and the rest don’t knows or wouldn’t says) mean anything.”

Two in-depth mood pieces by reporters covering the campaign (without any polling information) give a flavour of the issues which were used. As I observed, the SNP were hitting almost entirely on fossil fuel prices like there was no tomorrow (which there won’t be if this carries on). And the Labour Party campain was hammering on and on at a some insignificant and misreported imposition of charges in some home care services by the SNP-led local council (the leader of which was the SNP candidate). The Guardian outlined this too. The BBC did a tiny bit of fact-correcting in its article, with:

A retired ex-miner added: “They will be taking away free prescriptions next - I can see it coming.’ (The SNP, for the record, plan to extend the scope of free prescriptions, not restrict them.)

But in the long run this is hopeless. We, in Britain, don’t have the slightest understanding for how money adds up. That’s why supermarket managers can add one penny onto every single product in the shop, take 10p off the can of beans, and we think they whole place has suddenly become better value. We work by instinct, which is utterly flawed when it comes to mathematics, and the press who are similarly mathematically illiterate don’t bother to do the work to put us right. Something is sucking. It’s like an allergic reaction and you don’t know what food it is, and it’s going to take months of experimentation to work it out. The political establishment don’t want us to find out why we keep getting what we don’t want.

What are the results from the leaflet drop? Well, I can identify two instances where the URL must have been copied off the page and used on my website on the Sunday we were there: At 9:58 in Markinch, and at 12:10 near the Leslie Roundabout. That’s looks like it.

It’s not like people are unhappy with doing things on-line, because the BBC’s Have Your Say website about the by-election already has over 600 comments in just a few hours. That’s the power of the official media. It’s the default place where everyone gets their thoughts and ideas. This is why when they mis-report things — which they do — it’s so damaging. The mis-reporting here is that Brown has had an amazing bounce-back victory on his handling of the financial crisis, etc, when it was in fact all there ever was was a bunch of reliable Labour voters far away from Westminster with no interest in politics whatsoever voting for their local boy, Gordon Brown.

Until people who care start to get out of the policy issues and work out what is happening in the electoral system, it’s going to be hopeless. This is the place where there is the only source of a countervailing power against the ownership of the country by neo-conservative war-makers, arms dealers, oil companies, endlessly greedy bankers who don’t care about the consequences, and other corporate horror-shows. We need to find out why the House of Commons is continually being stuffed with turkeys who keep voting for Christmas week after week, and find a way to stop it.

Today is two days after the United States has elected a president who’s actually intelligent for the first time in ages, and who appears to be somewhat aware and concerned of the awesome train wreck that we are heading towards as a species. Sure, everyone can see a crisis when it is happening. Where’s the heck is the chance that things will get done before it gets bad when it’s possible to avoid the disaster, but at a time when special interests find it both in their interest and their power to suppress it?

This article by Iain Macwhirter “the award-winning political commentator for the Sunday Herald and Herald who has also been a presenter of BBC political television programmes from Westminster and Holyrood for nearly 20 years” is based on 100% unmitigated and total bollocks:

Labour has put up a good fight in Glenrothes, but I don’t think they’ve done enough yet. They’ve hit the nationalists hard on the economy and council cuts. But the problem with Labour’s campaign, as with Glasgow East, is the sheer lack of bodies on the ground. No regal visits from Gordon Brown and the first lady, Sarah, can make up for activists knocking on doors. At the weekend, the nationalists piled 1,200 volunteers onto the streets and put leaflets through every one of the 40,000 homes in the constituency. You just can’t answer that kind of effort.

I was there all Sunday!

No goddamn wonder this country’s democracy is broken, with this news system just making stuff up to fit the chosen narrative. Any pro-democracy on-line project that could slowly be occurring, but is however inconsistent with the programme that these brain-dead zombies grew up with 20 years ago, will not be covered in favour of fabricated usual old horse-shit.

No wonder we aren’t getting anywhere. At one time we thought that attention would come if only we passed good enough work that no one else could do and which arguably addressed a systemic problem in the structure democratic engagement.

But now we realize that the only hope is to wait for this older generation of useless hacks to simply die off like so many incumbent MPs entrenched in safe seats in the absence of a system of primary elections.

Delivering two thousand Public Whip fliers to random properties in Glenrothes took the whole of Sunday, from 8 in the morning to 10 at night. Part of the lack of efficiency was my cowardice: I skipped houses where there was a risk someone inside would see me coming up the garden path in order to injure my fingers on their metal letterbox with its internal flap and stiff brushes that do not yield to a mere folded up bit of paper.

I shouldn’t have worried.

Most everyone were sunk heavy into their sofas to watch Strictly Come Dancing or the Formula One car championships on the telly, and they were not going to get out of it for some scrappy bit of paper now crumpled against their letterbox flap, let alone turn on their internet computer and copy in a URL in order to experience my boring web-page about Parliamentary politics.

In the United Kingdom, political parties take action by delivering election leaflets. Most party politicians begin their career with a long stint of this form of activity, and they return to it in order to help motivate the troops on whose unpaid work their re-election ultimately depends.

While you’d be kidding yourself if you thought that the experience in any way put you in touch with the hopes and fears of the great British public, by the time you’ve made your forty-ninth promenade across yet another unfeasibly wide expanse of brick paving bordered on one side by a 3 bay garage connected to a house whose house whose entrance configuration made it crystal clear that the whole establishment was merely a docking station for cars, rather than a place normal people would approach on foot or by bike, you begin to get the picture. Even the poorest estates were totally infested with automobiles. The excellent network of cycle-tracks throughout the metropolis were noticeably under-used.

Hand delivering political leaflets through door after door for hour after hour gives a lot of time for thinking. My mind wandered.

Our great leaders at all levels of government know exactly what’s coming down the line in the future. They have the numbers, they’ve seen the predictions, and they are sure of what will happen — just as they knew for a long time that cigarettes killed horribly, that industrialized force-feeding cows on ground-up diseased sheep is poisonous, that war is always an atrocity, that uncontrolled financial speculation results in a crash, that the abundant supply of alcohol to young men causes violence, and that when a loud-mouthed American billionaire property developer promises to build the world’s greatest golf course on your irreplaceable sand-dunes, he is probably lying.

We would all benefit if we were governed by wise and courageous politicians who acted in accordance with real realities and actual issues. No political tribe comes close to this standard, but there are sometimes glimers of hope.

For example, the Scottish Parliament has been debating a ban on off-license sales of alcohol to under-21’s following some apparent success of the policy in several pilot areas. I don’t know the actual merits of these experiments, but they happened (unusual for a policy that sounds like a “good idea” to someone in power), and it may be worth serious consideration by sober grown-ups taking a clear view of the practicalities and the pros and cons to society, without resorting to made-up emotionally charged and hypothetical case examples like that provided to support a petition against it on the LibDem candidate for Glenrothes, Harry Wills’, campaign website, which says:

The SNP want to stop twenty year old soldiers, just like those in the Black Watch, who are returning home from serving our country in Afghanistan, from buying beer in an off-licence to celebrate.

Harry Wills, Liberal Democrat by-election candidate, has branded the SNP proposal as an “outrageous attack”.

He said: “They SNP seem to think that our male and female soldiers, many of whom are under the age of 21 and are out in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, risking their lives for our country, are not responsible to buy alcohol when they return.

“The SNP plan is an outrageous attack on our soldiers and other responsible young people. If Scotland is to tackle its drink problem we need the overwhelming majority of young people who drink responsibly on-side and setting an example to their generation.”

Now, Mr. Wills almost certainly knows that this is a stupid and unconstructive thing to say (as it was when it was aired earlier by Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser during the Parliamentary debate), but when you are campaigning for votes you don’t care about pulling things down and actively misleading the public about how the world works as much as you do about being elected.

Just where are we supposed to get our political information from in this country? In America there are large and well-funded organizations like the League of Women Voters and vote-smart to help people assess the record and the promises made. But here you get nothing but a couple of people riding around in the dark with their home-made flier linked to an unloved website and no media back-up.

There could be one lonely table reserved in the main public library, or one notice-board in the Rothes Halls where the candidates could pin up their election materials and schedule a regular hustings in the auditorium, but no, we can’t be seen giving any kind of institutional support of the democratic choices that are available here, no matter how easy and enlightening it could prove to be.

We stopped for lunch in the Kingdom Shopping Centre in the middle of town. There are no shops or cafes whatsoever outside this covered area, and practically all the ones inside were chain outlets. I had the worst dish of broccoli cheese in my entire life. It was like eating a used J-cloth. If this is what Scots do to their vegetables, it’s no wonder they don’t eat any.

Back outside we circled the Raytheon factory where it is alleged they make GPS-aided navigation systems (remember, those satellites were put in the sky to help the US government massacre people, not for you to find your way round while sea-kayaking) for missiles and bombs.

But a job is a job, and the Raytheon website has 12 currently open for highly skilled employees that will probably be paid enough to buy all those SUVs and run them on the oil our brave soldiers have been fighting over for the last six years. I knew I’d find a business like this, because the Labour candidate had sneered on his website about the SNP’s plans to cut military spending over-all.

This kind of argument really pisses me off, because it concedes that military spending has nothing to do with the protection of liberty and justice, but doesn’t go so far as to make the connection that — but for the wholesale penetration of the body politic by the military-industrial complex — the government could be spending the national wealth on equipment that was actually productive, such as insulating all the houses so they consumed less fuel, or building electrified railways between towns in anticipation of the time when it became no longer viable to burn oil.

And that’s what drove me nuts about the SNP campaign, as expressed in the few leaflets we did pick up off the street:

THUD! That’s the unwelcome sound of another whopping great energy bill landing on your doorstep.

SNP success in the Glasgow East by-election campaign forced New Labour to abandon a planned 2p hike in fuel tax

Use your vote to demand cheaper energy.

No mention how this would be a fundamentally temporary and costly measure that answers nothing to the question of how we’re going to deal with the next five or twenty-five years. Politics these days is advancing one day at a time, like a man walking backwards with his gaze only on the past. It’s frightening.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in Saudi Arabia, following his second visit to the Glenrothes, where the BBC reported his efforts to persuade the sheiks to invest their easy-earned cash in renewable energy in the UK.

I spluttered my coffee.

That’s a new one.

In my lifetime British Prime Ministers have only ever tried to do two things in Saudi Arabia: (1) persuade them to buy billions of pounds of weapons equipment from BAe who are above the law when it comes to bribery and corruption, and (2) persuade them to pump more oil to bring the price down so we can burn more of it and not change our lifestyle for another few moments.

If there’s one thing about the rich, especially the super-rich, it’s that the concept of the public good simply doesn’t exist. We’re just dots on the ground far below. They don’t care about us at all. There are rules about how vast sums of private capital can only ever be shifted around on the basis of the most greedy and selfish terms possible. The deals are only done when they see they will make more money in the end. That’s never the question. The question is why do politicians keep insisting that they have to deal in this way that always guarantees them a profit on their “investment” and puts us deeper in debt, when it’s quite obvious that there has always been enough of our own public money available on far better terms. That was until this great bank bail-out to cover their profits.

We were staying in the Glenrothes Travelodge, which appeared to be run single-handedly by one employee at a time providing 24 hour coverage in 8 hour shifts. They were excellent, friendly (if a bit overworked), and let us stash our bikes safely inside down an unused hallway. Across the road was a gigantic Amazon.com “fulfillment” centre.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous too. We finished delivery of the last few leaflets on our way out of town before the long hilly cycle-ride back to Edinburgh, only partly thrown off course by the propensity of some of the locals to removal crucial signposts marking part of the way. My brain finally stopped spinning with random thoughts about politics.

From my observation, there was very little political activity going on in the constituency. We visited every corner of the network of towns, including a trip out to the Henge in Balfarg and maybe saw six party posters in the windows of the houses. The UKIP contingent passed us by in their cars bearing those stupid car window flags everyone had during the football world cup. We saw two activists on the street knocking on doors. There were three SNPers handing out balloons and flags (no leaflets) by the shopping mall on Saturday. And that’s it. It was nothing like what I saw in Crewe during the by-election there. Pretty much all the activity as reported in the news, from what I can see, is in the form of sham photo opportunities that don’t represent the reality.

I will be interested in seeing the results, which will be overshadowed in the news by the US Presidential election. No doubt the timing is coincidental.

On the train home I listened to Ground War for the Presidency on This American Life, where they covered the experience of the party-workers in Pennsylvania State.

It made me cry. I urge you to listen to it. What these people go through in terms of democratic involvement, well, nothing in this nation comes within a thousand miles of it. We have nothing to be proud of. Truthfully.

The Publicwhip Glenrothes intervention has been scaled back. It can’t be the same without Aidan’s irish outwardness and his capability of talking to random people in the street. I don’t do that. He impulsively drove up last night to the Edinburgh hostel Becka and I were staying at to drop off the leaflets he’d printed so far, and then drove back home to fly off to his family at 10 hours notice. So we’ve engaged plan B, which involves cycle touring between here and Glenrothes, and possibly some leaflet dropping at 5am in the morning when there’s no chance we’ll meet anyone.

So, here’s to the next by-election. May it be in a more convenient place with more activists who can get involved.

Two nights ago we visited a god-forsaken industrial estate in Liverpool where a young man had taken delivery of an entire shipping container of these astoundingly ugly plastic babies that — when the button was pressed — emitted an 8 minute tinny pre-recorded version of the British constitution (as it would be if anyone wrote it for us) in a chinese accent, written by a chinese political student in China. Having exported democracy to so many parts of the world (like steel, textiles, war, and machine tools), it is only fitting that in this century, we import it in such a tacky package containing the democracy we need, along with everything else.

I made Becka buy one for 25 whole english pounds because we had to.

That’s art for you. Maybe we should redesignate PublicWhip as a public work of art, some glass-tank puppet feature re-enacting MPs trolling through the division lobbies again and again in accurate rendition of the legislation passed over the last 50 years, and then get a grant for hundreds of thousands of pounds (the approx price of this super-bad new war memorial thrown up in Liverpool University recently) to acquire, clean-up and process the data. But then I thought if any party was deserving of an arts grant, it’s the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Maybe all the political parties ought to be paid for out of lottery arts money. How about if the leadership went on tour around the country and gave public lectures like Mark Thomas or Mark Steel where the public paid to attend, and all the profits went to the party. They do this lecture circuit after they retire from politics, why not while they’re in office.

Gotta go now.

It’s taken nearly a week and 400 lines of C++ code to complete the algorithm shown in the above picture, where a series of trapeziums, representing the conical sections of a tool holder, are merged into one continuous monotonic (in radius distance from the axis) piecewise linear curve.

We get these kinds of non-joined up segments when thickness is applied to the toolholder shape and all the previously consistent sections start to overlap in various ways depending on how much material you’re adding. It’s important to have a consistent contour to work with because you can code things much faster than checking the collisions of all the independent segments individually. For example, when you lower the cutter down in Z onto a point, the distance between the point and the axis tells you the unique conical segment that it will collide with. No need to check any others.

You notice in the drawing the big triangle contributes three individual segments to the final red line. This aligned envelope finding algorithm — pain though it is — is about a 100 times easier than the polygon intersecting algorithm which you have to implement if you want to find the offset contour from an arbitrarily shaped pocket slice. That’s an algorithm many CAD programmers have foolishly tackled, not having the wit to recognize the extreme difficulty of it. In fact, if I was giving CAD developers interviews for my job I’d ask them to tell about how they would approach the problem of finding the offset of a polygon, and if they showed any confidence of being able to do it, they’d fail the shortlist. Only by suspecting that you’ll have a hard time doing it by brute force (which results in a debugging project for the next 20 years) are you likely to hunt for and find out about the real solution, which involves Voronoi diagrams of lines (not the simpler one of just points).

For some reason I’ve stupidly implemented it in C++ rather than Python, probably because I needed to use my Along(lam, a, b) function and other little quirks in my small functions library. This means that we need to provide accessor functions to get the results back out of the C++ objects and into the Python, which is the interface to the graphical visualization tools. Maybe when I’m feeling I’ve got the time I’ll convert it from one language to the other (or someone else can volunteer if they want to — I’ll give you the code). Like I said, I made the wrong choice. I’ve been having a heavy cold all week, which may have clouded my judgment.

I was checking out the real UN site to work out what’s the hold up with the General Assembly transcripts. I haven’t had one arrive on my server since A/62/PV.103 in June, and we’re already way into the 63rd session.

The list of Session 62 resolutions is here and it records meetings all the way up to A/62/PV.122 in September, without links to the verbatim transcript documents. (The videos all go on-line right away, because that’s easy to do.) The resolutions passed in those meetings are also on-line, so I perused them and stumbled onto A/RES/62/278 which said:

The General Assembly Recognizes the usefulness of the existing online mandate registry, and… Notes that one of the important findings of the process is the difficulty of identifying resources associated with one particular mandate, which limited the potential of the review process to fulfil its objective of strengthening and updating the programme of work of the Organization and improving the allocation of resources for the effective implementation of mandates;

The Online Mandate Registry?

Search for it: It’s here.

I had a good look and noted this finding down onto the Wikipedia Page for United Nations so other people could find it, as not everyone reads this blog. It’s been going since 2006. The Introduction explains:

Legislative mandates express the will of the Member States and are the means through which the membership grants authority and responsibility to the Secretary-General to implement its requests. The resolutions adopted from year to year by each of the principal organs are the primary source of mandates. Mandates are both conceptual and specific; they can articulate newly developed international norms, provide strategic policy direction on substantive and administrative issues, or request specific conferences, activities, operations and reports.

For this reason, mandates are not easily defined or quantifiable; a concrete legal definition of a mandate does not exist. Resolutions often signify directives for action by employing words such as “requests”, “calls upon”, or “encourages” but an assessment to distinguish the level of legal obligation arising from the use of these different words has yielded no definitive answers. Such ambiguity in resolutions may be deliberate “to make it easier for Member States to reach decisions.” But since the membership has indicated a wish to use its review of mandates to examine opportunities for programmatic shifts, it is both necessary and desirable to identify a working definition of the unit of analysis and delineate the scope of the exercise.

Guided by the 2005 World Summit Outcome and subsequent discussions in the plenary, I have defined a mandate as a request or a direction, for action by the United Nations Secretariat or other implementing entities, that derives from a resolution of the General Assembly or one of the other relevant organs.

To facilitate the review and as a companion piece to this report, the Secretariat has compiled an electronic registry of mandates originating from the resolutions of the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. The registry of mandates, along with accompanying guidance for users, is accessible at www.un.org/mandatereview.

The executive summary is more forthright:

The single greatest symptom of the lack of a coherent system for evaluating mandates and their effectiveness is the uncoordinated and burdensome mass of reports requested from the Secretariat. The quantity of the reports obscures their quality and impact, overwhelming the Member States and overburdening the Secretariat. Because information is not often provided on the overall picture of the Organization’s work in an area, it is difficult through those reports to judge the effectiveness of mandates in meeting the Organization’s objectives.

Year after year, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council continue to adopt new mandates on the same issues, sometimes even under more than one agenda item in the same organ, usually without introducing new ideas or approaches. While some overlap of mandates from different organs is inevitable and different perspectives desirable, the existence of many interrelated mandates is generally confusing, redundant and wasteful.

The proliferation of mandates has in some cases led to overlapping, uncoordinated and inconsistent architecture for implementing mandates, in which the whole may be less than the sum of the parts. Little guidance is provided on what to do with older mandates that address the same issues, which therefore linger on over the years.

A fundamental and recurring challenge has been the adoption, year after year, of hundreds of mandates which must be implemented within resource constraints that do not keep pace. Member States confer additional responsibilities with neither corresponding funds nor guidance on how resources should be reallocated. This gap leads to real costs for the Organization and the people it serves.

So, to be clear, the semi-disastrous 2005 World Summit had its outcome adopted as a resolution, in which paragraph 164(b) said: “The General Assembly and other relevant organs will review all mandates older than five years”, and the secretariat quite reasonably decided that the first thing they needed to do was make an online registry of all mandates.

Just in case you aren’t completely clear what a mandate is, Paragraph 164 was indeed itself interpreted as a mandate, number 17171 in the database, to be precise.

I found the meeting where Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon presented this registry to the UN:

That is why the decision to conduct the review, even if it was not the most glamorous that heads of State and Government made last September, was one of the most meaningful and potentially historic. It is also a daunting challenge. While there are real opportunities to achieve results in the short term, to conduct a full review of mandates will take time and sustained commitment. But the outcome could be extremely rewarding, particularly for those we serve around the world.

Members of the Assembly, it is your review; you are the ones who are going to undertake it. I am only giving you the tools to conduct it: an online registry of mandates and, in the report before you, an analytical framework.

The registry, which responds to requests from several Member States, is a searchable electronic inventory of still-active mandates originating from the resolutions of the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. It will enable you to find all the mandates you have adopted and to view them in a convenient way.

See, computerization is important for organization. Pity they chose such a poorly laid out and utterly cludgy java servlet database for it, rather than using on a copy of MediaWiki with all its high level Web2.0 structures. Out here in wikipedialand, we’ve been constructing our own mandate registry. Just think how cool it would be if the UN staff inserted their information in this place rather than burying it behind horrible codes and 1980s style database interfaces.

Oh well, never mind. I’m sure it looks all completely reasonable to the e-Envoy in his experience.