Posts by David Pollard 1321 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Although it's not yet terribly fashionable to question the big bang hypothesis, there may be concerns in this quarter. For example, Roger Penrose recently expressed well-founded doubts.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/pift-rpa121908.php
A papal alliance with the Kuhnian dogmatists in the science camp would serve to bolster defences against those who query the orthodox creation story.
Equality before the law is one of the necessary requirements if it is to have moral authority. This means that either everyone has to be on the NDNAD, as Prof. Sir Alec Jeffreys has always argued, or no one.
If the size of the database with everyone on it would cause it to crumble, and be susceptible to malfeasance and errors, then at 7% of the population these problems exist already or will become serious very soon.
The detection rate directly via the NDNAD for all crime is actually quite low, public perception being bolstered by a small number of high profile crimes, detection of at least some of which didn't actually depend on the NDNAD. (The Genewatch site has details.)
The crime scene DNA database would be almost as effective as the NDNAD and any shortfall in detection would probably be more than balanced by the increase in public co-operation were the NDNAD to be scrapped. This is, however, difficult to assess because the Home Office has so far failed to make appropriately detailed figures available and has obfuscated the issue.
@ AC @ steogede
The recent ruling came from the European Court of Human Rights (associated with the European Convention on Human Rights to which the UK signed up and which Tories sometimes complain about). This is not the same as the EU.
Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys has argued consistently, and correctly, that in order to be non-discriminatory the NDNAD would have to contain the records of everyone. Under-10s would presumably be included in such a scenario.
The alternative non-discriminatory approach is to include no-one and to use the crime scene database instead, together with temporarily held profiles taken during investigation or for evidence in prosecution.
Isn't this a variant of a standard 'grey hat' technique for getting higher up in the click rankings?
On second thoughts, maybe it's a variant of boredom in the graphics department, like the one that struck Coca Cola in the '80s:
http://www.deyi8.com/news/78/coca-cola-recalled-an-advertising-poster/
It would be interesting to know if the images of waterboarding that were broadcast on yesterday evening's TV (just after 10 o'clock) would fall within the guidelines.
Although it was appropriate for this to have been brought to public attention, I certainly find it "grossly offensive" that it does actually occur; and there can be little doubt that the activity shown "threatens harm to life or limb".
The current market price is $55 a pound (in 250 pound lots - it fell as low as $14 a few years ago) and Gen-IV technologies will allow U238 to be used as well as U235, increasing utilisation by a factor of 50 or so. David MacKay's sums suggest that there's easily enough available to supply electricity for 1,000 years or so.
Fission may not be renewable in the very long term, but it's a major part of the solution to present-day needs.
"Have you never had a crime committed against you? if you did, did the police find any finger print or dna evidence? also did you want that guy found? if so, how do you expect that they find the person that committed the crime?"
My partner was raped and murdered, so I have given questions such as this a good deal of thought.
El Reg comments isn't the place for all the details, but my conclusion is that the NDNAD and the new totalitarianism do not provide anything like an appropriate solution to crimes of this sort. If there is a solution it comes from people, not policies.
It sometimes seems that the press, police and politicians stir up more bloody-minded violence in their witch-hunts than was entailed in the original ghastly act itself. Repeated public displays of man's inhumanity toward man under the banner of 'law and order' do more harm than good.
"The problem for the police is that the next government may well not be Labour... Over the last decade, it has been the Tories who have tended to be more critical of police requests for added powers..."
Well, obviously: because the Tories have been in opposition.
Is there any reason to suppose that they will have much interest in civil liberties if and when they come to power?
A bunch of politicians has finally realised that "additional efforts are needed ... giving a new impetus to mathematics, physics and chemistry teaching at every level."
Despite having presided over the decline of the nuclear industry (France excepted) and its central role in the founding of the EEC (remember the Euratom treaty?) they have the gall to expect us to believe they are competent to manage our affairs.
What's sad is that technologies which can enable safe and efficient use of uranium and thorium have been known for a decade or two (Gen-IV), as have methods to denature the long-lived components of nuclear waste (search [partition and transmutation]).
Science teaching is not the only area which needs attention. What's needed is that politicians should have some understanding of it too.
Though I'm no great fan of Mrs T., it doesn't help to quote her 'no such thing as society' out of context. She was arguing against passing the buck, suggesting that an attitude of 'society should do something about it' doesn't usually provide much of a solution.
see Gerry Keen, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/computer_competence_tests/comments/
One of the main reasons that manufacturing in the UK went into decline is that the UK joined the EEC. The larger home market, promoted as one of its great benefits, helped our local competitors just as much as it helped the UK. Overseas trade, in which we did have a comparative advantage (intrinsic opportunities for synergy), declined.
By being in the European customs union UK firms were exposed to predatory competition and lumbered with regulation and the costs of bureaucracy. Opportunities for trade with existing partners in other parts of the world were limited by the abolition of advantageous tariffs (such as Commonwealth Preference)..In addition the Common Agricultural Policy led to higher food prices which increased the cost of manufacture and made us still less competitive in the world market.
It's not so much that people are "prone to fear and panic" concerning ID cards, more that they have a thoroughgoing dislike of them.
ID cards symbolise and are part of a growing totalitarianism that is an anathema to some and causes disquiet in many. Not everyone buys into the "nothing to hide ..." argument.
If you really don't understand why so many are opposed, and want to know why rather than just to troll, you might want to check out the history of concepts such as habeus corpus and equality before the law; and to ask a few parents if they want their children to be on a national DNA database and for their school and medical records to be open to inspection by all manner of bureaucrats...
It's fairly clear that the government can't be trusted and ID cards would give them more power.
Aside from the dyed-in-the-wool extremist fringes of the CND, most people presumably want to see existing nuclear waste made safe and the threat from weapons mitigated as far as possible.
It does more for global stability to develop safe, secure and reliable energy sources than to prepare to squabble over the declining resources that the world holds.
Gen-IV has the potential to reduce the half-life of nuclear waste from hundreds of millenia to a few centuries by fissioning transuranic elements, and to turn existing stockpiles of decommissioned weapons into energy. It can increase the utilisation of uranium by a factor of 50 or so and also allows the use of thorium, of which there are large reserves, and reactors can be proliferation resistant.
The UK had been at the sharp end of research. It's a shame that the nuclear energy industry has been run down, with several thousand top-level jobs disappearing in the last decade or so. Whatever happened to the 'white heat of the technological revolution'?
"The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) has issued over 16 million disclosures since inception" (answer to Angela Watkinson) so the correction of 12,000 records suggests an error rate of around 1 per 1,000. Presumably the actual error rate is somewhat higher: disclosures have been provided for only one in four of the population, and not everyone will have noticed or taken the trouble to correct errors.
It would be interesting to see an estimate of how many people aren't recorded who the system is presumed to label.
The crucial information required to assess the usefulness of the NDNAD is the proportion of detections that can be made from the crime scene profile database.
Aside from a small and diminishing number of cold crimes, the NDNAD of personal profiles - including those of convicted persons - could probably be scrapped without significantly reducing detection through DNA alone were the resources to go instead into increased profiling of crime scenes.
The increase in public co-operation from scrapping the Orwellian aspect would most likely more than compensate for any shortcoming. Public co-operation, when it's there, is the police's most useful asset.
But figures aren't available to compare the effectiveness of the crime scene database with that of the NDNAD.
Yours are the ones with my DNA on it. (Think about it.)
"Does this mean that 1 in 6 people who are arrested have done nothing wrong?"
With the best will in the worlds a proportion of arrests are likely to be mistakes. What's worse is that a significant proportion of convictions are wrongful or unsound.
Though Merkins often come in for criticism, in the USA there has apparently been a proactive programme to use DNA profiling in those cases where it had not been available at the time of conviction and where it could provide an indication of innocence. It's telling that there has been nothing like this in the UK, despite the relative ease with which it could be implemented.
As best I can tell, Prof. Jeffreys sees forensic DNA profiling as a useful tool which can help to establish innocence or guilt. From the outset he has drawn attention to the dangers of social inequity which arise if the technology is used to construct partial databases.
Equality before the law can be provided either by having everyone on the NDNAD or having no one on it and relying instead for policing on the crime scene profile database. In each case stringent public scrutiny is required to minimise malfeasance and errors.
From the Select Committee on Science and Technology Seventh Report, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmsctech/96/9607.htm:
'During this inquiry we also heard reservations about the practice of retaining DNA profiles of suspects who are never charged with an offence, or found not guilty. Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys told us that he was "totally opposed to the extension of the database" in this way, regarding as "highly discriminatory" the fact that "you will be sampling excessively within ethnic communities, for example"'
@ michael
If the database contains deleted stubs without any (cloaked) link to the original details and an archive containing them then the audit trail isn't complete. There would be no way of knowing, e.g., that someone hadn't paid to have a record removed. To provide a full audit trail all the data that has ever been entered has to be available somewhere together with records of amendments and deletions.
Isn't there a technical problem here? It's not possible to preserve a complete and fully functioning audit trail without also keeping details of records that have been deleted or modified.
If the system allows amendments and deletions to be made without a full trace being preserved, then the data is not secure. If a full trace is preserved then records can only be cloaked rather than deleted.
Prof. Sir Alec Jeffreys, having reasoned through the implications of the technology that he ushered in, made it clear at the outset that if they were to allow social equity DNA profile databases would have to be all or nothing. Most still seem to ignore the valid argument that he presented.
Curiously, there was a similar misuse of the word 'latter' earlier today (rather than 'the latter which', 'the last of which' might have been preferable:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/04/secure_hash_competition/
Given that it's unlikely that the same mistake would be made independently in two separate articles, maybe these are cryptic clues for a treasure hunt on Friday.
New Scientist's article may be wide of the mark in several ways, but GDP is a rather poor measure of wealth.
For example, providing that the infrastructure isn't too damaged, natural disasters and wars lead to an increase in GDP. Neither does GDP indicate the distribution of wealth: if the super-rich get richer while many poor people get poorer GDP may nevertheless increase.
Wasn't it Ted Heath, whose single great innovation the three day week remains almost entirely unacknowledged, who talked about improvements to the quality of life?
The Royal Society has succeeded in bringing to attention a curious aspect of being human that is often overlooked. We often seem happier to engage in hypothetical discussions about something that we know only exists in our imagination than to engage with reality.
Hmm, I must do some work...
Good point. What's really needed is a database storing the details of all members of government and state functionaries of all types who have been involved at every level with decisions that affect each child. Then when something goes wrong, as sadly it sometimes does, it will be possible to apportion the blame appropriately.
"A 'universal' system ... is much less stigmatising."
The situation here is not unlike that of the National DNA Database, where the lack of universality leads to prejudice against minorities, erosion of equality before the law and stigmatisation. There is a similar potential too for system creep.
Stigmatisation through the child database wouldn't necessarily be cured by including all children on it, as those who are vulnerable still need to be identified.
Debate over who should be on the database - all or partial - is a false dilemma. It steers attention away from the more relevant questions of whether the database is appropriate in the first instance, what data should be on it were it to be implemented, how or whether the various misuses to which such systems are prone could be prevented, and the purposes for which it should be used; and, indeed, from the more fundamental question of what the state's role should be.
If it really is appropriate for the state to intervene in the lives of "up to 50% of children", then more fundamental changes seem necessary than just setting up a database with its potential to provide more control than care for those in need.
"Richard Dawkins is indeed saying that a rationalist who thinks for themselves will not believe in the existence of a god."
Hmm. Bishop Berkeley's concept 'Esse est percipi (aut percipere)' in the early 18th Century is surprisingly close to some of the concepts being advanced in contemporary quantum mechanics. So a rational scientist could quite reasonably have houseroom for a concept very similar to that of a theologian's omniscience. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esse_est_percipi)
Suggestions that Dawkins is a "blinkered hypocrite" come about not so much because his approach is rational but because it is strongly reductionist and appears to many agnostics to deny all spirituality and sense of wonder.
@ Sarah Bee (though I'm not a proper scholar myself)
My old headmaster, Nat Clapton, would not let any of his charges put 'atheist' on their university application forms, arguing succinctly that to deny proof of God's existence was also to deny the opportunity of disproof, therefore logically untenable. He did, however, allow 'agnostic'. I assume that his usage of the terms as answers to the question, "Does God exist?", of 'No' and 'Dunno' was correct, though this may have changed in recent decades. Admittedly this doesn't provide shades of 'Dunno' but it does keep things simple.
"Who made this, a 14 year old with a power fetish?"
Maybe it was made *for* 14-year olds. Recruitment for the armed forces can't be all that easy these days.
By logging access and then using 'Einstein' and 'server in the sky' to do a bit of automated background checking over a period of a couple of years it would be fairly simple to generate a list of potential recruits.
'... will someone please explain how going nuclear (with fission reactors) is a good idea when it's the second most expensive form of generation around and has no hope of getting cheaper because we're already near if not at "peak economic uranium production" and at the end of the technological improvement cycle?'
So-called Gen-IV reactors can 'burn' thorium, of which there are much greater reserves than uranium. They also fission all isotopes of uranium, so increasing utilisation by a factor of fifty or so. Even better, they can fission transuranic elements; so they are capable of reducing the half-life of existing waste from hundreds of millennia to a few centuries. Oh, they could also 'burn' plutonium, were the powers-that-be so minded, in order to reduce and safely dispose of stocks of weapons-grade material.
This isn't to suggest that fission alone provides the solution to future energy needs. It will, however, be a good deal easier easier to tackle the problem with it than without.
The main difficulty with nuclear energy, western governments included, seems to be that of encouraging its peaceful use rather than continued misuse in the absurd quest for global domination with which the industry has been tainted from the outset. To turn plutonium stocks into energy and to denature existing waste would be a step in the right direction.
The cost estimates that I've seen (and done as best I can) seem to show that with nuclear fission included in the energy mix electricity will be less expensive, both financially and environmentally, than with other options.
"... we are trying to stop a criminal act and not investigate one which has already taken place.
"We have to arrest early rather than late to protect the public. Sometimes we arrest when we have intelligence, but not evidence. We then have to work across different jurisdictions in different countries, unearthing the evidence we need."
Jacqui Smith, 2008, http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/Speeches/speech-to-ippr
“It is better that some innocent men remain in gaol than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned … Hanging ought to be retained for murder most foul. We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten, and the whole community would be satisfied.”
Lord Denning, 1988, http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/justice/
Let me try to get this straight. the Department of Justice has a £1.3 billion shortfall, so cuts are planned.
"The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) [which] legislates for using methods of surveillance and information gathering to help the prevention of crime, including terrorism" went through the UK parliament about a decade ago. (http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/about-ripa/)
Between 1999 and 2001 approximately £20 million had been given to major ISPs in order that they could set up facilities to store traffic data. Between 2004 and 2008 £19 million was paid to ISPs to collect the data. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/06/data_retention_grant_spending/)
Two years ago the Information Commissioner warned that, "Mistakes can also easily be made with serious consequences - false matches and other cases of mistaken identity, inaccurate facts or inferences, suspicions taken as reality, and breaches of security." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/02/surveillance_warning/)
In February 2008, Bill Thomson at the BBC reported on the Information Commissioner's concern at the ease with which almost 800 government departments could access traffic data, mentioning that a quarter of a million requests had been fulfilled in the first nine months of the system's operation in 2007. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/7226016.stm)
In August 2008, Chris Williams headlined, "UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo." Lord West had pointed out that this was "to maintain the UK's lawful intercept and communications data capabilities in the changing communications environment." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/19/ukgov_uber_database/)
Then, all of a sudden, the projected funding of the snoop initiative jumped to £12 billion. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/09/home_office_defends_communications_retention/)
And Ms Smith has justified this, saying, inter alia, "We have to arrest early rather than late to protect the public. Sometimes we arrest when we have intelligence, but not evidence." Er, what? "We then have to work across different jurisdictions in different countries, unearthing the evidence we need. ... experts, people who actually do this work, have explained clearly to me that this process inevitably takes time." (http://ukinusa.fco.gov.uk/en/newsroom/?view=Speech&id=7576189)
Oh noes, echoes of John Major's 'back to basics' common sense notions about family values are beginning to seem like revolutionary policy initiatives. Where's my duvet...
"The threat is huge ... There are large complex plots."
Perhaps their Lordships who are associated with the Admiralty and the Security Services will be aware of the fable of Chicken Lickin. Although perhaps no more than a simple story for children, its moral may nevertheless be worthy of consideration in these troubled times.
http://fairytales4u.com/story/chicken.htm
... and for a real life version from the heyday of early cold war paranoia in 1954
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,890881-1,00.html
With winter approaching in chilly northern climes there must be more than a few who wouldn't mind being within thermal transport range of a disk farm. Battersea power station incorporated district heating years ago, so it can't be all that difficult.
Hmm, where did you say they are going to build the UK's new £12 billion spy-centre silo?
Did they provide a "telepathy-proof room" in which to conduct the test? Alan Turing himself seems to have thought that one would be required. Perhaps this was his concession to the problem of Gödel incompleteness in finite state machines.
His starting point for the test, the imitation game, could be much more fun. Maybe next year...
"Was phorm nothing more than a secret gov trial ?"
It was certainly convenient. It showed up likely areas of resistance and tested the sensitivity of the general public to the prospect of wholesale surveillance: jolly useful for the government spinmongers.
It would be interesting to know how many comments there were in forums opposing Phorm which included something like, "... but of course I don't object to monitoring by the government ... [to stop 'terrists' etc.]." I noticed a few and wondered if they were made by stooges or whether trolls alone are sufficient to cloud the civil liberties debate.
Could this technology have a useful purpose - control of locust plagues? Back-of-envelope sums suggest that total power levels of tens of MW or so might be needed, because swarms can be rather big. But it might just work and would do a good deal more for peace than aiming them at people.
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