Wenlocks ever watchful eye

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Bronze command surveillance Wenlock The London Olympics may be long gone, but the legislation lingers on. Now many of would thing that a word that was invented in ancient Greece might not be subject to copyright, but we’d be wrong. It turns out that as far as the Olympic committee is concerned no one can refer to Olympic Games with out their permission. Now you might thing that only starting in the lat 1800’s that the modern Olympics might be coming a bit late to the party to claim ownership of a tradition millennia old, but it seems they view things differently.

Not only do they claim to have copyright on the name “Olympics”, but they also make sure it’s enacted in legislation whenever a country hosts the games and if you want to take part in the games then you have to agree that they own everything to do with the games. The Olympics Rules stating:
“14 Olympic designations*
An Olympic designation is any visual or audio representation of any association, connection or other link with the Olympic Games, the Olympic Movement, or any constituent thereof.”

And further:
“1.2
Each NOC is responsible to the IOC for the observance, in its country, of Rules 7-14 and BLR 7-14. It shall take steps to prohibit any use of any Olympic properties which would be contrary to such Rules or their Bye-laws. It shall also endeavour to obtain, for the benefit of the IOC, protection of the Olympic properties of the IOC.”

So if you want to play at the Olympics you have to make sure no one else can use anything associated with it, and if you host the games well it will end up in your laws. The “London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006” defines the “Olympic Period”:
“c)the London Olympics period” means the period which—
(i) begins four weeks before the day of the opening ceremony of the Games of the Thirtieth Olympiad that are to take place in 2012, and
(ii) ends with the fifth day after the day of the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games 2012”
And later goes on to say that:
“(6)
Sections 10 to 18 (including any power to make orders or give directions) shall cease to have effect at the end of the London Olympics period.”
Sections 10 to 18 cover transport only, advertising and use of thing the IOC consider theirs are in later sections and even have their very own act the “Olympic Symbol etc. (Protection) Act 1995” . So the special and increasing protection of words associated with the Olympics are still in force, which is just plain silly especially as it would seem that the IOC don’t have a sense of humour and have taken against the awesome Lancashire Hot Pots and their 2008 Classic “The Beer Olympics” or as they now call it following threat of legal proceedings – “The Beer “International Non-Profit, Sporting Quad Yearly Event” ”

Amazing how language and humour can be ring fenced and whittled away by special interest groups pushing things into legislation on a “temporary” basis.

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Brian Cox on climate change

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I generally don’t say anything much about climate change as there are many other people out there writing about it who’ve spent far more time looking into it than I have. However the recent video of Brian Cox “explaining” climate science I think deserves some comment. I’m not going to talk about the science so much as about how he’s answering the questions. If you’ve not seen it already, here’s the video:

Now I’m also going to ignore how often Senator Malcolm Roberts is interrupted and how the chair lets that pass, and just pay attention to Prof Cox (who for the record I don’t care for much at all). Now the first thing that strikes me is that Prof Cox is obviously prepared – presumably just because he knew who else was on the show, and not because he was in any way briefed. The first problem starts with the chair deferring to Prof Cox purely because he’s a scientist, now “science” is a very very broad church and knowledge of one field doesn’t in any way imply knowledge of another. I know this because I read physics and know less than feck all about biology, if you’re lucky scientific training will teach you to be skeptical and how to interpret data and recognize good and bad studies – but it doesn’t give you magic authority in every field. Prof’s Cox’s deference to the “shocking” predictions isn’t really that encouraging as science has predicted all sorts of things in the past, what matters is how well those predictions match observed data and climate change wise the score isn’t so good. He then makes a horrible mistake in science of appealing to “consensus”, science isn’t a consensus activity. The scientific consensus lasts until someone proves the theory wrong, which relies upon falsifiable predictions being made, it doesn’t matter how many scientists believe something unless they can make predictions that can be tested and that support their case. Also the “consensus” in climate science has been shown to be not nearly so strong as some would have us believe and note the chair isn’t prepared to let this be challenged. You’ll note that when Sen. Roberts is talking Prof Cox seems to be not listening but instead is leafing through papers for a graph he just happens to have brought along.

Talking of graphs he then asks if graph A is correlated with graph B, when any scientist worth their salt knows that:
“Correlation does not imply causation”
To suggest other wise is lazy in the extreme and would fail most under grads. Now I said I wouldn’t talk about the science but I think his graphs are worth looking at.

Are they correlated

For his question to be meaningful we have to assume that the two graphs cover the same time frame in which case the correlation doesn’t look that good to me, as the temperature graph shows a fairly steady rise, but the CO2 graph only shoots up right at the end. If there was correlation one might expect the lumpiness of the CO2 graph to be present in the temperature graph. Oh and he switches between CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 emissions, which is a bit of sleight of hand. He really does go on about correlation an awful lot, not so much about causation. The chair then steps in with an appeal to authority, because Prof Cox is a specialist on one field we must trust him in another. Prof Cos then indulges in another sleight of hand by correlating NASA putting people on the moon with their ability in other areas. Which makes as much sense as saying:
“Bert can fix cars are you really suggesting he can’t perform brain surgery?”
NASA may or may not be qualified to talk about climate science, they may or may not have mucked about with temperature data – but the fact that they put people on the moon is entirely irrelevant. Then as the Senator observes he tries to tie having doubts about climate data with doubts about moon landing, to discredit by association. What I find very strange is that as a rebuttal to the accusation of manipulation Prof Cox speaking about the various agencies says:
“They’ve all manipulated it in the same way and accidentally got to the same answer”
Personally that’s exactly what I’d expect, if you have sets of data which show the same thing initially, then manipulate all sets in the same way, if you don’t get the same answer either you’re doing it wrong or your data sets didn’t show the same thing to start with.

So for a scientist Prof Cox really doesn’t seem to be very good at doing science, and when Sen. Roberts calls him on it he’s subject to yet more interruption. Prof Cox then finally talks about science briefly in that we have to make predictions that can be falsified (making models), when the Senator points out that the models have been proven wrong he blusters and doesn’t allow the Senator to make his point. When they do start talking about the data and the models the chair interrupts and gives Prof Cox even more time claiming that the Senator had been listened to rather than interrupted.

So what we actually have from Prof Cox isn’t so much a rebuttal nor any sort of answer nor even a lesson in the scientific method, we just have appeals to authority, straw men and claims that correlation is the same as causation. Which really doesn’t make a convincing case against the Senators view-point. Far too much pounding of the table and not enough pounding of the facts (whatever they are).

Now before I run away and resume avoiding talking about climate change again here’s a link that asks the very pertinent question of what dow we mean by “global warming” and does it even make sense as a concept?
Abundant Scientific Evidence That ‘Global Warming’ Is A Made-Up Concept

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BBC Van Scam

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BBC technology in full There has been a bit of a furor of late due to a leaked report about how the BBC plan to capture those heinous people who watch iPlayer without a TV license. This has raised the question of BBC detector vans and how the BBC can catch you for watching TV without a license. Just to save time I’ll give the first word to Arstechnia and say out right that:
“The real scandal is that you still believe TV licence detector vans are real”
Once upon a time the BBC could maybe perhaps have monitored the radio signals given off by cathode ray TV’s though this is unlikely and even trickier with LED TV’s and harder still with the numerous devices we can watch “tv” on these days. Which is of course where the Telegraph article came in, with the reasonable assumption that to catch you watching iPlayer at home they’d need to snoop you WiFi/internet traffic. The BBC have said that they’ll do no such thing, so at this point lets turn things over to that bastion of tax evasion the Gruniad.

The Gruniad starts by dismissing concerns about the impact of “detector” vans on privacy as the domain of right-wing nut jobs – which given they don’t and probably have never worked isn’t totally unreasonable. We should be just laughing at them and wondering why the BBC is spending so much money on scare and bully boy tactics. However they did get a statement from the BBC which makes it clear how much nonsense the “detector” vans are and how poor the state of journalism is in some parts of the main stream media. So what have the BBC said and what does it tell us about what they might or might not be doing?

“it is wrong to suggest that our technology involves capturing data from private Wi-Fi networks.”

So if they’re not capturing data from your network then they can’t do packet inspection, traffic analysis or really anything that might be useful. But none of it matters they’re not capturing data – so they’re not getting anything locally which removes a vast chunk of possibilities we might have had to consider as to what they could be doing.

“It has ruled out combing its own records of computers that have logged in to iPlayer and matching those up to licences”

So it’s not looking at its own server logs, which is insane as quite frankly that’s the best place to get data. If you run the server you know which IP is down loading what. Of course linking that IP to an address is a vastly different problem, involving court orders and a lot of leg work to find out from each ISP what customer had a given IP address at a given point in time. As most people have dynamic addresses for their connection which can change frequently this is non-trivial unless the BBC have a deal with the main UK ISPs to get customer IP data in bulk. If they do have that then we need to have strong words with our ISPs. It also wouldn’t entirely solve the problem as many people (especially BT customers) provide open hot spots and many of us share our WI-FI details with visiting friends so even knowing which address was on a given IP, doesn’t prove who was breaking the law. As the Gruniad observes the Beeb is allowed to use anti-terror legislation to track down people who don’t pay their license fee. Not paying your license fee being right up there with setting off bombs.

Which leaves us with really only three options:
1) The Beeb is getting your ISP to spy on you – and detector vans are just theater to scare people
2) The detector vans contain a bloke with binoculars driving round trying to spot people watching things they shouldn’t be.
3) It’s all a giant bluff designed to generate regular press articles to scare people into paying up.

Now I’ve been wrong about the states snooping on us before, but quiet honestly by money is on giant bluff (or the bloke with binoculars at a push). If they’re not looking at their own logs and they’re not snooping our networks there’s not many other options.

The Gruniad does get one thing right though:
“In the long run, a more elegant solution would be to require a code linked to your TV licence to access iPlayer.”
Numerous streaming providers have solved this problem, you pay a subscription that allows you to watch/listen to stuff on X number of devices. No detector vans needed, no bullying needed, it self polices as if you share your codes then you quickly run out of allowed devices. It even allows them to collect money from abroad and do away with checking where people are connecting from. The big question really is why didn’t the Beeb do this from the out set? One can’t help but suspect that the problem is it would move them that bit closer to being a subscription service and that would make it trickier to justify the universal license fee.

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