Pete's Odyssey

Pay your farmer or pay your doctor

Pete Lewis — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:55:34 +0000

As someone who is quite into food, I love watching Masterchef, the show in which amateur cooks compete with each other over a period of weeks, facing various challenges in order to win the coveted title. I've actually been watching the UK, US and Australian versions of the show, which vary immensely in style. I don't normally like food TV shows, but Masterchef's common theme appeals to me: the quality of the food and ingredients used.

In fact, over the last few years I've started paying real attention to the quality of the ingredients I use in my cooking - and put in my belly. This has ranged from getting organic vegetables from Abel and Cole, learning how to make my own bread and beer - without any additives - and regularly getting eggs from my parents' chickens. I've become convinced of the benefits to both health and soul, of doing this.

So, something that chimed with me was when I heard Adrien Nieto, the runner-up in season two of the American Masterchef quip "pay your farmer or pay your doctor."

In the US as I understand it, payment for medical services can be a real issue, and I gather people end up spending some considerable thought on how to prioritise money for medical bills against other things. I can imagine that in some circumstances, there is little choice, and other purchases must fall by the wayside. If then, there is indeed some correlation between health and quality food, Adrien's claim could be quite true. Those who choose (or who can only afford) to eat cheap, low quality food, are inevitably likely to face higher medical bills. I would be very surprised if this message gets across to many Americans, but there is probably little denying the economic logic it presents.

In the UK and many other countries however, we don't pay for medical treatment based on how much of it we need and use. Despite this difference, the economics of food production and distribution are much the same. In a sweeping generalisation with many exceptions I'm sure, high quality food does cost more than low quality food in the UK. So where's the economic incentive to eat well?

This is of course a very simplistic analysis, and I am certainly not arguing that we should incentivise the buying of good food by charging for medical treatment, but the dynamic is worth considering for its effect of people's behaviours.

There are public health efforts to encourage healthy eating of course, and they should be applauded. But the real issue for me that makes our current system of food production and distribution wrong is that the economics of it do not support a desired, but somewhat intangible outcome of good health and happy, soul-enriching food. I haven't researched into this particularly, but I have some intuition that I've developed from my own experiences.

Firstly, low quality food for sale in supermarkets is made artificially cheap, through the use of manufacturing processes which make it low quality. This over-engineering of food and its distribution establishes a low baseline price for food in our minds. Market segmentation then ensures that the higher quality products in the supermarkets are able to be packaged and presented as such, and command a higher price tag. These more expensive "premium" foods, often reflect the real price, and it's no surprise that farmers struggle to make a living through the production and distribution of quality food.

But secondly, since high quality packaged food becomes the preserve of only a more wealthy or health-conscious market segment, the price of high quality food through the supermarket channel can actually get over-inflated, when compared, for example, with local distribution. We end up with a vicious cycle, so long as one sticks to supermarkets.

Compare, for example, the quality and price of supermarkets' packaged "premium quality" ranges of foods (e.g. "The Best", "Taste the difference" etc.) with quality fresh ingredients from a local farmers' market or bakery.

This is all my intuition, a testable theory, perhaps. But if there is some truth to it, then my question would be whether future quality food can be provided through the centralised economic model of supermarkets and distribution chains at all. Or, perhaps whether the real answer to quality food lies in localism instead.

Or, perhaps since in the UK we pay the cost of health care through general taxation, Adrien's choice lies at the feet of government instead of individuals. Should we subsidise the cost of quality ingredients? Just a thought.

Have Coffee Will Travel

Pete Lewis — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:51:58 +0000

Since I started working as a postdoc on a European project, I've been doing a lot of travel for work. And I mean a lot. In the last 18 months, I've been to Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the US, Norway three times, Germany twice and Belgium twice - and one of those trips was just for the day. It's a lot of fun, and a great opportunity for sure, but it is also often very tiring.

All this seems to have created some form of automated homing device in my sleep-filled brain, which is trained to seek out coffee. Luckily coffee is one of those words which is basically the same in most Western languages (caffe, kafe, kaffi, etc.) It's easy to spot. What has really surprised me though, is the difference between the coffees that tend to be readily available in different countries.

One gripe of mine is the awful coffee they serve up at standard functions here where I work in the UK. There are usually only self-serve sachets of freeze-dried instant coffee accompanied by mini plastic tubes of UHT "milk". To be honest, I'm not even sure I count this as coffee within my usual definition. It sure is embarassing though to have to offer that to visitors.

Contrast this with two of the best coffee experiences I've encounted: Oslo in Norway and Bologna in Italy. Italy, we might expect to have fantastic coffee, and anything less would have been a disappointment. I wasn't disappointed. At the meetings I attended there was even a guy present whose job it was to make espressos upon request, from a special portable espresso machine. They were delightful. The place where I wasn't expecting to have such awesome coffee, but has consitently surprised me with its range and quality is Norway. On my first work visit to Oslo I was welcomed with an amazingly rich and dark shot glass of espresso, accompanied by a tiny morsel of dark chocolate to take the edge off it. The coffee shop round the corner from my regular hotel there is just as great: high quality preparation, fresh and tasty. And, for the particularly sleep-deprived, they were able to produce a coffee known as "Thor's Hammer", which I learnt was a cup of regular filter coffee with a shot of espresso dropped into it just before serving. Nice, for when you need a kick. Still, Norway has provided the best coffee I've tasted while travelling.

Another place well known for coffee, the US, was not as pleasant. At almost all the meetings and conferences I've been to in the US, a large metal urn of coffee has been produced at around 8am, which is then left to stew (once, even simmer, I observed) for several hours during the day. While not actually reaching the state of tasting bad, any flavour has always been sucked out of it by the time I've had a cup, and in addition to the low strength with which American coffee is usually served, it's generally disappointing to the extent of just not worth bothering with.

However, the award for the worst coffee I've tasted while travelling, so far, goes to functions organised by the European Commission in Brussels. Before visiting for the first time, I expected the quality of the coffee to reflect the combination of Belgians (who generally take care of what they drink, if you think beers and the like), folk from all around Europe, and the desire to schmooze, network and impress high powered people that comes with most political institutions. But no - and this is not from a single sampling on a single date either - I have only known the coffee produced at these events to be undrinkable. It almost tastes like its been boiled a la USA, reduced down to a thick sauce and then thinned out again using washing up liquid. It's really vile. I should also point out though that not all the coffee in Brussels was this bad. I don't usually bother with Starbucks and the like, but the chain bakery Paul seem to do a decent job wherever they are.

So, coffee-wise, there's a big two thumbs up to Norway from me. And Italy too, as we might expect. I wonder what the likelihood of seeing "Norwegian Roast" beans in the supermarket in the UK is though.

In Praise of Stating the Obvious

Pete Lewis — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:54:28 +0000

I'd like to give a little space for an activity that I've grown more appreciative of recently: stating the obvious. "Of course stating the obvious can be useful," I hear you say. Well, let me try to state why, from my experience, I think so too.

Firstly, suppose I think I understand something, or have a new idea clear in my head. At this stage I've often found myself feeling satisfied and moving on to something else, perhaps building on this to develop resulting ideas or trying to implement something based on it. But, if instead I try to write down the original idea, it very often turns out to be a little more difficult to express than I'd imagined. Spending a few minutes to clear that up in writing or mathematics can unearth subtleties or lead to a review of the idea that I hadn't previously thought of. Without doing this, building upon ideas can end up feeling like I've built my house on the sand, so to speak.

Mathematicians have been doing this for ages. I read a paper today which proposed a formal model for describing self-organising systems, which it seems to me is all about stating the obvious with respect to this field. But to me, theorists really add value to a field when they can clearly express ideas in this kind of way and ensure any subsequent reasoning is properly grounded (and previous flawed reasoning can be exposed).

My second point is that just because an idea is obvious to me, I shouldn't presume that it's obvious to anyone else. This is something that I think most people who've done a Ph.D. (and many who haven't) encounter. Once you've spent literally years thinking in detail about one specific idea, that idea can seem very obvious indeed. It seems to me that the more you think about an idea, the more the world starts to look like it would from that perspective. But this certainly doesn't change the way the world looks to anyone else! Matt Might's "Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D." is a great example of this.

This point is related to the oft quoted idea that there really aren't stupid questions, just stupid answers. Feeling like something you say is stupid and will expose you as being ignorant leads to the same result as assuming that that same something is too obvious to mention. From either perspective, we can say that perhaps the idea is obvious to everyone else, and perhaps it isn't - and you'll never know unless it's brought up. In a group discussion, a good chair will know when to take a discussion offline, so stating the obvious - or asking about it - can really be helpful.

This brings me to my third point: stating the obvious establishes shared assumptions. Imagine a rather contrived example, when two strangers meet and discover that they are both experts in the big bang theory. It may take only one sentence for the strangers to realise that one is a Physics Professor and the other likes American sitcoms, but more subtle unspoken assumptions can be quite counter productive. And this occurs simply because certain things are deemed too obvious to mention.

And this brings us back to my first point about building on ill-thought-out ideas. If one such idea can be disruputive in one person's mind, then what happens when two or more minds have different ill-thought-out perspectives on the same nebulous concept? In my experience work will either stagnate, one person will dominate and the other lose interest, or else the result will be an even more confusing and almost certainly wrong composite idea.

So, I'm learning to do myself a favour and state the obvious more often. Even if it's just to myself.

Burnin' and Lootin'

Pete Lewis — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:44:37 +0000

There's not a lot I feel I can say about the rioting and looting that's going on this week in London and around the UK. By all accounts, it's pretty scary and everyone is quite shocked.

I am absolutely sure though that I don't want to live in a society where this happens.

But I've read quite a bit of two related views in response that I just don't think make sense. Firstly people are asking what the point of this is, from the point of view of the rioters. "If racism by the police or the system more widely is an issue for these people", goes the line of questioning, "how does it help to burn out houses and shops in your own neighbourhood?"

But from what I can see, I don't think any of these rioters are trying to "help" the situation or improve it. That's not the aim; it just seems to me an outright combination of anger and opportunism.

The second subsequent view is that if it's just violent and selfish crime, the main response being suggested is just to give them a good kicking, so to speak, to bring in the army, water cannons and rubber bullets, to lock them all up and make sure they pay. That's the way to deal with these sorts of criminals.

While there is some logic to that, it misses the point. I repeat that I do not want to live in a society which behaves like this. And that includes both the behaviour itself and the reasons for it. This happens because we, collectively, make and let it happen.

From what I've seen, we've got four things which have combined to make a nasty cocktail this week:

1) These people seem to have nothing to care about: no jobs, no money, no aspirations, prospects, political direction, influence or hope.

2) They are angry at being sold out by the establishment and / or the system and more recently and specifically angry at perceived racism, manifested through the Duggan killing.

3) They have absolutely nothing to lose.

4) They have a lot of time on their hands, given that they have no jobs and nothing better to do.

The question isn't why go crazy, it's why not. And for all those that are rioting and looting, there are probably ten times as many just sitting at home depressed and lonely. This is our failure.

There can't be any excuses for what they are doing, but there's sure as hell a reason for it. We have to own up to what that reason might be.

The only exception I can see to not having anything to care about or aspire to, is possibly that they've been bombarded with clever psychology for their whole lives to condition them to want 42 inch plasma TVs and Adidas tracksuits. All in the name of stimulating consumer demand and keeping the economy growing. So, when it kicks off, it's no wonder that's what they go and try and get. In a previous generation they might have been after something less material.

Vegetable Sources.

Pete Lewis — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:51:15 +0000

The first of our radishes are ready! And wow they are nice. In fact, they're insanely peppery, which is great.

And there's lots more where that came from.

While I'm on the subject of delicious veggies, I want to give a shout out to Abel and Cole, an organic box delivery company, who we've been getting a weekly delivery from for almost five years now. Just look at the size of this pepper they sent us this week:

Great stuff, guys!

Back on Radio 4's Today Programme

Pete Lewis — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:46:57 +0000

I got invited back to Radio 4's Today programme this week, to take part in a panel discussion on the aftermath of the recent phone hacking revelations. They had decided to reconvene the panel they brought together for the general election in 2010. Back then we did two debate segments, which I wrote about here and here.

This discussion aired this morning just before 8 o'clock, and if you're interested you can listen to it either on the BBC website, here, or below:

Your browser must support HTML 5 to listen to this, please upgrade!

Back in the Garden.

Pete Lewis — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:41:52 +0000

I have to admit: it's been a while. Despite all this, last year the sum total of my gardening activity was zero. Well, it's been a busy twelve months: I managed to get my PhD, I started a new job and more recently, got married. Free evenings and weekends were few and far between, which is when most of my gardening took place. Gardening is actually a really relaxing thing for me, and I just didn't seem to find the time for relaxing.

Well, this year, better late than never, I've got a few things going on. Having barely been touched for a year or so, the compost waiting for me at the bottom of the garden was fantastic when I opened it up this week.

I've said this before but I think that the production of compost is one of the closest things to magic that exists in the world. I mean, I just chuck all our food scraps, bits of garden waste, the odd bit of paper, etc. in a bin, leave it alone for a few months, and when I come back there's this lovely fine warm stuff that I can grow things in - and people pay money for down the garden centre. Added to that, since I started composting about four years ago, the amount of waste that we leave out for the council to collect has plummeted. And despite putting so much in there, each day, our compost bins have never been full.

So, the compost is opened, dug in and some seeds have been planted. And this time I'm trying to be a bit more cat-savvy too, with a little bit of protection I've constructed.

I've got some coriander and basil, chives and a strawberry I managed to salvage from the weeds in some pots. Then the small bed (which is all I've got going right now) has got some swiss chard and radishes in it waiting to germinate.

A couple of weeks, and the fun begins.

"Don’t Look to the Ivy League": Howard Hotson in the London Review of Books

Pete Lewis — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:11:07 +0000

Howard Hotson has written a great piece on the London Review of Books analysing the effect of differences between UK and US university funding and policy. An excerpt:

The data which appear, at first glance, to demonstrate the great strength of the US university system are revealed, on even the most rudimentary analysis, to demonstrate nothing of the kind. Measure for measure, US universities are manifestly not the ‘best of the best’. If value for money is the most important consideration, especially in an age of austerity, the American model might well be the last one that Britain should be emulating.

The full article is here.

There are lots of interesting thoughts in there on students as rational consumers in a marketised education sector and the subsequent drive to chase improvement of the "student experience". Are students in fact the best judges of what their experience of university should ideally be like? Is anything else just insulting their intelligence? Or do academic standards and freedom imply that they can't be?

Nesta, trustedness and the muddy goat.

Pete Lewis — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:53:41 +0000

I was playing around with Nesta recently, a Ruby-based web platform, which uses just text files instead of databases (like the more heavyweight Drupal, which this site runs on.) It's actually remarkably simple, lets me write things in a range of markup languages, such as Markdown and HAML, and best of all, lets me edit the articles directly in my text editor, rather than having to use a little box in the web browser. It's not required, but the idea is that you use git to manage a Nesta site and publish things. And I like git.

A few months ago (and I forgot to blog about this), I was elected as one of the Trusted Users at Archlinux, which has been my preferred GNU/Linux distribution for a good few years now. The TUs are basically a bunch of people who are responsible for keeping the Arch User Repository (AUR) in good order, and for maintaining packages in the community repository.

So, I decided (and this was long overdue I think), to start writing down more tidbits of knowledge that I pick while hacking around on Arch. To this end, I've set up muddygoat.org, a Nesta-based site, which will serve mainly as a place to collect aids to memory, and to record things that took a while to figure out or find an answer to. I've also stuck up a web interface to git repositories of my current configuration files, etc. This seems to be the "thing to do", and actually I've benefited a great deal from others doing the same.

My intention is to keep this site, Pete's Odyssey, as it has been: a place where I can let off steam or spew my opinions and ill-thought-out musings. But, I intend to use muddygoat.org just for more technical stuff that might not really be of interest to a general audience.

If hacky Linux stuff is your thing, take a look.

Technology Strategy Board email fail.

Pete Lewis — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 12:32:40 +0000

The Technology Strategy Board is the UK’s national innovation agency. Our goal is to accelerate economic growth by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation.

We understand business, and our people come mainly from business. We work right across government, business and the research community - removing the barriers to innovation, bringing organisations together to focus on opportunities, and investing in the development of new technology-based products and services for future markets.

But:

Hi,

Could you please let me know how to disable HTML in the email notifications?

I don't seem to be able to find an option to get it to send me just plain text.

Thanks,

Peter.

Then:

Hello Paul,

Unfortunately we do not currently support non-html emails, but this has been
raised as a potential enhancement with the software development team. You
may be able to set your local email reader to display these emails as
non-HTML; however I am afraid we aren't able to help you with this and you
will need to ask your local IT support teams if you want to consider this
option.

Thanks,

(with attached JPEG)

On Nokia and Microsoft's new plan.

Pete Lewis — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:26:16 +0000

It was quite widely reported yesterday that the two behemoths Nokia and Microsoft have announced a new strategic partnership, which will see Microsoft's software being used on Nokia's smartphones.

This has caused quite a stir, since despite Nokia being somewhat impotent in the smartphone market of late, it had spent a lot of money (i.e. billions) on developing its new fully open mobile platform Meego, in partnership with Intel, based on the old Maemo software. It was widely expected to have its first Meego smartphone unveiled this month.

So am I surprised? Well not as much as I might be, since the new Nokia CEO is an ex-Microsoft guy. But, this does have the potential to have significant ramifications for the future direction of smarphones - and mobile computing in general. And I fear that it's not good.

I had intended to write a blog post about my thoughts this weekend, but I got engaged in an interesting online discussion on the topic yesterday, so thought that I would replay that here instead (ever so slightly edited for readability).

It got started by my friend Matt:

Matt:
Nokia forming a partnership with Microsoft. Looks like tired old Symbian will finally be going then!

Me:
Oh dear... I'd feared that something like this might happen. This is not good.

Matt:
I had surmised that you might say that. Without stoking your flames, why? (I'm fairly undecided right now.)

Chris:
For a start it's encouraging Microsoft. They need less of that! Their desktop environment should die out of principles, but their mobile platform is just terrible.

Matt:
Actually, it isn't. Windows Mobile 6 (and previous) was a dire abomination of an awful OS. Windows Phone 7 looks to be a big improvement. I still don't particularly like it, but that's not because of the OS; it's down to a general dislike for Microsoft. It certainly can't be claimed that Symbian is close to WP7 now, IMO.

Me:
Several points, I guess:

For a start it's a decision by Nokia to place themselves in the bracket of "just another hardware developer" (like HTC etc.) using someone else's software. Nokia always did something a little interesting and differe...nt and that was always good. This means that there will be less innovation generally.

Nokia were probably the best bet out there for someone to actually make a phone platform which was free, unix based and suitable for daily use. There still isn't one out there and now it looks increasingly likely that the phone software ecosystem will (continue to be) driven by the big software houses and locked-in platforms rather than there being any real open project. Phones are now computers - computer need this to exist as a possibility for people, and it just doesn't.

Nokia own Qt, and they're dumping it for their own use. They also employ several KDE developers (since these guys also contribute to Qt). What's the business case for this any more? We can probably see many of the core KDE folks having to go and get jobs elsewhere now, meaning less KDE development.

The last thing keeping me interested in the future directions of mobile phones has just disappeared with this. It's a sad day for the ecosystem to lose Nokia in this regard.

Matt:
I agree with your first point. It's a real shame that Nokia are losing one of their USPs by no longer developing an operating system (if indeed they are dropping Symbian/Meego).

I don't think Nokia would (could?) really have released a free, open-source OS whilst remaining competitive. Developers want operating systems which are "locked down" to minimise the effect of software copying. Though we both know that an open-source OS can be completely secure, in the face of super-locked-down operating systems like iOS and WP7, developers wouldn't even look at something like Meego.

I always thought nokia buying Qt was a bit of a strange one...

Alas I think this was kind of inevitable. If Nokia kept going as they were, they would have simply disappeared (to paraphrase their CEO, the platform would have burned to nothing). Either they risk spending more time with an aging, awful OS (Symbian), or they put time and risk into developing yet another competitor (Meego), or they join forces with something far more likely to sell well which is already at market. It is a dark day for Nokia, but I don't think they had much choice.

Me:
I think Nokia has greatly underplayed their hand.

Let's not forget, firstly that Nokia sell more phones than anyone else by an order of magnitude. It may not look it here in the Comptuer Science department in a relatively wealthy university, but iphones are a niche market.

Nokia also have Qt, which is a very stable, extensive and mature plaftorm which runs natively on almost anything. This is ideal for mobile computing, when the hardware changes so frequently. What else does this?

I think you're right that this is exactly what they need to do if they want to try to compete directly with Apple (which is what everyone with Microsoft blood inside them is obsessed with), but Nokia is more than that. Toyota don't sell particualrly good Rolls Royce alternatives, right? (And Toyota sell more cars than anyone else, BTW...)

So, I think this new CEO has a lot to answer for in that regard, but also why on Earth couldn't he get people developing the Meego thing to just pull their fingers out? That's what a decent boss would be able to do. Instead the head of the Meego development team, Torres, walked out yesterday and the CEO goes asking his old friends for help....?

Basically, my disappointment comes down to this: With every other computing device I own, I buy hardware and then run what I want on it - except for the one in my pocket. It's a failure of the market, at least.

Matt:
I love that "nokia sell more phones" argument. Sure they do, but a huge proportion of them are dumbphones, sold to developing markets and third world countries. In smartphones, nokia are very much struggling (they've never even had a foothold in the States, and despite many fanboys saying that doesn't matter, of course it really does).

Your Toyota abstraction isn't really appropriate. At the moment, Nokia are trying to compete directly with Apple in the smartphone market, and android too. That's the reason for this move. They are currently the Toyotas trying to compete with the Rolls Royces. If they intend to continue in that market, they need to up their game, and fast. If they only want to compete with the Ford Focus, then continuing to develop dumbphones and feature phones using bespoke software is fine. Nokia can see that there's a limited timespan left for non-smartphones.

The lack of Meego development is pretty inexcusable. It did seem to have a lot of potential, but nothing seems to have happened. Who knows why?

Being able to run what you want on whatever hardware you have is a little idealistic. Sure, we'd all like that, but it's realistically not going to happen. The best you can hope for is something that will run either android (fairly customisable/hackable) or some more locked down OS. For you, that sucks. Many people don't seem to care.

Me:
Sorry Matt, that's not "the best I can hope for". I won't be told that I just have to make do or somesuch crap. For people who really believe that about the world (it applies to much much more than just phones), life must be a bit numb. (I ...suspect as an academic and a teacher, you don't really believe that either).

(This wasn't supposed to sound aggressive, sorry if it did.)

This "most people think..." stuff also really winds me up. In this sense, markets stifle creativity, because they ensure that the companies with the resources to be creative instead focus on "the average consumer". And, no progress can ever be made by aiming for the average. If anything, it just reinforces norms. Nokia had the potential to continue to try to move the average. It's sad if today means that they will no longer try.

Matt:
I don't think they did have that potential, though. They became complacent and let themselves go stale. With banks putting them on credit watch, they couldn't continue to faff about. This was really the only decision they could make, whilst staying afloat. Really the problem is that nokia screwed up a long time ago.

Okay. "Hope" is the wrong verb. "Expect" is closer - irrespective of what you want or think is good for the market, iOS, Android, and (soon) WP7 have the hold. Nokia either continue to pump out crap and waste time, and sink, or they take the easy option, and just about stay afloat.

Me:
That's possibly true - guess we'll never know now. Really then the reason for this is the economic "machine" that John Steinbeck wrote about. There's a quote about it at the start of chapter 2 in my thesis, if you can bothered ;-)

Interesting discussion though :-)

Mark:
Whilst not at all sorry to see the back of Symbian and the awful Ovi (I had a Nokia 5800 "smartphone" which nearly found itself thrown out of the window on numerous occasions) my first reaction to the Microsoft news, other than "big surprise", was also one of disappointment.

But I wonder what effect this will have on competition between Win7 and Android? Perhaps the extra growth in Win7 smartphones will prompt Google to put more resources into Android too. Google certainly don't look like they're ready to concede defeat in the smartphone war, so it may not all be bad news.

Matt:
Android aren't going anywhere. You're right; it will be very interesting to see how this develops between them. I would hate to see Nokia become just another hardware manufacturer - but that said, HTC are doing alright for themselves. There are always going to be niches for each OS tbh; WP7 is the one that has the hard work to do right now.

Mark:
Robert Peston on the deal: "There is something rather awe-inspiring about the idea of two great beasts from different species trying to work together and have babies"

Edd:
Interesting read, all.

Pete, I think there is a subtle, but important, difference between "aiming for the average user" and saitsficing the average consumer by reinforcing the status quo.

I don't think companies such as Apple and Google are peddling the status quo. In 2007 Apple launched something that no-one else had ever seen before, and it has now, in 3 years, fundamentally changed the computing landscape - probably for good. Mobile platforms are massive, and inspired by that, touch-based tablet computing has taken off.

I don't think such a big paradigm shift resulted from Apple et al. focussing on satisficing the "average consumer". Nokia were doing that (and maintained to do) - hence why they are now a shadow of their former selves.

Of course, fundamentally - often the case ;-)- you are right, because having a bottom line does stifle creativity. Imagine what Apple/Nokia/Google could achieve if their designers and engineers were given free reign.

However, as a large business, you need to aim for the average user's attention, both to support yourself financially, and your position in the marketplace. Clearly though, competition over the average user's attention drives innovation; it's naive to think otherwise.

I guess my point is that aiming for the average does not always reinforce the status quo (in your words norms).

It's also hard to know if alternate models would better drive creativity. Some amazing things have been achieved within the Free Software movement, but some things have suffered also. For example, there are many OSS people who will always choose functionality over form -- fine and sensible. But this mantra doesn't seem to be preaches in all areas . For example, I think UX and UI design have not moved forward as quickly as other aspects of Free Software, probably because there is a lack of supply of competent people to make progress -- they all work for Apple and Google. . .

Interesting stuff.

Me:
Edd, you're absolutely right that in 2007 Apple were definitely not aiming for the "average user" with their iphone. There was no peddling the status quo there, and they used their significant resources to take a big risk. This is exactly what I'm suggesting that Nokia should have been doing now. Instead, since then Apple's phones with the addition of the quite similar Android have become the new status quo (at least for high end phones) and Nokia, it appears, are aiming for this "average".

Where is the next creative push coming from?

Matt:
One has to wonder what else can be done. As Edd said, it comes down to the bottom line. With little money, innovation isn't going to happen.

Edd: Pete, yup, You're right. I fear now that Apple's innovation will stagnate over the coming years, and as there is no competition in other directions - Android/webOS/Win7 all have the same aims - we will probably hit another IE6 / Windows ME / Geocities era, which will suck.

Greg:
Apple have nothing new to bring to the table for a few years, at least. They took a risk, it paid off, now they get to play it safe and reap the benefits for a while.

Pete, you're right, you aren't going to see a truly "open source" device comparable to the iPhone/Android phones. There is a project to get Linux running on the iPhone which has very few contributors (just one guy running the show, I think). To me, that would be the most likely solution, but if nobody is working on it doesn't that just show that nobody really cares?

Edd:
Greg, unfortunately I expect it is the case that a lot of free software developers don't want to support the lining of Apple's pockets by encouraging people to use iPhones. Shame.

Greg:
Yeah, it is a shame. But we aren't going to see truly 'open' hardware until someone demonstrates why it would be a great thing. Chicken and egg...

Me:
Exactly, that's been the sticking point. Which comes back to my argument that it requires someone with a bit of money and a lot of foresight to take a risk, push us off equilibrium and break the chicken and egg cycle. Nokia were the best hope to do that, now there doesn't seem to be any obvious player.

Greg:
Having said that, Microsoft seems quite open to people jailbreaking WP7, even going so far as to give free phones and tshirts to hackers working on it, or even expressing an interest in doing so.

At least it's a step in the right direction; obviously there shouldn't be a need to jailbreak, but it's more than you can say for Apple et al.

Edd:
Manufacturing becomes a big problem though, then. I paid £500 to buy my iPhone 4 outright, i.e., not subsidised by a carrier, and Apple have sold like 30 million of them. A major challenge then, is how can open hardware phones be brought to market at similar costs, but on a much smaller scale?

Carriers won't subsidise open phones, that is for sure, so the only viable way would be for the phone to be sold outright.

"Having said that - Microsoft seems quite open to people jailbreaking WP7" - surely this is a cynical ploy to close the holes though?

Greg:
Possibly. But it if is, they're burning a very, very valuable bridge way too early in the game. On Edd's penultimate comment: exactly, that's the problem. The vast majority of people simply aren't interested in making the compromises that would... be necessary for a fully open platform. You just aren't going to get an 'open' phone as good (in hardware terms) as the iPhone, it's as simple as that.

I have a fairly successful app which depends on the ability to jailbreak the iPhone, so you'd think I would be crazy about the idea of an open mobile platform, right? Nope. Even I acknowledge that an 'open' phone is a far less desirable platform for everyone, consumers and developers alike. It just doesn't make sense for the smartphone industry. Your average consumer won't be interested because it means increased confusion, significantly less polished UI/UX, malware, and a complete lack of coherence in 3rd party app UIs. Developers won't be interested because of rampant piracy - and yes, the locked down nature of iPhone/Android *does* stop a LOT of piracy. If these phones were 'open', I can promise you that many publishers would run a mile; or even worse, they'd impose their own horrific DRM schemes to compensate. A nice counter-argument is, of course, to say "but there'll be more innovation." I don't believe that either. Software innovation in smartphones is already happening at a fast pace in terms of app development, and if people want to contribute to a smartphone OS, they can do so via Android. Smartphone manufacturers won't be interested because of the severe loss of ecosystem control.

Doesn't exactly leave many other interested parties, except for hackers... which would explain some of the stuff said in this thread. Nobody with a valuable opinion cares about open mobile platforms.

Matt:
I think that about captures it, Greg!

Me:
Greg, I think that's right that the majority of people aren't concerned with this. But then almost everything in a marketplace satisfies a minority - it's just a question of how big the minority is and balancing that against the potenti...al margin etc. You may well be right that at this moment in time the number of people interested in an open platform balanced against the cost of building a platform is prohibitive. However, there's no inevitability about this, and things change quickly.

I've said before in these types of discussions that I don't personally care about what the majority wants, or even what anyone else wants. I only know what I want. It may be though that at this point there's no business sense given the high costs in providing this though. In this vein, good luck to the hackers trying to make things run on what hardware exists then.

I think the "lots of developers" argument is not particularly relevant though. Linux doesn't have thousands of developers writing trivial software to try to sell for a few pence on locked down platforms in order to make a quick buck (and actually I'm quite glad of that), but it still has plenty of developers - enough for the purposes of those that choose to use the software. Some of my most regularly used software is written by one or two people in their spare time and it suits my needs fine.

So what are the blockers to this happening? I guess expensive hardware is one as Edd says, and this was always the case in computing until standard platforms came along. Once hardware became more standardised, choice in software opened up more. Perhaps we're just not there yet.

What is Computer Science (in one sentence)?

Pete Lewis — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:30:44 +0000

A call went out on a mailing list at work today for contributions from those working in Computer Science to define the term. We were asked:

In one short sentence - what is your personal definition of Computer Science?

The questioner was trying to get at whether Computer Science is really a science at all, or is it engineering? Or is it applied mathematics, or even art?

Anyway, firing off a one sentence (almost) reply was quite easy, as I've been giving this very question some thought over the last few months. My response was:

To me, Computer Science is the science of problem solving.

I wasn't quite able to keep it to one short sentence, and qualified this a little too:

I think it's actually better termed Computational Science, since it's the science of computation (as a method of problem solving) rather than the science of beige boxes with circuit boards inside!

I'm sure the answers to this will vary greatly, and I'll be interested to read what others thought. Interesting question.

The Square Root of Three

Pete Lewis — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:03:29 +0000

Just watched the second Harold and Kumar film tonight. There's a great poem in it, by Dave Feinberg. Thought I'd post it here:

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three.

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight?

Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine.

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
With just some quick arithmetic.

I know I’ll never see the sun,
as 1.7321.

Such is my reality,
A sad irrationality.

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three.

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply.

To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer.

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands.

Our square root signs become unglued.
Your love for me has been renewed.

Thesis word cloud

Pete Lewis — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:46:03 +0000

For those that haven't actually read my PhD thesis yet (shame on you), I created a word cloud of it, containing all the common words, minus a few obvious ones like "and" and "the". The basic idea is that words that appear more often are represented as larger words in the cloud, like a tag cloud. Words appearing less often are smaller.

Burma radio update

Pete Lewis — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:05:35 +0000

I wrote back in June about a campaign Amnesty International are running to get radios into Burma. I'm not going to go over again why we really should care about Burma right now - there's plenty about that on Amnesty's website.

But, in the week that Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released from house arrest, Amnesty have released a short video updating on the progress of the radio campaign and showing how some of them are being used.

It's worth a watch.

The end of the public university in England?

Pete Lewis — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:40:19 +0000

I graduated from the University of Manchester in 1987 with no debt. I paid no fees and received a maintenance grant to earn a degree in Politics and Modern History. If my seventeen year old son were to follow in my footsteps he would graduate with debts of at least £50,000 and were he to study in London that could rise to £90,000. In the space of a generation we have witnessed the destruction of the public university.

So claims James Vernon, in his excellent article The end of the public university in England, published this week.

Highlighting that the Browne Report recommends the complete withdrawal of public funding for the teaching of the arts, humanities and social sciences, he provides an impassioned and well reasoned argument against the current proposals and policy trajectory of the last twenty years.

I'm in total agreement that in light of the recent announcement of a 40% cut in the higher education teaching budget for England, this is a crucial time for defending the role of public, universal universities in what seems to me to be a century of increasing uncertainty and social disempowerment in the name of economic progress. As Vernon so eloquently puts it, economic utility is not the measure of who we are or who we want to become.

Browne Review

Pete Lewis — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:11:58 +0000

Received today from David Eastwood the Vice Chancellor of my university. I'm seriously dismayed by crap like this.

Over the next few days you will no doubt hear in the media about the recommendations of the Browne Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Support. I wanted to write to you directly to explain why I believe that the review's proposals offer a very good deal for students and a fair and progressive way forward that will enable universities to provide a high quality education on an affordable basis. These recommendations will not, of course, affect anyone currently studying for a degree.

If the recommendations are adopted by government no-one will pay fees up-front. Graduates, not students, make a contribution to the cost of their higher education, and they will only do so when they are in work and can afford it. Graduates will contribute only when they are benefiting from their higher education.

There will be new quality guarantees and greater student choice. These proposals will mean that universities must provide open and transparent commitments to guarantee students the right kind of information, the right amount of teaching, and the right quality of learning.

There will be a generous system of support for student living. The grants for the least well off will be increased, and no-one should be deterred from studying by the cost of their maintenance. Where families can contribute, they will; when then can't, students will receive grants. All students will benefit from loans which, again, they repay only when then can afford to do so. There is a new flexibility too. Part-time students will enjoy the kind of support both for tuition and living that the current system denies them.

It is also important to recognise the wider context in which we find ourselves. Our universities are a huge success story, second only to those of the United States in terms of reputation, quality, and impact. But despite this success government spending on higher education will not be maintained at the current level; we are in line for deep cuts. It is critical to maintain the academic quality of UK higher education and continue to enhance the student experience so that universities are able to meet student expectations and the nation's needs. We need to be bold and imaginative in seeking alternative solutions to maintain the UK's world class universities.

Some have set their faces against student fees, while not understanding how a progressive system would work and not appreciating the dire alternatives. When you read Lord Browne's proposals you will see the best way, and perhaps the only way, to maintain a high quality, flexible higher education system which gives all who can benefit from higher education the opportunity to do so. If the government adopts these progressive recommendations, we will achieve the higher education system our country needs and that our students deserve.

The full report will soon be available at http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview and you will be able to read my answers to a range of questions about the review's recommendations on the BBC News website later today.

Best wishes
David Eastwood

In case that wasn't obvious the first time, let's read that again: "I believe that the review's proposals offer a very good deal for students." This is Orwellian doublethink at it's crudest.

My Doctorate

Pete Lewis — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:04:26 +0000

On Monday of last week, I was examined for my doctorate and I passed. Yesterday, I received a letter from the university confirming that I had indeed been successful and that a PhD degree certificate would be coming my way.

The reason that I haven't blogged this until now is that I've been really quite overwhelmed and it's taken a week to try to get my head around the whole thing. I started on the journey to becoming a Doctor of Philosophy in November 2006, shortly after I finished my Master's degree. Three years and eight months later, in July of this year, I'd submitted my thesis, all 47 thousand-ish words of it.

I'm not sure I can quite pinpoint the time when I first decided that I wanted to do a PhD; it sort of grew on me slowly. I do know that I always quite liked the idea that there were people around who worked in universities and spent their time thinking about things, proving things, experimenting and occasionally emerging with something that would have an impact. The impact you get from this kind of work is almost certainly going to be different from the kind of impact that is created by commercially driven short-term market chasing. Even "long-term" or "blue sky" research projects in most companies don't, it seems, provide the same kind of thinking space as a purely academic environment. Both are needed, I think, but the latter always intrigued me.

Throughout my MSc degree I had no real intention of applying for a PhD, despite having told people in job interviews prior even to that that I would quite like to do a PhD one day. I suppose I always saw the idea of actually doing it as being quite mystical, not something I could readily have a go at. (Note to others: it's not mystical, it's fun, just ask.)

I suppose it was only after I finished my Master's degree and started working again that I realised how much I missed the academic environment and the sorts of conversations and work that took place. I wanted to go back and did so quickly. I happened to be really rather lucky at this stage, since a funded place just happened to be available in the school where I'd just completed my Masters. I'd done rather well at that, so they were happy to take me on.

Starting a period of PhD study is a strange experience. I was given a desk, a computer, library card and unlimited supply of free coffee. My office mates were largely a curious type, all at different phases of what now seems to me to be a fairly well defined process, though one which nevertheless feels incredibly individual. In week one I was given a whole load of blank progress forms, bearing dates reaching out into the far future of the next four years. I was vaguely aware that I would almost certainly be thirty by the time I finished. That seemed like a long time away.

For the next couple of years it felt like I was in suspended animation, like some stasis field had come down and swallowed me. I was swimming around in some kind of mental treacle. There was plenty of activity going on, I was reading, writing things, giving talks, making notes, throwing notes away, reading more things, drinking coffee... but any real progress seemed like it would only be observable from outside the stasis bubble. Inside, things were largely calm, but in a wave-like fashion punctuated by the occasional filling in of the next progress form, or going over feedback from a talk or paper I'd written.

Was this actually progress? Actually, such was the effect of the suspended animation that I don't even think it really dawned on me that I would, at some point, have to actually produce a thesis, and preferably before the progress report forms had run out. What does a thesis look like anyway? At this point, perhaps as late even as two years in, I started to be more aware of the outputs rather than just the activity.

Well, luckily I'd already received a lot of good advice from others. I had been writing since the very start, not waiting until the "writing up period" (the bit after your money runs out when you start to panic) before actually starting to write the elusive two hundred page document. In fact, when I actually sat down to enter File -> New... t h e s i s . t e x into Kile, subsequently copying across the various bits of written work I was roughly happy with instantly gave me a 91 page PDF. I cannot overstate how much of a boost this was, and how grateful I was at that moment for the advice to start writing from the get-go.

Another good piece of advice I received, and something that was actually repeatedly followed up by my supervisor and thesis group (that's the progress committee) alike, was to write and maintain a draft chapter structure (try saying that when you've had one too many dirty martinis). After emerging from the stasis field around the end of my second year, the draft chapter structure kept me focused and acted to harness the panic into action with outcomes. Whereas it's usual to spend the early part of a PhD study reading widely and exploring different avenues, towards the end my mantra became "if it's not in the draft chapter structure, don't spend your time doing it". Of course, it's not possible to obtain this kind of focus until you know basically what your thesis is going to be about, but when it did come, I found it really refreshing. "This week I did the experiments for the first half of chapter seven" is quite a nice thing to say.

Towards the very end, of course, as with all deadlines things got a little frantic. I needed to finish. The main technical parts of the thesis were written, but there was a lot of other stuff to get right. From basic stuff like formatting, to important things like evaluating the significance of the work you've spent the last three to four years doing (this could actually be quite soul destroying, I'd imagine). Writing the abstract is also an interesting experience. Distilling all that thought, time and effort into 200 words. It feels like a sort of opportunistic blasphemy.

And then suddenly it was done. The whole thing felt like it came together very quickly at the end. I think, after having spent a couple of weeks writing over a thousand words a day, I sat there just looking at it for almost another week. I changed a few words, tweaked the fonts, wrote and re-wrote the acknowledgements. The mental treacle had returned and I wasn't quite sure that I hadn't just gone a little crazy and wondered whether I should trust myself to know that I'd actually finished.

Well, after about a week and nothing obvious seemed missing, I submitted. This always sounds grander than it really is. Even a plum-in-mouth melodramatic call "To the Bindery!" (you shall remain nameless) didn't add any real excitement to the rather dull process of taking a couple of hundred pieces of paper to an admin person at a helpdesk in exchange for a receipt. I've heard talk of people not wanting to physically part with their thesis at that point, but it didn't seem a big deal any more. I think then I just wandered around for a while and then went to the pub.

My viva was scheduled for two months to the day after I submitted. For those that don't know, a viva, or viva voce ("live voice" in Latin) is the face to face defence of your work to the examiners. In the UK at least, no PhD student ever really knows what goes on in a viva other than by word of mouth. And that is from people whose memories are made under reasonable duress at the time. There are plenty of resources around to help with preparation for the viva, but at the end of the day it comes down to the examiners, their style, their interests and their view of your thesis. I was told to basically just know my own work - and let's face it, who couldn't after this amount of time?

My viva itself was around two hours long. It wasn't particularly pleasant, but that I think is largely due to the anxiety brought about by my having no real idea what the outcome would be. There's always the potential that every time one of the examiners opens their mouth, they could be about to blow your work out of the water and effectively write off the last few years of work. Other than that (which thankfully didn't happen in my case), the discussion was really interesting, the examiners were obviously well informed and had good and seeking questions.

The outcome of the examination process, as I blogged about after I submitted, is that the examiners can do any one of the following:

Award the degree outright.
Award the degree subject to minor corrections. This means that the thesis is acceptable, but corrections, usually typographical, changes in phraseology, corrections of faults in subsidiary arguments, are required.
Award the degree subject to major corrections. This means that the thesis is acceptable, but corrections, such as rewriting sections, correcting calculations or clarifying or amending arguments, are required.
Ask for the thesis to be revised and resubmitted either for the same or a lower qualification. This basically means that the requirements for the degree have not been met.
Award a lower qualification without corrections. This means that the thesis and/or performance in the viva were not up to standard for a Ph.D., but possibly an MPhil or something else.
Award a lower qualification with corrections or revisions. This is the same as the above case, but subject to corrections or more major revisions.
Reject it without the opportunity for resubmission. It's not good enough and there is no reasonable prospect of being able, in a reasonable time, to revise the thesis or improve performance in the viva, to merit the award of any qualification.

As I said in my earlier blog post, in the last few years of watching people complete their research degrees in the school, I can't remember ever seeing anyone who, after making it to submission, got anything other than the second or third option - major or minor corrections.

Well, back in July I wrote that "this obviously doesn't mean the others can't happen" and how right I was. Despite the discussion in the viva bringing up a range of "this thesis would be better if..." points, all of which were valid, I was awarded the PhD outright, without being required to make any modifications. Although when I was called back into the room after the examiners' deliberations, I was expecting to be presented with list of the points we'd discussed during the viva as corrections to make, they merely said that they thought that there was enough in the thesis to warrant a PhD, it was clearly my own work, and there was nothing that was wrong and needed correcting. Sure, it would be better if... x, y and z, but what piece of research is ever completely finished? And of course there's always a time constraint too.

I think it's fair to say that I wasn't really expecting to fail, having got this far and published much of the work in the thesis already, but having no corrections hit me like a brick and I'm pretty sure that I actually felt my jaw drop. The stasis treacle was back and this time set to the tune of some deafening symphony.

I've subsequently got it on reasonable authority that I'm the second person in the history of the School of Computer Science to pass their PhD without being required to make any modifications, and about this I'm quite lost for words.

So, thank you to all the people who helped me through the last four years and to achieve this - you know who you are. Thank you for putting up with my odd moods and obsessions. I hope this post might go some way to trying to explain how it's been.

Well, if you're still reading now, go read this.

Salomon RX Mocs

Pete Lewis — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:44:17 +0000

This month the shoes I received from FitnessFootwear.com are a little different - these bright green Salomon RX Mocs. Inspired by traditional moccasins, which Wikipedia tells me are native North American shoes made from one piece of material, sown together at the top, they're really lightweight but with a tough sole.

The picture might not make it obvious just how thin and light the uppers of these shoes are. Breathable would be an understatement; they're of a mesh construction which allows the air to totally flow around your toes while you're walking. I found that if I've been out exercising and my feet are hot, these are a great antidote. They're fairly easy to slip on too, but won't slip off like flip flops.

But as I said the rubber soles are tough and as thick and hard-wearing as I'd expect from a pair of Tevas or something similar. Salmon claim that these are good as a cool down shoe after a long walk, and I think they're dead right. I can see myself wearing these around the campsite, for walks in hot weather, as beach shoes or even just for popping to the shop.

My skis are Salomons and I've been pretty impressed with them, but it seems that the Salmon footwear range is growing into interesting areas too. These mocs are cool and I'm finding myself wearing them a lot. Oh and if you don't like the green, they have other colours too!

Epic Fellowship

Pete Lewis — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:44:24 +0000

As I posted recently, in July I submitted my PhD thesis. I'm currently waiting for the viva (exam to you and me), which is next week. This week I started a new job, as a Research Fellow at CERCIA. To some extent the work will be a continuation of what I was doing during my PhD, but also with some new ideas, applications and directions too. I'm working largely with the same people, at the University of Birmingham, and will be for the next four years, all being well.

In case you're wondering what I'm going to be doing, it's a European (FP7 funded) project, entitled "Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems", or EPiCS for short. It's all about self-awareness and self-expression in dynamic, decentralised and heterogeneous systems, and we'll be collaborating with various partners across Europe.

There wil be more to write here on this I'm sure, as I get started on the project. I try to keep this blog largely free of a lot of technical stuff, but I will hopefully post some more details soon.

Home brewed beer

Pete Lewis — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:53:26 +0000

My brother recently bought me a brew-your-own-beer starter kit, since he knows well enough that I'm into both beer and doing stuff like that myself. I've never made beer or any other alcoholic drink before, though my Nan did use to make her own wine from the various berries she found around the park.

So, over the last couple of weeks, I've been brewing. Here's the story.

Beer is basically made by the rather simple process of mixing malted barley with sugar and water, and then adding yeast, which over a period of time converts the sugar to alcohol in a process known as fermentation. The yeast eats the sugar and releases alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is why beer has bubbles in it. Some people add all sorts of other things to the process in order to give it an extra taste, a common example of which is the hops flower. Different types of yeast also apparently alter the flavour.

Arguably one of the most difficult things to do is to malt ones own barley. Malting is the process of taking barley (or other cereal) grains and soaking them so that they begin to sprout, and then stopping the sprouting process by drying the grain. Beer making is very similar to the early part of the whisky making process, so if you've ever visited either a brewery or whisky distillery that does its own malting, you may have seen the malting floor, a very large area above the fire, where the grain is spread out to dry. Many breweries and distilleries actually don't do this process themselves, and a specialist malting houses often provide brewers with "malted barley". If you're interested, the Highland Park distillery on Orkney does do its own malting, whereas Talisker on Skye doesn't. Both are worth a visit.

Anyway, on with the beer making. I may have a go at malting barley one day, but for now it's actually quite easy to get hold of a can of malted barley, with a small amount of sugar and water added to make it into a syrup. This was fine for my purposes now. The first task is therefore to add the malted barley syrup to a 25 litre tub.

The next step is to add hot water to the barley. I boiled this up in a pan, and then added it to the tub.

A kilo of sugar is then added to the mix. I was recommended brewing sugar, which apparently is basically just glucose. The mixture is then topped up with cold water and mixed through, making the whole thing luke warm, which the yeast will like. At this stage it started looking like a giant pint of beer already - though certainly didn't smell like one!

The instructions I was using sensibly called for me to check the temperature before adding the yeast, to make sure it wasn't so hot that the yeast would be killed. I used a small packet of yeast which came with the malted barley.

The lid then goes on the tub to prevent anything extra from getting in there and contaminating the beer, and the it's left to ferment for a week or two!

During the fermentation process, the beer can be checked on using a hydrometer, which looks a bit like a thermometer but floats on top of the beer to tell you what the gravity of the liquid is. Apparently water with sugar in it has a different gravity from the fermented beer, at which point the sugars have turned to alcohol, so this tells you how much the beer has fermented. When the hydrometer readings have dropped a few points and stabilised, the fermentation process is finished. This can also give you a guide as to how alcoholic your beer is, but I don't think it's that exact.

Once it's ready, the beer can by put into bottles or a barrel for storage. I opted for a barrel, since I really didn't fancy the hassle of messing around sterilising and sealing dozens of bottles. Instead it was easy to syphon the beer into the barrel.

Right at the bottom of the tub is a load of sediment, the remains of the barley and yeast. You have to be careful not to get this into the barrel.

And there we have it, a barrel of home made beer, and the first glass to try. It was actually very nice, it tastes most definitely of beer, though is a little watery in taste. But, it's quite drinkable and definitely alcoholic! And, I've got about 40 pints of it!

Sweetcorn Flatbread

Pete Lewis — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:28:48 +0000

I love food. I love making it and eating it. So, It's about time that I started writing down more about it. To kick off, here's a very simple recipe I've been playing about with for my own style of fried sweetcorn flatbread. The quantities here make around 6-8 depending on how big you make them. For more, just multiply the ingredients up by the same factor.

Ingredients:

1 cup of plain white flour, plus a bit extra for rolling out;
1 cup of cornmeal;
1-2 dessert spoons of sugar, depending on how sweet you want it;
1 small can of sweetcorn;
1 cup of milk (or water, for a vegan variety);
Some olive oil.

Method:

Put the flour, cornmeal and sugar in a mixing bowl.
Drain the sweetcorn to make sure it's dry, then add that too.
Give it a splash with olive oil, then mix well.
Slowly add the milk, mixing as you go. Once it gets clumpy, get your fingers in there and bring it together to a single ball of dough. If it doesn't need all the milk, that's fine.
Once you have all the mixture in one big ball of dough, take it out of the bowl and put it on a board, sprinkled with flour to stop it sticking.
Play with it a bit to make sure it's all mixed up nicely and not going to fall apart or anything.
Pull off just under a fist sized ball of dough, put aside the bigger ball, and making sure the board is well floured, flatten out the fist sized dough ball under your hand.
Work it with your fingers, spreading it out to form a pancake shape, turning it regularly to make sure it stays floured and none of the sweetcorn escapes. Don't use a rolling pin or spread it too thin as you'll squash the corn. Make sure the final thickness is about the thickness of the corn itself.
Splash some olive oil on a hot pan, and gently lay the pancake shaped dough onto the pan.
Fry for 2-3 minutes each side, until golden brown.
Do the same with the rest of the dough. This should be enough for 6-8 depending on how big you make them.
Enjoy them while they're hot!

New Merrell Goodness

Pete Lewis — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:37:36 +0000

Readers of this blog will remember that back in 2008 I reviewed a pair of Merrell walking boots (the Chameleon Wrap GTX Mid) from FitnessFootwear.com. They were lightweight, waterproof and very comfortable, and I liked them.

Well, now I've been sent the Merrell Chameleon Wrap Slam to try out. As you can tell by the name, these are in the same range as the walking boots, but the Slams don't have the mid-high ankle and as such are more like walking trainers than boots. In fact, they're Merrell walking design in a day to day trainer. There's actually a whole range of men's Merrells around this theme.

First things first, as the picture shows, they've still got the Vibram soles, which though I've not found to be totally indestructable (but what is?), are much more hard wearing than your average day to day shoe soles and provide the best grip I've found so far. Unlike the GTX Mid, the uppers are of a tough fabric construction rather than Gore Tex, but that just reflects that these aren't designed to be totally waterproof, with the low ankle line. Specifically, the upper is a mix of lycra and nylon, with rubber to reinforce in places. The neoprene holding the tongue in place is a nice touch too. So yes, all this doesn't provide the waterproofness of Gore Tex, but does make for great breathability and a very light weight feel. In addition, Merrell actually claim that the shoes are vegan, meaning that no animal products at all were used in making them. Cool, huh?

So, I've been finding that I've been wearing these shoes quite a bit since they arrived. In the main, this is since they're just so comfortable. As I found with the GTX Mids, Merrell do know how to make comfy walking shoes. These are very well cushioned inside, including an air-cushion insole. The neoprene on the tongue works to hold it firmly in place, gripping your foot like a handshake, meaning less movement, and therefore I suspect much less chance of blisters. They really are soft inside and comfortable to wear.

All in all I'm very pleased with the Chameleon Wrap Slam and those looking for a walking boot style trainer should definitely consider them. They're tough where it counts, soft but firm where they meet your foot, and for day to day walking when you're not tackling anything tricky needing ankle support - and it's not that wet - they're great. The lightweight breathable construction more than makes them a good first choice for that type of walking.

Any criticism I have would also have to be levelled at almost all walking shoes. I tend to find that the first thing that goes (after plenty of use) is the inside of the heel. In future shoes, I'd like to see something done to reinforce this area, while remaining soft and smooth enough not to cause blisters. But, I haven't seen this on any shoes yet.

If you're interested in taking a look, FitnessFootwear.com have some Merrell shoes on sale right now.

Submission Complete

Pete Lewis — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:50:41 +0000

Well, on Tuesday of this week I submitted my Ph.D. thesis to be examined. It felt pretty monumental.

It contains 47919 words, 203 pages, 130 references and 8 chapters. I submitted 1346 days after I started, that's three years, eight months and just over a week.

After handing over two copies of the thing to the University, the process now is to wait until I have my viva, which has been set for the 13th September. At that point, they can apparently do any of the following:

Award the degree outright
Award the degree subject to minor corrections. This means that the thesis is acceptable, but corrections, usually typographical, changes in phraseology, corrections of faults in subsidiary arguments, are required.
Award the degree subject to major corrections. This means that the thesis is acceptable, but corrections, such as rewriting sections, correcting calculations or clarifying or amending arguments, are required.
Ask me to revise and resubmit thesis either for the same or a lower qualification. This basically means that I have not have met the requirements for the degree.
Award a lower qualification without corrections. This means that the thesis and/or performance in the viva were not up to standard for a Ph.D., but possibly an MPhil or something else.
Award a lower qualification with corrections or revisions. This is the same as the above case, but subject to corrections or more major revisions.
Reject it without the opportunity for resubmission. It's not good enough and there is no reasonable prospect of me being able, in a reasonable time, to revise the thesis or improve performance in the viva, to merit the award of any qualification.

It has to be said that in the last few years of watching people complete their research degrees in the school, I can't remember ever seeing anyone who made it to submission getting anything other than the second or third option. But, this obviously doesn't mean the others can't happen!

So now I get a bit of a break, and get ready to defend my thesis in September.

Leaving the allotment

Pete Lewis — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:47:11 +0000

Yep, we just didn't have the time to commit to this that regularly. Still, we got a lot of stuff out of it last year.

The power of radio

Pete Lewis — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:29:42 +0000

President Sarkozy of France is in the UK today to commemorate 70 years since Charles De Gaulle made his historic first radio broadcast from the BBC in London, calling on the people of occupied France to resist the Nazis and organise into what became the French Resistance. Arguably this had a huge impact on the course of the second world war. But, listening to De Gaulle, what he offered to the French people in my view more than anything, is hope. Hope is something that I'd imagine would have been in short supply in newly occupied France, and in 1940 the defacto belief must have been that France had fallen to the Germans forever, and the dream of a democratic republic was over. But De Gaulle's radio broadcast changed this. It's now easy to imagine, with perhaps the romanticism of history on your side, the image of French folk secretively huddling round a radio listening to De Gaulle's message of hope.

But the purpose of this post is not just a history lesson, except in that best use of history which is to learn from it for the betterment of the future. Today there are still many other countries where the people are not free and in which hope is denied. I believe that few are more deserving of our attention at the start of the 21st century than Burma.

Burma is currently about to embark on its first election for twenty years, and at this time more than ever it is vital that people are able to discuss and debate what is happening in their country. Unfortunately, the Burmese junta has a habit of locking up journalists and political activists, rather than allow them to get involved in the democratic process. Perhaps even sadder, is that the vast majority of Burmese people have very little knowledge of this, or that there is the possibility of any change. In summary, after decades of military rule, there's little hope amongst the Burmese people.

Amnesty International is currently running a campaign in the run up to the Burmese election to try to get radios into Burma, so that ordinary people can hear for themselves that there is hope for a change. They're asking people to buy a radio (or two, or more) for people in Burma. At £12.50 each, they reckon that they can get them into Burma and delivered to ordinary people.

It's crazy isn't it, that in this 21st centrury world of Twitter and Facebook, blogs, 24 hour news and televised leadership debates, some people in the world don't even have a radio to hear that there's going to be an election. Quite a contrast to recent times in the UK.

Finally, I wonder if like Sarkozy is doing today, the political heir of Aung San Suu Kyi will be standing in London in 2080 thanking those with the ability to help, for the gift of radio.

Yet more bus price hikes

Pete Lewis — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:32:20 +0000

In case you missed it, Travel West Midlands (now part of National Express) have put up the bus fairs in the West Midlands yet again. Here's a letter I dashed off to one of my local councillors, Timothy Huxtable in anger.

Dear Councillor Huxtable,

I'm writing to express my dismay at yet further price hikes on Travel West
Midlands buses as of June 2010. Particularly, I note that there is an 80p rise
in the cost of an evening saver ticket, from £2.20 to £3.00.

From memory, in 2005 the cost of a standard single ticket was just £1. Now it's
£1.70. This is way way above the level of inflation.

Can I ask if the Council or you could comment on this please? Are these fare
hikes to continue as they have done in the last few years? I know that the buses
are now run by a private company, but they are still a public service and this
is atrocious.

Does the Council have a vision for what bus transport should be in Birmingham,
or is the plan just to sit by and wait until it's no longer viable?

I'd also like to point out the irony that this is announced just a few days
before the Birmingham Climate Change Festival. I wonder how much more CO2 will
be chucked out onto Birmingham's streets as a result of people driving more? I
know I certainly will be. This is a real shame.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Lewis

UPDATE: Within two hours of my email, Councillor Huxtable got back to me. Here's his response.

Dear Mr Lewis

Thank you very much for your email regarding bus fares.

As you comment, NXWM are a private company and hold a virtual monopoly in terms of bus travel in the B'ham area.

I am more than happy to raise this issue with representatives of NXWM next time I meet up with them and indeed would be happy to inform you of when the next Transport Users Forum (a public meeting) meets, where NXWM representatives will be present (this meeting rotates around the City).

There has been recent rises in NXWM patronage, but mainly from concessionary passes (over 60's) and season ticket holders, whose prices rises, I understand, have been kept below inflation.

This would appear to be a deliberate policy of NXWM and the losers have been those who purchase tickets on the bus - who have suffered (substantially) above inflation price rises. I would imagine this is a policy decision to "persuade" more people to buy season tickets.

I am also sure NXWM would also state their fuel costs and staff costs have also risen recently.

(Please note I am NOT defending their price rises, merely explaining the reasoning behind their price increases from what they have told me).

The City Council does indeed have a vision for increasing public transport usage but requires partners to work with us (regarding bus fares, bus routes etc). It makes no commercial sense for NXWM to price people off the buses and we have made this point to them on many occasions. I am sure the City Council will continue to make this point to them.

Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding this matter.

Yours sincerely

Timothy Huxtable

I think I might go along to one of these user forums. But as he quite rightly points out, this is largely due to the monopoly held by National Express. Now, who's fault is that and can it be changed?

Why I couldn't vote Labour and became a liberal.

Pete Lewis — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:12:25 +0000

I'll be honest, waking up on the morning of 11th May I felt sick. My vote has been used to put a Conservative Prime Minister in Number 10. Theresa May, someone with one of the most regressive voting records in parliament on issues of gay and women's rights is now Home Secretary and obtusely Minister for Equality. The right-winger-by-Tory-standards Iain Duncan-Smith is now responsible for social security policy. My vote helped do this. I voted for the Liberal Democrats and they got into bed with the Tories. It's my fault.

Why didn't I vote Labour? After all, I had been a member of the Labour Party for around six years, since leaving university, and since well before that I'd always considered myself well and truly a lefty. Why did I abandon them in 2010? Well, the Labour government over the last thirteen years has certainly got a lot to be proud of in terms of outcomes. On gay rights, mentioned earlier, section 28 was repealed and civil partnerships introduced. We've seen record funding for schools and hospitals, devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, damn it we've seen peace in Northern Ireland largely thanks to the efforts of Labour politicians over the last decade. The minimum wage was introduced, despite businesses and those on the right of the political spectrum having tantrums over how it would destroy British business. Of course, no such thing happened. These are all truly wonderful things, and I remember fondly being rightly proud of the party of which I was a member making them happen. Better still, in most of these areas, there's now not even any dissent in mainstream politics on these issues. No Tory MP to my knowledge stands up and argues that the minimum wage should be scrapped and the market be allowed to choose the lowest standard of living for people in this country. The debate has moved, and Labour should be proud of that.

But of course there is so much that I am ashamed of and angry about too. Within a year of taking office the Labour government introduced tuition fees for university students and scrapped maintenance grants. I was in the first year ever to pay fees. At the time, no-one even seemed to understand how the introduction of university fees and the removal of grants fitted in with Labour's aims. Education should be a right, not a privilege, was the mantra for activists at the time. Now, it is almost universally accepted in this country that to have an unsecured personal debt of the order of tens of thousands of pounds at the age of 21 is perfectly normal. Labour's aim was for half of all 21 year olds to be in this position by this year.

In schools and hospitals, many of the new building projects, such as the one which took place at the school I went to myself were privately funded in such a way that the buildings subsequently were privately owned. In my school, this led to the absolute madness of a building that was built only in the mid-1990s being mothballed and subsequently demolished because it didn't fit in with the contract agreed with the private sector partner.

The war in Iraq, in which it's now estimated that around 100,000 civilians died and which cost the British taxpayer £5.3 billion between 2003 and 2007 is now so infamous that even the word Iraq carries with it a connotation of arrogance, disbelief and sheer bloody mindedness. I marched in the biggest public demonstration that our country has ever known, alongside two million other people through London in opposition to the war in Iraq, shoulder to shoulder with such unlikely comrades as bankers, lawyers and headteachers, who themselves joked that they needed to pinch themselves to check if they were really "going on a protest". But the Labour government ignored the people, and went ahead anyway. Now Iraq is a bigger part of the legacy of the last government than any of these other elements.

And it seemed that the people really didn't know best, since on the only occasion I have ever sat in the public gallery in the House of Commons, I watched Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary stand up to defend the Labour government's abolition of the right to trial by jury.

As time progressed, to me one of the most significant policies of all would become the center-piece for the debate on Labour's approach to government: identity cards and a national database of the people. This was immediately unpopular, so the spinners subsequently decided a non-compulsory "entitlement card" was more palatable. This seemed to convince some news organisations that the scheme was being dropped, but meanwhile the Labour government ploughed ahead with plans to link up the database to all elements of life. Anywhere where a person interacted with an arm of the state, or one of its now private-sector contract holders, a terminal would be linked into this giant database of people, where the interaction would be recorded. Perhaps this would have included companies in other jurisdictions, such as the one in California which was tasked with distributing pensions, an arrangement which only became particularly well-known when they messed up the payments.

Many reasonable people questioned the need for such a detailed amount of information on every citizen to be held by the state, but to me the rationale was clear and not at all malicious. In fact, without any intention of analogy, it might quite honestly be described as Labour's "Big Brother" policy, and is fundamental to a modern, effective socialist state. The Labour movement's endpoint, unless its priorities are to be seriously rewritten, is this approach. In the early days of the Labour government, there were quick wins to be had: the minimum wage was introduced, the economy was doing well so the money was put into public services rather than tax cuts, long overdue social reform took place, such as new rights for minorities and new equality legislation. But then attention moved to what next. The policies introduced had helped a lot of the worse off and discriminated against people in society, but there were others, that were slipping through the net. We had the tragedies of Victoria Climbie and Peter Connolly (otherwise known as "Baby P"), there are unnoticed victims of unrecorded crimes and criminals who are undetected. Terrorists coming from both Leeds and Laska-Gar are threatening to undermine everything we hold dear. Young people, despite what the state does, still choose to hang around in bus stops with hoods on. There are victims. There is fear. There's more chance of being blown up by a terrorist than winning the lottery, or something. The answer for Labour was not initially to attempt to remedy these things by forcible control, but it is easy to make the case that it is impossible to rid society of these problems unless they are known to the state. Knowledge became the goal; evidence-based policy requires knowledge, and so knowledge we must amass. Only then could we begin to tackle the hard to reach problems in society.

So despite an horrific track record of being able to implement large computer systems, the state began building databases such as the compulsory National Identity Register, ContactPoint the database of all children in the country, and the DNA Database, for which the government went to court in order to try to block attempts to ensure innocent people's DNA records were removed from the database. The whole project was an attempt to monitor what people were doing, where they were doing it, and for what purpose.

The problem with this of course, is that unless I break a law, I am not accountable to the state for my actions. In fact, quite the reverse. And even if I do break the law, I am accountable to my fellow citizens, and in this regard the state acts as a proxy and mediator on their behalf. The approach that was being taken by the government was not just distasteful, it was a fundamental reordering of society. Instead of the state being accountable to the people, the people found themselves accountable to the state.

Of course, once this social reordering is complete in the minds of ministers and government officials, there is suddenly a wealth of opportunity for new activities to reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack (though immensely unlikely), or being grimaced at by a hoodie (probably more a clash of cultures anyway). Restrictions on the right to peaceful protest were introduced, control orders now allow the state to impose virtually unlimited and unquestionable control over individuals in order to protect the public from a perceived risk. Photographers, artists and people who wait for their friends in train stations and town squares are now routinely challenged by police to provide an explanation of the purpose of their presence and activity, or else be searched or even arrested.

I'm not claiming for one instant that these measures haven't in some way reduced the level of risk of terrorism or mugging, but that isn't the point. Consider that Labour has also often been criticised for having a targets-driven culture of public service provision. Indeed, amongst other things, local councils are required to put a target figure for the number of people who will be killed or seriously injured in road accidents (called KSIs) each year. This is of course just a tool, in order that the council might monitor the effectiveness of its measures to bring the number down. But it left me one wondering what an acceptable level of death would be. Zero is the obvious answer, but I doubt that's it. At what point does the level of KSIs become low enough that the council stops monitoring it, or diverts the road safety budget to something else?

As an example from where I live, in Birmingham 430 people were killed or seriously injured in road accidents in 2008, which represents a 17.5% reduction over three years earlier. But still the statistical risk of being killed or seriously injured in Birmingham in a given year is one in 2,365. Assuming the average life expectancy in Birmingham is 80 (which it's probably not), then that's about a one in 30 chance of being killed or seriously injured in a road accident at some point in your life. So, that explains why you almost certainly know or have heard about someone who was. By contrast, 52 people were killed in the terrorist attacks in London in July 2005, making the probability of being one of those unlucky Londoners one in 144,231.

There's a lot been written about relative risks, quantifying the impact of events and expectation, but I don't want to wax on asking why the Labour government (or any other previous administration) didn't do more to help those people in society at the greatest actual risk, or at least put significant effort into reducing the risks associated with everyday living in a normal British city. Instead I'll just pose this simple question: how can the risk of being killed or seriously injured in a road accident in Birmingham be avoided? One answer is actually incredibly simple: ban cars. Any government willing to do this would immediately cut the risk of premature death for almost everybody in this country by a vast amount.

If your reaction at this point is to think that that's rather crazy, ask yourself why. If the government is prepared to intervene into our everyday lives, stopping tourists taking pictures, putting people under house arrest with no trial or right of appeal, preventing people from peacefully protesting outside parliament, why doesn't it go the extra mile and make us all take the train or ride bikes to reduce the greatest risk?

Okay, so the purpose of this discussion is not to argue that the government should actually ban cars, though some might argue that it should, but instead to highlight the continuum in the politics of liberty and control, which at one end is ultra libertarian and at the other has us all put in isolated cocoons at birth. A more sensible approach to the KSI question would be to dramatically reduce speed limits, but even reducing them to 20 miles per hour in front of schools is politically difficult in many areas. When the Labour government began its project of building the database state it changed the game in terms of accountability between citizens and the state, and in doing so unlocked the door to a whole region of the liberty continuum which was hitherto off limits. The politics of fear, the highly spun narratives of the "war on terror", "hoodie culture" and even "we must do everything we can do to protect those at risk" allowed this to happen and the genie is now out of the bottle. We now no longer know where the line is on this liberty continuum; what territory is it forbidden for the state to occupy? For Orwell, a ubiquitous CCTV system, a continuous centrally controlled news narrative and the presumption of having to justify ones movements to the state were enough to write about. If we value our liberty at all, we need to rediscover where the boundary lies, and be honest about the cost.

John Cleese on Proportional Representation

Pete Lewis — Fri, 14 May 2010 09:40:45 +0000

For those not really sure what all this debate about Proportional Representation, STV, AV etc. is all about, this short video presented by John Cleese is excellent! Although originally a party political broadcast by the Alliance (the party which morphed into the Liberal Democrats), and aimed at the election in 1985, it's absolutely bang up to date in terms of the arguments it makes.

A letter to Nick Clegg on electoral reform.

Pete Lewis — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:53:35 +0000

I'm sure many are now following the developments in Westminster after the election resulted in a hung parliament. If you listened to me on the radio earlier you would have heard that this was indeed what I wanted to happen, in order that we could reform the voting system to something more proportional, something more representative of the views of the people in this country.

So, now we know that the Liberal Democrats have an offer from both the Labour Party and the Conservatives. What should they do? Well, here's the email I fired off to Nick Clegg and Chris Fox (Liberal Democrat party Chief Executive) this morning, through the Vote For A Change site. I guess I'm sticking my head above the parapet by giving up my right to an anonymous vote here, but if you agree with any of this, now might be the time to click here and do the same.

Dear Mr Clegg and Mr Fox,

I am writing to you as a first time Liberal Democrat voter; I have always voted Labour in the past, but had decided that a hung parliament was our best chance in a generation to achieve real reform of the voting system, to achieve PR. I also decided that you were the party most able to deliver on this in the event of a hung parliament.

I understand that there is a lot to be considered in the current negotiations, but I urge you in the strongest possible terms to not compromise on the key item of getting a referendum on electoral reform. David Cameron's promise of a committee to investigate options sounds like a line lifted right from Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister, as nothing more than an attempt at delay. Furthermore, it is also clear that electoral reform of the sort we both want is clearly unpalatable to the Conservative party and their supporters, and any talk otherwise by them can only be treated as just that: talk.

I, along with many other Liberal Democrat voters that I know, support you as a progressive party, in the same spirit as the Labour Party but with a the right views on issues around civil liberties, foreign relations, human rights, etc. The one thing that the election made clear is that there is now a clear progressive majority in the country as a whole: over 50% of the electorate. This is the mandate that we have given the politicians, and I implore you to find the way to make this work.

Do not underplay your hand in these negotiations, you can deliver us a referendum on electoral reform, we are all counting on you to do it, and will back you all the way.

Yours in good faith and expectation,

Peter.

Please also let me point out to any Labourites about to accuse me of abandonment and that I deserve what I get etc., that there are many many reasons why I am utterly unhappy with Labour too, but I live in a safe Labour seat and this also informed my vote. Perhaps, depending on the outcome of this whole process I'll write a little more about Labour too.