UK elections
I am following it on both 18 Doughty Street and on Conservative Home as they live blog it. Its pretty interesting stuff, this will be a real test for Cameron and the SNP. I am rather interested to see how some of the minor parties do as well.
Comments are off for this postCan you guess the subject matter?
I wrote these two sets of lyrics while flying high over the Atlantic in BA business class (highly recommended). Both sets seemed to come about with ease.
Bad Feeling
(Dodge)
I gotta a bad feeling
Things are a changin
All this parading
Its a great danger
War clouds are brewin
Best start a runnin
Or stay while preparin
For evil mens designs
Gather the forces round
Stand up and be proud
Not part of the crowd
Ignore the prayer
Murderous soul on the prowl
Like Hyenas in full growl
Fevered mind and sweated brows
Theres a comin danga
Stay wise and be free
But watch the gatherin skies
Stay wise and be free
Be wary or our kind all dies
Return
(Dodge)
She prays for his embrace
Not some national disgrace
Humiliated and utterly defeated
Morale and pride depleted
A mission gone wrong
Ends with a pressed throng
A normal naval control
Ends with loads of vitriol
Taken without a fight
None of that majestic might
Captured and violated
Paraded and humiliated
Remember the noble profession
Before expressing your derision
Their orders forbade
Lest they looked to invade
Forgive their plight
Sapped of their might
There in an Arab Sea
Unable to do their duty
Wiki thoughts
by Avid C. Reader
I’ve always been a fan of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia but
recently I’m starting to loose the faith, and it seems I’m not alone.
Education secretary, Alan Johnson, has gone on record singling it out
for praise as a tool for education but he has been criticised by none
other than Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger who has come to feel
that Wikipedia is now “broken beyond repair.”
The theory behind Wikipedia is fascinating. Anyone can add or edit
any article and the majority of decent and knowledgeable people will
ensure that any errors are ironed out. This has worked out
extraordinarily well and the encyclopaedia now has more than 1.7m
articles in English alone. However, recently cracks have started to
emerge. Well published failures in the system have included articles
edited to libel individuals or defame organisations, contributors who
have lied about their qualifications and mistakes that have included
announcing the death of people who have promptly written to complain.
The community of editors has become increasingly fragmented and
argumentative and the shear size of the project means that articles
with mistakes can now go uncorrected for months. But a more
fundamental problem has started to emerge. Whereas in a normal
encyclopaedia, an editor has the final say over the content and there
is a degree of reliability based upon their work. In essence, they
are the guarantors of the truth. In Wikipedia, the truth is arrived
at by consensus and there is no standard of reliability from one
article to the next.
The problem is most obviously displayed in the more contentious
articles. A piece on Gordon Brown, for example, is a likely target to
be enhanced / sabotaged by people during an election campaign. Public
relations companies now work on the pages for their clients to
improve their image. All of this means that the truth of some
articles is hard to ascertain. But the problems don’t stop there. The
‘truth by consensus’ model is starting to break down even on non-
contentious articles and arguments over even the most simply facts
can mean that the articles are left unreliable.
The Wikipedia project was designed to create order of of anarchy and
has done a remarkable job. Sadly it seems that those same chaotic
forces are now pulling it apart.
