Back to the future

Happy New Year. Here is a Blade- Runner- esque scene, again of Hong Kong, to celebrate. Isn't it strange to think that its vision of the future is so powerful that it still holds sway despite the film itself being 25 years old?

Authority in the Mediated Age

The lyric Who do you trust? is going round in my head. I need to find the song. This is the kind of thing the internet is good for. Being slightly distrustful of google and its ubiquity, I fire up ask.com and try there. Then when that doesn't work, I tried google, and MSN, and yahoo. The trouble is not too few hits, but too many. It's not an Eminem song I am thinking of, nor Queensryche, nor Springsteen. But that nicely illustrates what I wanted to blog about: sources of authority and web 2.0

In the old days many facts could be found in the library. The library contained the Sources of Authority, or at least it did if it was a good one. OK, it might not have been very easy to search for song lyrics for half remembered popular songs, but for standard academic stuff, it worked pretty well, especially if you had research skills. Now we have a problem, Houston.

The problem is that there are too many canons, too many places to look. How do I know who to trust? Knowledge has fractured into too many pieces: sometimes they overlap, but often they don't. And it is too easy to claim that your corner of the world is complete, and true, and consistent. If you want to talk about cooking asparagus or the best new bands or what the cool kids in Brooklyn are wearing then the cacophony of voices is fine, authentic even. But if I want to know about the harmonic language of Debussy or homology groups or the precise rules for deciding which companies go in the FTSE-100 index, I want to read something written by someone who knows what they are talking about. The investment in figuring out who that is, though, is a lot larger than in the old days, a distinct disadvantage to the much vaulted Web 2.0 paradigm. Authority can sometimes be useful after all.

Not to break the mood but...

...my favourite post of the week is Do Helping Professions Help? from the often readable Overcoming Bias. I like it because it asks a hard question about the system in a way that displays a delicate understanding of the rules.

Something that works, kinda

I was in Cam- bridge on Thursday, seeing some friends. We visited the Fitzwilliam museum, an interesting if flawed establishment. (Don't hang the Rembrandt so you can't see the face for the glare of the lights, please, folks.) A few minor carps aside, though, it is interesting how well the museum system works. The works are well looked after, they can be see, for free, much of the time, and it is uplifting and delicious to see three Monets from one seat. Here's a mask to whet your appetite.

New Year on the trains

I know I keep blogging about transport but in my defense, it's important, and no one reads this blog anyway. It is important because it is supremely co-operative: no matter how rich you are, you cannot build your own continent wide railway system, and you need the government to arrange the roads so you can get to the airport. The rules that constrain how the various parties interact determine the outcome and, palpably, some outcomes are better than others. Moreover this is not just about money: some countries, such as Switzerland, have a relatively efficient and low cost public transport system; others, such as us, have a high cost and inefficient one.



On the interminable journey back from Kent International Airport recently (yes, there is an airport just outside Ramsgate, and no, it isn't often used. Blame the fog.) I was thinking about this again. At least one of the issues is the mixed incentive structure for the providers of services. For a fixed amount of funding, you cannot optimise returns for shareholders and optimise services for clients simultaneously. You cannot minimise both short term operating costs and long term maintenance costs. You cannot negotiate an SLA that covers all eventualities over ten (or even thirty) years. So to hell with it: it will be a New Year soon - we need a new policy. Let's renationalise the lot of it. It couldn't be any worse, and at least we will know who to blame if it doesn't get better.

Hard edged thoughts from Asia

A little while ago I was in Hong Kong (cue gratuitous Blade Runner themed pictures of the city at night). On the way back, I read a paper Dilemmas of an Economic Theorist. It was probably a good thing that I was on a plane at the time: the spluttering of disbelief that such egocentric ramblings was published in a peer reviewed journal would probably have disturbed my neighbours if I had been at home. As it was I took another swig of Cathay's Bonnes Mares and composed a list of objections:

• Firstly this paper seems entirely ignorant of any philosophy of science. While economics clearly isn't scientific, one might at least hope one of the referees had heard of Popper if not Lukacs. Anyway. The author poses the 'problem': Should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of assumptions that will inevitably fail in some contexts? This simply shows the importance of defining a domain of applicability. Then if the model doesn't work within the domain, you have falsified it. It's wrong. Move on.


• The next 'dilemma' is even more absurd. Should our models be judged according to experimental results? What else are you going to judge them on? How nicely they are typeset? Whether they give you a warm and fuzzy feeling when you cuddle them? That such a question is posed in an eminent journal just shows how deeply screwed some academic economics is.



• Finally we have Do we have the right to offer advice or to make statements that are intended to influence the real world?

Ignoring the temptation to suggest on the basis of the foregoing economists have no right to enter a university let alone try to influence the real world, what else is economics for?

Show me an economist who is willing to put his own money on a trading strategy based on his theorists, and I'll respect him - Soros is the obvious example. Show me one who is trying to help a country improve its growth, or ameliorate poverty, or any other laudable objective, and I'll respect her too. But an academic who write papers as fatuous as Dilemmas of an Economic Theorist? Even the famously polite Chinese might have a problem finding something good to say about him.

Playing at the weekend

This is a fantastic area of countryside to the West of Exeter. I went walking with some friends on Saturday, and it was lovely: refreshing, beautiful and calming. It made me think about the importance of conserving country- side like this, of managing the transport and planning systems so that people can live close to where they work and travel between them efficiently. We have dysfunctional public transport system, a planning system that is about to be torn apart in the pursuit of unnecessary growth and a government with the inability to take responsibility for anything. If this toxic mix results in us losing views like this, we will have lost something truly valuable.

Part of the problem is that we do not think of the outcomes of policy decisions holistically. Why not demand that rules and laws are prefaced by a statement as to their intent and metrics to measure success? "This bill is intended to ... Measure of success include..." Then we can understand what the authorities are trying to (as opposed to what they say they are trying to do), judge whether their metrics measure the desired outcomes or not, and so objectively hold them to account.

Think of those proposed revisions to planning: are they about economic growth or the protection of the environment? If, as I suspect Gordon Brown would claim, the answer is 'both', how do we balance those two goals? Once we know what it means to succeed at the game, we can analyse the strategies that people will take in playing it.

What works? You wish...

'What matters is what works' Tony Blair once declared. I really believe that is true: sadly Tony doesn't, and I suspect never did. As Ann Clwyd is ejected from her position as Chairperson of the parlimentary labour party thanks to her support for Blair, it is worth highlighting five of the worse examples of Labour's doctrine pursuit of policies despite them obviously not working:

• Iraq. No more need be said than that one word.
• PFI. Wow, wouldn't it be really great to pay more for the same public services and lock the NHS, Transport for London and many other bodies into inflexible, long term contracts? Anyone who claims Gordon Brown is an economic genius should be forced to have 'PFI' branded on their forehead so they never forget the disasterous waste caused by this terrible idea.
• Faith Schools. We want a more tolerant society with higher standards of education. So let's set up schools which exclude some faiths, enhance the sense of being special of others, suck up education resources that could be spent on improving ordinary schools, and give their governance to those verging on monomania.
• Replacing Trident. We do not need to spend £25B on nuclear weapons now, honestly we don't. This is all about Labour appearing tough on defense: it has nothing to with what the country actually needs.
• The Internal Market in the NHS. No one who had actually spent any time trading the financial markets would ever suggest they are efficient allocators of resources so why on earth does the government think the market will magically solve the problems of the NHS?

None of these policies was obviously unworkable at the beginning: foolish or misguided perhaps, but not obviously unworkable. They all subsequently have been proved not to work. Yet still the government sticks with them, demonstrating the dominance of ideology over efficacy in their thinking.

Polonium Puzzles

Alexander Litvinenko was apparently killed with Polonium 210 and now another poor individual, Mario Scaramella, has been found to have the chemical in his system. While this is clearly tragic, it does raise some questions.

Firstly where would you get Polonium 210? It is really rare. The best natural source of Polonium is Uranium ore, where it occurs at a density of roughly 100 micrograms per metric ton. So you have to make it, typically by exposing Bismuth to a high neutron flux: you will need a reactor or conceivably a particle accelerator for this. There aren't too many facilities that are up to this job, and so global production is less than 100g a year. It would be cheaper and easier to beat someone to death with a baseball bat made of solid platinum than to use Polonium.

Once you have made your Polonium you have to transport it. At first sight, this isn't going to be difficult: Polonium is a dull grey metal. The problem is that it is extremely radioactive: a milligram emits as many alpha particles as 5 grams of radium. Now here is where it gets funky: because Po 210 is such an energetic emitter, it heats itself up with its own radioactivity and slowly boils away. A gram of Po 210 generates 140 watts of power: an extraordinary amount. So your lump of metal will slowly vapourise.

The answer is probably to dissolve it in something. Chemically Polonium is similar to Thallium and not too different from Lead, so you could use dilute sulphuric acid for instance to create a solution of Polonium sulphide. But don't go spilling it. The toxic dose of Polonium is around a picogram: it is 250 billion times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. Even if you dissolved a microgram in ten litres of water, each drop would be lethal. So is it really credible that someone transported this stuff by plane, then poisoned Litvinenko with it in a busy restaurant while managing not to ingest any of this extremely toxic chemical themselves?

Finally, how on earth did they discover Polonium in the restaurants, planes and so on? It's an alpha emitter, not gamma, so it isn't easy to locate. Something like Thorium could be easily spotted using a gamma ray spectrometer, but alphas get stopped so quickly in air, you would have to be really close to find potential contamination, then you would need a mass spectrometer to confirm what caused it. So what's going on?

Update. They have not found Polonium in the planes, in the restaurant, etc. They have found radioactivity. Presumably this is consistent with Polonium spillage or excretion -- the small amounts Litvinenko would have been sweating out after the initial poisoning are probably detectable -- but it would interesting to know exactly what has been found.