The DOBlog

Category: Other Thoughts

  • Leaving voicemail for ET…

    The Irish Independent carried an interesting article on its website today which poses the question if it is such a good idea to be announcing our existence to the Universe by sending targetted messages to far off galaxies (as opposed to the random waffle and piffle that bounces out as a by-product of our TV, radio and radio-based communications technologies).

    The gist of the author’s thesis is that “Life is not like Star Trek” – the aliens that may or may not be out there may not be of the hippy planet-hugger peace and love variety but may be… well a bit like us really but with bigger or better guns.

    The writer, astronomer David Whitehouse (thanks to Copernicus for correcting me as to the byline), name drops the various scientists who he has worked with in the course of his career, all of whom he co-incidentally asked questions of that are relevant to this present article. However he misses perhaps the simplest analogy of all…

    Throughout our history there have been civilisations that were advanced in terms of their technology and how they used it. Throughout our history these civilisations have explored the shores of distant lands. And throughout history indigenous peoples have wandered down onto the beach to greet and trade with these visitors from afar only to be massacred and enslaved for generations or to have previously unknown disease ravage their populations (e.g. smallpox and the Native Americans).

    Often the ‘first contact’ has been friendly and warm but the relationship has evolved to murder and imprisonment when the ‘powers that be’ in explorer-central see wealth and riches to be had from the forceful exploitation of the native resources of the new ‘colony’ – both its people and the wealth of its land.

    Who is to say that our radio messages to the great beyond won’t bring a Galactic Captain Cook to the shores of our world, or a Cosmic Columbus? Will our descendants find themselves fighting the battles of this planet’s indigenous peoples (such as the Indigenous Australians or Native Americans) against an alien authority?

    Maybe life will be more like “Stargate SG-1” and its spin-offs with two broad groupings of aliens – those who will befriend us and develop a nuturing relationship and those who would rather enslave or destroy. This is a likely outcome – but raises the question of who will answer the messages first.

    Or perhaps we’ll just be left leaving a galactic voicemail for an alien civilisation that died millenia ago?

  • IQ Trainwrecks.com

    The IAIDQ, an organisation I’m involved in for Information & Data Quality, has launched IQTrainwrecks.com as a resource to collate and comment on media stories highlighting the cost and impacts of non-quality information.

    Here’s an example of one of their posts. Our Electoral Register features there as do a few other stories. The IAIDQ team hope that this site will evolve into a focal point for informed comment on the real costs and impacts of poor information quality.

  • Laughter

    The mother of young man who I hope will be in a position to (legally) buy me a pint around the time of my 50th birthday has set up a nice blog called Tir na nÓg. It is full of nice musings on things maternal and political.

    The young man is called Oisin. He didn’t vote in the last election and will probably not care about elections, information quality or politics until around the next change of government (which given the Irish skill at these things could be further away than we’d like or closer than we think – all is vapour at the moment).

    Apparently he is a bit bigger now than he was when I saw him last – but not quite old enough to appreciate the world of blogging. Maybe in years to come he will be able to look at the very nice things that his mother has written about him and the things she got worked up about as a result of his arrival. Certainly he will probably have a nervous compulsion to leave his socks and shoes on when courting young ladies in years to come given the prominence his foot has had on this blog and elsewhere.

    That thought makes me consider for a moment what the dreaded ‘meeting of the parents’ will be like for the off-spring of the Web2.0/bebo/myspace/bloggerama generation. My parents had photographs and Super8 8mm silent movies of me. Arrgh. My wife loved them…. some scenes are still referred to the best part of a decade after she saw them first. However the meeting had to take place. The good plates had to come out. LOTS of wine had to be drunk. Thus it has happened since the dawn of time, since Ug brought Uggina to meet his parents and they dragged out the really embarrassing part of the cavewall to look at.

    Fast forward 20+ years.. Will Oisin’s mother and girlfriend simply swap Flickr links, the mother’s to Oisin’s antics pre-University, the girlfriends to his antics at University, in particular that drunken night when..?

    How will the poor lad run interference and filter the images that are presented to his significant other by his significant mother?

    In theory the digital image can last for next to infinity. In practice it is prone to the failure of hard-drives, the collapse of businesses, the destruction of servers etc. Will Oisin be tempted, around the age of 17, to unleash a virus to seek out and delete images and video of him from the world’s computers (a bit like Doctor Who did – a reference the lad’s parents will appreciate.)?

    Perhaps in some proactive and technology friendly homes this trend is already starting. Perhaps another of life’s embarrassing but necessary rituals is falling prey to the romance with technology?

    I commend Oisin’s parents for avoiding the bebo-holic rush to put the minutiae of their lives and the life of their child on-line. Such people worry me to the point of my wanting to have their access to any technology more advanced than a wax tablet and stylus severly curtailed. To paraphrase an Audi advert – Offspring, Dork, Technic.

    Yes, he may have his footprints (literally) all over the blogosphere before his first birthday but, much like any good superhero, nobody knows Oisin’s face.

  • Electoral Register issues

    Astute followers of the recent General Election in which there were a number of reports of problems with our national electoral register will doubtless be wondering where my comments on that issue might be.

    Rest assured that I haven’t forgotten about it and am working on collating the media reports of issues and tracking down other substantiated cases of problems with the electoral register. I will be producing an updated analysis of the likely root causes which I will publish here and over at the IQ Network website (www.iqnetwork.org). I may even get around to doing a presentation on it to the IQ Network in the coming months.

    Suffice it to say the issues are both simple and complex and the likely scope of root causes ranges from a failure of governance from Government, the lack of a clear strategy for improving the quality of the register, a reliance on scrap and rework to ensure accuracy (doomed from the beginning) and also the actions or inactions of key people in the voter registration and verification processes (including the public).

    Updates to come soon.

  • Oh dear… I’ll have to agree with FF.

    Two Fianna Fail Ministers have suggested that the media are obsessed with the Taoiseach’s finances.
    I’d have to agree with them. There is a whole lot more that they can look at other than that issue.
    Like

    • The likely fate of the newly discovered national monument in the middle of the M3
    • The divisive nature of FF’s proposal on stamp duty (what about people upgrading or relocating due to decentralisation?)
    • The constitutional challenge to the electoral constituency boundaries (trial adjourned on thursday… what else was happening that day?)

    And as for the party being the victims of an “orchestrated campaign”, some may call that paranoia. I think they’re just jealous that someone somewhere has a better orchestra and conductor then they have.

  • E-Voting debacle… but not in ireland (!)

    A few hours ago the Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland Douglas Bain, announced that electronic voting would be considered for future elections in Northern Ireland as a result of what he had seen in Scotland where e-voting was used this week for elections.

    Fast forward to now… the Scottish election is in a state of disarray given the failure of their electronic voting system. Problems were also reported in Northern England.

    Perhaps they should have stuck to pencils and paper and avoided this embarassment?

  • Michael McDowell spins on the spot

    Over at Tuppenceworth Fergal is bemused at the ability of Michael McDowell not only to keep two strands of an argument in his head but to forcibly express them as his position in the same sentence.

    This apparently is part of the PD policy on renewable energy. If elected they will wrap their leader in copper wire and him in close proximity to a magnet. As long as McDowell keeps we could get enough energy to power a small city.

  • Stamp duty dominates FF manifesto launch…

    …just not the way they’d want

    RTE News have THIS. Apparently Bertie got a bit garralous with Vincent Browne at the manifesto press conference. Spin handlers bungled a bit when Browne, apparently, was initially stopped by FF handlers from asking questions, which allowed him the opportunity to refer back to the good old days of The Squire Haughey.

    Bertie then seems to have flipped a bit:

    ‘This has nothing to do with the tribunal’, Mr Ahern responded. ‘I allocated my money for uses and I’m entitled to do that. I earned the money [my emphasis].’

    He added: ‘Are you questioning that I shouldn’t be allowed to use money?’

    Hang on a second… Mr Ahern has just said in front of the media that the money that was paid to his then partner by a business man who he was renting a house from which he has claimed was a “stamp duty” issue and was related to work his partner had done to “facilitate” renovations and refurbishments to the house is now money that he earned.

    What exactly did he earn it for?

    Over on DublinOpinion.com there have been a few good posts about Bertie’s particular version of events. When the phrase “the Chewbacca defence” is used to describe your explanation, you know you’ve got problems…

    Bloody hell Baldrick… I smell a crisis brewing – send for Zapp Brannigan!!

  • Election Constituencies

    Update from McGarr Solicitors

    McGarr Solicitors have just posted an update on the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral boundaries. The case, which was to be heard today, has been adjourned on request of the Defendants. The case is now to belisted for mention again next Tuesday (8th May).

    Perhaps I am overly cynical and maybe I’m jumping at shadows but I do find it an interesting co-incidence that the Defendants sought the adjourning of this case from the day that Fianna Fail were launching their election manifesto.

    Perhaps I am seeing ill motive in otherwise innocent action given that this adjourment coincides with a week in which the Government parties have been on the back foot and have seen headline after headline tumbling out that make important things like winning an election tricky.

    Certainly it would have made life tricky for Government TDs to focus on the manifesto soundbites on the evening news if all the journos wanted to talk about was a court case about whether they had dropped the ball on protecting democracy.

    Those constituencies that are under represented based on the Census figures should consider their own version of ‘Rock the Vote’ to the tune of the classic Dire Straits track “Money for Nothing”…

    I want one more TD

    Now that I think of it, that song is eminently appropriate given the lack of clarity about the Taoiseach’s financial affairs… which may indeed be perfectly legitmate and above board. He’s just not doing a good job of convincing people that that is the case.

  • Stamp Duty

    Stamp Duty

    Fianna Fail will be announcing today that they will be the abolition of stamp duty for first time buyers and the removal of any ceiling on the value of the property being bought.

    According to the Irish Examiner

    Senior Fianna Fáil strategists hope that this extraordinary change on stamp duty will help shore up support for the party after a terrible first four days of the campaign.

    They also hope it will draw a line under the controversy surrounding the payment of £30,000 sterling in the 1990s to the Taoiseach’s former partner Celia Larkin, by a Manchester businessman whose house they were renting at the time.

    ….so, to distract people from what type of stamp duty resulted in Celia Larkin receiving £30k sterling from Bertie’s landlord the strategic planners have lumped for a manifesto policy that will put stamp duty full square in the headlines for a day or two.

    The fact that the abolition would be backdated to the 30th of April is puported to be a measure to ‘remove uncertainty in the market’.

    This is classic Zapp Brannigan politics. FF have for months resisted proposals to amend the Stamp Duty regime. They’ve postponed the problem until it became a crisis and, lo and behold, the solution arrives in the form of a bribe to the electorate that will cost (according to the Examiner) “several hundred million euros per annum”.

    Given that (as IrishElection.com points out in detail in a manner that reminds me of the end of “The Usual Suspects”) FF has consistently and dogmatically resisted any call to change the stamp duty regime on the grounds that it would:

    • Cost 1000s of jobs
    • Likely as not have no real effect with the money going to developers instead
    • Only amount to auction politics, which FF wouldn’t do

    this represents a U-Turn on a staggering scale. A bit like a famous Danish beer, Fianna Fail don’t do auction politics. But if they did it’d be the best auction politics in the world. And just like said beer, too much quaffing from that trough will have you waking up with a massive headache feeling wretched and wondering what the hell you thought you were doing the night before.

    Irish Elections rightly ask

    Why was this not included in Fianna Fail’s Economic Policy document last week or yesterday?

    To echo Minister Cowen’s own challenge to Fine Gael’s Manifesto – how has this been costed in?
    What happens if there shortfall in growth forecasts? Will first time buyers be given a choice between their stamp-duty free homes or gardaí to police the estate or nurses to work in the local hospital, which may or may not get built because there might not be enough money for a hospital and a primary school.

    If it looks too good to be true it probably is. On Morning Ireland this morning George Lee’s view is that the measure would cause property prices to rise rather than plateau which will not address the underlying economic issue of affordability of housing for first time buyers.

    Hot on the heels of nurses and coppers, it’s the Prison Officers!!

    The Prison Officer’s Association is having it’s conference from today in sunny Sligo.

    Apparently their members are a bit peeved at the Minister for Justice seeking accountability from the prison officers one or some of whom, he claimed, must have been complicit in smuggling in the phone used to ring a national radio programme.

    They’ve pointed out that due to cuts in staff numbers on prison landings overall security is down 20% and that while Sunday visits have been permitted for some criminals no extra staff have been rostered to cover these visits allowing contraband and phones to be smuggled in.

    Remind me again who is responsible for staffing numbers, resources and policies in the Prison Service?

    Could it be the same person who jumped on the bait of the ‘blue flue’ (which had not been mentioned by the GRA) and made the possibility of a ‘blue flu’ an election sound bite?