I am presently coming to the end of a holiday in and around Chamonix in the Alps (first time I have been outside the UK for several years) and this consists of some notes on interesting things I have noticed.

They drive on the wrong side of the road fairly consistently, this takes a while to get used to.

Many toilets consist of holes in the ground, many lack soap and some even sinks. The romans had better toilets well over 2000 years ago, toilet technology has made significant advances in the last couple of millennia why not consistently take advantage of this? They have special ceramic things to go around the holes in the ground, why not use one with a more useful shape?
This is not to say that they don’t also have perfectly good working toilets or even that the good ones are not in the majority.

There is much greater biodiversity on the Alps than on mountains in the Lake District or the Cairngorms (my more regular haunts) many of the flowers are familiar from their use in gardens but I don’t think there is a garden centre in the world large enough to fit all the varieties of beautiful plants that there are in the Alps. There are also many insects I have never seen before a few of which are a little vicious including the very large number of ants which one must take great care to avoid sitting near.
Some of this greater biodiversity might be due to the mountains being younger and so more fertile or due to warmer summers but I don’t think that completely explains it. I suspect the fact that the landscape of the Lake District and Cairngorms being an artificial one created by our destruction of the forests which would naturally cover them has some significant effect as will the grazing by lots of sheep. The beautiful mountain meadows in the Alps are I think more naturally occurring with the trees not covering them because of the ground being above the tree line rather than felling.

I am on holiday with my parents who were last here some 27 years ago which allows them to notice some of the more obvious changes that have occurred in that time. Chamonix is about 3 times larger than it was then. The glaciers have clearly retreated a long way in that time and there is much less snow on the tops of the mountains than there was at the same time of year. Here climate change is an obvious “I can see it just by looking” thing (though obviously this could be a localised thing but for that we know it is a global one). We climbed up to a glacier and touched it, in a “do the things your children might not get a chance to do” and a “pictures or it didn’t happen” frame of mind.

The public transport up and down the valley is free, regular, punctual and really rather nice rendering cars completely unnecessary for the tourist. (Apparently funded by a 1€ a night per tourist tax)

Bread and (real) milk won’t last more than a day necessitating regular shopping, bread purchased in the evening may already be stale :-(. Restaurants may not open until 19:00 which is tedious when you need an early dinner.

The Alps are much more work than British mountains, so much more up, so much more down.
The Alps can get far too hot and it seems for the end of July and early August they do so regularly so perhaps June/early July would be a better time to come. Fortunately they are covered in trees which provide welcome shade and relief from the oppressive sunshine. A few hundred meters above the tree-line it generally gets more reasonable as the temperature drop due to height gain combines with stronger winds.

Gorges la Diosaz is wonderfully cool and reasonably priced at ~6€ and a lovely train journey from Chamonix.
L’Arguille du Midi is extortionately priced ~50€ but you would be hard pressed to find a better view.
Mount Chiref in Italy is much less well signposted than the several mountains we climbed in France/Switzerland which were wonderfully well signposted, still worth the climb.

It has been rather a long time since I last made cake, but on Wednesday I made one and people seemed to like it. My cooking is frequently somewhat experimental and this was one of those occasions so I will record the interesting bits.

None of the recipes I looked at put marshmallows in the cake mix before baking the cake. The reason for this is that they float to the top and explode. However I put a ring of mini marshmallows around the bottom edge of the cake tin before pouring in the cake mixture (A mixture using 200g dark chocolate as its main ingredient and very little flour) this make the the edge of the cake more chewy and resulted in an entertaining crown of exploded marshmallows around the edge.

I put most of the marshmallows into the ‘icing’ which was ~150g of very dark chocolate with a couple of bags of marshmallows melted in (glass bowl in boiling water). It takes a long time to melt the marshmallows in with the chocolate and requires a lot of stirring. You want enough chocolate in that it can transfer the heat to the marshmallows properly. I kept mixing until the consistency was a completely even sticky brown. It might be better to stop slightly earlier leaving lumps of partially melted in marshmallows in the mixture to add some more variety to the texture. Decorating with dark chocolate drops might also increase the nom factor.
With a cake containing 350g of chocolate what can go wrong anyway? ;-)
(remember the greaseproof paper on the bottom of the cake tin)

I should fix my camera.

This is another classic Josh Harris book, easy to read, challenging and engaging with serious issues. It is also great to see the way the author has grown further in wisdom since his first book “I kissed dating goodbye”. It shares a similar theme – dating is silly, it is all about commitment.
I picked it up at Departure (the Eden Baptist Church student weekend away) where 10 of those were doing some good offers. We had some great teaching from 1 Corinthians 12-14 on the Church there and I thought I would read a little more about it.
It is quite short with only 129 pages using a large print so can be read in a couple of hours.

The first few chapters are most applicable for people who are ‘dating’ the church which essentially means not totally committed to your local church. It has been a while since that was me – the church is the best thing God ever made. However it is good to be reminded again of the things that we know to be true and to think again of how we can apply that.
Chapter 5 “Choosing Your Church” is a good review of the fundamental things that a church has to have and of the attitudes etc. that are important to have while choosing.
However my favourite chapters were 6 and 7 “Rescuing Sunday” and “The Dearest Place on Earth”. Sunday has been the best day of the week by far for me for at least 3 years now but “Rescuing Sunday” contains lots of practical steps for making it even better. “The Dearest Place on Earth” is a great conclusion by exposition from the end of John and really calls us to go out and live this.

In summary, a good book well worth reading on the heart theology and application end of the spectrum – “you know this is true, now go live like that, you know you want to”.

One of the key differentiating policies between the Liberal Democrats and Labour at the recent local elections was that Labour were considering restricting the proportion of Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) that could occur in a section of road of a certain length. Labour won (at least in my ward) and I think that imposing such a restriction would be a particularly bad idea. Hence it is my democratic duty to try and explain why this is the case and so help prevent this happening. Essentially this proposal is equivalent to a proposal to throw me or people like me out of our houses so I should probably take this reasonably personally.
A House in Multiple Occupation is one in which 3 or more people who are not of the same household are living where household is defined by blood or by marriage or similar.

As I understand it the main reasoning behind restricting HMOs is that they are bad for the community due to lack of involvement by the residents (and perhaps bad behaviour on the part of the residents) and that they tend to be poorly maintained and so be bad for the area (house prices etc.).
Now those things might be true, or at least there might be a statistically significant increase in poor maintenance of HMOs and of lower community involvement by the residents of HMOs or even a higher incidence of reports of antisocial behaviour against people living in HMOs.
While it seems perfectly possible that those things might be the case I have not seen studies that have shown that to be the case I have not seem them (to be fair I have not looked). If there are no such studies then clearly no restriction should be imposed because before you start throwing people out of their houses (or at least saying “no you cannot live there”) you should at least be sure that the reason you are doing that is valid. It would be rather embarrassing to find out that this sort of thing had been done on the basis of a lie.

However even if it is true that residents of HMOs are more likely to be antisocial/anticommunity and take poor care of their property that is still no reason to restrict where residents of HMOs can live. It boils down to a “We don’t want your type around here.” attitude. Sorry I thought we were living in a free society in the 21st century where anyone could come and live next door as long as they are not currently in prison and can afford it. Perhaps if there was some sort of causation between being a bad person and living in HMOs there might be some more justification but even then – really is that the kind of society we want to live in?
So who lives in a HMO, well clearly people who don’t have a big enough household to fill a house or enough money to have a house to themselves and have done so. So mainly single people, probably also mainly young people. So after high levels of unemployment and debt young people are put at a further disadvantage by being discriminated against when trying to find houses to rent not only by the letting agents and landlords who would already much prefer families (and make this clear) but also by their local government. That does not strike me as a good move and seems likely to further alienate a group of people who might legitimately feel let down by society and so rather apathetic about supporting it. There are already quite enough problems to deal with this century without further unnecessary building of inter-generational tensions.

Now I think marriage is important so I would not get married just to be able to get a house but if people start getting told “Well if two of you got married then you could all live here.” some people might decide otherwise. This renders the whole thing unenforcable.

Monitoring which houses are HMOs in order to prevent the concentrations of HMOs exceeding defined thresholds involves some significant bureaucratic overhead which will have its own cost, it also means that the information on which houses are HMOs must be publicly available in order for letting agencies etc. to be able to work this out and hence know who they can rent the houses to. This would be a violation of the privacy of those living in these houses and would be likely to allow targeted advertising (and perhaps political campaigning) based on this information.

So if people are not allowed to live in HMOs what is the alternative? Well they could live in a family house instead. So they could go back and live with their parents (and leave their job, sounds like a great idea) or they could get married but that is not something someone can necessarily do. Or they could live in a house of single occupancy. However that would be a really silly idea.

It is significantly more efficient for a house to have more than one person living in it because then the constant costs of a house (such as kitchen space etc.) can be shared out between multiple people this also reduces the rent, utility bills etc. per person. Leaving more money for other things like saving up for a house or paying off student loans. This also reduces CO₂ emissions and so HMOs help save the planet. There is currently a significant housing shortage in the country and to a significant extent that is due to a reduction in the number of people living in each house rather than to a increase in the number of people. So our current housing shortage could partly be addressed by encouraging people into houses of multiple occupancy or at least to fill spare bedrooms with people.

In summary restricting the number of HMOs is discriminatory, unenforcable, bureaucratic, privacy invading and precisely the opposite of the kind of housing policy we should be encouraging.

So having rejected that policy as a thoroughly bad idea what kind of policies might actually address the problem?
People are more likely to invest in their local community if they feel they have a vested interest in its success and if they do not feel like they are outcasts from it.
If people are not sure how long they are going to be living in a location then it will not feel as worth while for them to get to know their neighbours when they might be moving in a few months or a year. Hence policies which increase peoples assurance that they will be able to stay in their present house long term are likely to encourage community involvement. Policies that make people think they might be forced to move by their local government because of who their neighbours are on the other hand…
Encouraging community is a very important thing to do and a very hard thing to legislate for because fundamentally it is a thing that people need to do collectively. Government can encourage it though and I am sure that there are many things that can be done by government to improve the situation. Society as a whole needs to decide it wants community and then to go out and do that. All of this is hard so we better get started.
Anyone for tea? coffee?

I am mainly going to focus on the council elections in my ward but first a bit more on the top level stuff.
These are mainly local council elections and so while national issues and the politics of Westminster have an effect they are not the primary purpose of these elections, electing inadequate councillors locally in order to send a message nationally is unwise because the skill of the particular individual is more likely to have an effect at the councillor level than at the MP level. There is also a fairly significant divide between national party politics and local party politics and those involved at the two levels may not agree with each other and so should be assessed on their own merits.

In terms of elections where I can’t vote: In Inverness Millburn I would heartily recommend my mum, Anne Thomas, candidate for the Green party. Not just because she is my mum but because I know she really cares, has good policies and has demonstrated her commitment to the local community in various voluntary capacities. In Burley in Wharfedale I would probably vote for Matt Palmer (Conservative and my cousin) if he is standing because though I don’t agree with him on everything he is solid and will do his best to do his constituents proud. In London I would be voting for Ken Livingstone because he was Mayor when I lived in London and did a really good job and while Boris has also done some good things I think Ken would do it better.

However I get to vote in Kings Hedges, and so it is my privilege and duty to do so to the best of my ability.

In terms of the people who have attempted to contact me and persuade me to vote for them there are two candidates Nigel Gawthorpe (Labour) and Neil McGovern (Lib Dem). The latter is currently a councillor and has made at least 6 deliveries of election material (some of it rather repetitive) against Nigel’s two pieces. No other parties of candidates have made any effort so I am inclined to believe both that it is a two horse race between Labour and the Lib Dems. Either the Neil really cares a lot about our vote or he is desperate.

I am a big fan of evidence based policy so lets look at the policies being articulated.

Labour: more dog waste bins, full time dog warden, litter trail from Tesco to C.R.C, Motorist rat run on Ramsden Square and Northfield Avenue [I haven’t noticed a problem on Northfield], fly tipping on Minerva Way, two Lib Dem former councillors have joined Labour, more affordable homes, 20mph citywide, ensure drains cleared, help residents clear snow and ice, start an energy cooperative [nice policy], more public seating.

Lib Dems: saved local library, want new Post Office (claimed closed by Labour), stop Labour’s plan to restrict the number of shared houses in Cambridge [as someone who lives in a shared house that is a fairly major concern for me, Labour haven’t refuted this claim but I haven’t seen them proposing it either], ‘Heatseekers’ to come and help people reduce heat leaking from their homes, money for fixing roads and pavements (apparently Labour did not support increasing this, particularly for pavements [which are quite bad]), Labour taxed Council tenants £1500 to spend in big cities, been councillor for the last four years and hard working. Helpful map and reminder of when and where to vote the day before voting.

Based on all that I am inclined to vote for Neil McGovern (Lib Dem) on the basis that he seems pretty committed and hardworking (at least for elections, I hope that continues throughout the year) and has some good policies though I might send him a letter saying “These were policies that Labour had which I thought were good and were not on your list, please do them too”.

In any case if you can vote tomorrow, do. (07:00-22:00 at a polling station near you, there is no excuse)

Under our present economic system we are reasonably good at minimising costs and finding efficiencies that save companies money. However we do not price negative externalities. So companies and individuals can do things that are bad for other people, or which only become bad when lots of people do them. There is no actual incentive for them to not do this except when there is legislation in place which provides that incentive.
Companies and individuals are good at acting in their own short term best interest but much worse at considering the longer term and the wider system of which they are only a small part. One of the primary duties of government is to ensure that this short term best interest lines up with the long term best interest of the country and the wider world.

Currently various places have carbon trading schemes. These just do not work. Companies are granted the right to produce a certain quantity of carbon dioxide, if they produce less they can sell the spare to other companies, if they produce more they must buy some. The problem here is that if companies can persuade their governments that they need slightly more right to emit then they can then sell this right at a big profit. This also results in the particularly tiresome behaviour where deliberately inefficient systems are built, and then made more efficient and large quantities of money obtained for the efficiencies that have been made (yey carbon offsetting).

Market systems do work but require things to be properly priced, carbon trading doesn’t do that. Instead a carbon tax where each tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent is given a fixed price by a certain quantity of tax being due for its emission. Here I mean tax in terms of the manner of its collection (imposed by government) but what it is is an encapsulation of the actual cost of the emission. The money raised could not just be used for arbitrary purposes but only those which help deal with the problems caused by the emission (investment in renewable technologies, efficiency, retrofitting insulation etc.).

Of course none of that is new, it has all been said before.

However normal schemes would fail as it is not in the best short term ‘economic’ interests of a country to impose an additional tax on carbon dioxide equivalent production. This is because foreign imports will have lower costs due to their emissions not being paid for. Hence to avoid shooting themselves in the foot by destroying their local industries and just relocate the pollution to other countries where it is harder to legislate for its reduction but with moral responsibility for it still lying with the importer. Hence import taxes based on the carbon dioxide equivalent in the country of manufacture and of the transport of it are required.

Such import taxes would as I understand it be illegal under international agreements through the WTO[1]. Tedious. However this is not a normal ‘tax’ it does not exist to raise revenue for a particular government (it should probably be focused on ensuring developing countries move straight to clean technologies without an intermediate dirty state) or to protect industries in a particular country. It is an enforcement of an actual cost, as long as it gets paid it doesn’t matter where. So it could be charged by the government in the country of origin and kept by them and then the importer would not need to charge it. This should hopefully mean that governments don’t get so upset with each other.

I envision three classes of countries, those fully into carbon taxation for whom all production inside their countries and for them in other countries is properly costed. Those countries who export to the first class ones and charge the cost for those exports in their own country. Those third class countries which don’t charge anything and if exporting to first class ones see the import tax charged but don’t get the money from it.
The main additional requirement for first and second class countries is what they do with the money they collect – they must not use it to subsides the very industries they are taxing though they could use it to provide loans for efficiency improvements etc. – as otherwise it would not have the correct incentiveising effect and would be anti-competitive.

That would of course require a huge quantity of political will and is fairly unlikely to happen, however when enough people start dying politicians will be forced to take notice. Unfortunately this will likely be rather late in the day.

The main difficulties are in calculating the quantity emitted and in fixing the cost. Calculation by “assume the worst possible method unless proved otherwise” should give pretty good incentives to provide good proofs of efficient methods and this becomes much easier when these things are priced in at the beginning. For example application when petrol is first petrol rather than misc oil then it is destined to be burnt so apply the tax then. When some coal comes out of the ground – going to be burnt so apply tax. An additional incentive for encouraging people to apply these things early in the supply chain when it is easier is to have a linearly increasing cost where each second it gets ever so slightly more expensive. So we start from 0 and run up to 1 over the course of a year so as to get the bugs out of the system before particularly large quantities of money get involved (10 per household is not much) then draw a straight line between 1 and 100 in price between then and 2050. Picking the currency to price this in is hard as its value is built on rainbows and not tied down to anything. Using the euro of the dollar might make sense but I am not clear as to what the best method would be for this.

[1] Though we do apparently have a tax on the import of components but not finished products which helps destroy our manufacturing industry, see petition to change that.

This begins my series of “ideas I have had”. Time for you to find all the holes in it :-)

(This follows on from discussion in Hall earlier (yes Chris this is for you))

It is fairly common and I think reasonable to argue that what is in the best interests of the economy (at least in the long term) is also in the best interests of the people in the long term. (There is much subtly here and I am not saying I agree)
However it is also frequently argued that what is clearly not in the interests of large groups of people is in the best interests of the economy. For example making large numbers of people unemployed overnight so as to slim down the NHS or similar.

I consider the lecture I had from a City investor this morning and the statement he made that essentially the value of the economy of a country is (modulo many other transient factors) the number of working people times the productivity of those people. In the event of making large numbers of people unemployed instantaneously the number of working people is reduced and due to the sudden influx into the jobs market not all those people will get jobs straight away as there won’t be enough available [0]. Then as a person remains unemployed their productivity decreases with time, they become progressively less useful to the economy and less employable so we have a situation where both the number of people working is reduced and where even when we get those people back into work their productivity will be reduced. So negative impact on the economy. Don’t do that. [1]
Yes management and bureaucracy breeds if left to itself and so periodically it is necessary to go around with a sharp knife, a keen eye and a steady hand and remove unnecessary things. However this should be done carefully at a rate such that those being made unemployed can be reabsorbed into working elsewhere doing something more useful.

Personally I would say that people are far more valuable than any physical thing and all structures of countries and economies and physical objects only have value when they are serving people (using a rather wide definition of both serving and people).

Yes I am procrastinating my dissertation. Well spotted.

[0]: Of course if that is not the case then this isn’t so much of a problem.
[1]: It might be possible to argue in certain circumstances that the effect on other factors (debt etc.) is sufficiently large as to outweigh this cost however I think that is likely to be rather rare.

This post exists because doing this was far harder than it should have been and hopefully this will help someone else in the future.

When creating a bar chart/histogram in gnuplot using the latex driver if there are a lot of bars and the labels for the bars are over a certain length then the labels overlap horribly. The solution to this would be to rotate them and the following LaTeX and gnuplot code allows that to happen and deals with various fallout that results.

The following defines a length for storing offsets of the labels in \verticallabeloffset as this offset will depend on the length of the text. It also stores a length which holds the maximum of those values \maxverticallabeloffset. It provides a command \verticallabel which does hte following: calculates the length of the label, moves the start position across by 1.4em, moves the label down by 2em (to provide space for the x axis label) and then down by the length of the text. It then uses a sideways environment to make the text vertical. Then it uses the ifthen package to work out if the \verticallabeloffset is bigger than any previously seen and if so it sets \globaldefs=1 so that the effect of the \setlength command will be global rather than being restricted to the local scope and then sets it back to 0 (this is a nasty hack).
It also provides the \xaxislabel command which shifts the x axis title up into the space between the x axis and the labels.

\newlength{\verticallabeloffset}
\newlength{\maxverticallabeloffset}
\setlength{\maxverticallabeloffset}{0pt}
\providecommand{\verticallabel}[1]{\settowidth{\verticallabeloffset}{#1}\hspace{1.4em}\vspace{-2em}\vspace{-\verticallabeloffset}\begin{sideways} #1 \end{sideways}\ifthenelse{\lengthtest{\verticallabeloffset>\maxverticallabeloffset}}{\globaldefs=1\setlength\maxverticallabeloffset{\verticallabeloffset}\globaldefs=0}{}}
\providecommand{\xaxislabel}[1]{\vspace{2em}#1}

Having defined that the following allows gnuplot histograms generated with the LaTeX driver to be included in a LaTeX document. It first resets the maximum offset and then ensures there is sufficient space for the labels

\begin{figure}
\centering
\setlength{\maxverticallabeloffset}{0pt}
\include{figs/graphs/comparisonSummary_data}
\vspace{-3em}\vspace{\maxverticallabeloffset}
\caption{foo bar chart}
\label{figs:graphs:comparisonSummary_data}
\end{figure}

The following gnuplot code generates a histogram which uses this to get the labels to display correctly.

set terminal latex size 16cm, 7.5cm
set style histogram errorbars

set output "comparisonSummary_data.tex"
plot "comparisonSummary.dat" index 0 using 2:($3*1.96):xtic("\\verticallabel\{" . stringcolumn(1) . "\}") with histogram title "Mean absolute error for different data sets"


I hope this helps someone. I should get around to actually patching the gnuplot latex driver so that it works properly – but that will have to wait until post exams.

So that might seem a little insulting but it is a statement of fact rather than of opinion. A few days I thought that AV was simply better than FPTP and so “yes” was obviously the right answer. Further discussion and consideration of the issue moved me to the position that since there were no valid arguments at all in favour of FPTP over AV based on methodology (it is simply better in all respects) anyone voting no was either being stupid (believing the deliberate lies being spread by the no campaign) or immoral (voting no in the belief that by supporting an inferior more unfair voting system they were helping to rig elections in favour of their preferred party). Further consideration has led me to believe that even the immoral argument is invalid and so no one who has carefully thought out the issues can vote no.

Before I can explain why you will first need to have any questions you have about methodology addressed. Is AV actually always better than FPTP? Well yes and Tim Gowers (Cambridge maths professor) has written a rather good blog post about AV vs FPTP which has been getting a lot of mileage among the Cambridge students. Having read that and perhaps thought a little about it you will hopefully come to the conclusion that the only reasons you have left for voting no are the ones that I would call immoral – you want to rig the vote in favour of your party because it is easier to rig the vote so that they win with a minority than to actually persuade people that their policies are better than those of the other parties.

Actually those arguments are just stupid as well, at least in the long term – current MPs can perhaps vote no on the understanding that they are only being immoral and not stupid but for the voter that expects to be around (or care about) elections in 20 or more years time then the short term thinking which results in a no vote being a valid option for immoral reasons is no longer valid.

At this point some people might be thinking “Your a lefty I don’t believe anything you say”[0] to which I will make some Peterhouse specific comments: Nicholas Wilson, Nick Dixon-Clegg, Matthew Wells are Conservatives through and through, and are voting YES to AV because it is fair. Owen Woods is a Socialist and is voting YES to AV because it is better. I as a green/orange lefty kind of person who respects people on the right enough that there are even a couple of people in the Conservative party I would vote for am voting YES to AV because it is fairer and better and there is no other sensible option on the table. This campaign is not a party political one it is a campaign between those who are right and those who are afraid of change even for the better.

Consider the two cases where someone might be intending to vote no based on immoral reasons: they are either a Labour or a Conservative voter and think that AV might harm the chances of their party getting into power so often. Well if you are a Labour voter then as Tim Gowers so eloquently puts it “A LABOUR SUPPORTER VOTING FOR FPTP IS A TURKEY VOTING FOR CHRISTMAS”. However what of the Conservative voter?

Well first I will assume that whichever party you support you think that they are the best party, they have the best policies the best principles and are generally better than all the other choices. (If not why on earth are your supporting them.) Then since they are the best then surely eventually they should win under a fair voting system as it will be clear that their policies and principles are better when discussed rationally, over time historically it will become clear (or be possible to make clear) that if the policies of your favoured party had been adopted on a whole range of issues at a whole range of different points in time then the outcome would have been unequivocally better. What I am saying here is that under a fair system democracy should eventually produce the right result if you are correct in your assertion that your favoured party is the best one. It might take a long time, it won’t be easy and things are dynamic so who the best party is in your eyes might change as its current leadership retire and are replaced – but if you believe in democracy then hopefully you believe that given enough time and effort on the side of the best party then they win. (Perhaps I am assuming more faith in democracy than you have, hopefully you have enough that the rest of the argument follows anyway)

Currently the Conservatives might do better under FPTP than under AV in a (fairly small) number of constituencies because though the majority of people in that constituency don’t want them to win they are split between Labour and Lib Dems as to who they prefer first over the Conservatives though the majority would sill prefer Labour over the Conservatives and Lib Dems over the Conservatives. This is the general problem of split voting and is one of the places that FPTP fails really hard because it does not collect enough information from voters to be able to pick the candidate with the most support since FPTP is designed for and works perfectly fine in situations where there are only 2 candidates and fails utterly when there are more than 2 (and there are always more than 2 candidates in constituency elections – even in the speaker’s seat).
However when picking a voting system we are picking something for the long term, we have had FPTP for over 100 years and Australia has had AV for over 100 years. It is not something that we change all that often and so any time the question does have a chance to be decided it needs to be treated seriously with application of long term thinking.
Currently there is not much of a split on the right while there is a fairly large spit on the left, but who can say for sure that in 20, 50 or 100 years from now the situation might be the other way around. For example UKIP might gain support from Conservative party voters, the Lib Dems might move further right (they are currently in coalition with the Conservatives after all) and so pull voters away from the Conservative party resulting in a split vote on the right while Labour mops up everyone left of centre. Then we could have a situation where Labour gained power and were immovable from it for decades despite having only minority support while parties on the right fought over who was the true party of the right. A Conservative voter might hope that Conservative voters are too sensible to let that happen and perhaps they are right but no one can guarantee that.

So we get to make a choice on the voting system now, and we probably won’t get a chance like this again for a long time. While in the short term it might favour particular parties a little to remain with FPTP, AV is clearly better and no one can know the future well enough to be sure that voting no now won’t result in the party they hate jumping up and down laughing on them for decades with a minority of the vote.

Vote AV unless you are stupid, but then even stupid people should be able to understand simple logical arguments ;-)

[0]: Words to that effect were said to me yesterday fortunately there were some Conservatives around to do the persuading.

P.S. though perhaps you might have found this insulting I don’t make any apologies for that, however it doesn’t mean I don’t still like you as a person, I just think you are provably wrong or a little immoral.

On Wednesday the Computer Science IB students demonstrated the projects that they have been working on for the last term. This is my thoughts on them.

Some of the projects were really quite interesting, some of them even actually useful in real life, some of them didn’t work, were boring and simply gimmicks.

Alpha: “African SMS Radio” was a project to create a pretty GUI to a “byzantine and buggy” backend. It could allow a radio operator to run polls and examine stats of texts sent to a particular number. However it didn’t look particularly interesting and though there might be use cases for such a system I think only as a component of a larger more enterprise system and only after the “buggy” backend they had to use had been fixed up/rewritten.

Bravo: “Crowd control” was a project to simulate evacuations of buildings. It is a nice use of the Open Room Map project to provide the building data. It looked like it was still a little buggy – in particular it was allowing really quite nasty crushes to occur and the resulting edge effects as people were thrown violently across the room as the system tried to deal with multiple people being in the same place at the same time was a little amusing. With a little more work it could become quite useful as an extension in the Open Room Map ecosystem which could help it gain momentum and take off. I think that the Open Room Map project is really quite cool and useful – it is the way that data on the current structure and contents of buildings can be crowd sourced and kept up to date but then it is a project of my supervisor. ;-)

Charlie: “Digit[Ov]al automated cricket commentary” this was a project to use little location transmitters on necklaces and usb receivers plugged into laptops to determine the location of cricketers while they were playing and then automatically construct commentary on that. It won the prize for best technical project but it didn’t actually work. They hadn’t solved the problem of people being between the transmitter and the receiver reducing transmission strength by 1/3 or the fact that placing a hand over it reduced it by 1/3 or the fact that the transmitters were not omnidirectional and so orientation was a major issue. They were also limited to only four receivers due to only having four suitable laptops. They used a square arrangement to try and detect location. It is possible that a double triangle arrangement with three corners at ground level and then the other triangle higher up (using the ‘stadium’ to gain height) and offset so that the upper vertices lined up with the mid point of the lower edges would have given them a better signal. Calibrating and constructing algorithms to deal with the noise and poor data would probably have been quite difficult and required some significant work – which IB students haven’t really been taught enough for yet.

Delta: “Hand Wave, Hand Wave” was a project to use two sensors with gyroscopes and accelerometers to do gesture recognition and control. It didn’t really work in the demo and since it had reimplemented everything it didn’t manage to do anything particularly interesting. I think using such sensors for gesture control is probably a dead end as kinect and the like makes just using a camera so much easier and more interesting.

Echo: “iZoopraxiscope – Interactive Handheld Projector” this project was about using a phone with a build in pico projector as an interface. This was obviously using very prototype technology – using the projector would drain the phones battery very quickly, in some cases even when the phone was plugged in and fitting it in the (slightly clunky) phone clearly was at the expense of providing the normal processing power that is expected in an Android phone resulting in it being somewhat sluggish. Since the sensors were rather noisy and techniques for coping with that were not as advanced as they might have been (they just used an exponential moving average and manually tweaked the parameter) they had some difficulties with sluggishness in the controls of some of the games. However I think they produced several nice arcade style games (I didn’t play any of them) and so did demonstrate a wide range of uses. With better knowledge of how to deal with sensors (not really covered in any of the courses offered at the CL) and better technology this could be really neat. However getting a battery powered projector to compete with normal lighting is going to be quite a challenge.
The thing I really like about small projectors is that it could help make it easier to interact in lectures. Sometimes when asking a question or making a comment in lectures it might be useful to draw a diagram which the lecturer (and the rest of the audience) can see and currently doing so is really quite hard. (I should take to carrying around a laser pointer for use in these circumstances).

Foxtrot: “Lounge Star” this was a android app for making air passenger’s lives a little easier by telling them information such as which gate to use etc. without them having to go anywhere and integrating with various airlines systems. As someone who has ‘given up flying’ (not in an absolute sense but in a ‘while any other option (including not going) still remains’ sense) this was not vastly interesting but it could really work as a product if the airlines like it. So: “Oh it is another nice little Android app” (but then associated short attention span kicks in and “bored now”).

Golf: The Energy Forecast this was a project I really liked (it pushed the right buttons) it is a project to predict the energy production of all the wind farms in the country based on the predicted wind speed. It integrated various sources of wind speeds, power production profiles for different types of wind farm and the locations and types of many different wind farms (they thought all but I found some they were missing) and they had a very pretty GUI using google maps etc to show things geographically and were using a very pretty graph drawing javascript library. So I did the “oh you should use the SRCF to host that” thing (they were using a public IP on one of their own computers) and I am sort of thinking “I would really like to have your code” (Oh wait I know where that is kept, snarfle, snarfle ;-) It is something I would really like to make into a part of the ReadYourMeter ecosystem (I may try and persuade Andy he wants to get something done with it).
I love wind turbines all my (small) investments are in them, we have one in our back garden etc. this could be really useful. [end fanboyism]

Hotel: “Top Tips” this was a project to see whether the comments traders put on their trading tips actually told you anything about how good the trade was. The answer was no, not really, nothing to see here. Which is a little disappointing and not a particularly interesting project “lets do some data analysis!” etc.

India: “True Mobile Coverage” this was a project to crowd source the collection of real mobile signal strength data. It actually serves a useful purpose and could be really helpful. They needed to work on their display a little as it wasn’t very good at distinguishing between areas they didn’t know much about and areas with weak signal and unfortunately as with all projects it started working in a very last minute manner so they didn’t have that much data to show. Nice crowd sourcing data collection android app of the kind that loads of people in the CL love. Of course there will be large quantities they could do to improve it using the kind of research which has been done in the CL but it is a good start.

Juliet: “Twitter Dashboard” this was so obviously going to win from the beginning – a twitter project (yey bandwagon) which looks pretty. They did do a very good job, it looked pretty, it ate 200% of the SRCF’s CPU continuously during the demo (but was niced to 19 so didn’t affect other services) – there are probably efficiency savings to be made here but that isn’t a priority for a Group Project which is mainly about producing something that looks pretty and as if it works all other considerations are secondary. My thoughts were mainly “Oh another project to make it easier for Redgate to do more of their perpetual advertising. meh.” (they have lovely people working for them but I couldn’t write good enough Java for them)

Kilo: “Walk out of the Underground” this was a project to guide you from the moment you stepped out of the underground to your destination using an arrow on the screen of your phone. It was rather hard to demo inside the Intel Lab where there is both poor signal and insufficient scale to see whether it actually works. It might be useful, it might work, it is yet another app for the app store and could probably drum up a few thousand users as a free app.

Lima: “Who is my Customer?” this was a very enterprise project to do some rather basic Information Retrieval to find the same customer in multiple data sets. The use case being $company has a failsome information system and their data is poor quality and not well linked together. Unfortunately the project gave the impression of being something which one person could hack together in a weekend. I may be being overly harsh but I found it a little boring.

So in summary: I liked “The Energy Forcast” most because it pushed the right buttons, “True mobile coverage” is interesting and useful. Charlie could be interesting if it could be made to work but I think that the ‘cricket’ aspect is a little silly – if you want commentary use a human. iZoopraxiscope (what a silly name) points out some cool tech that will perhaps be useful in the future but really is not ready yet (they might need/be using some of the cool holgrams tech that Tim Wilkinson is working on (he gave a CUCaTS talk “Do We Really Need Pixels?” recently).

Idea for next year: have a competition after the end of the presentations to write up the project in a scientific paper style and then publish the ones that actually reach a sufficiently good standard in a IB Group Project ‘journal’ as this would provide some scientific skills to go with all the Software Engineering skills that the Group project is currently supposed to teach. (No this is so not going to happen in reality)