So what about that Office for Students and the twat, then? I promised Paul Bernal off the twitter a blog post, and here it is. The thing is, it wasn’t just the ‘social media vetting’ that was the problem with Toby Young. Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about him knew he was wholly inappropriate…
Read More Everyone Hates the Phone Company: The Purpose of the Office for StudentsRemember Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s historical SF novel about the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a real-time planned economy using computers and the ideas of Oskar Lange and Leonid Kantorovich? Sure you do if you’re on this blog. Well, it turns out that it had a dark and twisted 1980s sequel. We already knew about…
Read More That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 yearsCold War nuts should follow Mike Kenner’s Twitter feed if they’re not already. His key shtick is getting interesting documents under FOIA and tweeting them bit by bit. This week, he’s got the national war instructions for the police, from 1977, codenamed POLWIN. This is some pretty bleak stuff, obviously; I can’t imagine instructions on…
Read More …and give reasons in writingHere’s a post, first of a three-part series, from The Monkey Cage about inequality and power. The point Martin Gilens makes is that where a policy has broadly similar support across US income groups, its chance of being put into effect follows a well-behaved response curve with its approval rating. But a policy on which…
Read More The reactionary Internet predates ‘t other unSo, a free, jetlagged afternoon by the pool in Palo Alto, after this experience. What to do? Obviously, hack on some code. I dragged out the lobby analyzer project and got it to actually spit out ministers, lobbyists, and MPs, with their weighted degrees in the network, onto the command line. The conclusions are dreadful…
Read More I cannot begin to theorise what may have caused such a catastrophic malfunction