No. Three cheers. I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but while everyone in the political press was huddling around scraps of gossip from the United States, or pouring abuse on Harriet Harman, the civil service has had a great couple of weeks. Yeah, this blog snarls at Whitehall every time the bell strikes. Its…
Read More Two cheers for bureaucracyCognitive neuroscientists staged an experiment in which subjects were asked to make decisions on whether or not to invest money. It was the classic set-up that demonstrates risk-aversion bias: on each round, the subject could choose between keeping $1 and taking a 50 per cent chance of getting $2.50. Theoretically, you should always take the…
Read More I am the message centre and I am in controlDo we actually have a policy with regard to Afghanistan? The question wants asking. After all, we’ve just had a change of government, and Gordon Brown is apparently willing to appoint people from other political parties or none. But despite this, Des “Swiss Toni” Browne is left in place as secretary of defence, with the…
Read More Does Gordon Brown have a policy on Afghanistan?I finally realised what my Big Idea about the Triesman Scheme for National Phrenology was. It’s that British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to “truthiness”. Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we’ve been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not…
Read More Scienciness!This is an extremely worrying piece of late-Blairite thug politics. More than one Labour MP, it appears, has been briefed before appearing in the House for questions on the NHS National Programme for IT with what purport to be private e-mails from Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the Cambridge Computer Lab. Typically, this…
Read More Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the pressThis is an image of the cockpit of the next-generation Russian air superiority fighter, the Sukhoi 35. (h/t Aviation Week) What strikes me about it is that user-interface design for combat aircraft has caught up with what computer-game programmers thought it was like in 1997. Sukhoi have clearly leapt ahead in the glass cockpit trend…
Read More GUI for Jets