My PhD student Haliyana’s work on photolurking was reported in an article Just can’t get e-nough in the Christmas issue of New Scientist. It has already been blogged by Guy Merchant (and lots of other interesting stuff on cyberculture at his my vedana blog).
politics of water – trouble in paradise
Today I got a mailed posting from Geoff Ellis who is visiting family in Mauritius (see copy at end of this entry)
Water politics is on the rise both because of climate change and competition for the use of rivers that cross borders. Recently I heard that the Dead Sea is drying up, although evidently the Aral Sea may be slowly recovering.
However, this also reminded me how as a child the Free Wales Army were my heroes. I was to small to understand much about it, but I do know they blew up water pipelines. Sadly (so I thought) they were eventually captured and put behind bars and the water pipelines were safe. Now I guess these were acts of sabotage rather than terrorism and in retrospect it sounds rather ridiculous … blowing up oil pipelines, yes, but water?
Being brought up with Cardiff they seemed sort of Welsh Robin Hood-like figures – very romantic.
It was only years later I understood the full story.
When I was nine years old my dad died and after that we lived on a state widows pension supplemented with students (and at one stage Irish navvies) staying half-board. Hard work – hot meals to prepare breakfast and evening, washing, not to mention cleaning the thick orange Cardiff clay from the carpets when the navvies were staying.
Once a year we got the bill for the water rates. There was also a once-a-year bill for the house rates (tax on land/housing), but as we were on low income we got 90% rebate for this, so it was not too bad. But when the water rates came, there was no rebate, and that stage not even monthly payments to spead the cost. Mum was good with money, budgeting carefully and saving for major bills, but still it was a big bill and hard to pay on one go … and for this water tax there was no relief or rebate, no matter your income, you had to pay in full.
It was then years later again and I was renting my own hose for the first time in Bedfordshire … England. When I got my first water rates it was for £60 (it was a few years ago!) and when I asked mum I found hers was for £300. The population in Wales is very spread out, so it is more expensive to transport the water, and hence, I guess, why it cost five times as much.
If Wales has a national resource (once the coal was plundered), it is water … it rains, and rains, and rains! When I was little my dad used to drive us up to visit Brecon, through the coal valleys north of Cardiff and up into the Brecon Beacons, with the vast reservoirs filling the valleys between the mountains. We picnicked beside the streams flowing down the mountains and wondered at the huge dams.
The water from these dams does not flow to Cardiff, the coal valleys or central Wales, but is piped to Birmingham … and as the water flows out, no money flows back. So English water is cheap, and the cost of Welsh water falls heavily on those who can afford it least.
The Free Wales Army deserve a play or a film, a slightly askance view … you cannot present blowing up water pipleines with a straight face, but with a hint of the issue beneath. For me as a child, the politics of water was a painful and serious business.
Geoff’s posting from Mauritius:
water trouble in paradise
L’Avenir, St. Pierre, Mauritius 31 Dec 2006
In this usually quite village of L’Avenir nestled amongst the mountains on the Mauritian plateau, New Years eve is a time for cleaning the house ready to welcome the New Year with fireworks. But this year is different. The road is ablaze at both ends of the village as some of the residents, frustrated by days of water cuts, have taken to Royal Road. They just haven’t run out of water, in the higher parts of the village for 5 days now, some have run out of clean clothes to wear. It is true that the reservoirs are lower this year due to less rainfall than usual over the winter months, but what makes the residents angry is the seemingly unjust way in which the limited water is supplied. In the neighbouring village of Beau Bois they have water and in the small town of St. Pierre a mile away I’ve seen people washing the pavements in front of their houses, no sign of water shortage there. And of course, the hotel swimming pools are full, the greens and fairways of the golf course are lush and I doubt if any ministers or government officials have been washing in a bucket! As one residents told me, making a civil disturbance in the only way to get the water turned back on, no one answers the water board office ‘hotline’ . Whether or not we will be able to wash in 2007 is somewhat in the hands of the gods.
Geoffrey Ellis (UK resident on holiday in L’Avenir with parents-in-law)
footnotes
I’ve just installed the footnotes plugin in my WordPress1 . It seems to work a dream.
I’ve used the following CSS:
ol.footnotes{
font-size:.9em;
color:#666666;
margin-top:0px;
}ol.footnotes li{
list-style-type:decimal;
}
- makes footnotes like this[back]
Saddam’s execution
The images of Saddam Hussein’s execution filled the newspapers this morning as they filled the TV news yesterday. Sadly the manner of the trial and execution seem to have transformed a ruthess dictator into a folk hero.
His execution now robs those who have had loved ones die in other mass executions during Saddam’s rule from knowing the truth. And moreover lets those in the West implicated in many of them off the hook.
I recall during the Iran-Iraq war, the reports in that clarion of left wing journalism, the Reader’s Digest, of the use of chemical weapons against civilian Kurds. Everyone knew about it, except the governments of the West for whom Saddam was an ally against Iran and the Kurds an inconvenince – friends of Iran and troublesome in Turkey. No justice for these families.
And why no trial for the massacres in the South following the Gulf War? Perhaps fear that it would bring back to mind the way we encouraged ethnic civil war in the hope it would topple Saddam without dirtying our own hands.
The hypocracy of the ‘diplomacy’ of the late 20th and early 21st century is sickening. In Iraq as in Yugoslavia, we sow the seeds of ethnic strife and then throw up our hands in horror at the results.
“first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye“
of monkeys and men
In my friend Nadeem’s blog he asks why can’t a woman be more like a man?
well Nad, I should explain, there is a biological basis for this 😉
you will have often have seen remarks by geneticists that say we human beings share 99% of our genes with monkeys.
now also you know that in a man there is that vital Y chromosome that is totally unlike anything in a female cell
well we have 46 chromosomes, so that vital difference means that just over 2% of our genetic makeup is totally different from a woman – we share less than 98% of our genes with women
in other words men are genetically more similar to monkeys than women
and so here is a picture of my favourite monkey:
Dennett’s Sweet Dreams – consciousness and the Turing test
I read Dennett’s Sweet Dreams a few months ago. Although I am also interested in dreams this book is about consciousness … indeed subtitled “Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness”
The book is largely about one message – that a scientific study of consiousness can only take into account third party accessible knowledge about first part experience. In other words I can only base a scientific study on what I can tell of other people’s consciousness from their actions, words and any available brain scanning etc.
Dennett has a meticulous rhetoric, but I found two broad facets of his argument weak, one more about rheteric and one substance.
First somewhat disingenuously he does not say that a scientific study of consciousness would yield a complete account of consciouness, but effectively the implication is there. That is he does not say that consciouness is no more than its phenomenial effects … but implies it.
Second, being a philosopher he focuses on incontrovertible evidence, whereas as scientists and humans often reasonable evidence is sufficient.
The first point is obvious and yet easily underestimated. A ‘scientific’ study of literature could formulate many known literary rules (aliteration, rhyme, etc.) and may even find new ones, and indeed poets in particular are happy to perform such analyses. However, we do not expect such rules to be a complete account of literture.
The second point is more substantive, but does interact with the first.
Dennett takes issue with philosophers who posit some form of non-sentient zombie (often called ‘Mary’) who/which nonetheless behaves otherwise exactly like a human including things that might appear to be conscious. They then say “but of course Mary is not conscious”. Dennett objects to the ‘of course’, which is really a statement about prior beliefs/assumptions (although Dennett, of course, frequently does the same with his beliefs!).
Dennett posits a Robo-Mary which is entirely mechanical/electronic and yet emulates perfectly the brain circuitry of a person and so can work out how the person would react and then reacts similarly. From the outside and by all her (emulated) subjective reactions she appears to be conscious. She would pass any ‘Turing Test’ for consciousness and yet many, perhaps most, would say she is not. The implication (from the first weakness) is that we are no more conscius than she (it?).
Actually I don’t object to the idea that such a creature may indeed be conscious, but I’d need more evidence than I would for a human, not because Robo-Mary is a machine, but becasue she is designed to appear conscious.
Robo-Mary is in fact a Robo-Mata-Hari, a spy, a robot in human clothing.
A good enough actor may convince you he is feeling happy, sad, or in love, and you may not be able to tell the differece between the act and the real thing, but that does not mean happiness, saddness and love are no more than their appearance.
As a philosopher, you cannot have incontrovertible evidence that a person’s emotions are real, not just a facade. However, as a human it would be unreasonable to therefore dismiss all expressions of emotion.
Some (well many) years ago, I worked with people at York who creating one of the first ADA compilers. There was a validation suite of programs that had to compile and run correctly for the compiler to get an official stamp from the ADA standards agency. I used to wonder about writing a program that recognised each of the tests cases and simply spat out the right code for each one. Any other program given to the program would simply print an error message and stop. The program would pass the test suite and could get the stamp as being a validated compiler, and yet would be completely useless. It would be a cheat ADA compiler.
Imagine if I sold such a cheat compiler. Any judge would regard it as fraud – whilst it passed the test, it is clearly not an ADA compiler. The test is there to validate things that are designed to be ADA compilers, not things designed to pass the test. So, the cheat ADA compiler is not adequately validated by the test, just becase it is designed to pass it.
Robo-Mary is designed to pass the consciousness test … indeed any consciousness test. We perhaps could never incontrovertibly tell whether Robo-Mary was conscious or simply acting conscious. However, when faced with another human being, an ordinary Mary, who is not designed specifically to appear conscious, it is reasonable to assume that she experiences similar things to me when she describes her experience in similar terms. I can never incontrovertibly tell that Mary is conscious, but it is reasonable to believe so. And it is equally reasonable to base a scientific study on such defeasible observations.
Turning back to Robo-Mary; convincing machine cosciousness would not come from machines designed to appear conscious, but more ‘by accident’. Perhaps one day my intelligent automated vacuum cleaner will say to me “Alan, have you ever watched those dust motes in the sunlight”.