Andrew Orlowski

New Labour’s favourite boffin has lost her job – for a very New Labour reason – and has responded with a classically New Labour riposte.

Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield was made redundant from her post as the Director of the Royal Institution after failing to balance the books. The full-time post itself is being abolished. In return, the Life Peer and WiReD magazine UK star is the suing the science charity for sex discrimination.

Greenfield’s £22m refurbishment of the Institution’s HQ saw it go into the red by £3m, and it had to sell property to balance the books. The refurbishment saw a new cafe bar and restaurant open at Albemarle Street.

Read more at The Register…

"It’s Google’s autistic approach to relationships," one senior phone exec told me this week. "They don’t know what hurt they’re doing, and they don’t care."

It’s nothing personal, guys. Today, some of the biggest tech companies in the world, who thought they were Google’s closest partners, will begin to understand how, say, copyright holders have felt for some time now. For the first time, I suspect, they’ll be enjoying that recurring tingle of amazement and disbelief that (as Chris Castle explained here), Google would even try and pull off such a stunt. It took EMI Publishing six months to realise that Google had claimed digital rights to its songs, for example. But even if the decision to shaft its closest Android partners and biggest customers is an aberration, a one-off, a fling that Google will later regret – then the size of the parties involved means it’s going to have lasting repercussions.

Even before Google started competing with it head on this week, the mobile industry was already wary of the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, and its inclination to hoover up every morsel of service revenue. Now complaining about that may be a bit hypocritical, you might think, if you look at how much of a transaction operators such as Docomo have traditionally retained, and how much they want to keep now. But look at the alternative, Google told the networks and device makers. That Mr Jobs doesn’t leave anything on the table. And besides, we Do No Evil.

Read more at The Register.

at The Register

This piece originally had a much longer section summing up the state of climate “science” – which the CRU leak has verified. The peculiar nature of the problem is why anecdote and modelling play such an important part in the persuasion business.

Scientific theories fall by the wayside when they fail to be the give us the most convincing explanation of the evidence. The onus is therefore on the supporters of the theory to make the demonstrations, not for opponents to ‘trump’ them, and come up with one better. Otherwise we’d still be discussing the distribution of phlogiston, or the particular qualities of ectoplasm.

Prior to 1980, the dominant factor influencing modulations in climate was thought to be the sun. This makes sense, since our primary energy source (unless you happen to live by a volcano vent) is the sun. If the current vogue for greenhouse gases loses favour, the result will not be a dangerous unstable rip in the fabric of space time. It’s simply likely that the consensus will, in the absence of a more compelling explanation, revert to solar influences.

(Ironically Hubert Lamb, the father of climatology who left the Met Office to found CRU in 1972, remained sceptical of the greenhouse gas theory until the end).

Now every scientific challenges is unique, but the manmade global warming hypothesis poses several specific problems for even the most honest scientist. The real battleground is over aspects of the ‘energy budget’ model – and convincing people means overcoming a number of challenges. The theory posits that small increases in CO2 concentrations (advocates prefer the phrase ‘well-mixed greenhouse gases’) have significant amplification effects. It’s accepted that a doubling of CO2 introduces very little warmth into the system – less than a degree centigrade, which is quite toasty and leaves us someway short of Thermageddon. Increasing the CO2 concentration doesn’t make an appreciable difference; since absorption is logarithmic, it doesn’t matter after a certain point.

So positive feedbacks play a central role in the hypothesis, which suggests that with more clouds, more energy is ‘trapped’, permafrost melts, methane is released, and so on, all increasing temperatures further. Global Warming theory rests on these strong positive feedbacks. If the earth absorbs larger amounts of CO2 than predicted – then the theory fails. If the earth radiates more out to space, then it fails. If the negative feedbacks outweigh the positive feedbacks, then the theory fails. As you may tell by now, demonstrating that greenhouse gases play some kind of role in the climate is not difficult. Demonstrating that they play the dominant role is.

Additionally, and to the perennial amazement of newcomers to the field, there is no ‘fingerprint’ or telltale signal that anthropogenically produced gases are the primary forcing factor. A few candidates have briefly starred in the role – C-14 isotopes, or signs of a ‘hotspot’ under the stratosphere – but these are rarely cited now. The ‘smoking pistols’ have proved to be ambiguous, or missing in action. With the human component just a small part (5 per cent) of CO2, and CO2 a small (5 per cent) part of the overall greenhouse gas mix, the challenge is clear.

Hence the increasing dependence, since 1980, of a range of anecdotal evidence, and computer modelling. In instances where simple empirical tests are sufficient to provide a theory, neither is needed. But science has now moved into what critics call a ‘post modern’ phase. In 2001, the IPCC published its Third Assessment Report and observed:

“Our knowledge about the processes, and feedback mechanisms determining them, must be significantly improved in order to extract early signs of such changes from model simulations and observations.”

So, while expressing quite frankly the state of the science, the IPCC was giving increasing weight to computer models as it was to observations. Modelling was beginning to eclipse empirical evidence.

So reasonable doubt exists whether something as significant as clouds are a positive or negative feedback. The Fourth Annual Assessment acknowledged that the “Level of scientific understandings” of non-Greenhouse forcings was low. That was charitable, the science hasn’t really been done yet.

Now it’s clear from the CRU exchanges – particularly between the Wigley and Trenberth “Where did the Warming go?” dialog – that the energy budget isn’t scientifically understood at all.

Not Proven is a reasonable verdict.

Opening Comments for the In The City P2P Panel, Manchester, on Sunday 18 October:

Although Rik [Falkvinge]’s in front of us in flesh and blood, he wouldn’t exist – the Pirate Party wouldn’t exist – without enforcement policies being the primary goal of the music business. The programme bills this as “two sides of a debate”, but as a journalist I get incredibly suspicious when I hear there are just two sides, because usually there are two, three or four more we don’t hear about. Let’s put this into context.

The Pirate Party exists because of a political vacuum. Politicians don’t do politics anymore. Compare them to Lenin and Thatcher, for example, who had ambitious programmes of what society should look like, that cut across social, economic and personal ideas of their time. If you look at what a politician does now, it’s focus groups.

So into this political vacuum you’ll have lots of fringe, single issue groups. The Pirate Party is the first and most successful.

Now Rik specifically evoked some Enlightenment values in his presentation – [individual rights against the church and state]. But I see this as a very conservative and reactionary movement in two quite specific ways. First it’s a techno-utopian movement that’s all about replacing politics. It presents itself as a political party, but it isn’t in politics at all. Politics is about people sitting down and working something out, a consensus.

It’s also reactionary in another way.

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A minor SpinVox investor says the beleaguered voice-to-text services company is up for sale. Invesco Perpetual says it’s cashing out, and it’s written down its investment by 90 per cent.

In a financial statement this week, Invesco disclosed:

More disappointingly amongst the unquoted investments, since the year end, the Company’s holding in SpinVox, the voicemail to text messaging business, was written down in value after the Company chose not to invest in a further funding round, which was dilutive to non-participating investors. The business has been put up for sale, and it is possible that, should a good sales price be achieved, the new valuation may be exceeded.

SpinVox’s PR company had not returned a call at press time.

The ’sale’ is not a surprise, since the clock has been ticking since the most recent re-financing operation. In that funding round, SpinVox received over £15m in new cash, but the price was high. Tisbury hedge fund representative John Botts has been installed as chairman, and SpinVox must repay a £30m bridging loan to Tisbury by 20 December.

Prospective suitor Nuance is unlikely to be interested, having picked up rival Jott earlier this year.

Invesco adds that it now values its £750,000 stake at £76,000, a 90 per cent reduction. Larger shareholders, including hedge funds GLG and Tisbury, and Toscafund’s Martin Hughes, have much more to lose.

That valuation will also make grim reading for any SpinVox staff who preferred to take stock instead of cash recently. In the case of a sale, they’re already last in line to be paid after the debtors, the preferred shareholders and option holders.

Read more at The Register: Russo and Tisbury.

Exclusive A form filed on Friday with Companies House show that Russo was appointed as a director of SpinVox Limited on June 2, 2009. No announcement was made to the press at the time.

However, yesterday Spinvox disclosed that Russo was no longer a director of the firm. Russo left on August 10.

Russo became CEO of Lucent in 2002, and subsequently steered it into its merger with French telecoms firm Alcatel. After the resignation of Carly Fiorina from HP, she was considered the most high-profile businesswoman in the US. She left the firm in 2008.

SpinVox with her high profile and industry experience, and serious high level access, both to operators and to financiers.

However, shortly after her quiet appointment, SpinVox had to defend itself against accusations that its machine translation technology was not what the outside world had been led to believe.

And shortly after that, it appears, Russo beat a hasty retreat from the firm.

The world’s source for global temperature record admits it’s lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow a third party to construct a global temperature record. The destruction (or loss) of the data comes at a convenient time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – permitting it to snub FoIA requests to see the data.

The CRU has refused to release the raw weather station data and its processing methods for inspection – except to hand-picked academics – for several years. Instead, it releases a processed version, in gridded form. NASA maintains its own (GISSTEMP), but the CRU Global Climate Dataset, is the most cited surface temperature record by the UN IPCC. So any errors in CRU cascade around the world, and become part of “the science”.

Professor Phil Jones, the activist-scientist who maintains the data set, has cited various reasons for refusing to release the raw data. Most famously, Jones told an Australian climate scientist in 2004:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

In 2007, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, CRU initially said it didn’t have to fulfil the requests because “Information accessible to applicant via other means Some information is publicly available on external websites”.

Now it’s citing confidentiality agreements with Denmark, Spain, Bahrain and our own Mystic Met Office. Others may exist, CRU says in a statement, but it might have lost them because it moved offices. Or they were made verbally, and nobody at CRU wrote them down.

Read more at The Register.

A while ago I joked that perhaps the RIAA had secretly recruited Charlie Nesson to be its court opponent. Everyone from Ray Beckerman at the “Recording Industry vs The People” blog to Nesson’s old pals at the Berkman Centre at Harvard had advised him to knock it off – or at least not pursue a crackpot defence. But when it comes to the technology utopians, all jokes come true eventually.

Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.

Nice work, Charlie.

Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.

Read more at The Register

Yesterday’s technology demonstration by SpinVox at its Marlow HQ reminded everyone just how hard it is to do voice to text machine translation, and how far away anyone is from automating the bulk of the voicemail translation in the real world.

All of the messages supplied by our small group of visitors tripped through to a human operator. The event was unnecessary and humiliating for all concerned. SpinVox shouldn’t have had to lift its skirts; we didn’t need to be there.

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