Journalism

Mueller Report

ianwaring Journalism, Newspapers

US media sources are very divided on partisan lines, so I thought I’d read the whole Mueller report. Accordingly, I’ve just finished reading the redacted version.

First 20% was all about the relentless Russian campaigns to insert divisive ads in social media. That included spear phishing Democratic National Convention accounts, downloading sensitive documents and releasing them in batches timed to nullify release of news critical of Trump.

The next 30% catalogues Russian attempts to engage the Trump campaign staff (and most other candidate campaigns) leading up to, and just after the election. Some staff told lies about approaches related to asking support of action in Crimea and support of a UN resolution about Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and were duly prosecuted for perjury. That said, no real success, and no real effect.

The last half of the work related to Trump going completely unhinged and relentless attempts to meddle with the work of the investigation. Given the relatively clean bill of health to the main work, it’s difficult to rationalise the reason why. Trump has largely saved by his staff refusing to carry out the more contentious directives from him. You’re left wondering why Trump went so far given the relatively benign nature of the allegations, given that his reaction was so intense. Got to wonder why.

Nigel Farage is mentioned as having useful folks “in his orbit” in London in approaches to Wikileaks. Still curious on why he visited Assange in the Ecuadonian Embassy at the same time Russia where seeking support for their invasion of Crimea. There were separate threads on large influxes of data into Assanges servers that didn’t appear to come over a network at various times, the implication that carrying data around by hand was a thing. But more questions than answers.

The first 70 pages of the work are the most chilling, and the same behaviours on Social Media appear to happening in the UK right now. Still wondering who is bankrolling Farages campaign and his plane travel – but hopefully some good journalism will give some answers in time.

Overall, Mueller did a quality job in the most difficult of circumstances. I hope that we’ll get a similar exercise asking similar questions this side of the Atlantic. There are lessons to learn here too. In the interim, the same behaviours continue unchecked…

Quality Journalism – UK Oxymoron?

ianwaring Books, Future Trends, Journalism, Metrics, Newspapers, Politicians

I’m writing this the day that John McCain died in the USA – and the most compelling eulogy came from Barack Obama. It’s a rare day right now when people can disagree fervently with each others views, but still hold each other in greatest respect.

In reading “The Secret Barrister”, you come away with a data filled summary of the comparatively and continued poor state of Westminster politics. Of successive abuses to a system of justice by politicians of all colours. To prioritise “PR” on everything to mask poor financial choices with sound bites, while quietly robbing us all blind of values we hold dear. And i’m sure Chris Grayling will receive few Christmas Cards from members of the judiciary based on their experience of him documented in this books pages.

Politics is but only half the story in this. I often muse to wonder where quality journalism disappeared to? There are good pockets in the London Review of Books, and with the work on the Panama Papers by ICIJ – but where else are the catalogue of abuses systematically documented in a data based, consumable way? Where is the media with the same bite as “World in Action” back on the day? It appears completely AWOL.

One of the really curious things about Westminster is that MPs are required to align to the terms of the “The Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament“. If you go down to item 6, it reads “Members have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents”. Now, tell me how the Whip system works there. On the face of it, it is profoundly against the very code in which our democracy is enshrined.

There appears to be no data source published on the number of votes taken, and whether they were “free” votes or directed to be 1, 2 or 3 line instructions from each whips office. Fundamentally, how many votes taken were allowed to rest on the conscious obligations to be exercised by MPs freely, or to what extent were they compelled like sheep through the abattoir voting booths there?

My gut suggests our current government are probably inflicting more divisive whips more often than any UK government in our history, not least as the future interests of our country appear to being driven by a very small proportion of representatives there. The bare complexion of this should be easily apparent from the numbers and some simple comparative graphs – so, who’s keeping count?

Democracy this isn’t. And the lack of quality journalism in the UK is heavily complicit in it’s disappearance.

WTF – Tim O’Reilly – Lightbulbs On!

ianwaring Amazon, Books, Enterprise IT, Facebook, Future Trends, Google, Intellectual Property, Internet, Journalism, Maker Movement, Management, Marketing, Metrics, Money, Patents, Politicians, Privacy, Robots, Shares, Software, Twitter, VCs Leave a comment

What's the Future - Tim O'Reilly

Best Read of the Year, not just for high technology, but for a reasoned meaning behind political events over the last two years, both in the UK and the USA. I can relate it straight back to some of the prescient statements made by Jeff Bezos about Amazon “Day 1” disciplines: the best defence against an organisations path to oblivion being:

  1. customer obsession
  2. a skeptical view of proxies
  3. the eager adoption of external trends, and
  4. high-velocity decision making

Things go off course when interests divide in a zero-sum way between different customer groups that you serve, and where proxies indicating “success” diverge from a clearly defined “desired outcome”.

The normal path is to start with your “customer” and give an analogue of what indicates “success” for them in what you do; a clear understanding of the desired outcome. Then the measures to track progress toward that goal, the path you follow to get there (adjusting as you go), and a frequent review that steps still serve the intended objective. 

Fake News on Social Media, Finance Industry Meltdowns, unfettered slavery to “the market” and to “shareholder value” have all been central to recent political events in both the UK and the USA. Politicians of all colours were complicit in letting proxies for “success” dissociate fair balance of both wealth and future prospects from a vast majority of the customers they were elected to serve. In the face of that, the electorate in the UK bit back – as they did for Trump in the US too.

Part 3 of the book, entitled “A World Ruled by Algorithms” – pages 153-252 – is brilliant writing on our current state and injustices. Part 4 (pages 255-350) entitled “It’s up to us” maps a path to brighter times for us and our descendants.

Tim says:

The barriers to fresh thinking are even higher in politics than in business. The Overton Window, a term introduced by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,  says that an ideas political viability falls within a window framing a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. There are ideas that a politician simply cannot recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.

In the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump didn’t just  push the Overton Window far too to right, he shattered it, making statement after statement that would have been disqualifying for any previous candidate. Fortunately, once the window has come unstuck, it is possible to move it radically new directions.

He then says that when such things happen, as they did at the time of the Great Depression, the scene is set to do radical things to change course for the ultimate greater good. So, things may well get better the other side of Trumps outrageous pandering to the excesses of the right, and indeed after we see the result of our electorates division over BRexit played out in the next 18 months.

One final thing that struck me was how one political “hot potato” issue involving Uber in Taiwan got very divided and extreme opinions split 50/50 – but nevertheless got reconciled to everyone’s satisfaction in the end. This using a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a piece of software called “Pol.is”. This allows folks to publish assertions, vote and see how the filter bubbles evolve through many iterations over a 4 week period. “I think Passenger Liability Insurance should be mandatory for riders on UberX private vehicles” (heavy split votes, 33% both ends of the spectrum) evolved to 95% agreeing with “The Government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control system, so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber”. The licensing authority in Taipei duly followed up for the citizens and all sides of that industry. 

I wonder what the BRexit “demand on parliament” would have looked like if we’d followed that process, and if indeed any of our politicians could have encapsulated the benefits to us all on either side of that question. I suspect we’d have a much clearer picture than we do right now.

In summary, a superb book. Highly recommended.

Politicians and the NHS: the missing question

ianwaring Health, Journalism, Management, Medical, Metrics, Politicians

 

The inevitable electioneering has begun, with all the political soundbites simplified into headline spend on the NHS. That is probably the most gross injustice of all.

This is an industry lined up for the most fundamental seeds of change. Genomics, Microbiomes, ubiquitous connected sensors and quite a realisation that the human body is already the most sophisticated of survival machines. There is also the realisation that weight and overeating are a root cause of downstream problems, with a food industry getting a free ride to pump unsuitable chemicals into the food chain without suffering financial consequences for the damage caused. Especially at the “low cost” end of the dietary spectrum.

Politicians, pharma and food lobbyists are not our friends. In the final analysis, we’re all being handed a disservice because those leading us are not asking the fundamental question about health service delivery, and to work back from there.

That question is: “What business are we in?”.

As a starter for 10, I recommend this excellent post on Medium: here.

Panorama and HSBC: wasted airtime

ianwaring Budgets, Journalism, Money, Tax

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Parking emotions to one side, companies percentage of total government tax income has been relentlessly trending down in every major economy for over 50 years. Given the size of savings needed to support the illusion of austerity to the bond markets (but don’t look too closely at booming public sector debt levels), the content of this weeks Panorama was sold heavily as a “look everyone, large amounts of money squirrelled away by the rich here”. Sounded like an interesting perspective, so I recorded it on iPlayer and watched it on the 40 minute train journey into London this morning.

Unfortunately, largely content free. You could summarise it as:

  • A Whistleblower in an HSBC facility in Switzerland leaked account details of many people holding large amounts of money in accounts there
  • Many people ended up coughing up extra tax money to HMRC as a result of the data leak
  • the bank gave advice to wealthy clients to lower their tax bills through schemes designed expressly for this purpose
  • Bank says they’ve reformed such practices
  • another Whistleblower says in her experience, they have not
  • Director at the centre of managing HSBC at the time was ennobled and hired as an advisor to David Cameron
  • more could be done (lots of see saws between the words “Avoidance” and “Evasion”)
  • err, I think that’s it

It then got surreal when the politician interviewed was one widely known as one whose £1.8m trust fund is fed from her fathers company that pays an effective tax rate of 3%.

So, the pursuit of a journalist who could do a thorough job and come out with some compelling (and actionable) story here remains unfulfilled. In the meantime, a few people are watching my question on Quora for which I can find no answer:

What benefits accrue to the UK by permitting large amounts of money to be held offshore in British Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories?

Any ideas? I sometimes wish I could get John Lanchester (one writer who is thorough and funny too) to have a crack at answering that.

Ians Brain goes all Economics on him

ianwaring Books, Budgets, Future Trends, Journalism, Newspapers, Politicians, Tax Leave a comment

A couple of unconnected events in the last week. One was an article by Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame, with some observations about how Silicon Valley was really one big Psychological Experiment (see his blog post: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_pivot/).

It’s a further extension on a comment I once read by Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB, reflecting on how Salespeoples compensation works – very much like paying in lottery tickets: http://maxschireson.com/2013/02/02/sales-compensation-and-lottery-tickets/.

The main connection being that Salespeople tend to get paid in lottery tickets in Max’s case, whereas Scott thinks the same is an industry-wide phenomenon – for hundreds of startup companies in one part of California just south of San Francisco. Both hence disputing a central ethos of the American Dream – that he who works hard gets the (financial) spoils.

Today, there was a piece on BBC Radio 2 about books that people never get to finish reading. This was based on some analysis of progress of many people reading Kindle books; this being useful because researchers can see where people stop reading as they progress through each book. By far the worst case example turned out to be “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, where people tended to stop around Page 26 of a 700-page book.

The executive summary of this book was in fact quite pithy; it predicts that the (asset) rich will continue to get richer, to the expense of the rest of the population whose survival depends on receiving an income flow. Full review here. And that it didn’t happen last century due to two world wars and the 1930’s depression, something we’ve not experienced this century. So far. The book just went into great detail, chapter by chapter, to demonstrate the connections leading to the authors thesis, and people abandoned the book early en mass.

However, it sounds plausible to me; assets tend to hold their relative “value”, whereas money is typically deflationary (inflation of monetary values and devaluation through printing money, no longer anchored to a specific value of gold assets). Even the UK Government factor the devaluation in when calculating their future debt repayment commitments. Just hoping this doesn’t send us too far to repeat what happened to Rome a couple of thousand years ago or so (as cited in one of my previous blog posts here).

Stand back – intellectual deep thought follows:

The place where my brain shorted out was the thought that, if that trend continued, that at some point our tax regime would need to switch from being based monetary income flows to being based on assets owned instead. The implications of this would be very far reaching.

That’ll be a tough sell – at least until everyone thinks we’ve returned to a feudal system and the crowds with pitchforks appear on the scene.

European Courts have been great; just one fumble to correct

ianwaring Google, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Police, Politicians Leave a comment

Delete Spoof Logo

We have an outstanding parliament that works in the Public Interest. Where mobile roaming charges are being eroded into oblivion, where there is tacit support in law for the principles of Net Neutrality, and where the Minister is fully supportive of a forward looking (for consumers) Digital future. That is the European Parliament, and the excellent work of Neelie Kroes and her staff.

The one blight on the EC’s otherwise excellent work has been the decision to enact – then outsource – a “Right to be Forgotten” process to a commercial third party. The car started skidding off the road of sensibility very early in the process, albeit underpinned by one valid core assumption.

Fundamentally, there are protections in place, where a personal financial misfortune or a criminal offence in a persons formative years has occurred, to have a public disclosure time limit enshrined in law. This is to prevent undue prejudice after an agreed time, and to allow the afflicted to carry on their affairs without penalty or undue suffering after lessons have been both internalised and not repeated.

There are public data maintenance and reporting limits on some cases of data on a criminal reference database, or on financial conduct databases, that are mandated to be erased from the public record a specific number of years after first being placed there. This was the case with the Spanish Gentleman who believed his privacy was being violated by the publication of a bankruptcy asset sale well past this statutory public financial reporting boundary, in a newspaper who attributed that sale to him personally.

In my humble opinion, the resolution of the court should have been to (quietly) order the Newspaper to remove (or obfuscate) his name from that article at source. Job done; this then formally disassociated his name from the event, and all downstream (searchable) references to it likewise, so achieving the alignment of his privacy with the usual public record financial reporting acts in law.

By leaving the source in place, and merely telling search engine providers to enact processes to allow individuals to request removal of unwanted facts from the search indexes only, opens the door to a litany of undesirable consequences – and indeed leaves the original article on a newspaper web site untouched and in direct violation of the subjects right to privacy over 7 years after his bankruptcy; this association should now have no place on the public record.

Besides timescales coded into law on specific timescales where certain classes of personal data can remain on the public record, there are also ample remedies at law in place for enforcing removal (and seeking compensation for) the publication of libellous or slanderous material. Or indeed the refusal to take-down such material in a timely manner with, or without, a corresponding written apology where this is judged appropriate. No new laws needed; it is then clear that factual content has its status reinforced in history.

In the event, we’re now subject to a morass of take-down requests that have no legal basis for support. Of the initial volume (of 10’s of 1,000’s of removal requests):

  • 31 percent of requests from the UK and Ireland related to frauds or scams
  • 20 percent to arrests or convictions for violent or serious crimes
  • 12 percent to child pornography arrests
  • 5 percent to the government and police
  • 2 percent related to celebrities

That is demonstrably not serving the public interest.

I do sincerely hope the European Justices that enacted the current process will reflect on the monster they have created, and instead change the focus to enact privacy of individuals in line with the financial and criminal record keeping edicts of publicly accessible data coded in law already. In that way, justice will be served, and we will no longer be subjected to a process outsourced to a third party who should never be put in a position of judge and jury.

That is what the courts are for, where the laws are very specific, and in which the public was full confidence.

Facebook Mood Research: who’s really not thinking this through?

ianwaring Facebook, Journalism, Newspapers Leave a comment

Facebook Logo

Must admit, i’ve been totally bemused by the reaction of many folks and media outlets I usually respect to this “incident”. As you may recall from other news sources, Facebook did some research to see if posts they deemed as “happier” (or the opposite) had a corresponding effect on the mood of other friends seeing those status posts. From what I can make out, Facebook didn’t inject any changes to any text; they merely prioritised the feed of specific posts based on a sentiment analysis of the words in them. With that came cries of outrage that Facebook should not be meddling with the moods of it’s users.

The piece folks miss is that due to the volume of status updates – and the propensity of your friends to be able to consume that flow of information from their friends – an average of 16% of your status posts get seen by folks in your network (the spread, depending on various other factors, is from 2% to 47% – but the mean is 16% – 1 in 6). This has been progressively stepping down; two years ago, the same average was 25% or so. Facebooks algorithms make a judgement on how pertinent any status makes to each of your friends, and selectively places (or ignores) that in their feed at the time they read their wall.

As an advertiser with Facebook, you can add weight to a posts exposure to show ads in the wall of people with specific demographics or declared interests (aka “likes”). Which can usually be a specific advert, or an invite to “like” a specific interest area or brand – and hence to be more likely to see that content in your wall alongside other posts from friends.

So, Facebook changed their algorithm, based on text sentiment analysis, to slightly prioritise updates with a seemingly positive (or negative) disposition – and to see if that disposition found it’s way downstream into your friends’ own status updates. And in something like 1 in a 1000 cases, it did have an influence.

Bang! Reports everywhere of “How dare Facebook cross the line and start to meddle with the mood swings of their audience”. My initial reaction, and one I still hold, is the surprising naivety of that point of view, totally out of depth with:

  1. the physics of how many people see your Facebook updates
  2. the fact that Facebook did not inject anything into the text – just prioritised based on an automated sentiment analysis of what was written and above all:
  3. have people being living under a rock that they don’t know how editorial decisions get prioritised by *every* media outlet known to man?

There are six Newspaper proprietors in the UK that control virtually all the National Newsprint output, albeit a business that will continue to erode with an ever aging readership demographic. Are people so naive that they don’t think Tabloid headlines, articles and limited right to reply do not follow a carefully orchestrated interest of their owners and associated funding sources? Likewise the Television and Radio networks.

The full horror is seeing output from a Newspaper, relaying stories about foreign benefit cheats, who end up hiring a Russian model to act as a Latvian immigrant, inject alleged comments from her to incite a “how dare you” reaction, add text of a government ministerial condemnation, and then heavily moderate the resulting forum posts to keep a sense of “Nationalistic” outrage at the manufactured fiction. That I find appalling and beneath any sense of moral decency. That is the land of the Tabloid Press; to never let facts get in the way of a good story. That is a part of society actively fiddling with the mood swings of their customers. By any measure, Facebook don’t even get on the same playing field.

In that context, folks getting their knickers in a twist about this Facebook research are, I fear, losing all sense of perspective. Time to engage brain, and think things through, before imitating Mr Angry. They should know better.

What if Quality Journalism isn’t?

ianwaring Amazon, Future Trends, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Open Source, Software, Twitter Leave a comment

Read all about it

Carrying on with the same theme as yesterdays post – the fact that content is becoming disaggregated from a web sites home page – I read an excellent blog post today: What if Quality Journalism isn’t? In this, the author looks at the seemingly divergent claims from the New York Times, who claim:

  • They are “winning” at Journalism
  • Readership is falling, both on web and mobile platforms
  • therefore they need to pursue strategies to grow their audience

The author asks “If its product is ‘the world’s best journalism‘, why does it have a problem growing its audience?”. You can’t be the world’s best and fail at the same time. Indeed. And then goes into a deeper analysis.

I like the analogue of the supermarket of intent (Amazon) versus a supermarket of interest (social) versus Niche. The central issue is how to curate articles of interest to a specific subscriber, without filling their delivery with superfluous (to the reader) content. This where Newspapers (in the authors case) typically contain 70% or more of wasted content to a typical specific user.

One comment under the article suggests one approach: existence of an open source aggregation model for the municipal bond market on Twitter via #muniland… journos from 20+ pubs, think tanks, govts, law firms, market commentators hash their story and all share.

Deep linking to useful, pertinent and interesting content is probably a big potential area if alternative approaches can crack it. Until then, i’m having to rely on RSS feeds of known authors I respect, or from common watering holes, or from the occasional flash of brilliance that crosses my twitter stream at times i’m watching it.

Just need to update Aaron Swartz’s code to spot water-cooler conversations on Twitter among specific people or sources I respect. That would probably do most of the leg work to enlighten me more productively, and without subjecting myself to pages of search engine discovery.

Death of the Web Home Page. What replaces it??

ianwaring Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Google, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Software, Wordpress 1 Comment

Go Back You Are Going Wrong Way Sign

One of the gold nuggets on the “This week in Google” podcast this week was that some US News sites historically had 20% of their web traffic coming in through their front door home page. 80% of their traffic arrived from links elsewhere that landed on individual articles deep inside their site. More recently, that has dropped to 10%.

If they’re anything like my site, only a small proportion of these “deep links” will come from search engine traffic (for me, search sources account for around 20% of traffic most days). Of those that do, many arrive searching for something more basic than what I have for them here. By far my most popular “accident” is my post about “Google: where did I park my car?”. This is a feature of Google Now on my Nexus 5 handset, but I guess many folks are just tapping that query into Google’s search box absolutely raw (and raw Google will be clueless – you need a handset reporting your GPS location and the fact it sensed your transition from driving to walking for this to work). My second common one is people trying to see if Tesco sell the Google Chromecast, which invariably lands on me giving a demo of Chromecast working with a Tesco Hudl tablet.

My major boosts in traffic come when someone famous spots a suitably tagged Twitter or LinkedIn article that appears topical. My biggest surge ever was when Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, mentioned my one page PDF that summarised his whole book on LinkedIn. The second largest when my post that congratulated Apple for the security depth in their CloudKit API, as a fresh change to the sort of shenanigans that several UK public sector data releases violate, appeared on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Outside of those two, I bump along at between 50-200 reads per day, driven primarily by my (in)ability to tag posts on social networks well enough to get flashes of attention.

10% coming through home pages though; that haunts me a bit. Is that indicative of a sea change to single, simple task completion by a mobile app? Or that content is being littered around in small, single article chunks, much like the music industry is seeing a transition from Album Compilations to Singles? I guess one example is this weeks purchase of Songza by Google – and indeed Beats by Apple – giving both companies access to curated playlists. Medium is one literary equivalent, as is Longreads. However, I can’t imagine their existence explains the delta between searches and targeted landing directly into your web site.

So, if a home page is no longer a valid thing to have, what takes it’s place? Ideas or answers on a postcard (or comment here) please!