Monthly Archives: September 2011

Unwanted

I first realised I wasn’t wanted around the age of 9. It was having to get up at 4am to be in a monstrous queue outside an embassy by 5am in the hope of getting a visa for some foreign Western European country that did it. It sticks in your mind when you have to spend most of your summer doing this, aged 9.
The next clue I got aged 10, in Austria, when I had to stay in on the anniversary of Reichskristallnacht for fear of skinheads.
Aged 12, my class mates were talking about all the foreigners and refugees from the wars which heralded the demise of Yugoslavia, who got “free food, and free housing, and even an allowance” and got to “sit around doing nothing all day”. Our teacher pointed at me and asked, “What about Mili?” “Oh,” they said, “Mili’s not like them. Mili’s different.” It left a bitter taste.
More recently, there was Bigoted Woman. A couple of the days ago, it was Ed Balls lamenting how Labour shouldn’t have let the likes of me into this country. In some ways, two thirds of my life have been a long series of microaggressions, based on the simple fact that I was born in a different country.
What is particularly painful is watching this trend get worse, all over Europe. From the neo-fascists in my own native Bulgaria, to policing the way women from certain cultures dress in France, and the persistent barrage of immigration scare stories in the British media, Europe is lurching to the right faster than you can say “flocking Eastern Europeans”. I find it sad, frustrating, and simply unworthy of liberal, democratic Europe in the 21st century.
Maybe one day the low-level racism and xenophobia I encounter on a daily basis will drive me away from this country. Where I’ll go I don’t know. Where are human beings welcome these days?

Ed Miliband’s new clothes – or a pox on all their houses

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Ed Miliband stood up yesterday and said that if Labour were in government right now they would “cut” tuition fees to £6,000 a year. What struck me about this is that no one batted an eyelid – the conversation simply degenerated into tribal mud slinging without even the briefest of pauses to examine the extraordinary claims the Leader of the Opposition was making.
Here’s what gets me about Miliband’s proposal: He is “cutting” tuition fees from a current £3,290 per year to £6,000 per year – and we are to feel grateful for that. Yes, you read that right. It is true that from 2012 onwards tuition fees will be, for most intents and purposes, £9,000 a year – but right now they’re not. Right now Ed Miliband is saying if Labour were in government they would “cut” tuition fees from three grand to six grand. I’m sorry, what?
The second thing that got me was the reaction from Liberal Democrat circles on Twitter to Miliband’s announcement. @markwhiley opined, “I think Labour owe all those Lib Dem members they convinced to sign up on the back of fee increases BECAUSE of them and the Tories, a refund”. There was something almost smug about @aligoldsworthy‘s “What #lab11 are showing this morning is that there isn’t an easy solution to HE funding in current climate. We Lib Dems know that pain.” And @AAEmmerson tweeted at party president Tim Farron, “have you looked at Eds tuition fee proposals? Why arent we out briefing it’s a tax cut for the rich?” (To Tim’s credit, he responded that he didn’t brief but stood behind anything he said.)
“[W]e are only pointing out labour’s opportunism and hypocrisy over fees”, quoth @WoollyMindedLib, before explaining that it was still Lib Dem policy to scrap tuition fees while Labour policy would be to double them.
What none of these vocal Lib Dems on Twitter seemed to understand is that, had their party not broken their election pledge and enabled the trebling of tuition fees, we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – be having this absurd conversation right now. It was the Lib Dems’ support of the coalition government’s policy to treble fees which has ensured that scrapping them is now permanently off the table, and that Labour can come along with a proposal of fees of “only” £6,000 and seem like a saviour.
Right now, the only people I trust on tuition fees are Tories promising full deregulation and privatisation, and the SNP. Everyone else is probably lying.

Two million people to be hit by a chunk of satellite today

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If you’ve ever watched any of Brian Cox’s TV programmes in a room full of physicists^[1], you may have realised that communicating science to the general public is somewhat challenging. Cox’s enthusiasm for “amazing” things is… well, amazing, but his metaphors can be rather clunky and a common criticism from physicists is that he tends to misrepresent or oversimplify areas he is not an expert in. On the other extreme of course, scientific papers are rarely written with the general public in mind and trying to read one may put you to sleep, explode your brain and/or leave you none the wiser after three hours of trying to understand a single page^[1].
Two examples of science coverage struck me this morning which illustrate some of the pitfalls nicely. Let’s start with the bad one.
On the Today Programme this morning, we were repeatedly told that there was a one in 3000 chance of being hit by a chunk of satellite today. Why, wondered I, weren’t we being advised to take shelter in bunkers, not to leave the house, and to take other sensible precautions, given that two million of us would be hit by space junk today? Why wasn’t there mass panic? If one in 3000 people were going to be victims of orbital debris, and there are somewhere between six and seven billion people on the planet, after all, about two million of us were going to make the acquaintance of a piece of NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).
You may think I’m being pedantic here, but I found the way the report was phrased extremely misleading. It felt like, in an effort to reassure the public, someone had picked a big number out of thin air and was throwing it at us in an attempt to stun us before the space junk hit. Looking at coverage of the UARS story across the BBC, it’s extremely patchy:

The headline for this video from BBS Breakfast quotes “1 in 20 trillion”, though the 1 in 3200 figure is in the text. To make matters worse, Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society (the talking head in the clip) makes an on-the-fly conversion between these two expressions of probability without showing his working. You could be forgiven for being confused.
Kevin Yates of the National Space Centre in Leicester does a slightly better talking head job on the Today Programme, converting the 1 in 3200 figure into a 99.7% chance that we won’t be hit.

Ultimately, though, the question remain: 1 in 3200 what?
To be fair to the BBC, a lot of the fault for this farce lies with the original NASA risk assessment. Overall, it’s quite a good document. It gives us the history of the satellite, tells us it’s been defunct since 2005, explains how risk is assessed and communicated. However, on slide 8, we find the following statement: “Estimated human casualty risk (updated to 2011): ~ 1 in 3200”.
Now, what I think this means is the every one in 3200 re-entry events (of this particular type?) is expected to cause human casualties. Context is everything, and context is very much what is missing here.
The second story that caught my attention this morning was the one about the faster-than-light neutrinos. This too I had heard on Today, and I only looked it up on the Guardian because someone posted the “If we do not have causality, we are buggered” quote on Twitter. I was, however, extremely pleasantly surprised by the Guardian’s coverage of this story. They gave me numbers, and those numbers made sense! Even better, they gave me error bars! And they explained the statistical level of confidence! They even linked to the original paper! Still, the story is very readable and understandable to someone with basic numeracy skills. The “buggered” quote does help too, and what I particularly like about this story – and the scientists’ approach to it – is that it gives a very good insight into the uncertainties of scientific research.
Moral of the story: You don’t need to stay indoors today in fear of space junk, but when someone’s presenting you with dodgy science coverage, do call them out on it.

[1] What do you mean this is not how normal people spend their free time?

Making good things happen – the crowdsourcing way

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I first met Morna a few months ago when I wrote an article about her for ORGZine. Little did I know then that a short while later I would be giving up practically every weekend over the course of a month, staying at a hostel in Dundee (What do you mean, bunk beds?), and adding the rather fancy title of “Marketing and Media Consultant” to my LinkedIn profile. That last one raised a few eyebrows at my usual place of work. But such is the persuasive power of Morna – she makes things happen.
I may, perhaps, have thought it slightly insane to attempt to start up a business – even a Web 2.0 business – over the course of three weekends with a bunch of strangers one had found on Twitter. Then again, I appear to be physically incapable of saying no to a shiny project, so I thought “What the heck, it’ll be fun!”
FlockEdu is nothing if not shiny. It’s an educational network, aiming to make education for adults accessible and affordable. For a generation for whom a university degree will cost as much as an average house in some parts of the country, FlockEdu may be a game-changer. As someone who is passionate about education I just had to get involved, bunk beds or not!
As it was, even though the small number of shares in the business I got in return for my efforts are highly unlikely to enable me to give up the day job any time soon, I feel I got at least as much out of participating in the FlockEdu “Sweatshops” as I put into it. I got to meet in person some great people I’d only known from Twitter; I made lots of awesome new friends and potential future business contacts; and I learned a huge amount about technology, media, marketing and running a business over the three weekends.
If you want to know more about crowdsourcing a start-up from the person who invented it, Morna is appearing at a couple of events at Social Media Week in Glasgow next week. And if you have a passion for teaching, learning or both, sign up for a beta invite over on FlockEdu. I think it’s got the potential to change the world.

Homelessness – a drive-by post

Dr Milena Popova

Rogue scholar, warrior poet.