cloudsoup

The Home Office – the UK’s department of State responsible for internal affairs – has been losing criminals and ex-criminals. According to the law here, foreign nationals who have served a sentence for a crime should be considered for deportation. Not deported, necessarily, but considered for deportation. After three reports published in the last few years had pointed out that this wasn’t happening the Home Secretary Charles Clarke has admitted to Parliament that he and his department have cocked-up and released over a thousand ex-criminals without considering deportation. Moreover, they’ve since lost track of many of these people, including rapists and murderers.

So all hell breaks loose in the press and some people call for the Home Secretary’s resignation. Everyone seems to think, though, that at least these people had served their time and were, even at worst, not being treated any differently from our own home-grown crims.

Well maybe. But in the UK a convicted murderer receives a life sentence: prisoners with life sentences who are paroled are released on a life licence and if the terms of the parole are broken the convicted murderer can be immediately recalled to prison.

So far that seems clear. Now here’s my question. How do you tell if someone’s broken their parole terms and recall them if you’ve lost track of them and don’t know where they are? Here’s how the BBC reported the Home Office’s frantic actions once the story broke:

The Home Office says that 107 have been found and it is now frantically trying to work out what happened to the remaining 900

Unless we suppose the Home Office fails effectively to track convicted murderers only of foreign nationality then it seems they have a rather larger problem on their hands, one that nobody’s talking about yet.

I’ve written about Stephin Merritt’s songs before; the lyrics that bear comparison to Cole Porter, the tunes that probably don’t. Now Norm has discovered 69 Love Songs and calls one of the songs beautiful and extraordinary. So many of them are.

As I’m off to Washington soon here are the lyrics of Washington DC from the same album (listen to an excerpt):

W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby, D.C.!
W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby, D.C.!

Washington, D.C.
It's paradise to me
It's not because it is the grand old seat
Of precious freedom and democracy
No, no, no
It's not the greenery turning gold in fall
The scenery circling the Mall
It's just that's where my baby lives
That's all.

Washington D.C.!
It's the greatest place to be
It's not the cherries everywhere in bloom
It's not the way they put folks on the moon
No, no, no
It's not the spectacles and pagaentry
The thousand things you've got to see
It's just that's where my baby waits for me

W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby D.C.!
W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby D.C.!

Washington, D.C.!
It fits me to a T
It's not the people doing something real
It's not the way the springtime makes you feel
No, no, no
It ain't no famous name on a golden plaque
That keeps me that makes me ride that railroad track
It's my baby's kiss that keeps me coming back
It's my baby's kiss that keeps me coming back

Ex-NUT President John Illingworth:

Probably a third of you and a third of our members will experience mental illness at some time

Here’s why John thinks he was under so much strain:

I tried as a primary head to lead my school in a way that was consistent with NUT principles, resisting imposition of initiatives by Tories and New Labour

That’s a bit clearer. I’m not sure I can think of any other job where a senior employee could deliberately work against the clear and legal policies of his employer without being sacked. What gave John here the idea it was fine – though difficult, apparently – to take direction from his union rather than the people who pay his salary I can’t imagine.

Robert Elms introducing popsters Spandau Ballet at the Scala, Kings Cross:

From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet

This man has made a living from writing…good news for us all.

I’d like a republic and a written constitution, please.

It’s just infantile, this obsequious fawning. I heard today the ex-King Constantine (Greece) describe the Queen as ‘serene’. That’s a rare outing for the word. The BBC (them again) reporters can hardly pick themselves off the ground they’re grovelling on.

And a written constitution when we’re about it. It worked in the States, again, to disallow teaching creationism. In the UK we have faith schools stuffing absolute nonsense into kids. Let’s end it.

That’s right, the BBC Climate Model. According to the BBC an error has struck their model. Yesterday they explained the problem was caused by an error in their downloadable install (the model processes data using Berkeley’s BOINC distributed computing infrastructure); today the story’s changed and problem’s now said to be caused by the model ignoring sulphate emissions.

Whatever the cause of the error and whatever the BBC’s odd way of correcting errors in reporting here’s the question I’d ask: why is the BBC funding climate research?

The majority of climate researchers agree the globe is warming up and the majority again think our CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause. This subject and the representation of research and opinion seems to annoy libertarian and right-wing bloggers but I’m going to believe what the majority of sensible scientists tell me. I don’t know much about climate models and though I thought weather systems were chaotic – in which case I can’t see how it’s possible to provide dependable long-term trend forecasts – I’m not a chaotician. I’ll believe the experts.

But why is the BBC supporting and funding this research? The BBC is a publicly funded broadcasting corporation. It isn’t a science research funding body. This is as baffling as if the Beeb had decided to fund, say, research into plastics or aeroplane wing shapes or better ways of preserving frozen chicken. It’s science research but it’s nothing to do with broadcadsting.

The BBC derives its income from a compulsory, flat-rate (and therefore regressive) tax. I can’t see how it can continue to defend this revenue model if it misuses its funds in this way.

In FS2004 I make a lovely takeoff, climb steadily to 2,000ft, level out, set revs, maintain speed but then however much I try I can’t manage the steep turn within the limits. I think it’ supposed to be at 45-50° maintaining height within 100ft and speed with 10mph either way and I think I’ve done it but I always fail.

Passing this course will be necessary for when I have to take over the piloting of our 747 to Washington after the pilot and all other crew fall victim to the shellfish. Anyone got any hints?

It’s odd, seeing Amazon guess your reading and viewing tastes so well that it suggests you buy things you already have. Today Amazon’s suggesting I buy Talk To Her by Pedro Almodovar, which I have on DVD, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: And Ninety Nine Other Thought Experiments by Julian Baggini which I bought a couple of months ago and When I Was Born for the 7th Time by Cornershop which Helen bought a few years ago.

We drove over to Oxford today to visit my favourite museum, the very peculiar Pitt Rivers.

Named after General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, it’s stuck at the back of Oxford’s Natural History Museum – well worth a visit in its own right and always popular with children because of its impressive collection of dinosaurs – and is an anthropological and ethnographic museum founded on the General’s original collections. And it has shrunken heads.

I often visited the Pitt Rivers when Helen was at Oxford and we lived close to the city but I hadn’t been back for years. Stepping into the gloom – the lighting’s kept very low and the museum offers torches to help you read the hand-written explanatory cards – I could see that next to nothing had changed. The ground floor is a jumble of Victorian display cases, their contents arranged not by geography or history or culture but by theme – so, for example, the section on funerary rituals includes artifacts from Africa and a wrapper for Mrs Oliver’s funeral biscuits, from Yorkshire, with a helpful note suggesting the biscuits were possibly a faint echo of prehistoric cannabalism.

Then there are the shrunken heads. The shrunken head display always has a crowd of people pressing against it and you’ll have to wait a few minutes to get to the front. There you’ll see shrunken sloth heads (used as a replacement for a human when the murdered victim was a relative), real and ghastly shrunken human heads, each about the size of a small orange, blackened with incongruously long and seemingly healthy hair, a few human scalps and instructions on how to shrink your own heads (remove bones, stuff with wet sand and use pebbles to keep the shape).

Towering over one end of the floor is an enormous totem pole – the museum has a large number of artifacts from native Siberians, Canadian Aleuts, Inuits etc, and native Americans. One photo of a group of native Americans names the individuals, apparently at their tribe’s request but instead of noble or romantic names like Running Wolf or Sitting Bull they’re called Shot Both Sides and Coarse Hair.

In the section on Polynesian/Melanesian/Micronesian culture I was looking out for one of their sea maps – a lattice made of straw or reed or sticks representing currents, with small shells attached representing islands – but didn’t find any. Lots of models of outrigger canoes that had to keep the outrigger to the windward side when sailing which caused problems when sailing into the wind because of the need to tack, a problem solved apparently by simply swapping the bow for the stern.

It’s probably a mistake to think of the Pitt Rivers as a delightful anachronism – I’m not sure any self-respecting Victorian museum other than the Pitt Rivers would have resisted the chance to organise its collection to support a particular narrative. The Pitt Rivers doesn’t seem to tell any story except, perhaps, to suggest that all cultures do the same sort of stuff and that we’re all quite peculiar.

Call for review of NHS IT upgrade [BBC],

The £6.2bn upgrade of the NHS IT system needs to be independently investigated, leading computer scientists say.

The group of academics have written to MPs questioning whether the plans are robust enough to meet the demands of the NHS

And then from the original Computer Weekly article:

Suppliers say they have been warned off speaking about the NPfIT, and IT directors in the NHS fear being victimised if they openly express critical views. Academics, who are independent of the NHS, can express their concerns without fear of repercussions
:
Two weeks ago Accenture, the main supplier to two of the five NHS “clusters” in England, announced a predicted write-off of £260m on the contract. The share price of its main subcontractor iSoft, which supplies three of the clusters, has more than halved since it warned at the end of January that its profits on the NPfIT would be lower than forecast.

Another major supplier, BT, has been fined more than once for poor performance. A fourth, CSC, has announced significant job losses and put itself up for sale

So when the Government brings in a compulsory ID system (and it will be effectively compulsory as soon as it’s introduced) that hold biometric data on everyone in the UK, that is queried who-knows-how-many-times per day, should we have confidence in it?

The Government has not successfully completed any of the ambitious computer projects it has embarked on while in power. This does not bode well for the NIR, which is bigger and more complex than any yet attempted. A large number of IT experts have expressed doubts about the potential for success of this database.

No2ID