Just stumbled across the National Parking Control website. They are providing DIY parking control kits that you can use to issue parking tickets to people who park 'illegally' on your property. I place these bastards in the same league as Claims Direct and other companies that literally make a business out of other people's misfortune.

Parking enforcement has always been a particularly sensitive topic for me - probably due to the fact that I seem to be particularly susceptible to getting tickets on a more than regular basis. The last was a few weeks ago at 11:23pm just of Haymarket. A week after that I seem to remember being involved in a 2 hour negotiation at the car pound in delightful East India Docks in an attempt to get back a friend's car that she clearly owned but did not have 'correct' documentation for.

Anyway, back to NPC. They issue you with a kit which includes a bunch of signs, stickers, leaflets and then the parking tickets themselves. Tickets are for £60 (if paid within 14 days) and NPC takes £15 per ticket issued. Now you might ask - why bother using NPC when you could just issue your own tickets and take all the money yourself? Well, here's the clever part. If you did that, then you are hardly likely to take someone to court for non-payment of a ticket - it's only £60 after all and you might not even win. Instead NPC promises to do this on your behalf, in effect working as an insurer for you - the ticketer and the enforcer (by way of threat) to the ticketee. 

So how can these guys even operate? You might think that you need some kind of license to be able to issue parking tickets. Apparently not. 

"If the land owner can prove the trespass, then he or she is entitled to recover nominal damages, even if he or she has not suffered any actual loss or damage. If the trespass has caused the land owner to suffer loss or damage, then he or she is entitled to an amount to compensate for that loss or damage."

Thus the circle is complete demonstrating NPC's clever business model which makes money out of the misery of others. To make matters worse, NPC will give you £5 per ticket "for life" if you recommend a friend or neighbour. Yeah, great.

Just saw this ad on TV. Seriously, it's not that hard to wrap gifts!

Physicist Lenny Smith is interviewed in the New Scientist about the 'danger' of climate change prediction models. He says that whilst the models are certainly indicative of the affect of human activity upon climate change, it is dangerous to place too much value on their actual results. 

He also points out that "national research centres are charged with both advancing the science and selling their results commercially". This amplifies the issue of over-valuing the results of the models because when an actual fiscal value is applied to it, there is a danger of a) over-selling - the scientist acts like a sales man and the incentive is tied to a need to have a strong belief that your data is correct, and b) over-valuing of the data by the purchaser - why would you purchase data from the experts if you don't trust that they are correct? This unavoidable human bias undermines the models themselves because they should be *entirely* objective.

Another more simple problem with the models is that they are often too ambitious. Next year a largely government funded body - the UK Climate Impacts Programme intends to run models which will allow the goverment and commercial organisations to 'predict' weather patterns by the hour well beyond the year 2060! We are currently at the stage where we can barely predict the weather accurately for the next week, let alone the next year or 50. I'm not the greatest fan of conventional probability (IMHO it's an artificial man-made concept that was invented to help us understand the world but that's another story) but I can use it to explain how when compounded, the accuracy of a model can be vastly reduced. Imagine that our clever weather prediction model could predict the temperature of the earth in a year's time with a ±1% margin of error. Might not make difference in the short term, but compounded over 50 years there is a ±40% margin of error. That's 1 minus 99% (or 0.99) to the power 50.

Anyway, my point here is not really to argue that weather prediction models are inaccurate or over-valued. I know nothing of this and my reasoning would be simplistic - I'd rather leave this to the experts such as Lenny Smith. I am more concerned about the use of models in a more broad sense. A model by definition is a mathematical or data representation of a scenario in the real world. It is also vastly simplified - of course it has to be since you can't actually model the real world - that in itself is a paradox. Because models are always simplifications, they often fail to take into account various small details and always fail to take into account the details that we don't yet know.

As a conclusion, I am not saying that models are useless. Far from it. I just think it's worth be cautious about relying on them too much. The investment banks relied on massively complex financial models that no one thought could fail - and we know what happened there! - And why did it happen? Because their models like many others weren't able to match the true complexity of the real world.

This is the problem you see ...

Ok ok, this is a serious post.

Some background: Yesterday (November 18th), The Register reported that the BNP membership list had been leaked onto a blog on the internet (my heart bleeds, couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch etc). This contained names, addresses, phone numbers, email, professions and other details of most, if not all of the paid-up members of the party. This is bad [for the BNP] because they are a very secretive organisation - and for good reason - BNP members are not allowed to become members of the police force (though a number of them are) and specific anti-BNP restrictions apply on a number of other jobs in different goverment organisations. This aside, due to the nature of their beliefs, members of the party are not particularly popular amoungst people who are not - e.g. they are branded racists, biggots, far-right nationalists etc. In a follow up today from The Register: BNP party leader Nick Griffin said the party had sent formal demands to web hosts to remove the list. He also said the party had made a complaint to Dyfed-Powys Police - but Dyfed-Powys was unable to confirm this to us. The BNP claims it will be asking for an investigation into breaches of the Data Protection Act, theft and receipt of stolen goods and breaches of the Human Rights Act.

Attempting to tackle this problem by legal means will NOT work. By now there are undoubtably thousands of copies of the document all over the internet. Of course wikileaks has got it's hands on a copy, and The Pirate Bay indicates that there are several hundred/thousand copies floating around on BitTorrent. The problem that they now have is that because of the internet, it has ceased to be a) a problem that can be governed by UK law and b) a problem which can be governed by any law. The other issue is that they don't really have the common moral good on their side either. For one I'm hardly sympathetic towards their plight. 

I find this whole debarcle particularly interesting because it is a clear example of how it is simply impossible to govern the internet. The BNP are now totally screwed because they and their members had something to hide and now there's not a chance (absolutely zero percent) that they're going to succeed in supressing the issue. The only thing they can do is ... well, I can't really think of anything they can do. They're screwed and there's going to be some serious carnage over the next few days!

Om!

Nom nom nom nom nom!

Lunch today was good! Steamed Sea Breem with ginger. Mmmmmmm 

Does anyone know what the point in countersigning a passport application is? Is this going to stop those 'terrible' illegal immigrants we seem to be obsessed with?