May 31, 2005
French "non" analysed
Useful digest of the French rejection of the European constitution, as reported in Europe's press.
Posted by Mark at 4:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2005
Libération thinks Zarqawi's dead
In an interesting piece about the announcement of Zarqawi's "wounding" Anne Giudicelli, commmenting in the French newspaper Libération, thinks that the coverage (with its tributes and biographies) suggests that he is already dead and the ground is being prepared for an official announcement.
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May 26, 2005
Swimming pools in London
London's swimming pools are closing at the rate of one a year, claim campaigners from the London Pools Campaign. They handed out awards yesterday at Marshall Street Baths - a public pool which closed "temporarily" seven years ago.
Councils hate pools. They are expensive to maintain. There are three boarded up, mothballed pools within walking distance of where I live: Kennington Park Lido (covered in asphalt and used for tennis), Manor Street baths - closed, but still intact (featured in the torture scene in the film "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels") and the Elephant and Castle leisure centre, closed soon after completion when wrongly-specified tiles fell from the roof into the water. It is now used for occasional boxing matches.
Manor Street baths is allegedly no longer owned by the council - the local MP Simon Hughes looks shifty whenever the subject is mentioned. When local residents mention the demand for pools, they are told that there are plans for a pool in Coin Street, Waterloo by the river. Handy for the workers of Covent Garden and Waterloo, no doubt, but less so for the tens of thousands living on housing estates round here.
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Italy stays off-line
Eurostat's survey gives an average EU penetration of 47% (that is: the proportion of the population using the Internet). Britain has 62% - just at the head of the big countries. But Italy lags with 31% - around the level of the new entrants to the EU, Latvia, Polond and Lithuania - and far behind the leaders Sweden (82%).
I haven't seen an analysis of the reasons, but would guess that the failure to de-regulate telecommunications stands at the head of them. It is going to cause Italy increasing damage as time goes on.
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May 23, 2005
Bright pupils in poor schools "fail"
A report finds that bright pupils in the UK suffer when placed in poor schools. They suffer even more dramatically when isolated from other bright pupils.
The study bears out what must be obvious even to the most obtuse educational bureaucrat: you can't cater for all pupils in the same way. The bright pupils do not drag the average pupils along in their wake unless there are enough of them to make a difference. If there are only one or two they will even under-achieve, the report says. I would add that they will be isolated, bullied and tormented.
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UK oats boom
Consumption of porridge in the UK went up by 25% last year. People are eating oats because they don't give you the mid-morning sugar crash you get from eating sugary cereals and bread. The jargon for this is that porridge has "a low glycaemic index". We are doing our bit. After extensive research we have discovered that the best porridge oats are Sainsbury's Rolled Scottish Oats 750g (69p). They take a little longer to cook but have a better flavour than other options, and so require less salt.
Posted by Mark at 8:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 21, 2005
Why MG Rover failed
Rover closes in April 2004 and 5,000 lose their jobs
In an excellent survey Cambridge/MIT business academics Matthias Holweg and Nick Oliver argue that Rover's recent failure was not the result of any of the proximate causes - the collapsed joint venture with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, poor customer satisfaction, the selfish behaviour of the Phoenix Holdings, the lack of a government bailout.
Rover's problems stemmed instead from the failure of the company's 1960s founders to understand the economics of car production.
Building cars is a low margin business (typically 3% or less of the capital employed). There are high barriers to entry because of the costs of developing new products. Existing manufacturers succeed by achieving economies of scale. These economies of scale are generally thought to kick in when anywhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000-plus cars a year are being built. From a late eighties figure of 450,000 Rover's sales fell steadily to 107,000 last year. It is important, when producing this number of cars that there is the maximum re-use of components between different models and to keep variations to a minimum. VW has been good at this; MG Rover has not.
MG Rover grew out of the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BMC). It was created in 1968 from the many competing companies of Austin, Rover, Alvis, Triumph, Riley, Wolseley etc. These amalgamations should have created economies of scale - in the US, GM had similar origins - but senior management kept their "Austin" or "Rover" identities and refused to co-operate in sharing the components necessary to achieve those economies of scale. The result was a persistent lack of profits, which starved the company of the money necessary to invest.
The BLMC Mini - the lack of standardisation meant that it sold at negative margin
The famous industrial unrest of the late sixties and early seventies occurred also in France (at Renault) and in Italy (at Fiat). There were similar problems with build quality. These problems were not peculiar to Britain and were not in themselves critical in destroying the British car industry. What destroyed it was that lack of profitability.
Government got involved ...
The management had not taken the tough decisions when they could. Those decision became tougher after 1968 when government got involved more and more in running the business, encouraging the mergers with tax-breaks, and eventually putting in the then enormous sum of £2bn in the mid-seventies to nationalise the company. Government ownership provided the opportunity for the car industry to become the forum for politically-motivated agitators like Derek Robinson ("Red Robbo") who was involved in 523 incidents of industrial unrest between 1978/78. But again, this was not in itself the cause of British Leyland's problems.
There were two later moments, the authors report, that might have saved the company. The first was the joint venture with Honda, which was a great success, introducing modern Japanese technology and build methods, and opening up the EU market to Honda. The deal was leading to real progress until British Aerospace sold the company from under Honda to BMW - a much worse fit. British Aerospace claimed they wished to concentrate on defence, but they also lacked appetite for the investments required by the car business (and preferred the fatter margins of government contracts).
The BMW years were a disaster. MG Rover was by now too big to be a niche manufacturer, and too small to be a volume car manufacturer. When BMW took Mini, sold Rover to Ford and kept only MG as the mass car marque, it was clear to some in the industry that MG should exit the volume car business and concentrate on its popular sports car (as Alchemy partners proposed). Instead the sentimental desire to keep a volume car business going (and the union's position on redundancy payments, which would have broken Alchemy's business model) led to the deal with Phoenix, who promised to maintain jobs and plants. The failure to make the Alchemy deal work, the authors imply, was another spurned reprieve.
The Phoenix managers knew that they had to get a joint venture going, but fannied around and made stupid decisions like spending money on an Italian sports car business. (They did sort out their pensions, though). Holweg and Oliver state that the Phoenix deal was pretty much doomed from the first. They spent BMW's £470m dowry, sold off anything that wasn't nailed down (brands, land, the parts business, the finance house) and then ... phut!
What killed MG Rover, concludes the report, was "the massive under-utilisation of capacity". The corporation should have slashed its costs earlier, rationalised its product lines and used the money saved to invest in advanced production techniques. Without wanting to sound like Will Hutton, one can see that the attitudes both of the City (wanting to see dividends maintained) and the government (wanting to preserve jobs in key constituencies) would have been powerful influences against both of these courses of action.
Posted by Mark at 5:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
BBC devotes more attention to populous, poor countries
In a thought-provoking paper Ethan Zuckerman has developed something called a Global Attention Profile (GAP). He demonstrates that countries tend to receive press attention in direct proportion to their economic power from all English-speaking media outlets except BBC news online.
BBC News Online - virtuously - seems to devote attention to countries proportionate to the size of their population.
Posted by Mark at 8:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Google Mini and the world live web
The launch of the Google Mini raises to - to me - intriguing possibility of Google borrowing capacity from its network of users in order to enlist them in the job of storing the unimaginably vast index it will need soon if it is to store not just historic web results, but live ones as well.
What I mean by that is that the advent of RSS implies the possibility (and hence one day the demand) for all sites to report updates live to an index. The problem is that index is going to need to be a vast, vast thing. So much easier to solve this problem with network computing, and in Google desktop and the Google Mini, Google is starting to give itself a potential infrastructure to make this a reality.
Posted by Mark at 8:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
Abandoned baby adopted by dog
From Kenya, the story of an abandoned baby who was successfully adopted by a dog.
There is a considerable literature about the adoption of children by dogs and other animals, which date back to Romulus and Remus. It is all beautifully linked in the website Feral Children. (The site contains news - to me - that the famous Kaspar Hauser's hair was recently DNA-tested and he was found to be - as rumoured - a descendant of the House of Baden.)
Bruce Chatwin wrote a nice piece about one called Shamdev in the book What am I doing here?
Posted by Mark at 5:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft vs. Google
Fascinating Fortune piece about the personalities involved in the Microsoft versus Google war ... Living in the remote technological fastness of London, England I never realised that my ex-Amazon colleague Chris Payne was running MSN search. Good on you Chris - it's a big improvement.
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Attacks on Firefox start
Firefox: it's quicker, it supports RSS, it's got tabbed navigation, it's totally safe - OK scrub that last one.
Firefox identified a security exploit on Saturday which allow it to be attacked by a malicious site. Short term workaround: Go to Options > Tools > Web Features and disable a)Javascript and b)"Allow web sites to install software".
They are working on a fix.
Posted by Mark at 4:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
UK education report advocates switch to Linux
A report for the UK education industry suggests switching to Linux on cost grounds. There are other benefits - not least of which is being able to look at and work on the source code of applications.
Two barriers to this:
1) Microsoft has done a good job selling to the ministry, who administer a £15,000 bounty to schools using MS products. This amount of money represents riches to cash-strapped public sector schools.
2) Open Office - the main productivity option to Microsoft Office here - is still fairly horrible to use. The people in my office who use it complain bitterly about minor errors which make it hang, strange auto-formatting quirks, and its desperate slowness. Microsoft Office has some of these issues itself (and is very expensive) but Open Office needs to reach at least comparable quality for large and conservative institutions to be tempted to make the switch.
Posted by Mark at 4:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 5, 2005
"Little discussion in Washington of the aftermath of military action"
The Sunday Times has printed a leaked memo of the UK cabinet discussion of the future war on Iraq. 23rd July 2002 - ten months after 9/11.
The case for war is described as "thin", the US National Security council isn't interested in asking for UN authorisation, there is little discussion in Washington of what happens after Saddam goes.
Britain votes today.
Posted by Mark at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 3, 2005
Aaronovitch: the case for believing Mr. Blair
Writing in the Observer, David Aaronovitch does his best to defend Blair from the accusation of mendacity. The case for the prosecution derives from the intelligence the government admitted having about Saddam's rockets:
IF Blair knows war is illegal if there is no strategic threat
AND Blair knows that threat is not strategic
THEREFORE Blair knows that war is illegal
Aaronovitch is disingenuous, to put it mildly. The key to the 7th March advice is contained in Aaronovitch's word "probably". As in: "the Attorney General thought that UN Resolution 1441 probably was permissive of military action against Iraq". The chiefs of the General Staff were asking: could they be put on trial for waging an illegal war of aggression? This is the charge levelled - let's not forget - against the Nuremberg defendants.
The attorney general's opinion is that they are "probably" OK. The war is "probably" justifiable. Even though the Security Council had turned down the idea of using military action against Saddam, the invasion could "probably" be defended by reference to the earlier, vaguer motion and its unspecified talk of "consequences".
Aaronovitch then argues that this opinion was "firmed up by the government's assessment of Unscom's report on Iraqi non-compliance". This was the report that said that Iraq was making "substantive progress" towards compliance. (So perhaps the "government's assessment" of this was to place no value on it at all.)
In any case, even the Attorney General's qualification - even that "probably" - was transmitted neither to the Cabinet or the House of Commons.
Old Aaronovitch has done his best, but on this evidence the defendant is still going down. The invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law, because it was not justified by the UN charter, which only allows:
a) military action in self-defence, or response to a "strategic" threat (e.g. the 1962 blockade of Cuba)
b) military action in response to a Humanitarian catastrophe (the 1992 invasion of Somalia)
c) wars sanctioned by a resolution of the security council (e.g. the 1991 international intervention in Haiti)
Tony Blair of course knew this, as did Geoff Hoon, Jack Straw and all the other lawyers in the government. In redacting the legal advice they received they were acting dishonestly. In defending his position Blair has strayed into several statements that even an apologist like Aaronovitch would find hard to describe as truthful: he has claimed that Hoon forgot to tell him (Blair) about the weapons intelligence, he has claimed that he was not involved in the decision to out David Kelly, and he has claimed that the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war never changed.
Posted by Mark at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Google builds an OS?
What if Google could outflank Microsoft and create a kind of virtual OS? This intriguing piece by Molly Wood revisits the old "Net appliance" scenario, this time from the perspective of Google.
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