Weeknotes: weather forecast, gadgetbahn, accountability
Check out the Met Office's review of 2020's weather:
...the UK’s third warmest, sixth wettest and eighth sunniest year in the UK national series, which extend back to 1884 for temperature, 1862 for rainfall and 1919 for sunshine. 2020 is the only year that features in the Top 10 ranking for all three. .... It is likely that, globally, 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record and that 2011-20 was the warmest decade. ...The UK has warmed by close to 1C, comparable to the global rise in average temperature.
February was the wettest ever for the UK, and the fifth wettest calendar month ever. It was followed by an exceptionally dry and sunny spring - the sunniest on record.
What's the long range forecast?
Relative to 1981-2000 average, 2020 was 0.93C warmer than average. However, the chart above suggests that, by the 2040s and 2050s, this would be counted as a cooler than average year.
For rainfall, annual projections for the UK have a large range as mentioned above. In the context of future climate, a year as wet as 2020 would still be considered a relatively wet year for the UK, but UKCP18 also projects an increase in the likelihood of its occurrence through this century.
... We have seen a number of exceptionally wet winters in the last decade and, due to climate change, we expect UK winters to become wetter. Of the Top 10 wettest winters, four have occurred since 2007 and seven since 1990 – while there has been a 17% increase in the total rainfall from extremely wet days.
David Finnigan writes about art:
Climate is an era, not an issue. We are living today in the early years of the climate era. At this moment, climate change has moved from being a story to being an all-encompassing setting. In that light, trying to make work 'about' the climate is like being a medieval artist trying to make work about 'medieval'.
One consequence of this is that today, even artists who don't mention the climate in their work are still producing 'climate art'. As Mckenzie Wark put it, 'All fiction is Anthropocene fiction, some of it just doesn't realise it yet.' Just as modern scholars read the novels of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen through the lens of the Industrial Revolution, so scholars centuries from now will examine all the art of this era through the lens of the planetary transformation. Even the most lightweight escapist artworks can be viewed in the context of the crisis, in the way that 1930s screwball comedies are often seen as a reaction to the grim realities of the Great Depression.
.... At its worst, climate art and cli-fi tends to rehash the same stale post-apocalyptic tropes. Alex Steffen argues that this kind of apocalyptic thinking is a refusal to see past the end of our old worldview and into the realities of our new existence. 'The need to present a before-and-after narrative landscape obscures the most difficult part of the planetary crisis, which is that it will grow more chaotic, and we will never in our lifetimes have a "new normal".'
 |
| https://twitter.com/dougclow/status/1348943390973550593 |
A lovely three-part essay by Hillel Wayne about software engineering and 'trad' engineering, concluding:
First of all, We software engineers are “really” engineers. All the differences people give between software and “real” engineering don’t accurately reflect what “real” engineering looks like. And the biggest difference, licensure, is a political construct, not a technical one. At the same time, there is a difference between the different ways people make software, and it makes sense to think of software developers and software engineers as distinct concepts. But even then, it’s very easy for a software developer to become a software engineer and vice versa.
Second, we are not special. There are some aspects of software engineering that are unique to software, such as the speed of iteration, loose constraints, and the consistency of our material. But software engineering has far more in common with the other forms of engineering than it has differences. The same ideas that engineers use to advance their craft are equally useful in our own domain.
Finally, there is a lot we can both teach and learn. Engineering processes are more sophisticated than ours in ways that we can extract lessons from. Traditional engineers have a stronger sense of professionalism and responsibility than we tend to. In contrast, our culture is much more open and our communities much stronger than what exists in trad engineering. And our developments in version control have the potential to revolutionize traditional engineering.
 |
| https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1353396713067847682 |
Wow.
Pick your investors wisely, says Charlie O'Donnell - consider their politics:
Some investors who rewrite the history of innovation. They forget that taxpayers funded the creation of the internet and contributed to pharmaceutical discoveries. They call for the end of regulations except for the ones that incentivize them to invest through tax benefits regular people don’t get. They want the government off their backs except when it comes to making sure no one builds affordable housing down the street from them.
These people want to make the technology ecosystem the wild west where anyone that doesn’t have privilege and power just gets run over and I fully believe their views are going to make them less desirable to have on cap tables. ...
Don’t let someone who could give you a term sheet scare you into thinking that de-platforming violence and hate is censorship. Don’t let them tell you that living wages must come at the expense of “worker freedom”. Don’t buy the argument that anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps unless you see them fighting the SEC for you to able to invest $100 into their fund as a non-accredited investor—given how much they’ve been bragging about their top-quartile returns and unicorn investments. Don’t let them tell you that anyone can learn to code and make a living unless they’re willing to put a homeless shelter with internet access in their neighborhood.
There's a new taxonomy for investment capital - introduced by Rob Tashima here
 |
| investor taxonomy |
Gareth Dennis writes about local transport. I learned a new term - gadgetbahn:
If it isn’t autonomous, and it isn’t a metro system, then what exactly is the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro? ... Have you heard the word “gadgetbahn” before? It is a portmanteau coined to describe transport proposals that, to all intents and purposes, ought to be delivered using proven railway technology and yet go out of their way to be anything but a railway. Typically, such systems are intended to distract from or be at the expense of investment in proper, functional public transport.
... Led by Mayor James Palmer, the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority are continuing to progress their tunnelled bus system, bizarrely named the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro or CAM for short, which promises to transform transportation in the region.
Meanwhile, over in Las Vegas, Elon Musk’s aptly named Boring Company has been updating the details of its Loop system..., which is reaching the end of its initial construction phase.
Originally proposed as a tunnelled rapid transit system using platoons of autonomous people movers...is now little more than a lane of traffic buried underground, with a fleet of regular Tesla cars shuttling a few people between stops. Even the much-celebrated autonomy has been dropped, with each vehicle requiring a permanent driver. And the capacity of this system? Merely a fraction of the promised figures.
... This is a useful bit of foresight as to what happens when the glamour of a technology-heavy solution pushes the rather more mundane matters such as “how many passengers will it carry” or “will it actually work” to one side. As I’ve heard it neatly put, “nodes before modes” — in other words, understand what a transport system needs to do and then pick an appropriate type of system that fits.
... Even the name itself is all about the technological whizzgiggery rather than describing the transport network independent of how it moves people about... its “autonomous” features are further undermined by the fact that “driver costs are included, as CAM is expected to operate with drivers on ‘day one’ and move towards autonomous operation at a future date”... In any case, making a huge fuss about autonomy betrays a lack of knowledge of the public transport sector — for example, the Docklands Light Railway has been “autonomous” for decades.
So, what are we talking about?
CAM was selected in an options appraisal process that concluded back in January 2018, undertaken, I’ll add, by the same consultancy that proposed it in the first place. CAM was selected over a more conventional MCS because it supposedly offers the same benefits as an MCS but for a third of the cost.
Around a year later the consultancy in question then published their strategic outline business case, in which the cost of CAM had increased from an optimistic £1.7bn to a more reasonable £4.5bn. This was precisely the cost of the MCS system that they had analysed in the options selection report (with a more reliable estimation as it was based on proven engineering), completely undermining the decision made in that report.
Aside from the cronyism driving pandemic response in the UK, at least, we aren't very good at talking about things that aren't a good/bad binary. This great Twitter thread from Malka Older discusses how values and how to handle scarcity have beenn neglected -
 |
| https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1355132467628429314 |
 |
| https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1352454103927037952 |
Also, this is not good:
 |
| https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1353589712145899521 |
Can the state fix our broken capitalism? Diane Coyle reviews Mariana Mazzucato's latest book:
In the middle of a tough winter, the government enticingly vows to “build back better,” but it’s hard to believe things can go “back” at all.
Yet changing “the system” is difficult. What new form of capitalism should we be hoping for and how can western market economies hope to get there? Fixing challenges of such range and complexity requires co-operation between many people and organisations, all in the context of populist politics and fundamentally diverging views. After all, some countries (the US pre-eminently, but also to a concerning extent the UK) do not have the political consensus or the institutional capability to control a lethal pandemic. What are the chances of transforming business and daily life to deliver, for example, zero-carbon activity, better infrastructure, lower inequality, higher productivity, or the preservation of biodiversity?
... authors such as Thomas Piketty, Walter Scheidel and Peter Turchin have argued, from different perspectives, that only major crises or catastrophes bring about system resets. Conflict is what cuts through the tangle. Perhaps, in early 2021, the world will turn out to be at just such a point. But given that previous resets included world wars and revolutions, this should not be viewed with total equanimity.
... Mazzucato’s new book criticises the narrowness of the philosophy that says the only role for government is to correct “market failures,” stepping in when the private sector cannot deliver adequately by itself... The power of this once-dominant philosophy is already ebbing, however... the Conservative government of Theresa May introduced an Industrial Strategy in 2017... The swathe of official strategy documents could not be clearer about the need for active government in, for example, shaping markets for new technologies.
... It is easy to see why officials like the clarity and sense of purpose that a mission gives to their responsibilities for improving society. ...But there are many choices to be made regarding both missions and intermediate challenges, which plunge us deep into the political domain. ... “Citizen wellbeing” is hard to argue with, but that may just push the disagreements down a level: why target the dementia burden rather than, say, redressing some of the multiple challenges from insecure work to inadequate housing facing the young?
... However, in today’s context, Mission Economy underplays two key issues. One is implementation. “Government failure” is not a myth.
... The other missing issue is accountability for outcomes. Complex problems require a lot of people and organisations to co-operate... For cross-cutting “missions” truly to get off the ground, such accountability must—somehow—be brought to bear across the traditional departmental responsibilities, and across different levels of government. Given the range of actors involved, who would be responsible for achieving a dementia-burden target by 2030, and which legislature would she have to answer to? Who could she require to act? Who would she have power to sack? Who would set the budgets? Leave the answers to these questions vague, and you discourage anyone from taking responsibility, and invite buck-passing and political evasion. The challenges are fiendishly complicated, which is perhaps why catastrophists like Scheidel or Piketty focus on clarifying moments of conflict.
How should we tackle cybercrime in the future? There's a new paper from the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre &friends:
... as we have seen an enormous rise in reported cybercrime in the pandemic, we have paradoxically seen this dominated by issues with a much more local character. Our paper sketches a past: of cybercrime in a turbulent 2020, and a future: of the roles which state law enforcement might play in tackling online harm a post-pandemic world.
... we are witnessing a generational change in patterns of crime – in particular, a large increase in volume online harm.
... we argue that the local character of the rise in volume cybercrime also points to a potentially different future, one which doesn’t rely on centralised command or PREVENT-duty approaches taking on frontline online harm reduction. We argue that in fact, local forces are potentially better-equipped to handling many of these issues, and that ‘democratic’ community policing approaches driven by communities themselves could serve these functions in a more accountable and responsive way. This goes against the grain of traditional wisdom in this field, which sees cybercrime and online harm as a ‘globalised’, high policing issue, whose reach and scope make local responses impossible.
It's hard to work out things from postcodes in the UK, because there's so many different ways we organise local areas for different purposes. At least we can see them all(?) here:
 |
| https://twitter.com/ONSgeography/status/1351183963986001921 |
But then postcodes are problematic anyway. There's a consultation open about how we manage postcode data in the UK - check out this explainer from the Centre for Public Data and respond by 5 Feb.
How do you know which masks are good? Why are we still reliant on random, hand-made cloth masks when better materials are available? Zeynep Tufekci observes that things have not changed as much as you might have guessed since early 2020. I wish better reusable masks were available - the volume of waste generated by disposables used by regular folk not in high risk situations is grim. But we know there are materials that work well in layered cloth masks - this knowledge just doesn't seem available to many mask-makers, and the consumer has no clue what good looks like anyway.
 |
| https://twitter.com/debcha/status/1353466934625505281 |
How can people find the interesting local ventures near them? Adrian McEwen on the Hannah Directory in Liverpool.
Check out the videos of the eclectic talks and demos from Wuthering Bytes in 2019.
Alexis Lloyd et al have written a comprehensive article about where User-centric Design falls down, and design methods to counter this. Digital products don't live in isolation from businesses and wider society.
Food and agriculture are complex too. In this long twitter thread Tom Clarke describes the interplays between sugar beet growing in the UK, the international markets and the subtleties of bee-killing pesticide legislation.
Worth reading the article if you have FT access:
 |
| https://twitter.com/1Br0wn/status/1354104437724377090 |