I’m glad that Malala Yousafzai did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.
This is not because I do not applaud her bravery and support her fantastic campaigning work. Rather, I worry about the effect of thrusting the prize onto someone so young.
Previous Nobel Laureates have reported that winning the prize is incredibly disruptive to their career. Peter Higgs, who was awarded the Chemistry prize last week, tried to escape media inquiries. But they tracked him down eventually,
Our media is full of stories of child prodigies pressurised into excellence and unhappiness. Child actors regularly seem to end up in rehab units, and the career trajectory of child pop-stars like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus makes everyone uneasy. We angst over the plight of Royal babies, born into incredible wealth but no privacy. Continue reading
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Strike one item off the bucket list: I’ve written a WordPress plugin.
Paragraph Level IDs is available now from the WordPress plugin directory, and I’ve created a static page on this site to explain the detail. But in essence, the plugin adds lots of little anchors into the HTML of your blog posts, before each paragraph.
This means that the author and users can link to specific paragraphs in a piece of online text.
This functionality is extremely useful when dealing with long screeds of text. Someone may quote a bon mot, but if you follow the link to where the writer says the quote came from, you often have to trawl through many paragraphs to find the quote and check the context. If a site has anchors, or id attributes embedded in the HTML, the person creating the link can send the reader to the exact paragraph in the text.
This is a very old technique, one that has been present in HTML since its earliest incarnations. But few people use it routinely on their webpages. This plugin offers an easy way to alleviate that inefficiency! Continue reading
Yesternight I went looking for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) apps.
For the jargon wary and the jargon weary, OCR is the process by which a computer converts a scanned image of some text to actual editable, malleable computer text. It’s a useful tool to have on hand, especially if your work (or play) deals with anything literary or historical. Like speech recognition software, its also a bit magical.
I wanted to transcribe a few noteworthy pages of a novel, to paste into my Commonplace Book. Rather that wait a few hours until I could use my office facilities to scan and convert the text, I sought recommendations online and did a search of Apple’s App Store.
It’s been slow on this blog recently. Nothing posted in just over a week.
That’s because I’ve had a busy week at work. English PEN have joined the Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch and Constanze Kurz to sue the British Government at the European Court of Human Rights, over its use of mass surveillance programmes such as Prism and Tempora. The application argues that these programmes are too wide in scope, go beyond anything provided by law, and have ineffective oversight.
Prism, you will recall, is the US spy project that secured access to the data stored by American telephone and internet companies – including tech giants Google and Apple. Tempora, meanwhile, is the British project to physically plug-in to the undersea fibre-optic cables in order to intercept billions of communications (since this involves actual bending of light, I would say that it is this programme that should actually be called Prism, but there we go).
Privacy is a human right guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Convention (ECHR). Free speech is also a human right, Article 10. As I wrote in an English PEN bulletin on Friday, Privacy is a crucial guarantor of free speech.
Activists cannot comfortably share information nor discuss advocacy if they believe the authorities are looking over their shoulder. How can you read and write freely if you suspect that someone, somewhere, is keeping a record of your thoughts?
A central allegation made by whistle-blowers is that the NSA and GCHQ have been sharing data gleaned from these programmes. Since the spies are given much more leeway to snoop on foreigners, the two agencies can avoid warrants and oversight by simply spying on each others citizens, and sharing the result! If this is happening then it is very wrong and shows that the legislation and oversight in this area is not up to scratch.
Our group has chosen to take go straight to Strasbourg because there is no effective remedy in the UK. Other civil liberties groups that tried to challenge the Government over its use of the Prism and Tempora programmes have been sent to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. But that’s a body which investigates complaints in secret, so its no good as a forum for redress, or for calling the Government to account.
A dedicated website has been set up for the campaign. It puts the case in context, and gives an overview of the arguments. We have also posted the actual legal applications. We asked anyone who is incensed by our Government’s complicity in mass surveillance to donate to the legal fund. The campaign raised the £20,000 target in less than 48 hours – this is clearly an issue that the public feels strongly about.
I am very pleased with this image I took, of St George the Martyr’s church, juxtaposed with The Shard at London Bridge.
That is all. Carry on with whatever it was you were doing.