This is no time for a conservative Conservative

This post has been inspired by two things: the first, more positive one, being a quote shared by Jasmine Conley (do follow her, by the way) and the second being Lord Lawson’s small-minded, small-C-conservative attitude — mainly inspired by the mercenary requirements of pimping his book, I suspect, despite the longevity of the campaign. Maybe it’s out in paperback shortly or something.

Of course in doing so he has abandoned any pretense of positivity; and completely ignores any related problems we can only really address by lowering our dependency on carbon. Moreover by refusing to come up with a positive solution, or even the framework for a positive solution, he has reverted to the worst type of Conservative: unimaginative, reactionary, and curiously sacrificing his economic principles for the sake of a quick quid.

Now I’m not going to get into the debate about climate change, although in the interests of fairness I will outline my position. Far better minds than mine with a far greater understanding of the facts have concluded that human-caused CO2 emissions are contributing in small but subtle ways to climate change. I see no reason to dispute their scientifically derived theories. Scientific theories are testable and tested: scientists hoping to prove something try their hardest to prove the opposite, and, most importantly, provide the means and methods for their results to be independently verified or refuted.

And to all those who have argued that our recent cold snap “proves” that Global Warming is a hoax (including, shamefully, some MPs): go and learn some science and stop embarrassing yourselves. Halfwits. It makes me so angry to see this ignorance so willfully and gleefully paraded. You are the British equivalents of Sarah Palin.

OK; deep breath. And remove the swearwords.

Anyway, back to Lord Lawson. His main argument against acting now on climate change is, from what I can determine, that it would be expensive and we can’t be 100% certain yet that it’s necessary. For someone who ran our Economy (not particularly well, admittedly) I find it wonderfully ironic that he completely ignores the Stern Report. Of course being a Tory politician of the old-school, mathematics is beneath his dignity; but surely he could have compared the cost of doing something now against doing something later? It’s really quite a simple risk calculation.

And his abandonment of free-market principles! This is the perfect opportunity for some “creative destruction” from the Schumpeter school of entrepreneurship (Mark I in particular). Investment into new technology is going to be the key (although that is admittedly more Mark II). And there’s so much to invest in.

One of the main problems with our current, outdated, national grid is that it is designed to work with a relatively small number of large power stations distributing power, and isn’t designed to cope with a large number of small power stations contributing a little. Changing this would be a significant boon anyway. Hell, even coming up with a new way of transporting energy using our current infrastructure would have a huge impact: our distribution system is highly inefficient (hence why the voltage is so high. A-level Physics that) and a shockingly large percentage of power is lost through resistance, escaping as … heat.

Then of course there is the power-generation itself: all “alternative energy” technologies are in their infancies and require investment. There is more than enough room for both State- and private-sector investment: it’s noticeable that Oil companies are re-launching themselves as energy companies, although I would love to find out whether there is any substance to this. And let’s think not be scared to think big. After all, we’re never going to get to Mars on a coal-fired rocket.

To abandon this … well, as someone who is young enough to have to pick up the tab for his generation’s profligacy, I’m nauseated. After having created this mess, they not only refuse to clean it up but they are actively trying to prevent someone else from cleaning it up.

I hope that the current generation of Conservative leadership stick to their current principles and don’t allow themselves to be cowed by this dinosaur into a cowardly, small-minded response. A recurring theme of my posts has been leadership: particularly that I think David Cameron is starting to grok* it, even as Gordon Brown flails around in increasing desperation. This is another leadership challenge, and a test perhaps of the positivity of his Conservatism. It’s also (potentially) a legacy-defining moment. Ignore the haters and do something about it before it’s too late.

*grok: to completely and intrinsically know something; to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with.

Cover-it-Live: changing the world?

A lot of my followers on Twitter may have noticed that I’m plugging Cover-it-Live quite a lot. So: full disclosure: the company I work for has a strategic relationship with Cover-it-Live and I’m sort of in charge of the European Operation.

However this doesn’t detract from the fact that I think this product (and it’s imitators) is in the process of causing a massive paradigm shift in Broadcasting and Media, and possibly further. I just wanted to take a moment and explain why.

First there is the concept idea of “Live-blogging”. Using Cover-it-Live you can live-blog events and discussions. Big match on? Set up a live discussion, complete with goal flashes, polls, pictures and user comments. Similarly with huge events like the recent inability of the UK to deal with the bad weather — Sky News had a viewer window (with user commenting disabled) pulling in Tweets with useful information, and Le Monde used Cover-it-Live to cover the earthquake in Haiti.

The next idea is the concept of a panelist discussion. The best way to think of this is to imagine that when you run an event you are the producer of a talk radio show. You’re in the “studio” and receiving messages (Tweets, comments, etc.) from the “listeners”, and with you in the studio you have some “expert guests”. If you like a question from a listener, you read it out — which is to say, if you like a comment from a reader, you publish it. Your experts can then jump in and answer — which is to say, their comments have been configured to automatically publish. The Times does this very well, attracting top sponsors to monetise their events.

So far so good. But Cover-it-Live has a whole load of other features which move this beyond the world of the media. If you looked at the Le Monde event you will see that they’ve embedded in the live-stream photos and YouTube videos (you can see some screenshots in this gallery too). ESPN loves to throw in polls into their coverage of live events — who was the best player? — a great way to encourage participation.

And … you can now include live video from a webcam in your event.

Bridging the on-air/online gap: Sky News display live chat from the web

Personally I think that this constitutes a massive shift in broadcasting — providing the infrastructure for true web-casting. But there’s (even) more: Cover-it-Live is going to solve one of the biggest issues in the media world, the on-air/online gap. As you can see in the picture, using the Cover-it-Live XML feeds you can now display your web event on the TV. By it’s very nature this could be placed nearly anywhere — just ask your development team! Using the APIs you can equally suck in text messages, or mobile pictures, and display them in your feed. You can in fact manage a truly multi-media, multi-platform event all from one place.

Yeah, this is going to change the world.

Thoughts walking home from another terrible experience on the Northern Line

For some reason this last week the Northern Line has been horrific. I had thought people were still on holiday but apparently everyone who isn’t appears to be jostling for the same space on the same line. Dealing with it tarnishes my soul a little bit every day. It appears to be designed to frustrate — honestly, who put’s a ten minute gap in service at about 8pm going South? What half-wit thought up that little gem?

But I don’t like to rant. Well, I do; but no one likes to read one. Really I wanted to discuss transport in the capital more broadly. I’ve heard before that the average speed of movement through central London hasn’t increased in 400 years and I wanted to try to understand why.

Now obviously we are hampered by our own history in a way that comparable cities aren’t. In Zone 1 in particular our streets are the same as they were since time immemorial, Robert Hooke’s grand plan of grid-like regularity scuppered by the petty venality of London’s property owners — a venality still much in evidence to hundreds of tenants across the capital to this day. Our Tube, the oldest in the world, runs on the same lines as it’s Victorian antecedents. The Central line contorts and writhes across the City, apocryphally to avoid the Vaults of the Bank of England, but more realistically to take advantage of a leasing loophole and save a bit of money.

But such a history should not be dismissed. London’s bus network has been arguably the best in the world for at least the last five years, even if the situation is bleaker across the country (I was delighted to see the recent anti-competition investigations launched into Stagecoach, First, et al.). The night-buses are the great equalisers of the city. We’ve all been part of that happy band of brothers sailing gently home on a busy bus, bailed out after the ridiculously early closure of the Tube, happily surprised by it’s deceptive speed. The man on the Clapham Omnibus — well, these days, he’s probably a trendy media type — has a firmly enshrined place in legal history as a reasonably educated and intelligent man.

Inevitably any discussion of London’s current transport situation leads us to the current policies of our Mayor, Boris Johnson, and his unelected and inexplicably unaccountable advisers; although the policies of the Government of the day (currently Labour) are equally important due to the nature of the beast. Commuter-dom is not a purely local issue and the transport necessities of London are different to the situation in any other town in the country.

This country has a truly terrible recent history with big infrastructure projects. Witness the still-ongoing debate about the Trident renewal plan, or the outrageous equivocation from our current government over our new aircraft carriers — although I will save my criticisms of the MoD and it’s more-than-questionable cosiness with the “private” defence industry for another post though. Look at the delays and cost overruns on the Channel Tunnel, the never-ending sequence of improvement works on the M25 — even the diabolical mismanagement of the current gritting crisis indicates a fantastical managerial ineptitude from all levels of our government. However the national government has only a limited affect upon London’s specific problems.

Yes, yes; commuting is a large and integral part of our problems. All “gateways” into London should be upgraded and improved: what, for example, is happening with the old Eurostar station at Waterloo? Why are we wasting these valuable platforms? And please can someone explain to me what on earth is the point of the now-labyrinthine route around KX underground station? Coming in from the South, going past Victoria or Waterloo or London Bridge, you can see how massively over-crowded each of these becomes during rush-hour. Fortunately we have the CrossRail, hailed as a saviour to a commuting problems. This is probably true for Essex, Surrey and Berkshire although I would ask if there weren’t other areas which would benefit more.

But what about within the M25, for local commuters? Well first of all the current funding gap — a well chosen euphemism for “massive financial mismangement” if ever I’ve heard one — needs to be addressed. The scrappage of the Western Extension of the congestion zone has drained finances with no discernible reward. In fact I’ve noticed (in an extremely unscientific survey conducted over the course of about ten taxi and car rides) that the traffic situation is worse. And what was the reason? Basically a good old fashioned bit of Tory Tax-cutting.

And yet the services we receive from TfL are not going to be fixed just because we can afford to run them — although running with the same level of “service” as we currently suffer on budget would be nice. The PPP initiatives have demonstrably not worked: costly, ineffective, and with huge delays. Therefore I would bring maintenance and upgrade work entirely “within house” and remove the profit-seeking middlemen from the picture. Please don’t misinterpret me: I’m all for profit-making free enterprise, yet I would suspect even Milton Friedman would be on my side in this debate (see, for example, Capitalism and Freedom). Simultaneously I would hope that they break Bob Crowe’s tyrannical hold over the transport system: the unions have to realise that their pension demands, for example, are overly-optimistic and that unionisation in the civil service (and their tendrils, offshoots and related bodies) is, to put it mildly, not needed and not supportable.

A fully working Tube service would be an immediate improvement on our current situation but the problem as ever with infrastructure projects in this country is our chronic short-term attitude. We need something which would make the Tube work for at least the next twenty years. We don’t even have air-conditioning, for crying out loud. I’m no engineer (I am a Mathematician) and I’ve no immediate ideas beyond the approaches they’ve already made; and I can appreciate the difficulties in making wholesale changes. But as ever I am an optimist, and I believe that someone will come up with a great solution to all our problems (and I kinda hope it’s me).

I would also look to expand the current Tram network in South London — unfortunately the geography of the region prevents an expansion to the tube network. Anyone who has been on it, or any of the great Tram services across the country or the continent (I’m thinking of Amsterdam in particular here), can testify to their regularity, speed and the fact that they can quite happily go down a High Street.

All of these measures could go a long way. But perhaps we need to be truly radical to solve our problems — a change beyond something we could even begin to imagine. Maybe everyone in the city will out of choice decide to give up their unnecessary car! But something must be done to bring the rest of our creaking transport system inline with the night-buses.