I asked one of the volunteers whether the aim was to count species, or members per species per unit of time, or something else. She shrugged and directed me to a man carrying a large folded butterfly net.

While I walked over to Net Man, I noticed several of the other volunteers passing around a glass vial. Each of them sniffed it gingerly, pulled a face of disgust and passed it on to the next volunteer.

Net Man told me the aim was just to count species. For each specimen, if the species were readily identifiable, that species would be entered in the log immediately; if not, the specimen would be collected for a more detailed examination.

At this point, he was interrupted by an eager beaver volunteer, who passed him the vial. You’ve got to sniff it! said Eager Beaver. Net Man swung his torch up to the vial.

That’s a Nicrophorus, he said, A sextant beetle. I’m not sniffing that! Anyway, it’s covered in mites.

Nothing wrong with that, Eager Beaver countered. Go on, sniff it!

They make my skin crawl, replied Net Man. He turned to me with the beetle. I thought for a moment he was going to make me sniff it (which I was quite prepared to; I’ve not sniffed a Nicrophorus before), but he just held it up so that I could see it better. Under the bright torch light, the mites were clearly visible. A quick glance and you might mistake them for patterning, but hold your gaze a moment longer and you’d notice them moving. The flow of their movement reminded me of cows grazing.

It’s basically just a bus, volunteered Eager Beaver. The beetle’s the bus; the mites are the passengers. The people on a bus don’t make your skin crawl, do they?

Well… said Net Man. They laughed heartily. Given the stories I’ve heard about the remarkably strange people my friends have encountered on Cambridgeshire buses, this was a predictable joke.

Net Man returned his attention to the beetle, who, in its spot-lit crystal canister, was now being gazed upon by several curious onlookers.

These beetles, he declaimed, Are remarkable carnivores. They like nothing better to eat than mice. They’ll work together to drag a mouse into a hole in the ground. Then they chew up the insides and lay eggs in the middle so the larvae can eat what’s left of the mouse on the way out.

That must make the mouse’s skin crawl, I suggested. This brilliantly humorous observation evidently marked me out as the most lay of laymen, because it was immediately ignored by all present. Somebody muttered something about going to join his friend who was looking for bats. Far off in the distance, an owl hooted.

I wished Net Man and Eager Beaver good luck in their survey, and resumed my jog. Crossing the narrow span of Coe Fen Footbridge in the gloaming, I very nearly tripped over a man huddled to the railing in dark clothing. He excused himself by explaining he was looking for bats.

Sam,

You may have heard about Jamie Leigh Jones — an American woman who was gang raped by her co-workers while working for a defense contractor in Iraq.

Her employer (KBR, an affiliate of Halliburton) “lost” the rape kit, locked her in a box for 24 hours, and then prevented her from filing charges in court — by invoking a private-arbitration clause in her contract. KBR picked the arbitrator.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) proposed a bill last month to allow victims of rape to bring their case to court. Sounds like an easy vote, doesn’t it? Most senators thought so. All female Republican senators thought so.

But Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) voted no to protecting rape victims — after receiving over $700,000 in campaign contributions from the defense industry and Chamber of Commerce, both of which lobbied against Franken’s proposal because arbitration saves them money.

Today, we are asking people across the country to sign an expression of outrage at Burr’s decision to put campaign contributors above rape victims. We’ll keep the media informed about our growing number of signatures, and shame Burr publicly.

Can you help us shame Burr? Click here to sign — and then please pass this email to others.

(At the link, you can see a great video of Jon Stewart calling out Burr and others.)

We are also releasing a poll we commissioned in North Carolina, which shows Burr voted against the overwhelming majority of his own constituents. 73% of North Carolinians disapprove of Burr’s vote against Franken’s proposal. And after hearing that Burr took over $700,000 from the defense industry and Chamber of Commerce, a majority believe Burr’s vote was affected by those interests.

Thus again, the point we have made over and over: Whether or not you believe Burr sold out, his behavior leads most to believe money buys results in Congress — and that taints our democracy. We need to shame these politicians one by one until Congress realizes that it’s time to replace special-interest-funded elections with citizen-funded elections.

Can you help us shame Burr? Click here to sign — and then please pass this email to others.

We will keep you up to date on our progress. Thanks for helping to Change Congress.
– Lawrence Lessig

P.S. Local and national media have already reported on our poll this morning. Here are some more results:
73% of North Carolina voters disapprove of Burr’s vote against rape victims, only 14% approve.
56% of voters are less likely to vote for Burr in 2010 as a result of his vote, only 11% are more likely.
67% think money buys results in Washington DC, only 14% think it doesn’t.
47% think Burr cast his vote because of the money, only 34% think he thought it was the right thing to do.
52% think Burr’s $700,000 in special-interest contributions “hurt his judgment,” only 34% thought it didn’t.

I’ve signed. While I understand that the question of how to legally prosecute accused rapists in a manner that is fair both to the plaintiff and the defendant remains a matter for disagreement, I’m disgusted anyone with the resources to learn about the issue would vote in favour of allowing corporations to eliminate opportunities for rape trials altogether. Arbitration should, perhaps, be an option, but it should certainly not be the only option: the possibility of pursuing a criminal prosecution against rapists must be allowed to remain open for all citizens. I’m relieved that despite the efforts of Burr and other Republicans (they were all Republicans) who voted against it, Franken’s proposal passed.

In case you want to post it on your own blog or otherwise re-use it, the email above was licensed under CC-BY.

In my dream, the EastEnders universe was real – it wasn't a television show – and Simon and I both lived in that universe and were nodding acquaintances via a mutual friend. Inside this odd dream world I passed Simon outside a bakery that used to exist on Church Street in Stoke Newington (evidently, he had wandered to Stoke Newington from Walford – no great distance in this fictional universe and indeed not a terribly long way in reality). Lingering to overhear a conversation he was having with someone I did not know, I discovered that he was planning – as all EastEnders characters seem to plan at some stage – an act of larceny. Specifically, he was planning to provide unlimited lemonade at a large children's party by means of a bar pump connected to an illegally tapped water supply and barrels of lemonade syrup stolen from a neighbourhood business.

Walking away from the bakery, it struck me that this was not so very different from Simon's normal modus operandi: to deliver a synthetic product to the masses in a way that undermines the very communities from which those masses are drawn, and what is more, to do so in a way that has a fraudulent veneer of generosity.

At a dinner party hosted by the mutual friend later that same day, I confronted Simon about this at a moment when we were in the kitchen away from the rest of the guests, surprising myself by then  launching into a monologue conveying the dislike I have for his career. It went something like this:

“The sad thing is, Simon, this nasty business with the lemonade is really no worse than what you do in your day job; in fact, in your day job you take fewer risks and do more damage. You give society a saccharine experience at a greater cost than its members imagine. The products you push are designed to be addictive and to make a small number of people a large amount of money. They actively promote imitation over innovation, fakery over reality and cult of personality over human understanding.

“What good did Westlife or 5ive do for the music scenes of the countries in which they grew up? Are Girls Aloud really consequential enough to warrant the column inches written about them, or do they merely have the luxury of some of the best publicists money can buy? The difficulty Susan Boyle has had adjusting to the binary nature of the fame you purvey isn't her fault: it's due to the unhealthy nature of that fame. She is, to paraphrase the well-known quote, too healthy to easily conform to the  expectations caused by the sick social paradigm you promote.

“Now, had the money your labels invest in manufactured stardom instead been used in fostering grass-roots art and music scenes perhaps Boyle and those around her would have had a less competitive, commercial vision of musical theatre, thereby allowing her to achieve something of the success of her hero Elaine Paige but organically and without feeling she required the opportunistic and hyper-judgemental attention of TV talent show hosts like yourself or Michael Barrymore.

“And how much other innovation might have come from that sort of investment? Whole new musical genres might have been created! And yet your television shows and the records you release seem always to be shackled to unimaginative cover versions of Unchained Melody. They are derivative to the second or third order. Britain is squandering talent by wasting so much time and money on your shows when the television cameras could be crawling the night clubs, community centres, concert halls, schools and dingy rehearsal rooms where musicians congregate to explore new ideas. Why not foster that collaboration by reporting on the many such artists whose talents are all worthy of exposure to a wider audience instead of creating artificial scenarios in which a handful of people receive adulation and the rest are dismissed because they don't fit the narrow confines of your preconceptions or those of your fellow judges and big-label A&R men? Innovators need exposure to like-minded audiences and colleagues, and yet you have shown little interest in facilitating this, preferring instead to reap the fruits of earlier innovators' sweat.

“Simon, for all that the singers among your selected few represent the kind of sweetness and light that can be found by making the most MOR choices, you are the king of the millenial philistines. Your philosophy is not that of Matthew Arnold, it is that of Andrew Keen, and its damage is felt by every struggling but competent musical artist whose adventurousness you have taught your audiences not to share.”

At that point, he picked up a frying pan from the draining board and made quite seriously as if to hit me in the face with it. I ducked, hefted a heavy glass blender to throw at him if he continued, and said, raising my eyebrows, “Surely you don't think fighting over this is the best way out.”

A sudden click of sharp heels on the tiled floor alerted us to the arrival of our host, who had surely come to see what was detaining us. She, in turn, raised her eyebrows. Under her gaze, we put down our weapons and returned to the dining room.

It’s some time since I’ve posted here with much regularity. A spate of deaths among family friends, the end of a romance I tried to save before concluding it was impossible, a substantial investment of time helping out a friend who was having a harder time of things than me, and a few other significant complications, have been my lot of late. That hasn’t left much room for blogging.

Now, I’m finally turning my attention back to my academic future. Much as I love my current job, my (almost) three year contract finishes in December, and besides, I’ve a research project I’ve been itching to get off the ground and I need to find somewhere that’ll let me do that. Most likely, this will be a university department in the informatics field, but I suppose it could potentially be a forward thinking company. If you know of any funded PhD positions or jobs being advertised that would provide scope for researching, experimenting with and publishing on semantic annotation and the authority of information, please drop me a line.

As for the blog, I’ve drafted several new posts over the last few months, none of which are ready for publication yet. I’ll polish them up and post them if allows.

A while ago, I wrote about why serving XHTML (the language with which this site happens to be marked up*) as application/xhtml+xml is cool. There's more to the story than that, though. For more of the same (why it's cool), but with much more detailed arguments, read this piece by Ian Hickson.

There are, however, downsides to serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml. The greatest of these, by far, is that malformed XHTML in the page can cause a fatal error. In other words, if I make a typo when I'm coding one of these pages, your browser may not let you see the page at all. Arguably, that keeps me on my toes and ensures I'm writing well-formed XHTML. Unfortunately, this is also an issue that affects user-generated content. In the context of this site, the only user generated content is in the form of comments (if you didn't know, you can comment on the article below; try it out!), but still, this would mean that if a user entered - by mistake or on purpose, it doesn't matter as far as the computer is concerned - ill-formed XHTML code into a comment, that could prevent you or anyone else with a compliant browser, from viewing the page at all. That's not cool; it's basically providing all you nice readers with a way to mount a denial-of-service attack against pages on my site!

So how can we get around this? Various ways. The main one is to ensure that ill-formed XHTML doesn't get served, even if it's what was entered. On this site, I've done that for the comments by setting up a plugin that assumes all comments are being entered in a lightweight, popular markup language called Markdown. The Markdown plugin, in theory at least, won't generate ill-formed XHTML, even if the user has entered some; the plugin will escape the ill-formed parts. This will mean that if a user writes a comment that contains ill-formed XHTML, the comment might end up looking a little bit weird in that some of the markup will remain visible (well, with ill-formed code, it's not unreasonable that it should look weird!), but it won't stop the page from rendering.

Have I covered my back on this front? I hope so!

* Specifically, a flavour of XHTML known as XHTML+RDFa.

While this in itself is not terribly significant, it has brought a great deal of media coverage to bear on CD and fields related to his work; coverage of which I am now, with this blog post, responsible for a small part. The coverage has, mostly, been very positive. The public relies on the mass media for an understanding of scientific and historical issues: relatively few people actively seek detailed historical or scientific information on a frequent basis. An increase in media coverage for a topic that combines these two subjects is therefore welcome.

One benefit of the increased coverage appears to be a shift away from clichés, as journalists compete to expose the less well-known details of CD's life and work - or at least, those less well-known details that have mass appeal. I haven't followed all the coverage (who could? It's international, voluminous and ongoing) but my perception is that it has been more nuanced and informed, especially on the topic of religion, than Darwin coverage I remember from a few years ago.

Darwin remains an oft-misappropriated rallying point for many stripes of demagogue. To some, he is a hate-figure; for others, an almost sublime leader. But the discussions I have been seeing in the press recently have tended to eschew these extremist and anti-historical positions in favour of important details of Darwin's intellectual development, its context, and its immediate repercussions. By largely foregoing wild speculations about Darwin's responsibility - or otherwise - for social Darwinism, eugenics, modern atheism, etc., and by focusing instead on what scholars have been able to firmly establish from primary historical sources, the latest round of coverage instead largely portrays Darwin as the immensely thoughtful, lively and hard-working naturalist, family man and citizen that those sources reveal him to have been. Long may this continue! And happy birthday, Charlie

PS. This post was written entirely of my own volition

If I’m not mistaken, the four categories of online content the IWF seeks to blacklist are:

• Child sexual abuse images hosted anywhere in the world.
• Criminally obscene content hosted in the UK.
• Incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.
• Inappropriate chat or behaviour with or towards a child online.

It’s the first and last of these that my proposal covers, and I’m going to suggest narrowing the focus to the USA, where the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act has for several years required producers of websites containing sexually explicit contents to cause to be affixed to every copy of any [such] matter , in such manner and in such form as the Attorney General shall by regulations prescribe, a statement describing where the records required by this section with respect to all performers depicted in that copy of the matter may be located. The Act goes on to state that the term copy here includes every page of a website on which such matter appears.

The Wikipedia article above links to one such prescribed statement (also known as an 18 U.S.C. 2257 notice), which states, among other things, that all people depicted on the site were at least 18 years of age at the time the depictions were created, and that the owners of the site have documentary evidence of this. It also includes an address where that documentary evidence is kept. Given the legal requirement that the statement must be as the Attorney General shall by regulations prescribe, I think it’s safe to assume that all legitimate prescribed statements must have this information.

I think this is a pretty good system. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this, but I do think that child abuse is a serious issue, and that as long as there is an adult entertainment industry, measures like this to keep children out of it are generally quite sensible.

But do you see where else this is going? If the IWF has blacklisted a page hosted in the USA that contains such a prescribed statement, then either the statement is false (e. g. the page actually does contain explicit content of someone under 18) or the IWF was not right to blacklist it. (It’s worth noting here that as in the USA, the age of majority is also 18 in most parts of the UK, which means that in assessing material from the USA, the IWF would not have had to take a difference in age of majority into account when determining what constitutes child abuse.)

So, the next task is to discover whether there are any such pages. This is where things start to become difficult.

The IWF doesn’t make its blacklist public. It does offer to provide the blacklist to its member companies, though, so perhaps if you work for one of those companies you could simplify this step and leak me a copy Failing that, there is another way to get an indicator of the blacklist that should be adequate for the purposes above: using the method given by Richard Clayton. This only obtains IP addresses of sites that contain blocked URLs, but because of the requirement that all pages of such sites must provide an 18 U.S.C. 2257 notice, this will in many cases be sufficient. (The cases in which it might not are those in which, for instance, more than one site is hosted at the same IP address, but though these may create false negatives, they should not create false positives.) The Guardian reports that Clayton was able to scan 98 addresses per second over a dial-up connection. Assuming the use of a modest broadband connection around four times faster than that, the whole IPv4 range could probably be scanned in under 6 months.

Once the blacklist (or a list of IP addresses for sites with blacklisted URLs) has been obtained, these URLs or IPs could be scanned with a Python script or similar to determine, for each one, if:

1. it is hosted in the USA, and
2. its index page contains text indicating the presence of an 18 U.S.C. 2257 notice or a link to one.

The contents of the pages wouldn’t have to be saved, which is important because of the potential illegality of doing so, and a human being wouldn’t have to view the contents either. The script could simply make a note of the URL/IP, and perhaps the snippet of HTML in which the 18 U.S.C. 2257 notice appears. These notes, together, would comprise what I’d call the intersection list: the intersection of being IWF-blacklisted, hosted in the USA, and nominally 18 U.S.C. 2257 compliant.

This brings me to one particular assumption that I haven’t yet addressed, and it’s this: that there are any such sites. I don’t actually have evidence that there are. But given that:

• the IWF blacklisted an album cover that’s being openly on sale in shops for 30 years, and
• the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act has been successfully enforced,

I think it’s clear that both sides have, in the past, acted wrongly, and that therefore it’s very likely that there would be some overlap. If there is overlap, then that’s worth knowing, because either: it could provide information leading to the successful prosecution of a nasty-piece-of-work content provider in violation of the Act, or: it could devalue the IWF by showing it had wrongly blacklisted content as child abuse. This would prompt further scrutiny of the organisation and, one hopes, its reform.

As for how it should be determined which of the two organisations is at fault (the content provider or the IWF), I’m not sure what the best procedure would be, but here’s my guess. The FBI has an ongoing program for spotting 18 U.S.C. 2257 violations. If I had obtained a list of intersection URLs/IPs as described above, I’d forward it to the FBI in the first instance, and I would ask to be kept informed about any subsequent investigation that might occur. If, after a reasonable time, the FBI had not acted against all the content providers, I would have to assume this was because they did not think all the content providers had committed offences. At this point, I’d refer any remaining URLs/IPs to the IWF, via what seems to be (the page is poorly written) their complaints procedure, explaining the circumstances, the automated nature of the investigation, etc. If all this proved inconclusive, I’d consider posting the results of the intersection scan to WikiLeaks for others to follow up – although I’d want first of all to be certain that it was legal for me to do so.

So, any proficient computers users with a bit of spare time on their hands reading this? You know what to do.

There are various other changes below the surface, which should, I hope, make it easier for me to extend the site with various things I think would be useful to me, friends, family, etc. We’ll see how that goes.

If you spot any bugs, please let me know so I can fix them. Thanks

Oh, and for those of you who didn’t spot the reference, it’s an Everclear song.

So if it seems suspiciously quiet on the sampablokuper.com-in-your-feedreader front, please visit the site and grab the new feed URLs.

If this all reads like gibberish to you, then it’s probably not something you need to worry about.