“Government U-turn over book scheme cuts” blares the Independent newspaper today. Apparently the UK Government decided to cut a scheme that gives books to all children last week, and has now changed their mind in order to decide not to cut it.

I don’t have any knowledge, or a particularly strong view, about how we should best encourage people to read as a society.

I do want to use this as an example, a simple and basic one, of how terrible information flow on the Internet is, and on how terrible modern journalism is. By terrible here, I mean just how utterly our society fails at giving the most basic tools for intelligent people to be able to have opinions based on any sort of knowledge or evidence.

The article, and all other articles I could find easily, fail to answer three obvious questions that even the most basic journalism on this story should answer. And in the modern world, answer means to give hyperlinks to full sources as references.

1. Where is the announcement that the scheme was being cut?
2. Where is the announcement that the scheme is not, after all, being cut?
3. How good is the Booktrust bookgifting scheme? Where’s the research showing whether it is value for money and helps with reading?

A quick search on Google News and Google Blog search finds not a single article with a link to a primary source answer to any of those questions. The best you get is:

1. The Daily Mail article, Children’s book funding to be cut as Government axes £13m from reading charity, describes the news of the original cut most clearly for me. It says that the first source of the story was Booktrust, and that someone at the Department for Education confirmed it via a “statement”. The actual text of the press release from Booktrust or the statement from the Department seem unavailable. And there is certainly no link to a detailed Government budget spreadsheet or similar, so we could for example put the spending cut into the context of the amount spent on libraries.
2. Everyone’s source for the u-turn stage of the story seems to be the Press Association article Government in Booktrust U-turn. Again, no sign of the actual text of the joint statement by the Department and Booktrust. A search on the DfE website doesn’t even find mention of Booktrust on the entire site, and the Booktrust blog doesn’t cover it.
3. The only expert, if anecdotal, evidence on the quality of the scheme that I can find is in the comments on The Bookseller website. There is strong disagreement. Some comments from people working at the involved agencies liking the scheme, one from a librarian and one from a middle-class parent who think it is a waste of money giving reasonably well off people books, several comments describing how there are plenty of sources of money to keep the scheme going. I’d hope a blog search would find some detailed, analytical blog posts from experts in the field, but it didn’t.

I’m struggling to decide who comes out worse from all this. Every single newspaper and blog that I could find on the Internet, for not even taking the time to get basic factual information other than from press releases and statements by organisations. The Government, both political parties running it and Booktrust for failing to publish any information at all about the whole matter. The whole of society for letting our information infrastructure get so bad.

Tactically, I think the Labour party comes out quite well. It has taken merciless PR advantage of the failings of the media and the Government. But strategically it has lost it – it had a chance to persuade me with evidence that Booktrust is a good value scheme, something Labour should be proud of. But it has given no evidence.

Most irritatingly, I’m not even sure if there was a u-turn. From the evidence we have, it could well be a power game where the Government is trying to get publishers to contribute more to the scheme. Or a simple administrative thing – they want to renegotiate the contract, so they said they wouldn’t renew it, and then Booktrust did some PR on that. Or it could be a genuine u-turn – which could be a good thing, depending why they did it. Governments should u-turn, if they’re doing so because they’ve listened to evidence!

With the quality of reporting available, I can have no idea.

So, what do we do about it?

• We, or at least I, need better tools for finding good information. Yes, I can try reading pay for sources which sometimes dig deeper, such as the Financial Times or the Economist. But they’re not much good here, when I want to respond to tweets about a live political issue. Is there a blog search tool that only finds me good, analytical posts, from people with some knowledge about a field, or the time to research it? If not, perhaps someone enterprising can build it. Perhaps from a large curated list of blogs, perhaps via a new website with a community adding structured commentary to clusters of newspaper articles.
• We need a much stronger force to stop newspapers, NGOs, political parties and Governments from making statements without giving detailed references and sources. It should be totally unacceptable, as unacceptable as it would be in an academic paper. The Media Standards Trust are working on a nice tool which I hope will shame newspapers that just copy and paste press releases. But that’s not enough. Maybe we could have a boycott, or maybe we could get the Google News people to drive traffic only to newspapers that give proper references. Ideas please!

The particular example of Booktrust is just one example. This problem happens to me nearly every day. I get two partisan views of every political issue – ones I could have guessed from the headline. What I want is deeper understanding, sources I can trust to be finding the evidence that will help society take the right decision as a whole.

Happy New Year!

Looking for some sample data for the election quiz software I’m writing, I naturally went to the Official Monster Raving Loony Party website. The very first policy they list is:

Cool on the outside:
To combat global warming and climate change all buildings should be fitted with air conditioning units on the outside. (Source: Monster Raving Loony manifesto proposals)

At first this sounds just funny… Until you realise that we do have a technology that is the same as “air conditioners on the outside”. Indeed, the office building I’m in right now is heated by one. They’re called air source heat pumps (Energy Saving Trust link).

This air conditioner on the outside won’t solve global warming by cooling down the atmosphere, but instead by saving energy on heating, and reducing the amount of fossil fuels we have to dig up and burn.

According to the Energy Saving Trust page above, they generate 2.5 times more heat by pumping than an electric fire would using the same electricity. Julian and I looked up the spec sheet for the ones in the basement of Liverpool Science Park ic2, and it claimed 4 times. There’s a picture of the pumps and some details in the 10-page synopsis of David MacKay’s energy book.

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party have 26 candidates according to YourNextMP. I wonder if all their policies secretly actually would work, and are only merely apparently funny? Much like I stopped reading the Onion when the normal headlines got as crazy (round about 2004), perhaps now is the time to start voting for the OMRLP.

I like John Redwood. I started reading his blog in 2006 while I was involved in the Save Parliament campaign, trying to stop the Government pass a Bill whose craziness you’ll have to read about by following the link. John spoke prominently on the Internet and in Parliament against the Bill.

Since then, I’ve seen eye to eye with him on issues such as David Davis’s resignation over civil liberties and the lack of quality in Parliament’s law making process.

But for some time, I’ve been distressed by his view on climate change. Unlike David Cameron, John Redwood seems to be hiding from reality. Rather than accepting our predicament, and using his other political principles to work out how to fix it, he uses weasel words to avoid saying whether he believes or denies.

For a while I accepted this, and tried to point him to evidence he might listen to in the comments of his blog. For example, Confederation of British Industry reports on climate change (“Our changing climate is a threat to the way we live and work. Building a low-carbon economy requires government, businesses and consumers to work together, but we are not doing enough quickly enough.”).

Finally I was tipped over the edge, and challenged him to say whether he thought climate change was happening or not. It seems others have asked him the same thing, as he replied in full.

Here’s the core of John Redwood’s reply:

The warmists and their Ministers need to set out in detail their case to the public. They need to show that

1. The world is warming. Some temperature series show no warming in the last decade, and a cooler period after the war until the 1970s.
2. That warming comes from rising CO2 levels
3. That past periods of warming prior to industrialisation in both historical and geological time were caused by processes and events that do not apply today
4. That the man made element of increasing CO2 is the bit that matters and will cause unacceptable warming
5. That it makes more sense to try to stop the CO2 increases and the warming, than to invest in ways of handling the adverse consequences
6. That taxing and regulating is a better way to change human behaviour than incentives and technology

Even in the full article, John Redwood still doesn’t set out his view. He doesn’t say what he thinks on any of points 1 – 6, or why. I think that he is a climate change denier, but that he isn’t very confident about it. He doesn’t want to admit it in public, then find out he was wrong later in life.
No matter, his old blog posts are still a smoking gun, that will show that he was indecisive, that he didn’t lead when it mattered.

Yes, John is correct that warmists need to show 1 – 6 above. They’ve done so in numerous scientific papers and fat books from the IPCC, as well as evidence you can see with your own eyes. However, it is also the case that denialists need to show the opposite:

Actually John, the denialists and their supports in the old energy companies need to set out in detail their case to the public. They need to show that:

1. The world is not warming. When the north sea is melting, glaciers are retreating.
2. That warming comes from somewhere other than rising CO2 levels
3. That past periods of warming temperature prior to industrialisation in both historical and geological time were caused by processes and events that apply today
4. That the non-man made element of increasing CO2 is the bit that matters and is causing unacceptable warming
5. That it makes more sense to invest in ways of handling the adverse consequences than to try to stop the CO2 increases and the warming
6. That “taxing and regulating” is what is being proposed, when it isn’t, it is creating incentives for the market to deploy existing technologies and create new ones.

I’ll give John that the warmists have to prove all of their 1 – 6 are true, whereas the denialists only have to prove one of theirs is true. However, the denialists also have to show:

b. That allowing for the growth of China and India, and the fundamental physical limit of easily accessible fossil fuel reserves, we will be able to continue using existing sources of fuel indefinitely, at cheap prices.
c. That in an unstable world, where Russia have cut of gas supplies to customers, and there is terrorism, we can continue to rely entirely on a complex supply chain of imported energy every winter.

The burden of proof is just as much on John’s shoulders to show we shouldn’t act to reduce carbon emissions, as mine to show that we should. It’s a risk based analysis.

The sad thing is that John’d be pretty good at working out what action to take to help British businesses make money by getting the world a new zero carbon energy system. He says sound things on related subjects, such as the need for flood prevention (the photo at top of this blog post is John discussing flooding with his constituents) and on making Government buildings energy efficient. Heck, he has recently posted on energy security.

So near, John.

All you have to do is admit to the evidence that climate change is a risk to our country, just as insurance companies do, and help us take out the ultimate insurance policy.

A zero carbon energy system.

Someone asked me to think up counterintuitive predictions for the next year – things which might happen, but where it would not be ordinary for them to happen. Things with a hint in the present world of their possibility.

Here’s some, make your own in the comments.

• Ordnance Survey will go bust – i.e. their revenue will suddenly fall dramatically (due to competition from OpenStreetMap, Google).
• Vince Cable will be Prime Minister (with backing of tabloids, after a hung Parliament coalition Government collapses due to a further financial crisis, and then the formation of a Government of national unity).
• Someone will work out how to print photovoltaic solar panels on a device as cheap as a household inkjet printer, shares in all other energy businesses will collapse.
• There will be a nuclear war, with a bomb at least as large as
  Hiroshima used on a civilian population. I don’t know where, because it’ll be somewhere we don’t quite expect.
• At least one famous person will lose their job, reputation and spouse due to an affair discovered using reverse face-image recognition on Flickr photos of crowds.

What are your wild predictions for the next year?

A year ago, I predicted “2008 to be quite a ride“. What happened?

On holiday, Eddie Izzard’s voice guided me round Wales. As we drove, a box smaller than my hand sang songs by a band that broke up nearly 40 years ago, as if they were in the car.

The same part of the US military which created the Internet funded the rat-sized cortex simulations. Most such projects in 60 years of Artificial Intelligence have come to nothing. I wouldn’t bet on them all, always coming to nothing.

The world entered the predicted financial crisis that could “make 1929 look like a walk in the park”. The UK is still at the early stage where, for most, only friends of your friends have lost their job. Expect it to become your friends and maybe you in 2009.

The US President-elect selected a scientist as his Energy Secretary. Three countries and two US states announced their change to the electric car. In December, the company implementing this unveiled their first recharge point in Israel.

A thousand mirrors were lined up in a Spanish desert, to gather the energy of the sun. The new power station will be finished in January. Next up, one twice as large again. It will use tanks of salt to store heat and produce electricity at night.

Finally, the Large Hadron Collider may have been turned on, but they never collided any particles together. Readers still looking for more exotic ways to end our crazy human adventure, perhaps unsatisfied with methane fireballs, can continue to worry about negatively charged strangelets and microscopic black holes for 2009. Until summer, when the first collisions will happen and the world doesn’t end.

How wild do you think 2008 was, and 2009 will be?

I’ve written before about how I cherry pick campaigns that are most likely to be successful. You’d have thought that on such a large, difficult subject as climate change and our energy security, it would be impossible to cherry pick.

But it turns out there is a big gaping hole.

Nobody is running a single issue campaign for people across the political spectrum. One to lobby the UK Government to stop climate change destroying our economy and way of life, and at the same time to safeguard our supply of energy.

There are environment charities (such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) doing excellent work, but they don’t really make the case properly as to why people who don’t care about the planet should be caring about climate change. There are international development charities (such as Oxfam and Christian Aid), but they don’t really explain why somebody struggling to make ends meet in the UK should also be very worried about it.

Nobody until now that is.

Please sign up to our new campaign, Serious Change.

P.S. We’re never going to whine about polar bears, or ask you to change your light bulbs. We’re always going to lobby and cajole so we all fix this problem together. The investment the UK needs to make will create jobs and a sense of purpose, from which everyone will benefit.

P.P.S. Pass this on to anybody you know who is worried about Climate Change but would never join Greenpeace.

Travelling by car back from relatives yesterday, a woman’s voice, inside a box as small as my hand, knew exactly where we were at all times, and gave my mother detailed directions at every turn.

Earlier this year, a multinational corporation simulated a brain the size of a mouse’s on a supercomputer. This almost interactive simulation will help people learn more about the function of our own cerebral cortex, and hence how our minds work. They are moving on to a rat’s cortex, which is three times larger.

For a Christmas present, and on a whim, I gave two of my relatives a year’s education for a girl somewhere in Africa. Neither I nor my relatives will ever meet her or know who she is, and none of us fully understand the economic system that makes this either necessary or possible.

The chief economist for an economic forecaster worries that the world is on the brink of a financial crisis that could “make 1929 look like a walk in the park”. He tries to be reassuring that the central bankers will act correctly to avert this.

Last month, the spokesbody for British businesses released a report begging the Government to regulate them more (yes, more). They hope that a tough carbon pricing system and other measures will safeguard their businesses against chaotic worldwide weather patterns in coming years.

European and African politicians and engineers are planning to build hundreds of thousands of mirrors (image top left) in North Africa. These mirrors will focus sunlight into towers, and create steam to generate renewable electricity for Europe and fresh water for Africa.

Beneath the Alps, scientists are getting ready to turn on an arcane sixteen mile circumference machine in May (image right). It will fire particles with unspeakable energy, in order to unearth the fundamental laws of how our physical world works.

2008 is going to be quite a ride.

Let’s make it a good one.

Some people complain that all the activism, campaigning, trying to change the world for the better never has any affect. In the last year I can think of 4 major victories, all in campaigns I’ve had a small involvement in.

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill – I posted about this boring sounding but deadly Bill at the beginning of last year. We had to set up a whole Save Parliament campaign to try and stop it. The Bill was still passed, but was much less dangerous partly because the Government rewrote it under public pressure.

Statute law database – At the end of 2005 I posted about the School without rules, explaining how the laws of our land are not freely available. This was fixed at Christmas by a new Government website. It’s not clear what affect our external agitation had on the decision not to commercialise the data itself, but I suspect it was some. Congratulations to the then Department for Constitutional Affairs for doing the right thing.

Reed Elsevier and the arms trade – At the start of 2006 I wrote up in two posts my trip to the London Book fair, where they tried to kick me out of a Freedom of Expression seminar. Last week, Reed Elsevier’s board were finally forced to abandon running arms fairs. This Guardian article explains how the campaign was won. I’m a bit miffed to be honest, as my T-shirt now doesn’t tell the truth any more!

Freedom of Information Amendment Bill – This recent Bill attempted to exempt Parliament and MPs from Freedom of Information law. We sent out a Public Whip newsletter which explains more. The Bill was passed by the Commons. But luckily our unelected Lords have more sense, and news just in is that the Bill has been abandoned because they can’t even find one Lord to support it. WriteToThem was used by the public to send over a thousand faxes to Lords telling them that they did not support the Bill. In my day job, we had to set up a second fax server to meet the demand.

So there you go, four victories. Never let anybody tell you it isn’t worth campaigning.

Oh, and of course I’m lazy, so I cherry pick campaigns. Those were all won because they were achievable and reasonable. Easy ground to fight on. I admire those who spend years on much harder campaigns. But even they have major victories.

Three weeks ago my friend and colleague Chris Lightfoot committed suicide. He’d been taking anti-depressants for a long time. My mind flips like a necker cube between loving anger and complete compassion. Anger with anyone for deliberately leaving the privilege of being in this beautiful world. Compassion for the extreme pain that he must have been in, and that I am lucky enough never to have known.

I met Chris originally because he was my new ISP, and because of our shared interest in politics and computers. Tom’s written an excellent post summarising Chris’s achievements in software, politics and policy. He was argumentative, cussed, and super bright. He was loving and affectionate, for the world and his friends.

The picture is of Oggie (as many called him) with a friend’s baby. He loved the natural world, walking, cats, animals of all kinds. He had a dagger-like, cheeky, loving smile, which is how I’m remembering him, right now.

(Thanks to jfairbairn for the picture, click on it for others taken at the same time, and for larger versions. The official announcement is on Chris’s blog. You can find comments and links to other tributes there. And instead of flowers for the funeral, give money to no2id, a campaign close to Chris’s heart.)

The unusual short film competition with board games which I was at two weeks ago was fantastic fun. Again, Mark has a bit to say about it. There’s also loads on the Really Restrictive Shorts blog which I wrote some of. Click the “1, 2, 3, 4… next… last…” links right at the bottom of the page to see more. There are photos and videos and so on.

Also today, there’s a good description of mySociety in the Guardian. That’s the, also unusual, charity that I work for. Given we’re anarchically structured, Tom Steinberg clearly can’t be my boss. Instead you could think of him as the person the rest of us delegate fundraising, client management and making sure the accounts balance to. I missed it, but they put me in the week before last talking about PledgeBank.

Cambridge is sunny today, and the snow has just melted from the roofs. Enjoy your this next precious year, wherever you are!