• This column was first published in ITWeb Brainstorm, a South African business technology magazine, on 1 October 2007. Do subscribe, if you prefer to read it the way it was intended to be read: in print.

In March 2003, this column was headlined Root out Poison Ivy. It wasn’t the first call for her dismissal, but it did coin the now-famous nickname for our Minister of Communications. It’s time for an escalation.

This magazine has documented every step in the failed politics of telecommunications reform in South Africa. Now the entire sorry saga is retold in a paper co-authored by Willie Currie of the Association for Progressive Communications and Robert B. Horwitz of the Department of Communication at the University of California in San Diego.

The ten-year retrospective makes for sobering and intensely depressing reading. The authors interviewed everybody who was anybody during this time. In its 44 pages are collected, with academic rigour, failure upon failure, which makes the most cogent case yet for the dismissal of the current Minister of Communications, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

Moreover, I contend that it justifies the abolition of the ministry itself.

The headline of the report, “Another instance where privatisation trumped liberalisation,” perceptively highlights the core philosophical error underlying the policy of “managed liberalisation” that South Africa followed since Telkom was first granted its monopoly in 1997.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hands up who thought I was being sarcastic. Sorry to disappoint. Eddie Funde and Dali Mpofu, respectively chairman and CEO of the South African public broadcaster, are right on the money with their latest statements.

According to Computing SA, they’re calling for more public funding for the SABC, and less reliance on commercial revenue.

“It is very unusual for the public broadcaster to be 80% commercially funded,” Funde says. “It is very hard for the public broadcaster to fulfil its mandate and at the same time have to go around and looking for money. We are working very hard to change that situation.”

If you’re going to have a state-owned public broadcaster (the value of which is an entirely different argument), it should be funded not from advertising revenue, but from tax. The problem with permitting the SABC to sell advertising is that it drains a great deal of potential revenue from commercial broadcasters. This makes it hard for them to compete, which results in a perceived market failure, which in turn causes a slow, steady expansion of the SABC’s presumed mandate.

I don’t see the value in a public broadcaster that shows bargain-bin movies, American soap operas and late-night sleaze. What possible public purpose does that serve? Public broadcasting should be educational. It should promote the arts. It should give a leg-up to local productions. It should screen stuff that isn’t commercially viable for private broadcasters. That means that it shouldn’t contribute to making things commercially non-viable by leeching advertising revenue out of the private sector.

That, in turn, means it should be entirely funded by public money. And since TV licence fees are inherently regressive, not to mention expensive to administer, this means funding it from the tax coffers. This change will narrow its mandate and focus its efforts. It will curb scope creep. Instead of dragging down the aggregate quality of South African television, it might even raise the overall standard.

It’s not the only change I’d like to see in the broadcast sector. Issuing broadcast licences to all qualifying applicants, regardless of whether they compete with the SABC’s free-to-air model, instead of artificially limiting their number according to what the government guesses the market will bear, would be another. But funding the SABC from taxes alone would be a great leap forward. If you’ll excuse the expression.

I don’t mean “Mugabe’s Moses” in the Afrikaans sense (”Mugabe se Moses”), which, roughly translated, means “screw Mugabe”. On the other hand, it appears that he did get screwed.

Rotina Mavhunga, also known as Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium no doubt well-versed in exploiting gullibility, recognised that the lunatics in charge of Zimbabwe might be taken in by an outlandish Moses-at-Horeb scheme to strike — excuse the pun — oil.

Details of this story appear first to have been reported in Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald. Clemence Manyukwe of the Financial Gazette also reported on the case, claiming to have seen court documents recounting the swindles of Tagarira.

I’ll let Jan Raath’s version in the Times of London tell the tale:

When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe’s Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.

After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe’s lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.

More than a year later officials realised they had been duped. Ms Tagarira is now in custody, awaiting trial on charges of fraud or, alternatively, of being “a criminal nuisance”. Details from court papers published this week said that over 15 months, until July this year, Ms Tagarira convinced Cabinet ministers, ruling party heavy-weights and top army and police officers that by striking the rock with her staff she could produce enough fuel to supply the country for 100 years.

The legal firm representing her told The Times that she had been refused bail and no trial date had been set yet.

“It’s an outlandish story but the people in government who believed this are the same ones who believe that Mugabe’s official policy of printing money will end inflation,” said an economist, who requested anonymity.

The story continues with details of how the official “task force” determined whether she was speaking the truth: they put the stuff in their lorries and drove off. QED.

If this story is indeed true, the world should thank the sorceress of many names for sacrificing her liberty to prove the degeneracy, gullibility and just plain stupidity of Zimbabwe’s government officials. It should thank the witch of many frauds for risking torture and death to show that Robert Mugabe doesn’t need quiet diplomacy; he needs a padded cell.

(Hat tip: Blue Crab Boulevard.)

If the South African government asked me to recommend whether to enforce a standard document format across all its departments, and if so, which standard to choose, I’d unhesitatingly respond, “yes,” and “Open Document Format“.

However, this decision would be based on functional requirements, such as whether the data would be accessible independent of particular software choices, whether the format is human-readable, whether it could integrate with other systems, and whether, in future, other software from other vendors might be able to read it.

The government reached the same decision, but some of its reasons are horribly misguided. The standards document the government produced (PDF) declares that standards for interoperability are to be preferred according to their “degree of openness”. The quality of being an “open standard” is then defined:

• It should be maintained by a non-commercial organization
• Participation in the ongoing development work is based on decisionmaking processes that are open to all interested parties.
• Open access: all may access committee documents, drafts and completed standards free of cost or for a negligible fee.
• It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute and use the standard free of cost.
• The intellectual rights required to implement the standard (e.g. essential patent claims) are irrevocably available, without any royalties attached.
• There are no reservations regarding reuse of the standard.
• There are multiple implementations of the standard

This strikes me as a very badly misguided definition. Not even Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes software must be “free” as in “free beer” (though if it is, all the better, of course).

Yet the government’s specification is full of references to “non-commercial”, “free of cost” and “without any royalties”.

It is, of course, perfectly within its rights to specify a functional requirement for an open standard. But demanding that it is free, that it is maintained by a non-commercial organisation, that all intellectual property is given away for free, is going way beyond any reasonable, functional definition of “open standard”.

It excludes any supplier that provides software conforming to perfectly open, accessible, and functionally satisfactory standards, but does so for a fee. It might even end up excluding all those open source developers who spent their twenties toiling away for free in the vain hope that one day, they’d get to pay for their sports cars and luxury homes from support revenue.

Someone is going to get very, very badly burnt if this is how government thinks about software. Last time I checked, you evaluated benefits and weighed them up against costs, to arrive at a purchasing decision. This makes zero cost — at least for a significant subset of software — part of the required benefit. Granted, it is a neat way to ensure that all government software deals will, in future, have an infinitely high benefit to cost ratio by definition.

Microsoft has already lost the battle to have its own horrible (and horribly named) document format accepted as a standard. South Africa’s own standards bureau were among those that advised the International Standards Organisation not to ratify it.

But if Microsoft — or any other commercial software supplier — takes legal action for being unjustly excluded from government business because of this deluded document, they’d be fully justified, in my humble, faux-lawyerly opinion.

If you want to know how “scientific consensus” is cooked up, look no further than the speaker lists at climate change conferences. Actually, do look further: to who doesn’t get invited to such shindigs.

Last week, the American Statistical Association sponsored a workshop on climate change. The goal, according to David Marker, one of the organisers and facilitators, was to “delineate a statistical science perspective on understanding climate change and to develop a consensus statement on the areas of clear knowledge, as well as those areas in which great uncertainty remains”.

Of course, developing a “consensus statement” is easy if you neglect to invite people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who famously broke Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature chart (right). Showing Mann’s methodology to be so badly broken that it turns even random data into a hockey stick, is one of the more significant statistical contributions to climate research in the last decade. Considering that the question of how to use proxy data to reconstruct a historic temperature record, and whether this record does or doesn’t show warm and cool periods corresponding to solar activity, remains a hot topic of discussion within the ASA (PDF newsletter), this on its own would appear to qualify them for invitations to such a workshop.
McIntyre has also been swimming against the tide of obstructionism and even secrecy by government scientists to audit US temperature measurement stations. Though the focus of the research is the siting of these stations and how “bad data” gets “corrected”, a surprise discovery forced James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to correct the benchmark temperature record which — like Mann’s Hockey Stick — the politicians on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use to scare us into give them more powers to tax and regulate. Again, the significance of McIntyre’s work on the statistical treatment of climate change data appears to be substantial. His comments on some of the topics raised at the ASA workshop show insight and familiarity with the issues.

This isn’t the first time that McIntyre and McKitrick have been omitted from speaker lists. Shortly after McIntyre’s discovery that NASA GISS had been cooking the books, a conference on integrity in scientific research likewise overlooked the Canadian, even though he’d raised red flags over the secrecy with which NASA GISS treats its data collection sites and its statistical methods.

Understanding climate change requires the combined skills of atmospheric scientists and statisticians, said Marker. The former understand the physical relationships being investigated, while the latter know how to determine which hypotheses are strongly supported and which are still subject to uncertainty.

And here I thought the consensus of the people that get invited to consensus-development workshops is that the science is settled.

I’m super-mad at a super-poke. Was El Reg ever right. You can never leave Facebook. Wrote Chris Williams:

The funniest thing about such groups is that you can’t actually leave Facebook. Ever. The closest you can get to the escape hatch is a temporary deactivation. As Zuckerberg whispers in your ear as you grab the handle: “Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups.”

You can opt not to receive emails telling you about it, but your data cadaver is still there, waiting to be reanimated. Spooky.

Well, technically that’s true. You can indeed opt not to receive e-mails telling you about it. It’s just that nobody’s listening.

Facebook doesn’t actually heed that request. When I deleted my account, I took great care to heed the warning, and to choose not to receive any futher e-mails from Facebook. What do I need notifications for if I need a Facebook account to see what they’re about?

Within hours, I had received e-mails notifying me of a private message, that I got tagged in a note, and that someone sent me a super-poke. Even before leaving, I had told Facebook that I wasn’t interested in the damn super-poke application. So that’s twice Facebook told me to go poke myself.

The link that claims to allow me to “control” what e-mails I receive from Facebook requires… re-joining Facebook.

The spamming sods deserve Microsoft. I expect a video raspberry from Mark Zuckerman next, for falling for his phishing scam.

I’m off to update my spam filters. Facebook is now officially evil.

I promised I’d leave Facebook if it did a deal with Microsoft. I said I’d make good on this promise.

Some impatient souls (or should I say Facebook Fanboys) weren’t even prepared to grant me a few days to tie up loose ends and inform friends and group members, but insisted that I delete my Facebook account instantly.

This update is for them. My account is now gone. To be accurate, it is available for perusal only by Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft.

I can be found on Orkut, LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse. I’ve never liked the idea of using more than one social network site, however, so eventually I’ll choose. I quite like the update stream and look-and-feel of Plaxo, but in the end I’ll probably settle on Orkut. Especially since it’s due for a re-launch and overhaul starting next week. I can’t wait.

I’ve long held a certain view about the climate system. It is hugely complex and chaotic in a mathematical sense. It is incredibly hard, if not impossible, to predict, especially when we only measure relatively few of the constituent data points and even then have done so for only a few decades, mostly. Because the system is chaotic, most of the underlying variables have a “butterfly effect” on a predictive model of the system as a whole.

In short, we know far too little about climate to make serious public policy commitments about it. Most likely, our attempt at changing the climate will fail. If not, the chance of it working is at least as high as the risk of doing the wrong thing entirely and making matters worse.

It seems at least some scientists agree.

Gerard H. Roe and Marcia B. Baker, of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle, published a paper (PDF) — peer reviewed, the works — which says, to put it simply, that uncertainty is not only characteristic of past climate predictions, but is an inevitable feature of the system.

Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in the last decades. Both models and observations yield broad probability distributions for long-term increases in global mean temperature expected for doubling of CO2, with small but finite probabilities of very large increases. We show here that the shape of these probability distributions is an inevitable and general consequence of the nature of the climate system, and we derive a simple analytic form for the shape that fits recent published distributions very well. We show that the breadth of the distribution, and in particular, in the probability of large temperature increases, is relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes.

In other words: “It is evident that the climate system is operating in a regime in which small uncertainties in feedbacks are highly amplified in the resulting climate sensitivity.”

Despite being a climate skeptic (and not being qualified to critique their work in any case), I’m not entirely convinced of this argument. Neither is this physicist, Luboš Motl, and he adds a crucial observation:

I agree that during the last two decades, not much progress was made in these questions, especially if you look at the knowledge of mainstream scientists. But unlike Roe and Baker, I don’t think that it is a consequence of fundamental limitations of such a chaotic system. It is a consequence of having too many incompetent, politically passionate, corrupt, and dishonest people in the discipline.

Jim Hansen, phone home.

Some people seem to be getting very excited about a new Boeing hydrogen propulsion project that uses a hydrogen engine in an unmanned, high-altitude aircraft. They couldn’t have read the whole release, because they’d realise we’re basically talking about a small aircraft with a propeller that can carry a bakkie-load or so. So it’s about as advanced as Baron von Richthofen’s tri-plane, except that the wings are mounted end-to-end so it flies a little higher, and it has better spy cameras.

The Register rips into it, and I won’t even try to compete:

World-straddling arms’n'airliners behemoth Boeing yesterday … made an unexpectedly loud splash, with the new motor being described as a “wunderengine” and the “future of aviation”, not to mention “a good option for reducing carbon emissions”. It even got Slashdotted, by the put-it-in-a-car dept.

Actually, it’s in a car - the Ford Fusion. That’s because it’s really just an ordinary four-cylinder car engine, fitted with a turbocharger so as to run at 65,000 feet. Ordinary car petrol engines can run on hydrogen without too much trouble; the problem is building a tank which will hold the cryogenic fuel without it all boiling off.

…

As for this sort of gear being the future of aviation, or reducing carbon emissions, steady on. Very slow prop planes aren’t going to be much use for anything except surveillance and comms relay, really - that’s what the military want them for. Maybe it will become easier to run ordinary piston engines on hydrogen lower down, where it’s noticeably warmer and the fuel will boil off somewhat quicker - indeed, BMW has a demonstrator car that can run on hydrogen now (though its fuel does all boil away in a matter of days, potentially causing the garage to explode if you’ve rashly parked it inside).

You could run ordinary turbofans on hydrogen too, with a bit of fiddling; but you’d never fit much of it into ordinary planes. It would only be a goer in various exotic hypersonic designs, where advantages in speed might make it worth one’s while to fill most of the fuselage with weight-efficient cylindrical hydrogen tank. That might be the future of aviation; car engines and propellors won’t.

It’s been a good four months. I watched the South Africa network on Facebook grow from 100,000 to 400,000 members, and missed Miss South Carolina by minutes. Maybe she is on Orkut. That’s where I’m going.

Adieu, Facebook. I never was sure about the propriety of the Facebook feature that copied your blog posts as notes. But then, I never was sure about the propriety of poking random people either, or giving them growing gifts.

If the notes annoyed you, my apologies. If you enjoyed them, thanks. Soon, however, they’ll be no more. If you kept track of these posts via Facebook, you’ll have to subscribe to my RSS feed instead, or become a guinea-pig for the brand new e-mail subscription service on your right. (If it doesn’t work as expected, please do let me know.)

Microsoft is buying a teensy sliver of Facebook for a whole lotta dough, with the intention of advertising at me. Personally. It thinks it paid $300 for that right, but I’m not up for that. The deal is all over the news, and as usual, The Register has by far the best headline and funniest take on it.Shortly after I blogged about the impending deal, in which I explained my deep misgivings about the prospect of doing business with a company whose products, privacy policies and security record I don’t particularly like, and whose online services I’ve long vowed never to use again, I made a public promise. If Microsoft buys a stake in Facebook, I’m leaving.

I’m not saying that Google is any less of a privacy risk, but I sold my soul to them a long time ago, and to date, it hasn’t burnt me. There’s no turning back now, and I have no spare soul to sell to Microsoft. Call it a risk exposure minimisation strategy. Orkut was all the rage in 2004, when I last tried it, but it was a dog. It’s been groomed a little since, had its nails clipped and stuff, but still seems to enjoy some canine capriciousness. I’ll get used to it. Someone, somewhere in the Googleplex, must be paying just a little attention to Orkut, surely?

I’d better get used to it. Because in a few days, soon as I’ve informed everyone, handed over the groups I manage, and backed up whatever data I have on there, I’ll never point my browser at facebook.com again. Maybe eating the cookie will make me feel better.

Adieu, Facebook.

Update: I’m now on Orkut. Apparently, it’s up for a relaunch on 5 November, so I’m looking forward to see what the Googledroids have conjured up. If you’re there too, you can find my profile here.

Technology is root of all evil, says IMF. No really. “Technological progress alone explains almost all of the increase in inequality from the early 1980s,” the report (PDF) says.

The “press points” undermine their own message, however:

Over the past two decades, income inequality has risen in most regions and countries. At the same time, per capita incomes have risen across virtually all regions for even the poorest segments of population, indicating that the poor are better off in an absolute sense during this phase of globalization, although incomes for the relatively well off have increased at a faster pace.

Think about it: does income inequality matter? It is not absolute quality of life that matters to people? Those who say it does matter can’t come up with anything better than warnings about social unrest to back up their claim.

They fail to note that inequality rises even if the rate of income growth is uniform across all income levels. If you earn $10,000 and I earn $1,000, and next year, each of us earns 10% more, then inequality will have risen from $9,000 to $9,900. If my income rises by 50%, and yours by only 10%, inequality will still be up from $9,000 to $9,500. Yet will I really be worse off for it?

In fact, they fail to point out the rather obvious that for inequality to decrease, the rich would, to within a rounding error, have to stop getting richer altogether. Which is really what the left wants, isn’t it?

The notion of income inequality is the biggest fraud perpetrated on socio-economic discourse in decades. No wonder it leads to such absurd Luddite conclusions.

The threat from Essop Pahad, the “minister in the presidency” of South Africa, to withdraw advertising from the Sunday Times over the paper’s coverage of the theft conviction, alleged drunken misbehaviour, and abuse of power by Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister, is “dangerous, dangerous, dangerous”.

So says Anton Harber, the go-to man at Wits University for all matters journalism, in a column that sets out clearly why such a threat — which appears not to be empty rhetoric — would constitute “bad governance, an abuse of public trust and perhaps even corruption”.

They should be slapped down as fast as anyone else actively promoting the abuse of the state coffers in pursuit of their political agendas.

Other publishers and media owners might be tempted to rub their hands with glee at the prospect of this approximately R150-million being dispersed among the Time’s rival publications. If they do, they will be displaying an extraordinary shortsightedness.

To allow the government to use their expenditure to punish those they disapproved of and reward those they like would be to had them a powerful weapon to use against their critics. This month it may be the Sunday Times, but if it proves effective then you can be sure that it will be used against others. It means that publishers and broadcasters will have to think twice every time you do something which might find disfavour with the presidency, such as questioning the use of beetroot rather than antiretrovirals, or pointing to the poor conditions in your local hospital’s maternity wards.

It would be a matter of time before such a weapon was used against those who did no more than give favourable coverage to the wrong faction of the ruling party.

Well said. The threats to media freedom are mounting. President Thabo Mbeki regularly uses his bully pulpit to castigate what he believes to be irresponsible, inaccurate or unpatriotic reporting, usually in response to criticism of the policies of the ruling party, or the actions of the executive. Like anyone else, he’s entitled to his opinions, but a president should use his status and power judiciously. When a head of government publicly denunciates the very institutions that exist to protect the people from their government, this has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

When that same government threatens to use the prodigious power of public money against the media, this too has a chilling effect on press freedom. Not to mention that it’s your and my money, taken from us by legal force with the promise to use it for the benefit, not to the detriment, of the people.

Thomas Jefferson put it this way: “I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.”

That’s exactly what the ANC government is doing.

But they’re lying, the politicians might (and do) say. Again, Jefferson, who himself suffered greatly, both personally and as president, from the very press whose freedom he defended, responds: “The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.”

A free press can be good or bad, but without freedom it can only be bad.