Sh*t headline of the Week #1

Once again the Guardian abandons balanced journalism in favour of spin, with the headline:

“Local opposition to onshore windfarms has tripled, poll shows“

Failing to mention that this is a tripling of a very small number (7% -> 21%), and that the number of those in favour of wind farms (60%) is in fact almost triple that of those who oppose them.  But no, the Guardian ignores the majority poll numbers, which show support for wind farms remaining strong, just so they can run with a stereotypically tabloid-style negative headline.

Here’s the graph from which the story was derived – which in fact shows that while ‘strongly oppose’ has increased by14%, strongly support has also increased, by 5%:

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 Original NY Times article ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’  by David Foster Wallace 

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Congestion charging is hopeless

The Institute for Fiscal Studies just release a report entitled the ‘Mirrlees Review of Tax System’. The press release contains the following paragraph:

Taxation of petrol and diesel is ineffective for tackling congestion – the main cost of driving. In addition, and as the OBR has pointed out, as cars become more efficient this significant source of government revenue will decline rapidly. We should work towards a comprehensive system of congestion charging on the roads, replacing most of fuel duty. The potential economic and welfare gains are very big.

Increasing and expanding congestion charges can never ‘tackle congestion’. Despite giving the appearance of a direct solution to the problem – pointedly compared to the ‘ineffective taxation of petrol and diesel’, a strawman if ever there was one – it would barely begin to solve the problem of overloaded inner-city transport systems. Congestion occurs in cities, even in London, mostly during rush hour periods – i.e. much of the problem is caused solely by commuting. Most anecdotal evidence and even economic studies will show that the price-elasticity of commuter car travel is very low – increasing tax on this activity will only reduce it by a small amount. Look at the rail network for comparison – prices have gone up by a huge amount in the last 10 years, a practice partly justified by the operators as a ‘means to reduce demand’. In other words, train companies are actively trying to discourage passengers to use their services. That’s what their official line is at least, in fact they know very well that price increases reduce demand only slightly, but increase revenues greatly. Sure enough, passenger numbers in the UK have increased almost as fast as the fare increases, and show no signs of declining in the immediate future.
So, while rail operators are ramping up prices – ostensibly to drive passengers off their overcrowded trains – we have a suggestion from the IFS to increase taxes on car drivers as well, through congestion charging. The drivers who do abandon their cars will then be left with 3 options: (i) take public transport to work, (ii) move within walking distance of work, (iii) lose their job. Assuming (i) and (ii) are preferable, it would be safe to say that the majority would choose (i). However, this might reduce road traffic, but it doesn’t reduce congestion – it just shifts that congestion onto the rail and bus networks, which already suffer quite badly from it. So we’re left with a situation where this new congestion charging system, which itself might cost a considerable amount (cameras, computer systems, staff etc.) fails no matter if it is successful or not. If it dramatically reduces car traffic, where will the slack be taken up by public transport? If it doesn’t reduce traffic, what’s the point of it?
We could all save a huge amount of resources and energy if – going back to the list above – people could be given a strong incentive to choose (ii). That is, to move within walking distance of work. Forget a congestion charging scheme, forget expanding an already creaking public transport network – instead create policies and schemes that give employees a chance to live close to their workplace.
There are more than a few ways this could happen. I would favour something you might call a commuter tax – I know this sounds like a congestion charge, but it’s really not. This tax would be different because it wouldn’t apply to employees, it would instead be directed at the company they work for. If companies were taxed, per employee, depending on the distance in miles from the workplace each employee lived, they would have a huge incentive to ensure that said employees lived as close as possible.
I can only think of a couple of what could be considered negative side-effects this kind of system might exhibit. For instance, the best candidates for a job being rejected in favour of the ones that live closer, or areas around large company headquarters becoming stale and homogenous in character. On the other hand, what are the benefits? Rebutting those first two: Employers, rather than just taking the candidate for a job based on the distance of their home from the office, may take the best candidate as is normal, and then actively encourage and assist them in relocating. Employers could become landlords, buying and renting properties around their offices. Furthermore, this system would probably not create terrifying corporate villages around the glass towers of the city – if the tax was scaled appropriately, the difference between a ½ mile and 2 miles would be negligible, while commuters arriving from 20 miles away would incur heavy penalties.
Energy use would go down, congestion could disappear completely, and more dense and walkable inner-city neighbourhoods may emerge as a result. Finally, there is the greatest benefit of such a system – reducing the amount of travel we all do every day, and so too the wasted hours, frustration and the needless burning of fossil fuels.

Debunking no2AV’s latest leaflet – why the ’2nd-place winner’ is a fallacy

Figure 1: These stacks of votes give the impression that they represent numbers. Look carefully though, and you can see they aren't numerically consistent.

The argument had escalated quite rapidly – in no small part due to my overzealous opening statement, “there is not a single valid argument to ditching AV in favour of our current, broken electoral system of first past the post.” Unfortunately, this had the predictable effect of hardening the opposition against any possibility of a change of heart, and attempts at changing his mind for the rest of the evening were completely hopeless. As it turns out, the focus of his argument was on the claims of a single diagram, printed on a ‘No2AV’ leaflet that had somehow found its way onto our kitchen table (Fig. 1).

The diagram appears to show that under AV, a candidate winning the greatest number of votes can (*gasp*) lose an election to the candidate with the second greatest number of votes.  There are so many ways to discredit this cynical, deceitful and poisonous argument, so where to begin? Actually, I had to wrack my brains for a while to decide why it is that this stupid diagram was so effective.  I could see intuitively that it was incredibly dishonest and deliberately misleading, but I couldn’t immediately explain why – I think this pretty much sums it up though:

1:  The diagram is qualitative, yet masquerades as a quantitative basis for an argument. In other words, the heights of the piles are instinctively interpreted by the reader as representing  the total number of votes cast for each candidate. However, they do not (see Fig. 2). Once quantitative representation breaks down, the diagram becomes meaningless, except as a means to propagate no2AV’s agenda.

2:  If you look at all voting rounds, you can see that the height of candidate A’s stack stays the same throughout. This means that all the alternative votes cast by all voters for candidates C, D and E piles go toward candidate B. There are no reciprocal alternative votes between candidates C-E, and none for the candidate A (Fig. 3). Think of your local constituency – what are the chances of this happening there?

Figure 2: If you add up the votestack heights from candidates B - E, you end up with a stack almost twice as high as candidate A's. Why did no2AV perform this little stunt? Because if people see that candidate B has an overwhelming majority of votes - yes, AV is a *2-vote* system, and both votes count - they might see through this deceit.

3:  Following on from [2], if no2AV were serious, they would give an example of a situation where all alternative votes cast went to a single candidate, from a real-life election held under AV in another country. I suspect such an example does not exist. So, no2AV give no indication of (i) how likely the situation in [2] actually is (the odds are not good) and, most importantly, (ii) why this would be a bad thing anyway.

4:  Expanding on  3(ii), this diagram was put there to support a stinking, rotten red herring of a premise: That it is *unfair*, or scandalous for the so-called 1^st-place candidate to lose. Why is it unfair? The 2^nd place candidate got all of the alternative votes of all the rest of the voters. This means that more people placed a vote (first, or alternative) for candidate B, than for candidate A. In other words, more people voted for the ’2^nd-place candidate’ than the ’1^st-place candidate’! This is the root of why the diagram is so misleading and corrosive – the mere act of calling the ‘1^st-place party’ the ‘1^st-place party’ sets up the whole misunderstanding. It is a subtle psychological manipulation of an electorate that have never had a second vote. Candidate A is only the 1^st-place party in terms of the first vote. It loses because it receives no alternative votes at all. The diagram works so effectively because it plays on the fact that the electorate is stuck in the mindset of a single-vote system. In our minds, only the first vote matters. This is ludicrous because the whole point of AV is that we get 2 votes!

Figure 3: The votestack for candidate A doesn't change throughout the voting stages - however, in each stage there are always purple arrows leading from the smallest stack to the rest of the stacks. But, since all redestributed (alternative) votes all going to candidate B, there should only be one arrow in each stage, pointing to candidate B. For instance, in the final stage here, you can see clearly that the A stack does not change height, so why does arrow (i) even appear?

The clever combination of an implicitly quantitative diagram with deliberate inconsistency in the heights of the vote stacks and misleading arrows is effectively fraud: a visual lie. This is the equivalent of a sleight of hand card or magic trick. However, no2AV cover themselves from accusations of wrong-doing, because nowhere on the leaflet does it state that the stacks represent numbers.

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Some photos from the March for the Alternative, London 2011

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Not looking forward to this…

The end of youth

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I read the first page of Small is Beautiful

I think this quote perfectly sums up the lethal – if hilarious – combination of quaint idiocy, short-sightedness and hubris that defines much of modern human behaviour:

Modern man does not experience himself as part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.

E.F. Schumacher

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This took quite some time…

Visualisation of Murdoch’s Media Empire

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The LSE is not alone

This week’s widespread exposure of the LSE’s decision to put ethical concerns aside when accepting donations reminds me of another similar case in a London academic institution. I worked at the place for some time actually, it’s called Imperial College London. The object of my ire in this case is the Imperial College (nee Tanaka) Business school – a venture made possible by the kind donation of Gary Tanaka, a former philanthro-type now facing time for being something of a fraudster. He gave Imperial £27 million around about 10 years ago, which they gleefully accepted and ran with straight to the reception desk of Foster + Partners, demanding a cutting edge piece of starchitecture (as you do) as the jewel in their new business school crown.

First, a description of the Tanaka itself – most days on my way to the office I would have to walk past the main entrance of the place on Exhibition Road. In fact, so did almost everyone else, because the ‘front porch’ of the Tanaka essentially doubles up as the main entrance to the entire college. It’s a jarringly off-putting piece of architecture, that seems to revel in its complete uselessness. I can explain this with a photograph. So, you can see below that the high steel support columns and the awning-like structure they form resembles what could only be described as a giant bus shelter:

This is an impression that soon fades once you’ve been there in the rain, because you quickly realise that there isn’t actually any glass installed between those roof struts. Oh, isn’t it so wry and ironic of the architect to tease us like this, create expectation of function and then confound it – how brilliant! In fact, it just leaves people slightly baffled and confused, and sometimes wet. I have seen people walk into the shadow of this thing to get out of a light shower, stop for half a minute, look up, then skip up the steps so they can stand under the much smaller actual sheltered area by the entrance.

Anyway, that’s just the front – inside things get even more funky and modernist. The first thing that confronts a visitor is what appears to be a giant polished grain silo:

The major difference between this and a grain silo of course, is that one is used to store grain – a precious commodity with all sorts of useful properties – while the other contains economists and business administrators. Anyway, that’s enough architectural garbage, the point is that Imperial was happy to emblazon the title of Tanaka on this steel and glass ‘masterplan‘, but when he turned out to be slightly less than reputable, the college set to work quietly removing all reference to the former kind benefactor. In 2008 they renamed the building to the ‘Imperial College Business School’ but, strangely enough, did this too:

The name of the College’s business school is being changed from Tanaka Business School to Imperial College Business School. The change in identity takes effect from today and implementation will be completed in time for the start of the new academic year on 1 October.The change is being made to emphasise that the School is an integral part of the College by incorporating the Imperial College name directly into its title. Imperial alumnus and benefactor Dr Gary Tanaka, after whom the School was formerly named, will continue to be recognised for his generous support with the naming of the School’s accommodation as ‘The Tanaka Building’.

This is in fact the only reference to Tanaka I can find on the college website, and the more sceptical among us might surmise that they stuck the ‘Tanaka’ label onto a less conspicuous building in the college to deflect embarrassing questions. My view is that these embarrassing questions are actually quite important to maintain awareness that there can be a seedy side to the rarefied world of finance, charity and philanthropy. Imperial College, while ‘protecting their brand’, as they might put it (but what amounts to a revision of history) are doing a small disservice to society.

Eyesore of the Month – London Adoptable Architecture Gallery

You just know that, should it ever be built, it would be tragically sunk in a ‘reverse-titanic’ night-time collision with an errant tourist barge…

I know, this one doesn’t really count, because it’s only a concept building – I’ve been too busy recently to be out wandering for shots of vacuous architecture that already exists, so this will have to do for now.