July 2010

Did you know that each successive generation of German high-speed trains has had air-conditioning plant built for higher temperatures? The trains from the early 90s handle a temperature range from -20 to +32 degrees Celsius. Those from the mid-90s, -20 to +32, but if necessary they can exceed that. The ICE Type 3 handles temperatures…

Read More evolving

Via Bruce Schneier’s, an interesting paper in PNAS on false positives and looking for terrorists. Even if the assumptions of profiling are valid, and the target-group really is more likely to be terrorists, it still isn’t a good policy. Because the inter-group difference in the proportion of terrorists is small relative to the absolute scarcity…

Read More three links about false positives

I think everyone’s linked to this excellent piece on building a campaign against the cuts already, but I’d like to seize on this bit: The more we can build up a modern ‘doomsday book’ of the effect of the cuts, the more we can help people to make the second stage of that journey when…

Read More cuts near me

So there was Martin Kettle, talking about “bright Tory shadow cabinet minister Greg Clark” (he’s the one who is now the central government’s Minister for Decentralisation). Now here’s Kettle claiming that David Cameron “wins this season’s golden boot” because, well, he’s really nice. In fact, Kettle actually seems to have been handed this nanosecond’s version…

Read More Martin Kettle is still a worthless old hack