Save the data

This week we learned that Glasgow (my home town) has been volunteered to host a pilot project to collect and use urban data more efficiently. The idea is to link up real-time info about transport, traffic and energy to make delivery of related public services more responsive. Even in a medium-sized city like ours, the amount of relevant data my fellow citizens generate would seem to make this a huge job.

According to some data I just found on the internet, 90% of all the data that exists was created in the last two years. The challenge of sorting through all of this stuff, and condensing or consuming it for some useful purpose — for research, for commerce or just for fun — is becoming one of the great communications challenges of the age. Essentially, the job of any professional communicator has always been to sort through a lot of data and transform it into useful information: in journalism this means bringing out the salient facts of a story, in marketing the key selling points of a product or service, in PR a bit of both. But how do we go about sorting through the deluge of data that exists now?

  

JISC's rather good newsletter has some ideas about how we as individuals and institutions might go about this daunting task. I liked point 6, though it doesn't seem a particularly risky claim to suggest the visualisation of information will increase. The project to display interactive information about every bomb dropped on London in WWII, explored on the next page of the newsletter, is a fascinating example.

It's worth remembering that not all of this is new. This Economist article from 2007 on the history of graphic displays of information contains some examples that are just as impressive and eye-catching now as when they first appeared centuries ago. It's hard to think how today we could better illustrate the disaster that was Napoleon's campaign in Russia than by Minard's chart, while Playfair's beautiful depiction of wheat and labour prices seems to anticipate the Manhattan skyline. The dismal science can be fun too.

The JISC piece also leaves out the problem of institutional bottlenecks: right now I'm trying to explore visual.ly and easel.ly, but the browser on my work computer is obsolete and my attempts to get IT to upgrade it have so far proved futile. The potential for big data is exciting, but any big organisation generating the stuff is also liable to be sluggish in working out how to deal with it.  Big is not always beautiful, as this Guardian article explains. Mountains of data are of little use if your local council only consults 42 people about a major planning decision, then ignores them and does what it wants anyway.

One final point: as with all technology, the information revolution merely magnifies existing trends in society and human nature to produce new opportunities and new dangers. Might the disturbing extent to which American politics has become polarised be at least partly a feature of the ease with which readers, viewers and listeners can now avoid accessing opinions they find unfavourable?

Dearly departed

The Economist has a good blog on airport names this week, pointing out the trend for naming them and other key bits of infrastructure after famous locals. If Birmingham is seriously considering renaming theirs after Ozzy Osbourne, the genre would seem to have jumped the shark.

In Glasgow, we now have the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome. Clearly, on one level this makes sense, as he is not just Scotland's greatest cyclist but Britain's greatest Olympian (who also has a train named after him already). But there's still something about the trend that bothers me.

It's not just that the man strikes me as modest enough to be embarrassed by it (though we should be thankful for that: imagine if they were naming a stadium after Usain Bolt instead). It's also not just that he hasn't even retired yet (what if he competes there in 2014 and flops?) let alone died, which I think should be a minimum qualification for supplying the name of anything noteworthy. It's not hard to think of examples of famous people who have fallen from public grace towards or soon after the end of their lives or careers — not even hard in the realm of cycling — so the authorities will always be leaving themselves hostage to fortune.

It's not just the aesthetics either: compare JFK with its evocative former name, Idlewild. There may be a case for commemorating a few particularly great individuals — I would grudgingly accept Charles de Gaulle, I suppose — but there's not much poetry to be derived from the names of people. Imagine if every London Underground station were instead named after a well-known local: no more Swiss Cottage, Seven Sisters or Gallions Reach. It would be a sad loss to a small but distinctive part of our culture.

More than that, though, it's the idea that society can't really get along without particular individuals, which seems a depressingly authoritarian view of the world, and one that suggests an ahistorical lack of continuity with past and future generations: with the greatest respect to Sir Chris, soon enough he will mean little more to the latter than he did to the former. Nasty dictators still name not just their buildings but even their days of the week after themselves. Augustus did the same with the calendar in his time.

It seems to me a trend that, if we want to see ourselves as egalitarian and democratic — respectful of our heritage but free-thinking and free-naming — we ought to leave in the departure lounge.

Deconstructing dog whistles

Today I noticed a piece of political communication that raised my eyebrows: this one-day poster campaign by the Tories to highlight Labour's support for the government's 1% cap on public sector wage rises (a cut, in real terms) but opposition to the government's 1% cap on rises in benefits.

You might think I'm being pedantic (it is my job, after all) but I think what they've come up with doesn't quite come off.  When you have as few words as this to play with, as will always be the case in a billboard poster, the message needs to be totally unambiguous, and I don't think this is.

The 'by' makes it fall down: it suggests Labour support putting up benefits by an amount greater than workers' salaries, which obviously isn't the case.  On realising it's not the case, the floating voter on the Clapham omnibus might then find himself wondering why the Tories had put up such a misleading poster, and ask himself what else he can't trust them to be straight about.  It also raises the question: which workers?

My suggested wording (assuming that mentioning a 'cap' would be too Westminster villagey) would be as follows: 'Labour want to cut public sector wages. They don't want to cut benefits', perhaps followed by 'Only the Conservatives stand up for hardworking people.'  This leaves out that the government also want to cut public sector wages, so is perhaps a bit more ruthless, but also I think a bit clearer.  Or they could just have gone with 'Today Labour are voting to increase benefits more than public sector wages', or better still "more than nurses' and teachers' wages", if it has to be a one-day-only ad.

Commentators on left and right seem to agree that this is an effective message (as long as the Tories don't overdo it).  It might be a smart political strategy — and if they really can divide the country into 'strivers' and 'skivers' in self-identifying strivers' minds they'll have pulled off quite a propaganda coup — but tactically I'd say they've missed a bit of trick with this effort.

Am I missing the point entirely by trying to deconstruct the dog whistle?  Possibly: my straw man in Clapham might well not get as far as realising that, taken literally, the poster is nonsense.  The strategy, then, relies on confusing voters more than convincing them.  That might work: but why take the risk when a clearer but no less convincing alternative exists?

Absolute ranking disaster

Happy new year, and let's hope Plymouth can keep winning awards like this in 2013.

Style and substance

I've recently been reading F. L. Lucas's Style: the art of writing well, a rediscovered classic whose basic tenets are nicely summarised here. So far, this blog has mostly concentrated on clarity and concision, and given little attention to writing that is amusing, awful and artificial. Lucas's book is a masterclass in writing prose that is both clear and a delight to read. Here he is on our own favourite topic, the importance of communicating clearly:

For two thousand years Christendom has been rent with controversy because men could not agree about the meaning of passages in Holy Writ; both Old and New Testaments have been more disputed than any human will. The gardens and porticoes of philosophy are hung with philosophers entangled in their own verbal cobwebs. Statesmen meet at Yalta or Potsdam to make agreements, about the meaning of which they then proceed to disagree. Employers and workers reach settlements that lead only to fresh unsettlement, because they misunderstand the understandings they themselves have made. Sharp legal minds spend their lives drafting documents in a verbose jargon of their own which shall be knave-proof and foolproof; but it is seldom that other legal minds as sharp cannot find in those documents, if they try, some fruitful points for litigation. Even in war, where clarity may be a matter of life or death for thousands, disasters occur through orders misunderstood. Some adore ambiguities in poetry; in prose they can be a constant curse. 

For example it seems that, within a few hours in the Crimea, first of all Lord Cardigan's misinterpreting of Lord Lucan's orders wasted the victory of the Heavy Brigade, and then Lord Lucan's misinterpreting of Lord Raglan's orders caused the suicide of the Light Brigade. It is said that Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma in a statute of Edward III. And Professor Ifor Evans has adduced the strange case of Caleb Diplock who bequeathed half a million for 'charitable or benevolent objects'. Clear enough, one would have thought — though needlessly verbose. But the law regularly sacrifices brevity to make sure of clarity — and too often loses both. In this case legal lynxes discerned that 'benevolent' objects are not necessarily 'charitable'. The suit was carried from the Court of First Instance to the Court of Appeal, from the Court of Appeal to the Lords; judges uttered seventy thousand words of collective wisdom; and poor Mr Diplock's will was pronounced invalid. Much virtue in an 'or'. Well did the Chinese say that when a piece of paper blows into a law-court, it may take a yoke of oxen to drag it out again.

Nelson Jones once described Laurie Penny's writing (a bit unfairly) as 'not so much a triumph of style over substance as the use of style to obliterate any possibility of substance'. If he wants her to write with better style, more substance and greater clarity, he should start by giving her a copy of Lucas's masterpiece.

Careless communication costs lives

When I first started this blog, I mentioned that I sometimes notice examples of poor communication that aren't just annoying but actively dangerous. Here's an interesting example: a relative of mine was recently given a course of radiotherapy, and was given the timetable I've inserted below.

The last appointment, for some reason, is in black text on a dark purple background that could be quite hard to read and perhaps mistaken for a border and so missed altogether. My relative pointed this out to the nurse, who mentioned that several other people had indeed missed their final radiotherapy sessions (and so, presumably, received an incomplete or delayed dose) as a result of it.

I think we can forgive the initial mistake, but not the failure to fix it once its consequences became clear. The fact that the nurse did nothing to make it more readable makes this report all the more believable. It seems the NHS has some serious problems with communication; unlike with HMRC and other public bodies, the risks are not just to people's time and patience but to their health and lives.

'Poor communication' is very often a political euphemism for a controversial policy poorly implemented, as the NHS recently found with the Liverpool Care Pathway. Here, the ideal scenario would be a sensitive two-way consultation on a complex set of difficult decisions. If this consultation was an intrinsic part of the policy, then the policy failed, even if everything else about the policy was designed and implemented correctly.

Reading those stories, I was reminded of Charles Clarke's claim after the last general election that Labour lost because they'd failed to communicate their message well enough. It apparently hadn't occurred to him that — with the millions spent on press officers, special advisers and widespread advertising — the message had been communicated perfectly well, and that perhaps the real problem was a set of unappealing policies dreamt up by unappealing politicians. (Before I'm accused of any bias, it's worth pointing out that all other parties also lost the last general election, and no doubt for similar reasons but while deploying similar excuses.)

In the case of the LCP, relatives felt the NHS Trusts had failed to consult them properly; in my relative's case, the NHS was similarly inconsiderate in its communications with patients. In each case we can see the potential for slapdash communication — nothing more than the classic failure to fully consider the needs of the person at the receiving end — to cause serious suffering at crucial moments.

I once joked to a paediatrician friend that "if you make a mistake at work children die, but if I make a mistake at work the comma's in the wrong place". I must admit that I hadn't really considered the possibility of children dying because of doctors' inability to put the comma in the right place.

We are all liberals now

With the unsurprising re-election of President Obama, and with voters across the United States endorsing gay marriage and cannabis, we've heard a lot in the last week about the triumph of liberalism. What better time, then, to rid ourselves of an increasingly useless part of the political lexicon?

To a British politics 'n' history graduate like me, the word 'liberal' will always evoke John Stuart Mill's belief that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others". It also brings to mind the classical liberalism of political economy that began with Adam Smith and continued through Hayek and Friedman: the mantle that today would be claimed by libertarians.

At first, then, the L-word¹ meant 'being left alone by the government', as economic liberalism still does in Britain, or as neoliberalism now does around the world. Annoyingly, in many other cases it's often unclear whether it still means that or its opposite. We all like to consider ourselves liberal towards oppressive governments, but have very differing opinions on whether a particular government policy helps freedom (by freeing people from poverty, as the liberal left see it) or hinders it (by interfering in people's business, as the liberal right see it).

The waters got muddier after 1906, as Lloyd George's Liberal government introduced pensions and ramped up taxes on the wealth creators/parasites rich. Ever since then, it's been tricky to work out whether British Liberals and their successor parties are really on the left or the right — whether they want fairness or laissez-faireness — a fudge that recently helped get them back into government, but immediately became a problem again once they got there.

In the United States, 'liberal' is today almost entirely synonymous with 'left-wing'; when someone like Norman Mailer describes himself as a 'left conservative', we might take that to mean a Blue Labour-esque position that is conservative on social issues but left-leaning on the economy. I see no contradiction in that, but it strikes us as unusual because 'liberal' is now so often used to mean both left-wing (economically) and tolerant, permissive, etc (socially).

This also leaves us with the problem of why 'conservative' has become synonymous with right-leaning on the economy, particularly when conserving things is often the last thing on radical rightwing minds. I suppose this politico-linguistic problem really took off when the non-left, in Western countries, abandoned the Keynesian economic consensus in the 1970s.

In Australia, meanwhile, the Liberal Party is the equivalent of the US's Republicans (though they generally oppose a republic) or Britain's Conservatives (who are these days pretty liberal). They might be truest to the low church, small state origins of the idea, but we're left with a word that can mean its complete opposite, depending on the country, the context and no doubt the company.

Should we instead use 'progressive' to describe left-liberals, as many of them do? I would suggest not: any political idea to which no-one could reasonably object (in this case, 'progress') is not an idea at all. Similarly, the left in America seem to take offence at being accused (or take offence on Obama's behalf when he is accused) of 'socialism', a term many in Britain and Europe are still happy to use to describe their own set of beliefs. Might 'social democrat' (now a bit out of fashion in Britain) be less offensive, or does that suggest something more Mailer-ish; too much about responsibilities and not enough about rights? Would 'liberaltarian' be the most honest candidate, or is it just too much of a mouthful?

I suggest we seek guidance from the model offered by the excellent Political Compass, refining right and left economically into whether they are socially liberal or conservative (though even they use the rather loaded term 'authoritarian'; illiberalism and authoritarianism aren't quite the same thing, and there are plenty of constitutional conservatives who would pass as civil libertarians). The top left and bottom right of the compass have always seemed to me the most logical positions — either you accept government interference or social norms to constrain your behaviour or you don't — but that's for another post.

The point is that we have to use these terms with care, and should be quick to ditch them once they become interchangeable. Clarity in our political language might then become our best weapon against the lack of clarity in our political thinking.

^{1. [I've capped the L because so many sans serif fonts show a lower case l as indistinguishable from an upper case I: another serious failure of communications if you ask me.]↩}