January | 2015 | Steve Woods

Erasmus Prize for Wikipedia Community

17/01/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

When Wikipedia came online in January 2001, no-one could have have imagined its subsequent development. Fourteen years later, innumerable authors have produced more than 34 million articles in 280 languages. The Wikimedia Foundation attracts 20,000 mn. hits on the online encyclopaedia and its sister projects, heise reports.

This success is now being recognised by the Dutch-based Praemium Erasmianum foundation with the noted Erasmus Prize. Part of the citation reads: “By distributing knowledge to places where it was previously unavailable, Wikipedia also plays an important role in countries where neutrality and open information are not taken for granted. With its worldwide reach and social impact.”

Each year the Praemium Erasmianum foundation recognises people and institutions for their services. The prize will be handed over to representatives of the Wikipedia community in the autumn, while the prize money of €150,000 is to be used for community development.

In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation must grapple with future strategy. As Foundation Trustee Phoebe Ayers recently explained on her blog, the online encyclopaedia’s readership has clearly declined, particularly in industrial countries. Even sharply rising mobile access figures cannot compensate for the loss. The number of authors has also been declining steadily for several years. The Wikimedia Foundation is investing in a more attractive platform that’s also easier to use to counteract this trend.
Temple Meads prepares for track electrification

16/01/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Never having had the desire to learn to drive, I’m reliant on the railways for long distance travel and follow all developments on the iron road with great interest.

At present the Great Western line from Paddington to Bristol and South Wales is to be electrified in coming years and preparatory works are already well underway all along the route.

To be able to accommodate the power lines serving the tracks, the redundant Royal Mail conveyor at the west end of Bristol Temple Meads has been removed in recent weeks.

Network Rail has just released the video below which documents these works at Temple Meads.
FSFE stickers tell truth about cloud computing

13/01/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

As with all other fields of human activity, IT is not immune from fads and fashion.

One of the recent fads has been for so-called cloud computing.

Wikipedia describes cloud computing (often truncated to just the cloud. Ed.) as follows:

Cloud computing is a recently evolved computing terminology or metaphor based on utility and consumption of computing resources. Cloud computing involves deploying groups of remote servers and software networks that allow centralized data storage and online access to computer services or resources. Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid.

However, almost from the outset, cloud computing has been heavily criticised by free software advocates such as the Free Software Foundation’s founder, Richard Stallman.

The latest effort to counteract the cloud computing hype comes from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which has just produced a sticker that tells the simple truth about the cloud.

That’s right! Other people’s computers, although in this case the people or persons are likely to be juridical persons, i.e. corporations.

The stickers can be ordered from the FSFE (scroll down until you find them) and a small donation to its work would be appreciated in return.
City of Munich joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

12/01/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite.

On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third largest city – launched the LiMux Project to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011 to improve LibreOffice’s features aimed at enterprise environments.

“The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Doctor Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

With Munich’s addition, the TDF Advisory Board now has 17 members: AMD, CIB Software, City of Munich, CloudOn, Collabora, FrODeV (Freies Office Deutschland), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, ITOMIG, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia), Lanedo, MIMO (Consortium of French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest), Studio Storti and SUSE.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Vous n’êtes pas Charlie

11/01/2015 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics
Today an anti-terror rally is being held in Paris in memory of those killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo (posts passim) and at a Kosher supermarket in recent days.

It is said that up to 1.5 mn. people are attending the rally.

Amongst the attendees are many politicians, led by President Hollande. Many foreign politicians are also attending.

Charlie Hebdo was a beacon of free speech and freedom of the press. Several of the foreign politicians in attendance represent regimes whose treatment of the press is less than enlightened. They include:
- King Abdullah of Jordan, which last year sentenced a Palestinian journalist to 15 years in prison with hard labour;
- Turkey’s Prime Minister Mr Davutoglu. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other state;
- Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, whose armed forces killed 7 journalists in Gaza in 2014;
- Egypt’s Prime Minister Mr Shoukry. Egypt has not just jailed Al Jazeera journalists (now facing a retrail), but has also detained photojournalist Shawkan for more than 500 days;
- Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, which last year jailed a journalist for “insulting a government servant“;
- Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra of Algeria, which has so far detained journalist Abdessami Abdelhai for 15 months without charge;
- Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates, which in 2013 held an Egyptian journalist incommunicado for a month on suspicion of links with the Moslem Brotherhood;
- Prime Minister Jomaa of Tunisia, which recently jailed blogger Yassine Ayan for 3 years for “defaming the army“;
- Messrs Irakli Garibashvili and Boiko Borisov, the Prime Ministers of Georgia and Bulgaria respectively. Both Bulgaria and Georgia have past form for attacking and beating up journalists;
- Eric H. Holder, the Attorney General of the United States. Police in Ferguson have recently detained and assaulted Washington Post reporters;
- Prime Minister Samaras of Greece, where riot police regularly beat up journalists at demonstrations, including injuring two journalists at a protest in June 2014;
- Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, an organisation yet to be held to account for deliberately bombing and killing 16 Serbian journalists in 1999;
- President Keita of Mali, where journalists are expelled for covering human rights abuses;
- Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifah, the Foreign Minister of Bahrain, which is the world’s 2nd largest jailer of journalists in per capita terms;
- Sheikh Mohamed Ben Hamad Ben Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, which jailed a man for 15 years for writing a poem;
- Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who had several journalists jailed for insulting him in 2013;
- Prime Minister Cerar of Slovenia, which sentenced a blogger to six months’ imprisonment in 2013 for “defamation“;
- Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland, where “blasphemy” is still a criminal offence;
- Prime Minister Kopacz of Poland, which raided a magazine’s offices to seize recordings that might embarrass the ruling party;
- UK Prime Minister Cameron, whose security agencies forced The Guardian to destroy hard drives containing documents it had obtained from US whistle-blower Graham Snowden threatened the paper with prosecution if it continued to report Snowden’s revelations.
Hat tip: Daniel Wickham.
Bristol – European fly-tipping capital?

11/01/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

In the world of the city’s great and good, Bristol is off to a flying start celebrating its year as European Green Capital.

Plans are already well advanced to spend thousands on spurious ‘green‘ arts projects, such as dumping a load of old boats in picturesque Leigh Woods.

According to the blurb on the European Green Capital website, the “European Green Capital Award (EGCA) has been conceived to recognise and reward local efforts to improve the environment, the economy and the quality of life in cities.”

However, it would appear that there’s been little local effort – apart from protests by local residents and councillors – to improve the environment and quality of life in inner city areas such as Easton, Lawrence Hill and St Pauls, judging by the amount of fly-tipping that still goes on daily on our streets with no sign of a slackening or any meaningful enforcement efforts or action by Bristol’s seemingly impotent or uninterested city council.

The photographs below were taken this morning by local resident Hannah Crudgington and are typical of the grottiness we inner city residents have to endure every day. All the photographs were taken within a couple of hundred metres of each other in the BS5 postcode area.

Was Bristol awarded the European Green Capital award on false premises? Some in the city believe that to be the case. Judging the evidence of my own eyes, awarding Bristol with the European Green Capital award would have been more appropriate.

Do you agree? Please feel free to comment.
Dutch language is long-winded and peculiar, research reveals

10/01/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

De Volkskrant reports that speakers of Dutch are daily more circumlocutory with many diversions and ’empty elements’ than speakers of languages such as Bantawa, Bininj Gun-Wok, Egyptian Arabic, Samoan, Sandawe, Kharia, Khwarshi, Kayardild, Teiwa, Tidore, Sheko and Sochiapan Chinantec, according to research by graduate researcher Sterre Leufkens of Amsterdam University. A total of 22 languages were scored by Leufkens for the presence of unnecessary grammatical elements and rules. Her dissertation contains several disappointing findings about her mother tongue.

Take the difference between ‘de‘ and ‘het‘. English only has ‘the‘. Under the coconut palms of Samoa in the south Pacific they have know for a long time that life can be easier from a linguistic point of view. Another interesting fact is that when Dutch arrived in southern Africa, ‘de‘ and ‘het‘ melted like Dutch snow in the African sun to make space for the clearer ‘die‘.

Where Dutch is spoken. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Key – Dark blue: native and majority language; Blue: Afrikaans (daughter language); Light blue: secondary (non-official language), where some knowledge persists

Plural form

Dutch is also long-winded because verbs have a plural form – hij loopt and wij lopen – and due to the double plural endings of substantives: ‘ziektes‘ and ‘ziekten‘, ‘sektes‘ and ‘sekten‘. Dutch has no less than three ways to compose words. In linguistic jargon such peculiarities are known as historical junk.

In Dutch the lumber could have accumulated over the centuries due to the fact that few people made this language their own as a second language. When large groups actually do that it often results in grammatical simplifications. That must have happened some 1,500 ago with the West German dialect from which English is derived.

It still remains to be seen whether Dutch contains more lumber and ballast than German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Greek or Armenian. Dutch features as the sole Indo-European language in Leufkens’ research. “The point was to get an initial impression of what is possible in this area,” Leufkens told the magazine Onze Taal. “In that case it is better to take languages that are as far apart as possible.”
Latvian man spends 4 weeks in jail due to interpreter problem

10/01/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

A Latvian man spent 4 weeks in jail for an offence that would normally have attracted a non-custodial sentence, the Shropshire Star reports.

Rolands Etjantens pleaded guilty on 8th December to a charge of common assault, but was remanded in custody by Telford magistrates to await assessment by the probation service to see if he was suitable for community punishment.

According to his solicitor, Etjantens’ lack of English also meant he was not suitable for unpaid work in the community or supervision by the probation service as both of these would also require the use of interpreters.

District Judge Andrew King ultimately sentenced Etjantens, of no fixed abode, to 42 days in prison, meaning that he would be released within a few days.
Je suis Charlie

07/01/2015 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

Social media has responded quickly to the horrific attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris today, which resulted in 12 deaths and 5 injured. Four of those killed were Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Tignous and Georges Wolinski.

The press office of Amnesty International in France has described that attack as “A black day for press freedom”.

Many Twitter accounts changed their avatar to the Je suis Charlie image shown below, whilst many tweets were also tagged with the #JesuisCharlie hashtag.

Some of the harshest condemnations of the attack have come from the attackers’ co-religionists. The imam of Drancy, Hassen Chalghoumi, is reported to have said: “Their barbarism has nothing to do with Islam”.

My deepest condolences to the victims and their families.
WiFi coming soon to French TGV trains?

04/01/2015 Steve WoodsTech

After years of tests, the French state railway operator SNCF is going to launch an invitation to tender to equip its TGV (high-speed train) carriages with WiFi, Le Monde Informatique reports. There’s light at the end of the tunnel for the travelling public.

Three TGV trains at Paris Gare de l’Est. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

On Friday’s France Inter breakfast programme, Axelle Lemaire, the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs encouraged SNCF to deploy WiFi quickly on TGV lines. An invitation to tender to provide internet access will be launched very shortly under the aegis of SNCF’s digital strategy. The railway company has been testing a service using a flat satellite antenna on the roof of some carriages for several years. In June 2007, SNCF was reported to be working together with Colubris Networks. In December 2007, the firm was testing a WiFi service on TGV services to eastern France. There has since been lots of public relations exercises, but nothing definite for passengers.

If passengers are growing impatient waiting for the arrival of WiFi on TGV services, this is also because the service has already been available for many years on Thalys and EuroStar trains providing international services. SNCF’s immobility is once again being blamed on the cost of deployment: €350,000 would be needed to equip one TGV carriage. Asked whether the service would be free for passengers, the Secretary of State stonewalled expertly hoping “that the recent increase in SNCF’s fares will include the costs of deploying WiFi”, adding her wish that “using the WiFi would be without additional charge for passengers”.

Plural form

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