jonathan.rawle.org

Occasionally, I’ll see something in an article on the BBC News website that seems wrong, so I drop them a note via their contact form to point it out. They are actually quite good at correcting factual errors, although they seem not to write back to thank the the people who pointed them out. The only sign that a BBC News article has changed is the “Last updated” datestamp at the top.

Yesterday evening, I was reading an article, ‘Half’ unaware of smoke ban date, which claimed that many people are confused about the long overdue ban on smoking in public places in England. To the right-hand side of the article, under the heading “Across the UK”, the first link was to an article from 2005, How UK smoke bans differ. At the time the article was written, the government was considering a less comprehensive ban in England which would still have allowed smoking in “pubs not serving food” and in private members’ clubs, despite the fact that the other parts of the UK would have total bans. Fortunately, this proposal, which would have seen England becoming the dirty man of Europe where smoking is concerned, was voted out by parliament, so from 1 July, England will have a comprehensive ban as in the rest of the UK.

Unfortunately, because of all the confusion and coverage of the original proposals, many people still think that smoking will be allowed in some pubs and clubs. I thought the BBC’s inclusion of a prominent link to an outdated article unhelpful, as it would only add to people’s misunderstanding. I sent a quick note to the BBC website, and was half surprised to find today that they had removed the link as I’d suggested.

BBC error or revealing quotation?

On a previous occasion, I contacted the BBC website after it published an article on concerns about wi-fi networks in schools. It quotes a teacher, Michael Bevington, who claims that exposure to wi-fi in the school where he works has made him sensitive to other sources of electro-magnetic radiation. The story listed satellite navigation systems as one of the things that affected him.

Now, as I’ve discussed before, traditional satnav systems do not transmit anything, they simply pick up the weak signals from satellites and use these to calculate the current position. If anyone claimed “radiation” from a satnav made them ill, that would only show the the ill effects were all in the mind.

I left a comment to this effect via the form at the end of the article. That was back in December. I only remembered about it a couple of weeks ago, when the technology commentator, Bill Thompson, wrote an article, also on the BBC website, about how fears over wi-fi lack credibility. This prompted me to go back and find the earlier article. I discovered that there was no mention of satellite navigation. Was it the wrong article, or had I imagined the whole thing? Luckily, back in December someone had copied the article into a post on a discussion forum, so the original version is preserved. It clearly reads:

Like a number of other schools, Stowe has turned off some of its transmitters. But Mr Bevington says he is now sensitive to other sources of electro-magnetic radiation, such as phones, microwaves, fluorescent lights and in-car satellite navigation. He also has problems with city centre hotspots and his neighbours’ wi-fi networks.

The BBC moderators did not approve my comment for inclusion at the end of the article, but they did remove any mention of satellite navigation. (Of course, as usual, they didn’t thank me or notify me.) This leaves me to wonder whether Mr Bevington did mention satnav systems, or whether this was added by the BBC themselves – something that makes a big difference to the credibility of Mr Bevington’s claims (if only the difference between unlikely and totally ridiculous). But it’s something that’s likely only ever to be known by himself and the BBC’s editors.

In Scotland, 100,000 ballot papers were spoilt in last night’s elections. This has been blamed on the layout of the ballot papers, and also on the Scottish Parliament and local council elections being held at the same time, each with a different ballot paper and voting system.

The ballot paper for the Scottish Parliament looks simple enough to me, it even has concise instructions printed on the paper. Two votes, cast by placing one cross in each of the two columns. The local election, which required voters to rank candidates in order of preference, also gave instructions on its ballot paper. Yet not only did people vote incorrectly, they apparently also mixed up the two papers, despite them being clearly labelled – even if someone was unclear as to how to go about voting on one of the papers, the fact that instructions are printed on them should prevent people from mixing the two up.

Isn’t it interesting that, even if someone seems incapable of following simple instructions on a ballot paper, we still consider them capable of making an informed decision when it comes to voting in an election, with all the complex issues that there are to understand? On the other hand, perhaps some people simply couldn’t be bothered to take the trouble to vote correctly.

It’s all very well blaming the system, but I think the voters should take some of the blame too.

The BBC’s economics editor, Evan Davis, has a good article in his blog on the economics of Scottish independence. He basically states that the revenue from North Sea oil and gas an independent Scotland would enjoy equals the funding it currently receives from Westminster. So when, in the not too distant future, the oil runs out, an independent Scotland would face hard times unless it had managed to reform its economy drastically before that happened. The Scottish National Party’s idea that oil money could be put into an endowment fund for the future, as has been done in Norway, wouldn’t work as the money is needed now to pay for public services. (And while they may claim that the UK government has squandered the oil revenue, could the SNP honestly say that they would have done any differently in the 1960s or 70s?)

One point that particularly caught my eye is where Mr Davis says that Scotland would save money on defence as it could “free ride on the defence of its neighbours”. In other words, no-one would want to attack unimportant little Scotland, but even if they did, Scotland’s European neighbours, including the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, would jump to defend it. And of course, the rather left-wing SNP would have no interest in taking on peacekeeping or other internationally important roles, as their record in opposing the UK’s past involvement shows.

The defence issue reminded me of a television debate some years ago, where the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, was arguing that Scotland currently pays too much towards diplomatic representation overseas. The questioner had suggested that Scotland would have to foot a larger bill for its embassies after independence. But of course, an independent Scotland would have no intention of opening many embassies (probably just a few in counties where they would earn the most prestige). The SNP would be safe in the knowledge that citizens of the European Union are entitled to use the embassies of any EU member state, so no doubt Scots in trouble abroad would run to the UK embassy where they could be sure of friendly, English-speaking assistance. As with defence, Scotland would be saving money by using services paid for by the UK or other European countries.

There is some debate as to whether Scotland would automatically be an EU member, but opinion in the discussion following Davis’s article seems to be that Scotland and the remainder of the UK would both retain their membership. An independent Scotland would certainly become a net recipient of EU funding, initially at least. This contrasts with the UK, which is currently a net contributor to the EU’s budget. While “euro-sceptics” complain about this, I see no harm in contributing towards a more stable Europe by helping the poorer parts of the continent to develop. However, a Scotland that insisted on being independent from the UK, but still accepted its money, would seem quite hypocritical.

In a partnership, it’s best not to analyse who contributes the most financially. We are better off culturally and economically together, and there is no cause to complain about Scotland’s current funding arrangements. But an independent Scotland would be a different matter entirely, and I could foresee a great deal of resentment in the UK if Scotland was to thrive on payments from the country it no longer wanted to be part of. And wouldn’t the Scottish people feel ashamed of living off hand-outs?

Today is the first anniversary of the launch of my new website, complete with blog. Here are some stastistics for that first year:

• 42 posts (two of which were later removed)
• 124 comments on posts
• 35,000 spam comments automatically filtered
• 12,000 blog post page impressions (excluding the homepage)
• Most popular post UK music industry silences radio for overseas listeners with 57 comments
• 50 incoming blog links recorded by Technorati
• 220 photographs in my gallery

To celebrate the site’s first birthday, the software on which it runs has been updated to WordPress 2.1 (a process that went quite smoothly). Also planned for the coming months is a new theme that will hopefully make better use of space, and which won’t be so closely based on the WordPress default theme. But as it took me six months to release the current version of the site, it may well be October before you see any changes!

I’ve decided not to post an April Fool on my website this year. That’s not because of a lack of imagination (well, OK, it’s partly that too) but rather that I realised the internet covers all of the different timezones, so it would always be the wrong day for the joke somewhere in the world.

I occasionally post on a forum called SkyscraperCity, and yesterday I noticed the posts were full of words replaced with strings of asterisks. The site appears to use a filter to remove obscene language, yet the words that had been removed included “city”, “street” and “tower”, all words that are used frequently on a site about architecture and high-rise buildings. I wondered whether hackers could have accessed the list of swear words, but soon found a reference to 1 April elsewhere on the forum. So I fell for the joke – or did I? It was only 31 March, and surely tradition dictates that the person playing the trick on the wrong day is the fool?

So I’m not going to include an April Fool of my own this year. Maybe next year I’ll relent, and post one with a disclaimer about the different timezones. In fact, you can now find out what I will post next year using a new search engine that I found recently, which shows you how websites will look in a year’s time – effectively the reverse of the popular Wayback Machine, which shows how websites looked in times gone by. Why not give it a try?

If any readers found any good April Fools this year, online or anywhere else, please leave a comment to tell me about them!