Public photography, paranoia, and the police

1.31 am, 21st April 2010

This afternoon, looking out of the window of my house, I noticed that the sun was strong in the sky but that there were also some clear white clouds visible against the blue background.  As a keen amateur photographer I made a mental note that a strong sunset was likely and set off to a location that provides a good view across the London skyline. That location is close to Greenwich Park and Blackheath Common, a patch off grassland just beyond Wellington Grove and alongside Cade Road (overlooking Hyde Vale).

From an internet search I had found that sunset was due just after 8pm and I arrived about 20 minutes before.  I began taking pictures, initially just trying to work out the best camera settings for the light conditions, and then making slight adjustments as the position of the sun shifted or as I zoomed in and out of specific features on the skyline.

Just before 8pm I heard a police siren apparently getting closer. Soon, below me in Hyde Vale I saw a police car heading quickly down the road with its roof light flashing. A few moments later this was followed by a police van, also with siren sounding and light flashing. For a moment I was tempted to take pictures of each of these as they passed, but I reasoned to myself that these would not make very interesting photographs so I ultimately didn't bother. As these vehicles disappeared beyond the trees I assumed that they were heading off to deal with some typical urban matter such as a pub fight, a street stabbing, or a local theft. However, shortly afterwards I heard the sirens getting closer again and both vehicles stopped just behind me on Cade Road. The officers appeared to be paying attention to a car at the side of the road, which I assumed they had been chasing. I just carried on taking pictures of the sunset. As I was doing so I heard a voice behind me. A policewoman was asking me if I knew anything about the car at the side of the road. I shrugged and said no, probably looking rather bewildered.

The policewoman then said that they had received a report of someone behaving suspiciously with a camera, taking pictures of the houses. As I realised that this had to be me I was immediately overcome with a feeling of amusement. However, I was also aware that a protracted conversation would mean me missing the opportunity to photograph the sun as it finally dipped beyond the horizon. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to show the policewoman some of the pictures I had been taking. The following picture is one of the earliest I had taken (and one of the best):

From Sunsets

The policewoman seemed quite happy with this and thanked me, but also asked if I would give my name and address. I did so, but in retrospect am rather disappointed that I was so compliant. One is not legally obliged to provide one's name under such circumstances. The reasons I did are:
(a) As mentioned, my opportunity to photograph the sunset was quickly disappearing so I did not want to get involved in a protracted conversation;
(b) The policewoman was friendly and polite and - whether due to genes or upbringing - I am not naturally inclined to tangle with people who are nice to me;
(c) The policewoman was rather sweet and attractive, so - frankly - as a heterosexual man any argumentative thoughts I might otherwise have had just didn't come to mind.
(d) Although I thought I was on public land, I was not 100% certain because the road I had walked through leading up to it was a private one. The rules for photography on private land are not the same as for public.

The officer thanked me for having been willing to show her the pictures I had taken, adding that she was sure I would understand people's concerns in the context of terrorism, and then she went back to her car where, no doubt, she ran a check on me.

As I thought about this afterwards I felt rather more annoyed than I had been at the time. What kind of terrorist operation might I have been planning in the middle of some nondescript grassland overlooking residential houses? The idea was just ridiculous.  Moreover, assuming that I had been on public land, then I was entitled to take photographs of anything I liked. If I had wanted to take pictures of the nearby houses then that would have been entirely legal. As it happens, I remembered that a few of my early pictures - as I was working out light settings and so forth - had included some local houses in Hyde Vale:

From Sunsets

I am now very tempted to go back to the same area in daylight and make an obvious show of photographing all the surrounding buildings just to see what happens.

Some useful information and advocacy regarding photographers' rights can be found at the following website:

http://www.urban75.org/photos/photographers-rights-and-the-law.html

Governors at London Met announce their resignation

The following message was sent today from the Coordinating Committee of UCU at London Metropolitan University to all members:

The Board of Governors finally announced resignations at their meeting


yesterday. The Chair of the Governors has resigned with effect by end of

March. The other lay governors specifically associated with the Audit

Sub-Committee (effectively we understand virtually all the lay governors)

will resign in the summer. We assume an entirely new Audit Committee will

be in place by April 2010.



UCU understands that the formal announcement will be made today in the

form of an agreed joint communication from the Chief Executive of HEFCE

and the Chair of the Governors. We understand that the announcement will

include a statement that the new Vice Chancellor Professor Gillies will be

taking forward the action against members of the Executive group who were

in post during the period covered by the Melville/Deloitte Report and this

could include disciplinary action with the possibility of individual

suspension whilst his inquiries are proceeding.



Of course, as you will know from the Melville Report it was Sir David's

view that all members of the Executive group in post at the time should

take 'collective responsibility' for the failings that he identifies. UCU

shares this view.



Whilst UCU welcomes the announcements of the impending resignations of the

Board of Governors (clearly members will understand that this is a

considerable victory for the unions and, more importantly, for the

university), we are unable to commend the agreed order of their departure.

In current circumstances a delayed and staggered resignation is utterly

inappropriate.



We include below the statement from our Staff Governor Dr Kay Dudman that

was read out at the meeting itself.



"It is clear that London Metropolitan University's future and safety is at

stake. HEFCE has made apparent that there is a clear and immediate risk

that funding will be withdrawn unless they are convinced that their

financial support of the university with public funds is safeguarded to

their satisfaction. It is noted that HEFCE itself is not without blame,

as cited in the Melville report, in particular for failing to make a

written record of meetings.



London Metropolitan University cannot survive without public funds. The

honourable, and indeed the only, course of action is for the members of

the Board of Governors who were serving during the period in question to

resign, and that the Executive, as highlighted in the Melville report,

should follow suit. Their sacrifice will be for the good of the

institution as whole, and allow London Metropolitan University the

opportunity to flourish once again under the leadership of a new Vice

Chancellor, a new Board of Governors, and a new Executive.



I know that the driving force behind those who offer their services to the

Board of Governors is the ultimate welfare of the institution, and I am

therefore certain that the necessary steps will be taken in order to

ensure the University's survival. Resignation is the price that has been

demanded, and the price that must be paid. Resignation is now a

necessity."



UCU entirely agrees with this. An immediate resignation was the only

acceptable action that the governors and the executive (or at least the

named members of the executive) could have taken yesterday. The Board of

Governors and the named members of the Executive were required to

‘consider their position’ in the letter from Sir Alan Langlands 20th

November following HEFCE’s receipt and acceptance of the Melville/Deloitte

Report. It is clear that the Governors were initially very reluctant to

comply with this and have only done so as a result of HEFCE threatening

immediate withdrawal of further funding to the university. It is also

clear that HEFCE were specific in requiring the departure of Peter Anwyl

as Chair and any members of the Governors who had served on the Audit

Committee. This, we understand, included Sir Michael Snyder.



In office the Board have not at any point acted in the wider interests of

the university. The slow drawn out manner of their departure is

transparently a face saving exercise and is entirely consistent with their

previous actions and inactions that have been governed by narrow personal

self interest and self-esteem and not in any way and in any time the wider

good of London Met.



The next year is likely to be critical for the university. In previous

emails we referred to the announced short fall of £600 million from the HE

sector as a result of a public funding cuts. We also pointed up the

failure of London Met to secure any specific funding from HEFCE’s

Strategic Development Fund (potentially £10 million) despite the Interim

Vice Chancellor announcing this as one of his specific ambitions last

summer. How can the retention of a discredited Board of Governors until

the spring and summer be anything but counterproductive to the future of

the university? How can we hope to secure any new funding until they go?

How also their retention do anything but handicap Professor Gillies in any

action he finds it necessary to take against the Executive? What possible

benefit can be served to the university by them remaining in office?



Clearly London Met needs new governors, new management and a new start

now. This is an imperative not an impatient demand. UCU and UNISON

officers will be meeting Professor Gillies on Friday morning. We will

obviously be relaying this message to him and we will be putting to him

our views regarding new structures of governance and management at the

university. Specifically we will be asking him to announce immediately a

suspension of any further job losses that have already been announced for

July 2010 under the Cost Improvement Plan.



We include below the link to the video of the chaotic scenes outside

Moorgate at yesterday’s meetings. Speakers at the rally included Alaisdair

Hunter President of UCU, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Paul Mackney, ex-General

Secretary of UCU and representatives from Unison and from national and

local NUS. As you will see from the video, students at London Met took

action themselves and were right to do so, but it should not have taken

all this to get rid of the governors.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AymfQib2Yg


A further statement will be made later this week.



Mark Campbell UCU Chair

Cliff Snaith UCU Secretary

Debbie Rees UCU Membership Secretary

Yaz Djebbour UCU North Chair

Peter Cambridge UCU H & S Officer

David Hardman UCU City Chair

Jane Holgate UCU City Secretary

All that jazz

A bulletin from the Psychonomics Society 50th annual meeting in Boston, MA.


The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians.

Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn't manage to note every single detail, but I think the basic finding here is very interesting. In jazz, the improviser has to make a series of musical choices in relation to what the other players are doing. There is apparently a whole lore about coordination in jazz, with an emphasis on the necessity to coordinate section changes, but also the need for players to focus and concentrate whilst improvising a solo.

The study reported here recruited 30 experienced jazz and saxophone duos, and asked them to play a specially composed piece which included two improvised solos of 20 bars each. After an opportunity to rehearse the duos played in one of three conditions: (a) together - the face-to-face condition, (b) in separate spaces but with a video and audio connection, and (c) in separate spaces with only an audio connection. Audio recordings of their performances were rated on several criteria by three professional performing musicians, each with over thirty years' playing experience and previous experience of sitting on musical juries.

On a post-performance questionnaire, the face-to-face players reported being better able to concentrate than did the players in the other conditions. However, their improvisations were given the lowest ratings by the judges (who, remember, were blind to the conditions). The most highly-rated performances were those in the audio condition.

Among the other findings was that the sax players improved with practice whereas the pianists did not. However, the performance of the saxophonists was highly dependent on the pianists, who clearly laid the foundation that enabled the sax players to shine.

Top 10 learning tools for 2009

Jane Hart, a social learning consultant, compiles an annual list of popular learning technologies, as voted for by other learning professionals. The top 100 tools for 2008 can be found here. My own top 10 for 2009 (below) is slightly embarrassing because of the emphasis on Google products.  I have in fact made some use of the Zoho suite of applications, but there is a terrific level of convenience in having iGoogle set up as my web page, with the other Google products embedded within, many of which synchronise with my phone (an HTC Magic). I can hardly believe that GMail has been squeezed out of my top 10, not to mention YouTube (to which I sometimes upload screencasts that are recorded in Screentoaster), or Google Sites.

1. Blogger. My final year students have each set up blogs where they regularly record their thoughts about the material we cover. I also use blogger to record occasional research updates that might be of interest to readers of my textbook, and with a view to incorporating these into a future edition. 
2. Google search.
3. Google calendar. This is particularly useful because it synchs with my Google Android phone and sends reminders to my phone.
4. Screentoaster.
5. Google Docs.
6. Googer Reader.
7. iGoogle. This is an excellent way of organising your desktop.
8. Twitter.
9. Google Android.
10. MacBook Air - this is about half the weight of the regular laptops I have previously had and offers the speed of operation that Apple products have become known for. Particularly useful is the facility to record screencasts that is built into the operating system. This could possibly challenge my use of Screentoaster, which I have mostly used up until now.

Measuring utility

This posting is for the benefit of the students taking my class  "Judgment and Decision Making". I set the exercise of measuring your utility function for a certain range of monetary values, using two different methods: The Certainty Equivalence Method and the Probability Equivalence Method. Of key interest is whether the two functions look the same when plotted graphically. I did this exercise myself and the results are shown above.

When you do this, I'd like you to insert the graphs into your blog and include some commentary - especially if you find that the two curves look different. The website for plotting the graph is here. Select the option for coordinates plotting. Say you want to enter 5 coordinates, and then select . On the page that appears enter the monetary amounts in the column for X and the utility values in the column for Y. From the menu options to the right enter a short title in the

Review: The greatest show on earth

Review: The greatest show on earth: The evidence for evolution, by Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press. 2009.


In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth, I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he compares the teacher of evolution to a teacher of Roman history whose class is continually disrupted by "a baying pack of ignoramuses" who vociferously assert that the Roman empire did not exist.
Some might wonder whether a less confrontational tone would be more effective in getting the reader on board. I'm not so sure. Dawkins gives the example of Wendy Wright, the president of 'Concerned Women for America', who was interviewed for the Channel Four documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin. She repeatedly questions the existence of "intermediate" fossils, whilst Dawkins repeatedly ripostes that they are in the museums if only she would care to look. When one listens to Wendy Wright and the many people like her (see some of the risible creationist videos on YouTube) one feels that they are a lost cause.
However, for anyone who is unsure about the case for evolution and is willing to actually read about the evidence, then The greatest show on earth is a brilliant exposition. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the case and then asks how this could be explained by young earth creationism (creationists who believe that the world was created within the last 10,000 years) or intelligent design (creationism dressed up in the clothing of science).
Along the way Dawkins exposes many of the myths propounded by creationists. For example, although most evolution occurs over millions of years, some evolutionary change can be observed and, indeed, experimentally induced. In one key study, the coloration of guppies evolved to be more or less bright, depending on whether they had been placed in non-predated (or weakly-predated) pools rather than highly-predated pools. Likewise, artifical selection (e.g. dog breeding) is a de facto demonstration that animal forms can change, as opposed to all forms having been place on earth by a creator.
Another myth exposed by Dawkins is that of the "missing" link in the fossil record. Dawkins points out that evolution would be true even if we had no fossils; molecular analyses of existing species demonstrates more clearly than fossils just how different species are related to each other. But we are lucky that any fossil record has survived, and since Darwin's time many "intermediate" fossils have been found, showing the ancestral forms of many living species. Occasionally, some of the fossils in the pre-human lineage get reclassified as an earlier or a later form. However, this actually supports the evolutionary case by showing how close some of the different forms are to each other. In fact, if we had an entirely complete fossil record then it would be impossible to actually classify different forms because the changes between successive generations would be imperceptible.
Dawkins shows throughout how the creationist case has to fall back either on flat denial of the facts or on implausible forms of special pleading. A case in point is the use of radioactive clocks to determine the age of the earth's rocks. Radioactive clocks depend on the half-life of isotopes - the time taken for half the atoms to decay. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, but perhaps a creationist could argue that its half-life was different prior to Noah's flood. Special pleading, yes, but the pleading is worse when you bear in mind that other isotopes have different half-lives, so God would need to fiddle all of these in order to show that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.
One of the most amusing arguments against creationism is that of our interior physiologies. In contrast to the impressive exteriors of all creatures, the insides are frequently a shambles. For example, in mammals the laryngeal nerve does not pass directly from the brain to the larynx but, rather, takes a detour. Most dramatically, in the giraffe the laryngeal nerve passes right down the neck and back up again, a detour of about 15 feet. The reason for this absurdity lies in the evolution that transformed fish ancestors into mammals, which involved the stretching of the neck and the development of other structures.


Throughout The greatest show on earth the writing is crystal clear. The footnotes - so often a distraction in many books - are either illuminating or amusing. Although I knew the basics of evolution, I still learned a lot from this book. Anyone else who is willing to actually be exposed to the evidence for evolution would be well advised to read it.

Derren Brown and the lottery prediction

On 9th September, Derren Brown appeared to predict the results of the UK National Lottery on Channel 4 television. Two days later, he purported to explain this in terms of the "wisdom of crowds". He referred to a study reported by Francis Galton in 1907, in which many people attempted to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Although many different estimates were made, the average of these was staggeringly close to the true weight. Brown claimed to have averaged the guesses of a panel of people in order to produce the lottery prediction (the explanation was also mixed up with some stuff about automatic writing and group bonding).

On the blog site of the Guardian newspaper, some people expressed their doubts about the whole wisdom of crowds concept, including the Galton study. I posted the following response (I've corrected a small error in this reprinting):

Regarding the wisdom of the crowds argument, which some people have doubted, aggregating imperfect judgments can improve accuracy but it doesn't apply to the case of lottery numbers. Let's take Galton's example of people guessing the weight of an ox, mentioned in the programme (Galton's paper was published in Nature). In reality, the ox weighed 1198 lbs. If person A guesses the weight to be 1178 lbs then s/he is inaccurate by 20 lbs. Person B guesses the weight to be 1208 lbs and is inaccurate by 10 lbs. Thus, the average level of inaccuracy is 15 lbs. But suppose we average their two guesses; this gives an estimate of 1193 lbs, which is inaccurate by only 5 lbs. Thus, the level of error obtained by averaging the estimates is less than the average error of each individual estimate.


There are a couple of things to note here. First, the two estimates in the example fell either side of the actual weight, a phenomenon called 'bracketing'. With multiple estimates, at least one instance of bracketing is necessary in order that averaging estimates will improve overall reliability. When making estimates about something where knowledge can be applied, even imperfectly, multiple estimates are likely to cluster either side of the true answer. In the case of the lottery, knowledge cannot be applied. Because numbers are randomly determined, there is nothing "real" for guesses to cluster around. Indeed, the numbers 1 and 49 cannot even be bracketed, as guesses can only fall to one side of them.


Second, even where bracketing can occur, thus leading to greater reliability of the averaged estimates, greater reliability does not mean pinpoint accuracy. Rather, it simply means a reduced level of error. In the case reported by Galton, 787 people guessed the weight of the ox and the average of their estimates fell 1 lb short of the correct weight. Thus, even if it were possible to apply the wisdom of crowds to the National Lottery, the notion that this would lead to seven correct answers is risible.


I don't know how Brown did it, but having viewed the video of the "jumping ball" I'm inclined to agree that there was something along the lines of the split screen trickery that many have suggested.


As someone who teaches the psychology of judgment, it does concern me a little that mixing up genuine science with a barrel-load of hokum could damage people's understanding of, or trust in, the former.