Owen abroad

Archive for October, 2005

A discussion began at The Sharpener about why US blogging has a proportionately bigger readership, and more influence, than UK blogging; and it has been picked up by Martin Stabe and the Curious Hamster.

One explanation that has been offered is that the US mainstream media is worse than the UK media – so bloggers there fill a void.  Brian Barder (aka my Dad) doesn’t agree:

For generally balanced and well informed comments on current issues, comprehensiveness of news coverage, and the essential separation of news from comment, I would argue that the New York Times and the Washington Post are superior to any British newspaper with the partial exception of the Financial Times, which is anyway these days almost as much an American as a British paper, and which doesn’t lay claim to the status of a journal of record.

I agree, and not just out of filial loyalty, that the US print media is at least as good as, and in many ways superior to, the UK newspapers.

But I am not swept along with his idea that broadcast coverage of news and current affairs is any match for the UK media.  We have 80 channels of cable TV here at home and we don’t switch on the set from one week to another.  I get all my broadcast news from BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. I suspect my father’s perspective suffers from:

• selection bias – he is comparing the best US programs which are rebroadcast internationally (or which he sets aside time to watch) with everyday TV he watches in Britain;
• seeing the international version of CNN rather than the domestic version (which is almost unwatchable)
• focusing on TV rather than radio – there are no radio stations in the US that come close to matching the quality of BBC radio.

Finally, if the Foreign Office has a budget to promote Britain’s reputation abroad, it could use it to pay the BBC not to show BBC America which consists of nothing but reruns of dismal sitcoms like "Keeping Up Appearances". 

Perhaps because I started my working life in the Treasury, I take a rather puritanical view about the way civil servants should spend the public’s money.

So I am with Tim in being outraged by this report that DTI officials apparently used public money to pay for expensive hotels, BMW hire cars, and cocktails. (I say ‘apparently’ because I know that these press reports rarely turn out to be completely accurate). 

In my view, civil servants should never charge alcohol to expenses, should use the cheapest hotels in which they can efficiently stay and work, and should, where possible, travel by public transport rather than taxi or hire cars.

I have had to travel quite a bit at the taxpayers’ expense, and in my experience, government departments have strict rules. For example, civil servants are not allowed to use Air Miles earned on official journeys for private travel; and we had to stay at pre-determined hotels selected for their value for money.

Sometimes appearances can be deceptive. For example, my department negotiated a sweetheart deal with a particular airline, using bulk buying power to get business class flights at economy rates – which may have given the impression to an outsider that the travellers were lording it at public expense when the deal was in fact rather good for the taxpayer (as well as benefiting the civil servants).  And civil servants often stay in well known business hotel chains at government rates which mean that the room rates they pay are no more expensive than a mid-priced hotel which would be less convenient and provides fewer facilities. 

So I don’t know if the DTI officials are guilty as charged, but if they are, I hope they will be properly reprimanded. The fact that this is in the newspapers confirms that it is the exception rather than the rule for British public servants to behave this way, and I hope it stays that way.

If there is one thing that annoys me as much as public servants spending my money wastefully, it is private firms spending my money wastefully. All those expensive hotels and business class sections on planes were not built for people spending their own money, you know.  They were built for business travellers spending your money. It all comes out of your pocket in the form of higher prices, lower returns on your investments, or lower wages.  And the waste of your money by private sector firms is, in total, much higher than the waste of your money by your government.

Right wing trolls across the nation are reaching for their keyboards with their free hand to remind me that the difference is that you have a choice about which private company you buy from, invest in or work for, but government extracts its money from you by force.   But the difference in choice is not in fact very great.  For a start, you do not have that much choice about private sector firms to buy from or invest in – it is in practice very hard to find one that does not overpay its executives or allow them to waste your money on expensive flights and hotels. Second, you do have a choice about government – if you don’t like the one you have got, you can vote to choose another.  The difference in choice, to the extent there is one, is one of degree.  And much, much more of your money goes on private sector waste than it does on public sector waste.

That is not intended to justify abuses of taxpayers’ money by public servants or anyone else.  But as the only member of the Senior Civil Service with a blog (as far as I know), when Tim expresses scepticism that all civil servants are "Simply selfless devotees of the common good", I feel compelled to say that I am similarly unconvinced that those to whom we hand our money in a free market are any less inclined to waste it.

Finishing a half marathon yesterday in Silicon Valley the only water available was sugared water (misleadingly labelled "Vitamin Water").  No normal water was available for the runners.  That’s a disturbing new development.  You would have expected that runners would tend to have healthier habits than the population as a whole, so why would we want to drink sugar?

It is almost impossible to buy anything here in the US that is not filled with sugar.  The manufacturers lace sugar into foods that you might not expect to contain sugar – such as a tin of tomatoes or beans, breakfast cereal, bread, orange juice, soy milk, salad dressing, pasta sauces, pickles and crackers. 

And the quantities are large.  Kellogs Crunchy Nut cornflakes are about one-third sugar by weight (about the same as a Pop Tart). 

Why do manufacturers do this? Because sugar tastes nice and is addictive.  You will enjoy the food and come back to buy more.

If food manufacturers were adding heroin to our food, we wouldn’t allow it.  The food industry is cynically and deliberately poisoning us.  It is time we forced it to stop.

Avoiding added sugars when buying staple foods requires extreme vigilance.  Foods here are often misleadingly labelled, with the sugar disguised as maltodextrin, sucrose, fructose, glucose,  corn syrup, maltitol, dehydrated sugar cane, fruit sugars or other equivalents.  And by splitting the added sugar into these different components, the manufacturers can push sugars further down the ingredients list than if the sugars were all bundled together. 

The good news is that sugar consumption here in the US is beginning to dip down, after a peak in 1998.  From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, high fructose corn syrup exploded onto the scene, taking about a third of the cane and beet sugar market, adding to overall sugar consumption, and contributing to the obesity epidemic.  But while the total appears to have peaked, as the graph below shows, Americans still consume more than 5 ounces (150g) of sugar per day: the equivalent of about 4 cans of coke. Apart from soda, most of this is sugar added to ordinary food items by the food processing and catering industries.

Here is an article I wrote a while ago explaining the biochemistry of sugar consumption.  Added sugar will be the new tobacco: it is highly dangerous, addictive and poisonous, and is central to chronic health problems afflicting affluent societies today.

The Conservatives have demanded an urgent enquiry by Sir Gus O’Donnell, Head of the Home Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, into allegations that David Blunkett has broken the Ministerial Code by failing to seek the approval of an independent committee before becoming a non-executive director of a DNA testing firm.

Whatever the merits of this particular case, we should kill off the idea that it is the job of civil servants to investigate the behaviour of ministers.

Sir Robin Butler set a ill-judged precedent in 1994 by agreeing to investigate allegations against Jonathan Aitken.  In the absence of any powers to carry out any sort of investigation, he took Aitken’s word that he had done nothing wrong, and cleared him of improper behaviour. Later in the same year he did the same by clearing Neil Hamilton of receiving bribes from Mohammed Al Fayed.  In both cases, he was subsequently proven wrong.  That he was unable to discover the truth is not entirely Lord Butler’s fault; but he should never have accepted the task in the first place.

It is not civil servants’ job to hold Ministers to account.  The job of civil servants is to serve the elected government, not to police it.  Ministers are accountable to Parliament, and through Parliament to the public.

The current version of the Ministerial Code says this about enforcement: 

Ministers are personally responsible for deciding how to act and conduct themselves in the light of the Code and for justifying their actions and conduct in Parliament. The Code is not a rulebook, and it is not the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet or other officials to enforce it or to investigate Ministers although they may provide Ministers with private advice on matters which it covers.

So the Ministerial Code explicitly excludes the Secretary of the Cabinet from having to try to enforce the Ministerial Code, and rightly so.  If Parliament wishes to ask an independent person to investigate the conduct of a Minister, it should appoint somebody to carry out this task. Neither the Conservative Party, Parliament nor the Prime Minister should ask civil servants, who owe their loyalty to Ministers, to investigate them. 

Update 31 October: According to the BBC, the Prime Minister has asked the Cabinet Secretary to see if Mr Blunkett’s shares, held in trust for his sons, breached the ministerial code.  As quoted above, the Ministerial Code is absolutely clear that it is NOT the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet to enforce the code, and if Gus has any sense he will refuse.

In an amazing announcement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced today that it will donate $258 million to research on malaria, which kills 2,000 African children each day.

See more at my Vaccines for Development blog. 

A group of K-Stars ran the Silicon Valley Half Marathon this morning. All enjoyed it, and Tomas (1:29:53) and Dave O’Connor (1:24:50) achieved personal records. Christine (1:40:20) won her age group. Grethe ran 1:38:07 and I ran 1:21:49. Andy (1:22:56), Dave and I scored for the team. We were not the fastest team but don’t know if we were in the top three. (Update: we were third team.)

Now for a large breakfast.

In the photo (clockwise): Tomas, Mike (1:55:54), Owen, Andy, John (1:27:43), Dave O’C, Dave P (1:30:02), Christine, Grethe.  Missing from photo Heather (1:42:03 – second in age group).   In the 5km (not in photo) were Janet and Malinda.

Full results here.

Scooter Libby has been indicted today on five counts (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements). He has resigned. Note that an indictment contains only charges and is not evidence of guilt. Libby is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial; the prosecution has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Looking at the big context of this indictment, there are four distinct allegations of wrong-doing that have been levelled against Libby (as well as Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and others).

1. Knowingly revealing the name of a covert CIA agent.
Libby has not be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act or the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is what the Special Prosecutor was originally established to investigate. It has been said that, in Valerie Plame’s case, the importance of this is exaggerated, as she was not under cover in the field at the time. But if we take seriously the idea that the US is at war, and that intelligence is at the centre of the war effort, exposing a US agent would be a serious charge. During the second world war a Government official who had revealed the name of a secret agent would have been shot for treason. (This blog claims that at least one CIA agent died as a result of Valerie Plame being unmasked.  If so, that would be rather serious.)

2. Misleading the country about the case for war in Iraq.
Scooter Libby was briefing the media about Joseph Wilson because Wilson alleged that the Administration had exaggerated the case for war. In particular, the US and UK Governments had claimed that Iraq was trying to get nuclear materials from Niger. It is said that this was part of a wider effort, under the auspices of the White House Iraq Group, to ‘market’ the case for war.  The popular blog Huffington Post concludes on this basis: "I’m not saying that Plamegate is the same as Watergate. I’m saying it’s worse. Much, much worse. No one died as a result of Watergate, but 2,000 American soldiers have now been killed and thousands more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn’t."  Of course, it is not, in itself, illegal to have given a misleading account of the case for war in Iraq, though it may turn out to be politically damaging.

3. Misleading the media and the public about what they knew about Valerie Plame.
Is is alleged that Vice President Cheney may have misled the press, and thus the American public, about what they knew and when they knew it about the decision to send Joseph Wilson to Niger.  According to the New York Times, Mr Cheney told NBC’s "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, 2003 "I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson.", some three months after Mr. Cheney had been told that Valerie Plame was employed by the CIA and may have helped arrange her husband’s trip.  Again, this is not a crime, though it may be politically damaging.

4. Perjury and making false statements
This is what Scooter Libby has actually been charged with. If found guilty on all five counts in the indictment, he faces a maximum of 30 years in prison and a $1.25m fine for each charge.

***

Now you don’t have to be a political geek to know that it is always the cover up that does you.  In America, the articles of impeachment of Nixon over Watergate scandal related to the attempted cover up; and the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton rested on his efforts to cover up his affair with a White House intern.

In the UK, the resignations of David Blunkett and Peter Mandelson (twice), and the imprisonment of Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, were the result of their attempt to cover up, not the original wrongdoing.

So the question is, why do they do it?  They must know that their eventual downfall lies in the attempt to cover up their mistakes.  So once the investigation begins, why don’t politicians and officials just tell the truth? 

I have a hypothesis about the answer to this. It is hard to prove, but it is the only rational explanation I can come up with.   The reason that politicians and officials would risk their careers, and sometimes their liberty, by covering up mistakes and wrong-doing is that most of the time they get away with it. 

Our politicians are making the following call: the expected cost of lying and perjury – a small chance of a catastrophic outcome (in this case, 30 years in prison) – is less than the expected cost of coming clean every time something goes wrong.  And if they are right, this means that they must be getting away with it rather a lot.

Does anyone have a better explanation?

Regular readers will note that there appears to be an inconsistency between this and my view (expressed here) that politicians – at least in the UK – are generally decent people.  I do not think these are necessarily contradictory: it might be that only a small number of politicians and officials are engaged in this sort of cover-up, and it is just that group for whom the calculus above applies.

As Corporal Jones used to say in Dad’s Army, "they don’t like it up ‘em".

 Who are we talking about now?

Companies.  You know, rich people.  The sort that read Forbes.  Very upset, they are. About bloggers.  Yep, us. We, the people, have the temerity to stand up to corporate power.

Daniel Lyons has a preposterous article in Forbes (free registration) which whines a lot, in that annoying way that you see in movies when the tough guy is suddenly very afraid and pleads for his life. Apparently, bloggers sometimes criticise brands:

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

You can see his point, can’t you? What’s the point of being disgustingly rich if you can’t control the media, eh?

Lyons goes on:

The combination of massive reach and legal invulnerability makes corporate character assassination easy to carry out. Dry treatises on patent law and trade policy don’t drive traffic (or ad sales) for bloggers and hosts; blood sport does.

Call me cynical, but I haven’t noticed UK PLC or Corporate America sticking to "dry treatises" in their massive advertising campaigns to coax us to buy their products.  Nothing wrong in sexy blood sports when Mr Murdoch or Mr Forbes owns the channel.  Media sharks circling their victims when they smell blood: that’s what the punters want, right?  But what if the lunatics take over the asylum? What indeed.

No wonder companies now live in fear of blogs. "A blogger can go out and make any statement about anybody, and you can’t control it. That’s a difficult thing," says Steven Down, general manager of bike lock maker Kryptonite, owned by Ingersoll-Rand and based in Canton,Mass.

People can make statements and ‘you can’t control it’. You mean – citizens being able to express themselves to other citizens without rich people getting to decide who will be heard?  Blimey.  No more "Permission to speak, sir?".  Pass the port, Henry, we’re really screwed now.

Even mighty Microsoft, for all its billions, dares not defy the blogosphere. In April gay bloggers attacked Microsoft over its failure to support a gay-rights bill in Washington State (the company is based near Seattle). "Dear Microsoft, You messed with the wrong faggots,"wrote John Aravosis, publisher of AmericaBlog, which threatened to oppose Microsoft’s plans for a big campus expansion unless the company caved in. Microsoft reversed itself two weeks later, saying it supports gay-rights legislation after all.

A touching story: I’m missing the part where this is bad.  Perhaps if I were a billionaire businessman I would understand what was wrong with ordinary people putting pressure on Microsoft to act as a good local corporate citizen.

Lyons has some advice for businesses who come under fire from the bloggers: play dirty. Here is what he recommends:

BASH BACK. If you get attacked, dig up dirt on your assailant and feed it to sympathetic bloggers. Discredit him.

ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn’t liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger’s access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger’s name or Internet address.

SUE THE BLOGGER. If all else fails, you can sue your attacker for defamation, at the risk of getting mocked. You will have to chase him for years to collect damages. Settle for a court order forcing him to take down his material.

That doesn’t sound like good advice to me. That is a recipe for a company doing itself serious harm. In fact, it reminds me of another of Corporal Jones’s famous remarks, invariably uttered as he ran around like a headless chicken: "Don’t panic! Don’t panic!"

I suppose I knew that the rich and powerful would fear the day when ordinary people are able to speak the truth and have access to information that is not mediated by the control of, er, the rich and powerful.  But I didn’t expect them to be quite so open about the danger this presents to them.

They don’t like it up ‘em.

More at Micro Persuasion, James Robertson, Below the Fold, Dan Gilmoor, AccMan Pro, Doc Searls.

Tomatoes being unloaded in the market today in Berkeley.

Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a nominee for the Supreme Court.

It was clear that, whatever her merits as a person, Harriet Miers was not suitable for a lifetime appointment to a Court for which qualifications include a sharp legal mind, intellectual rigour, and an ability not only to make decisions but communicate the reasons for them.

In the United States, the process of Senate approval can weed out unsuitable nominees.  Admittedly it doesn’t always correct the Administration’s mistakes, but the fact that the system exists, and that it is not toothless (a Republican-led Senate having refused to approve the appointment by a Republican White House of John Boulton, and leading to the withdrawal of Ms Miers) forces the Administration to think considerably harder about who it is going to nominate.

In the UK, we don’t have proper scrutiny of the thousands of appointments made by the Government, generally by the Prime Minister under Crown prerogative.  We should.

However, the reason the Miers nomination failed was not only that she was not suited for the job, but because the appointment failed to secure the support of the conservative base, by virtue of whose support President Bush governs. In his current difficulties I suspect that he will be tempted to throw them some red meat, by the nomination of a conservative. We may yet wish that Harriet Miers had been confirmed.

Stuart Hodkinson says in the current edition of Red Pepper that the Make Poverty History campaign may split up.

The failure of MPH to achieve its political demands cannot be laid at the door of Oxfam, Geldof and company alone. By being too dependent on corridor-lobbying, celebrities and the media, by failing to give voice and ownership of the campaign to Southern social movements, by watering down the radical demands agreed upon by hundreds of grassroots movements, from both the South and North, at the World Social Forum, and by politically legitimising the G8 summit, the campaign was doomed from the start.

Interesting article by Tim Harford and Pablo Halkyard at the id21 website about the role of blogging in international development.

The World Bank, and other development organisations such as the UNDP and DFID, will have to work with this new technology, as many large corporations are trying to do. But the playing field is much more level than it was even a year ago. Being a big organisation counts for very little in the booming world of blogs – what counts is quick, relevant content. 

 

Today is the 60th birthday of the United Nations – the anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter here in San Francisco.

Read this excellent summary (pdf) of 60 ways the UN makes a difference, ranging from human rights to humanitarian aid;  from eradicating smallpox to creating a framework to support international business.

Here is a sample of the 60 entries:

12. Providing humanitarian aid to refugees

More than 50 million refugees fleeing war, famine or persecution have received aid from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees since 1951, in a continuing effort that often involves other agencies. The organization seeks long-term or “durable” solutions by helping refugees repatriate to their homeland if conditions warrant, or by helping them to
integrate in their countries of asylum or to resettle in third countries. There are more than 19 million refugees, asylumseekers and internally displaced persons, mostly women and children, who are receiving food, shelter, medical aid, education and repatriation assistance from the UN.

26. Laying the groundwork for business

The UN is good for business. It has provided the “soft infrastructure” for the global economy by negotiating universally accepted technical standards in such diverse areas as statistics, trade law, customs procedures, intellectual property, aviation, shipping and telecommunications, facilitating economic activity and reducing transaction costs. It has laid the groundwork for investment in developing economies by promoting political stability and good governance, battling corruption and urging sound economic policies and business-friendly legislation.

As Democracy Arsenal points out today:

With all the uproar about UN investigator Detlev Mehlis’ report implicating the highest levels of the Syrian government in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, we should not lose sight of the UN’s accomplishment in carrying out the investigation and issuing the findings it did. …

But without a broadly mandated UN, how could the Hariri case have moved beyond finger pointing?  The Lebanese government could never have been trusted to investigate.  There’s no way the US itself could have interfered.  The Arab League could not have been objective.  The EU would never have waded in.   The International Criminal Court would not have had jurisdiction.  Without the UN, its hard to envision how the investigation, particularly given its depth and breadth, could have been carried out. 

"For those whom God to ruin has design’d, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind."

~ John Dryden (1631-1700) English poet, dramatist & critic from The Hind and the Panther

According to a CBS poll, most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Just over half, 51 percent of Americans, say that God created humans in their present form, and another 30 percent say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent of Americans in the poll say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.

Neil Kinnock’s speech in Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983, rates as one of the finest speeches ever made in British politics.

It was two days before the General Election. He scribbled the notes from which he delivered the speech in the car on the way to the rally, and his voice was hoarse from campaigning.   He was elected leader of the Labour Party at the party conference in October 1983, after Labour’s resounding defeat. He went on to transform the party to make it fit for government.

Here is the full text of what he said.

If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you.

I warn you that you will have pain–when healing and relief depend upon payment.

I warn you that you will have ignorance–when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.

I warn you that you will have poverty–when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.

I warn you that you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work–when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.

I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.

I warn you that you will be quiet–when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.

I warn you that you will have defence of a sort–with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.

I warn you that you will be home-bound–when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.

I warn you that you will borrow less–when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.

If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday–

- I warn you not to be ordinary

- I warn you not to be young

- I warn you not to fall ill

- I warn you not to get old.

My father, Brian Barder was on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House this morning, to talk about diplomatic immunity.  The US Embassy in London has apparently decided that it should not pay the congestion charge.

I assume the aim was to bring on a crusty retired diplomat to make a fool of himself by arguing for the absolute necessity of diplomatic immunity to enable diplomats to park with impunity, drink and drive, molest small children and so on. If so, they failed. Though I am admittedly biased, I thought he did very well explaining why diplomatic immunity makes sense, how it is limited (by the ability to expel a diplomat who flouts it) and why the US Embassy in London is wrong to try to avoid the congestion charge.

But don’t take my word for it: here is an MP3 file (2.9Mb) which you can download and play on your computer (or iPod) with the interview.  Alternatively, for the rest of the week (only) you can hear the whole programme here.

Update: See Brian Barder’s blog entry for details of why diplomats, even American ones, should pay the congestion charge.

First things first. You can read blogs in web browsers, by bookmarking all the blogs you want to read and switching from one to another. You can, but you would be mad. What should you do instead?

There are programmes variously called blog readers, RSS readers, feed readers or aggregators (these all mean the same thing) which go to each blog that you want to read ("subscribe to") and collect the latest utterances of your favourite authors. You can then easily skim through the summaries of the new entries – rather as you might glance at the subject line of your emails – and then open up the full article for the entries you want to read.

There is a comprehensive list of aggregators here. As you will see, they are bascially divided into two sorts:

1. Some readers are online: that is, they are special web-sites that you log in to – rather as you would to a webmail account – which fetch the information from the blogs you read, and let you read from a single website. The most commonly used is My Yahoo! (though many users may not know they are using an RSS reader). Of the readers that are not integrated into a portal, the best known is Bloglines, and Google has just launched a new online reader which is too slow to be usable yet (but, knowing Google, it won’t be long before it overtakes the competition).
2. Other readers run on your desktop. They may integrate into other applications, such as Firefox or Outlook, or they may be stand-alone programmes. The best known plugins are Sage, which is an add-in for the web-browser Firefox (Internet Explorer 7 will apparently include something similar) and Newsgator (which is an add-in for Outlook). Of the stand-alone applications, there are free readers such as Sharpreader, RSS Bandit and Omega Reader; or commercial applications such as Feeddemon

On Linux, I use kaggregator, built into the kontact suite in SUSE 9.3, and it is excellent: stable, easy to use, powerful and quick.  Sadly, there is nothing as good for Windows. Yet.

On Windows, I have been using Sharpreader for some time. It is powerful and easy to use (very similar to an email program like Outlook). However, I have had two problems with it:

• First, it is a memory hog. It uses a lot (and I mean a lot) of your computer’s resources. That is OK if you have a fast PC with a lot of memory; but it can slow a laptop down to a crawl.
• Seondly, I keep getting "Just in time debugging" errors – which I assume are related to the .NET framework. I suspect I could switch these off fairly easily, but a quick scan on Google didn’t show any obvious ways to do so.

So I have been looking around this morning, and I’ve settled on RSS-Bandit, at least for now. The main advantages over Sharpreader, as I see them, are:

• tabbed browsing – being able to open multiple windows showing different pages. If you have used Firefox, you will know that once you have switched to tabbed browsing, you will never go back.
• better interface – I just prefer the design, which is modelled on Outlook 2003
• less memory usage, and no debugging errors

However, it does have some disadvantages. So far, they are:

• Screen repaints can be slow
• The blogs are listed in alphabetical order – there is no way to put your most interesting and important blogs first.
• I haven’t yet figured out how the cacheing and reloading of feeds takes place, but it seems to be a slow process

I also tried Feeddemon, which is a commercial product but has a free trial version. I didn’t like it as much as RSS Bandit – mainly because it does not have tabbed browsing. It is early days with RSS Bandit, but for now it has become my feed reader of choice.  In the meantime, I am surprised that a killer product hasn’t entered this market yet.

Update 24 October:  Playing with the Google Reader this morning – they seem to have made some improvements and it works much faster. Might be a good option if you are interested in having an online reader.

If you ever run a marathon, you will be bombarded with advice like this from the "Gatorade Sports Science Institute" (!):

Fuel up before the race-Drink at least 16 ounces of a sports drink with carbohydrates about 2 hours before the marathon, then another 8-16 ounces just before the race. Be sure to stop to drink at least 2-4 ounces at every fluid station.

Drink at every fluid station- Drink even if you don’t feel thirsty. Thirst is not a reliable indicator of fluid needs because by the time you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated.

Even the apparently impartial BBC tells us:

Take on plenty of water as you make your way to the starting area on Sunday morning and accept water and sports drinks every time they are offered during the race, even if you are not thirsty.

Is this good advice?  It is if you have shares in Gatorade (made by Pepsi) or Powerade (made by Coke). But it is increasingly apparent that it is NOT good advice for marathon runners.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that thirteen percent of runners in the 2002 Boston Marathon had hyponatremia, a deficiency of sodium in the bloodstream caused by drinking too much fluid.  This is not a new finding: Tim Noakes (a professor of sports science) published research twenty years ago showing that water intoxication is a risk in endurance events. In 2002, runners died of hyponatremia in both the Boston Marathon and the Marine Corps Marathon – and there are at least a dozen other examples of death during marathons from hyponatremia, and many more people who have been severely ill and at risk.  Your risk of drinking too much far exceeds the risk of drinking too little.

This is, of course, not what the manufacturers of sports drinks – who also sponsor many races – want to hear, or want you to believe.  But as Noakes points out, there is no evidence of damage from short term dehydration during races:

Everyone becomes dehydrated when they race … But I have not found one death in an athlete from dehydration in a competitive race in the whole history of running. Not one. Not even a case of illness.

In my 2002 book, Running for Fitness, I discussed the dangers of over-hydration (the first mainstream book on running to do so, as far as I know).  I noted that the recommendation of the Amercian College of Sports Medicine was to drink 600-1200 ml an hour but that "there is a danger that this may be too much for non-elite athletes who are running a marathon".  I did not mention that the American College of Sports Medicine is sponsored by, er, Gatorade.

Thankfully, the mainstream media are beginning to get it.  Yesterday’s New York Times reported that the participant handbook for runners in the New York City Marathon will say – for the first time ever – that runners should drink no more than eight ounces of water every 20 minutes. It is a huge advance that runners are being encouraged to set an upper, not a lower, limit on their drinking during races.

What about the risk that your performance will suffer if you are dehydrated?  The evidence for this is scant: in fact, it is striking that those who do best in marathons are often the most dehydrated at the end. 

I wouldn’t recommend this to less experienced runners, but I recently tried running a marathon (the San Francisco Marathon in August) without drinking or eating anything at all. Nothing passed my lips: nada.  All I had to drink that morning was one strong cup of black coffee.  I ran 3:05 without any tapering or preparation (in fact, I ran ten miles the day before as well) and felt fine.

Amby Burfoot, the editor of Runners’ World, says in the October 2005 edition that you should

drink when you thirsty, understanding that water, sugars, and electrolytes will help you to feel and perform your best. But don’t force yourself to drink.

Pepsi doesn’t want you to believe it, of course.  The "Gatorade Sports Science Institute" still says:

Although dehydration remains the primary challenge for the vast majority of athletes, hyponatremia should be recognized as a possible threat to those athletes who go overboard in their hydration practices.

Gradually, this information is reaching more runners, and fewer are suffering the effects of hyponatremia.  After the deaths in 2002, the number of people suffering from hyponatremia in the 2003 Boston marathon fell to 6 percent; and the London Marathon doctors are also reporting that the number of cases is coming down.

We have an uphill battle against the advertising and propaganda of the sports drink industry, and the powerful addictive qualities of sugar.

Sports drinks are useful, in moderation, during marathons because they replenish your blood sugar and slow down the depletion of your glycogen stores. When you do drink during a marathon, it is a good idea to drink a diluted sports drink (or just water with some sugar and salt in it) rather than plain water. But evolution has equipped you with a thirst mechanism for a reason.  Our ancestors who hunted in the hot sun for many hours did not force themselves to drink before they were thirsty, and nor should you. 

Read more about these runners who are the victims of the sports drink industry campaign to persuade you to drink too much: 

• Hillary Bellamy (1967-2002)
  
• Cynthia Lucero (1973-2002)

For the first time in history, global economic prosperity, brought on by continuing scientific and technological progress and the self-reinforcing accumulation of wealth, has placed the world within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether.

Jeff Sachs, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, Scientific American September 2005

You are right. We do have an historic opportunity this year to Make Poverty History.

Tony Blair, 16 April 2005, Campaign Diary

It’s an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. This should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it’s become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it’s ‘difficult’ justify our own inaction. Let’s be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don’t have is the will, and that’s not a reason that history will accept.

Bono in an interview to the World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day on May 3, 2004.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

Thabo Mbeki, President South Africa opening World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, August 2002

in the new global economy we are, all of us, the richest countries and the poorest countries – inextricably bound to one another by common interests, shared needs and linked destinies; that what happens to the poorest citizen in the poorest country can directly affect the richest citizen in the richest country; and that not only do we have inescapable obligations beyond our front doors and garden gates, responsibilities beyond the city wall and duties beyond our national boundaries, but that this generation has it in our power – if it so chooses – to abolish all forms of human poverty.

Gordon Brown, speech to the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, 16 November 2001

The challenge is a huge one. But the prize is very great. We are the first generation in the whole of human history that has the chance to eradicate basic illiteracy from the human condition. And we can do this within fifteen years. Let’s resolve today – together – that we will do what needs to be done to make this happen.

Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, Speech to World Education Forum, Dakar, April 27, 2000

Hunger is man’s oldest enemy. There is now the scientific knowledge and the institutional arrangement that makes it possible to overcome hunger, not only within the United States but throughout the world. This can be done within the lifetime of people now living, if there is the political will to do so.

The Heritage Foundation, 1984

Mankind has never before had such ample technical and financial resources for coping with hunger and poverty. The immense task can be tackled once the necessary collective will is mobilized. What is necessary can be done, and must be done.

The Brandt Commission, North: South A Programme for Survival 1980

Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty,

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to Congress, March 16, 1964

The world has been greatly changed, especially during the last century, by the discoveries of scientists. Our increased knowledge now provides the possibility of eliminating poverty and starvation, of decreasing significantly the suffering caused by disease, of using the resources of the world effectively for the benefit of humanity.

Linus Pauling – Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1963

Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world–or to make it the last.

President John F. Kennedy, Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20, 1963

I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. … To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required–not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. …For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

Harry S Truman, Inaugural Address Given at Capitol Building, Washington, DC, Thursday, January 20, 1949

For the first time in history the counsels of mankind are to be drawn together and concerted for the purpose of defending the rights and improving the conditions of working people – men, women, and children – all over the world. Such a thing as that was never dreamed of before, and what you are asked to discuss in discussing the League of Nations is the matter of seeing that this thing is not interfered with.

Woodrow Wilson, League of Nations (8th September, 1919)

Jacob Nielsen lists the top ten design mistakes of bloggers.  It is a very useful summary for all new bloggers, and a useful reminder for the older hands.

I would add the following six tips:

11.  Retain your own voice.  Blogging has evolved as a form of personal expression of ideas and experience,  and that gives it much of its unique value.

12.  Use trackbacks to continue the conversation.  These create a link in the blog you are commenting on, to your own comments.   Emerging blogging etiquette demands that you only trackback to a post that you also link to in your post.

13.  Use blog-reading software to read blogs.  It is much quicker and more convenient than surfing from one blog to another in your web-browser.

14.  Use the "excerpts" section of your blog software wisely.  Many readers skim the excerpts to decide what to read.  Make it self-contained and interesting.  Excerpts that are intended to tease are annoying.

15.  Link generously.  Links are our community’s currency and our main social asset.   Give credit it where it is due.

16. Bloggers hate rules.  Try to codify blogger etiquette at your peril. 

Hat tip: Bloggers4Labour