We were all so wrong

Nothing I say will be new or unique here.

But I wanted to admit that like so many other people, I was wrong.

I have a clear memory of that roller-coaster 24 hours on the 6th and 7th July 2005. I had a few weeks to waste, with a summer job lined up but nothing to do in the meantime. This was also a time when I was a casual party member of the Liberal Democrats - basically I shelled out ten quid and they spent about half that on stamps for letters asking me for more money. During my period of idleness I was bombarded with emails requesting help at a by-election in Cheadle, where Mark Hunter was up in a furious battle with the Tory candidate. With nothing better to do, I took a leap of faith and plunged into political campaigning for the first - and last, as it transpired - time. I had a fantastic few weeks, met loads of incredible people, tramped the streets with luminaries like (Lord) Tom McNally, heard loads of fascinating stories and ended up getting quite close to some very senior people in the party. It was a hoot.

One day when shoving a leaflet through a letterbox, a dog took exception and decided to have a good go at my knuckles, leaving me with a graze and plenty of paranoia about tetanus. So it came to pass that on the afternoon of 6 July, I watched the announcement in the waiting room of a Staffordshire A&E department. I remember the elation, the screams...and the call, in the nick of time, for Mr O'Neill to see the doctor please. (He took one look at my minor graze and laughed in my face).

I remember the following day too - it was a special one for us, for the then leader, Charles Kennedy, was to come and give a speech to rouse the troops. Sure enough, CK turned up first thing in the morning, but there were worried whispers and dark rumours spreading around the office of something terrible happening in London. CK was ushered into the kitchen with a portable radio - he needed to be able to hear the Prime Minister's speech on the bombings, so he could give his reaction.

Fast forward seven years and my excitement grew slowly and steadily. The Olympics have always represented something special to me - the pinnacle of sport, something pure and true, competing for the sake of competition, unsullied by anything else. But for the last few months, I was infected with a cancerous cynicism. The allocation of tickets I found tolerable - demand was always going to outstrip supply. The fact that I would have had to sign up for a new credit card in order to buy some, I did not find tolerable. I refused to apply for any on general principle, and started to be overwhelmed with a blanket of bitterness. But then the other stories about sponsors started to creep out. The Games Lanes - facilitating Coca-Cola execs to be whisked around London like royalty while real Londoners sat in tailbacks. The fact that you wouldn't be able to buy chips, because McDonald's said so. The fact that someone was going to be paid to go around covering up logos on the hand dryers in the toilets, because they weren't an official sponsor. The branding police. Horror story after horror story was leaked, and I felt a weary sense of depression about corporate inevitability.

Then there was the feeling of dread about the infrastructure. I'm well versed in the uselessness of the Jubilee Line, and with a fortnight to go there was a series of catastrophic failures. With London being swamped with extra people, there was no way the tubes would cope. London would choke up and fail, a mediocre town masquerading as a global city, like Atlanta in 1996. I looked forward to the Olympic Games not with anticipation but with apprehension. This was to be a sorry mess.

I decided to volunteer for a hefty chunk of the Games - not as a Games Maker but in my usual rather more mundane capacity which I'm immensely proud of. On the night of the Opening Ceremony I was on the streets of Bloomsbury - Tottenham Court Road was deserted. It was surreal. I went home feeling rather flat. But then I hadn't seen the Opening Ceremony.

I must admit that I've never bothered watching an Opening Ceremony before. I assumed it was just a glitzy pageant with lots of sequins, naff music, fireworks and jingoistic bollocks. I watched the ceremony on iPlayer the next morning and felt a rather unusual emotion. I've always been a proud Londoner. I'm a proud Australian. I'm a fiercely proud Irishman. But even though I was born in Hammersmith, there's something which I rarely feel but which Danny Boyle managed to ignite. I felt a sudden uprush, an explosion or pride in being British.

The Opening Ceremony was designed for British people. The sequences - particularly the TV montages - were full of injokes for Britons. Michael Fish, the Shipping Forecast, EastEnders, Soho sex shops, Great Ormond Street - all were referenced in at least a passing way. This was our Games, said Boyle, and it's for us. Some bits didn't work. The "digital love story" was naff and McCartney was cringeworthy.

But the best moment was Bond. It was understated and perfect. It was just so Bond. It wasn't Daniel Craig; it WAS Bond. You sensed that the curl of his lip at the footman was real, the swagger was just right. But the star of the show? The Queen, of course. Her "Good evening, Mr Bond" wasn't a line that had been rehearsed for a few minutes; it was a line that had 60 years of preparation. Our Queen is no Juliana of the Netherlands; it's the fact that she has been so invisible for the last six decades that made that line so wonderful.

As for the rest of the Games, everything has already been said. They were majestic, awe-inspiring, wonderful. I went to the table tennis and had a great time. I watched more Red Button in two weeks than in the previous two years put together. I screamed at the TV whilst watching handball and archery, weightlifting and gymnastics. I cheered on Mo and Bradley. I let out a broad grin for Usain. The Olympics did everything I'd hoped and more.

The BBC coverage was superb from start to finish. Michael Johnson was a star but my surprise hero of the games was the camp-as-Christmas, dry-as-Prosecco Ian Thorpe. Balding and Barker, Jackson and Boardman, they were all fantastic, and the multiple coverage just demonstrated how lucky we are to live in an age of such rapidly advancing technology.

But my cynicism was behind me, and I was happy to be wrong. The tube was fantastic (I even came through City Airport at rush hour midway through the first week, without a hitch). The branding police were happily low-profile. LOCOG were not the faceless, unsmiling bureaucrats we'd all imagined ruining our Games. Yes, there were hitches with the sponsors not bothering to turn up for the events (and shame on them all) but for the most part, these Games were utterly fantastic.

Best of all, the traditions. The Olympic Rings are surely one of the most powerful, evocative logos in the world. The lighting of the flame at the Temple of Hera and journey to the Cauldron. The symbolism of the Marathon. The Olympic spirit. The Olympics DO have a purity that is absent in so much of society these days, a complete antidote to the usual summers of Sky Sports screaming about football transfer rumours.

Like most of London today, I feel bereft. There's a huge black hole where before we had something to look forward to. But like my mum with her memories of Olympic Rings on her school exercise books in Gippsland in 1956, I will have memories to last me a lifetime, even if most of them will be from the TV. London, we put on the greatest festival on earth, and I'm so proud.

Proud

These are crazy days we're living in. The whole country seems to be soul-searching and scratching their heads for ever more implausible theories for the reasons behind the riots. Almost all of them are utter BS.

I could witter on about critical mass and mob mentality and the fact that the rules of the game have changed so that nothing is seen as unacceptable any more and how "game" may indeed be the right word to describe the attitude of the participants and how all the whining about cuts and poverty and politics and the way the whole thing was caused by Twitter are way, way off the mark. But it would just be drivel adding to a swollen morass of existing drivel.

So I won't. I'll just say that London remains the best city in the world and we'll stay strong. Once I've finished work tonight at my day job I'll be on my way in to volunteer for London for a 12-hour stint. It's times like these when I can cast aside the inefficiencies, the frustrations, the annoyances and inconveniences, and just be proud to be part of London's Finest Family. It's times like these that make us realise why we signed up.

(Original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel-eight/6024429000/)

***Update*** not often you see this (the first 15 seconds or so).

A lonely Christmas

With every unexpected death there's someone who'll feel the pain most. A December night, minus five on the scale and a blizzard on the way, and a light has gone out in someone's life. For me this is a stressful situation as I gather my thoughts, try to follow protocol, hoe I'm not forgetting things, concentrating on doing a good job, and keeping new colleagues under my wing. We are not the only people present. There is a newly bereaved brother. He is keeping up appearances, answering stupid questions, trying to be helpful. The realisation has not yet kicked in. The loneliness of someone alone in the country will not manifest itself for a few hours.

Hours pass as officious feet trudge muddy footprints through the hallway, radios bleep, hard male voices converse mixed with hushed tones at appropriate moments, occasional, accidental, stifled bursts of laughter break out. Hustle and bustle is everywhere, paperwork flows. Finally it is all over.

There is a week until Christmas. What would have been family affair has suddenly turned into a void. With any luck there may be a friend or colleague who will take pity. I hope so for his sake. I pass on final information about the coroner, mortuary, an apology that due to health and safety we cannot clean up the mess in the now silent living room. I mutter a limp euphemism about this not being pleasant. With an effort I look him in the eye, attempt a smile, which I hope conveys something approaching empathy, and, ridiculously, my final words are almost as if I'm saying goodbye to a mate after a pint. "Take care."

Suddenly the stony, glum resignation falters. I see shoulders slump. I know what this means. I shoo everyone out the front door and make sure not to look behind me as I pull the door shut. Some privacies are inviolable.

Hours later, nearing the end of a continuous 27-hour working day, hysterical exhaustion invading, I stare out from the window of a deserted, stifling twelfth floor over central London. Outside, nothing but a whiteout - the snowpocalypse descends. On an always-on radio somewhere on the other side of the bleak office, Chris Rea's "Driving Home for Christmas" comes on, and I have a little moment to myself which I am glad there is nobody with me to share.

A week later, it's Christmas night, and although I'm not really the praying type, that poor woman's lonely brother, who I'd never met and probably never will again, is in my thoughts. Christmas is no time to be alone.

Three of the best articles I've read all year

This week I've been smacked sideways three times by three of the most interesting articles I've read all year. I just had to link to them. Warning: moderate levels of nerdiness.

Firstly this one courtesy of Wired: quantum chess. Wowzer. Normal chess is hard enough for me with enough permutations to keep me interested for ages (at our recent cheese-and-port-and-chess night, the games were always the centre of attention despite some pretty stupendous smelly cheeses), and I've never got into Fischer Random chess, but quantum chess sounds nuts. And impossible.

Then this story from the LA Times, which was picked up on by the Freakonomics crew. That sort of shit gets me seriously excited. Mapping crimes isn't new - and police forces are already aware, for example, that serial burglars tend to work within a very small area - but using simulations to predict the behaviour and movement of criminals while including factors like police movements into the model, adds up to a very powerful model. "Humans are not as random as we think". That sounds familiar! Will it work? Would it ever hit the UK? Who knows, but even the thought cruising around in an IRV with real-time probability heatmaps for crime on the MDT gets me fidgety with anticipation. Look out for further developments.

As an aside, another, similar story that Freakonomics reported was this one on using text analytics to predict whether a film will succeed or bomb. Instinctively, that sounds like bollocks to me; some of the best films have the simplest plot lines, and vice versa. Isn't there some theory about there only being five stories ever written, and they're all by Shakespeare, or something like that? Stories about using science and/or data modelling to predict wacky things tickle me every time, but this sounds like nonsense to me. I'm happy to be proved wrong.

Finally, I've always believed in some similarities between physics and marketing (I've lost count of the number of people ask why I wanted to work in marketing after doing a physics degree, but it makes complete sense to me). What a delight, then, to discover a talk given by Google's Dan Cobley comparing the laws of physics and those of marketing. ("H/T" as they say to Mike Cooke). It'll only take up seven minutes of your time. He splits things up neatly into four analogies - all of which are neat: large brands have larger inertia and are therefore more difficult to change direction quickly (cf Newton II - nice!); and that as time goes on, it becomes ever more difficult to keep control of a brand (cf entropy) - he didn't explicitly make reference to the fact we are living in a more fragmented society, but I wonder if that was what he was referring to. But the real killer was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the observer effect that results from it. It's a simple idea (not so simple in practice) and many philosophical dilemmas result from it: that any observation you make actually affects the quantity being measured. As Cobley points out, the fact that consumer research can be affected by the very act of observing (consumers are less likely to give honest answers in the presence of an observer), can be compared obviously and simply to the Heisnberg-derived observer effect. Yes, yes, YES. I'd half had the same comparison stored up in my head but Dan Cobley has articulated is concisely. Some people in the comments whine about it not taking the true spirit of the Uncertainty Principle and how that's not the meaning of the observer effect, but that's just bluster and semantics - for all real-world, simple-analogy purposes, it holds true. Those moaners would probably have a fit if they saw my own analogy of flirting with quantum mechanics which I'm pleased to say has the seal of approval from my old flatmate Libby, a postdoctoral physicist who said she'd use the comparison with her undergrads!

Oh, and while we're on a science tip, a good piece by Evan Harris on the impending cuts to the science budgets.

policing and social media

I wrote a piece on the SML blog today about ways in which police forces are using, and can use, social media. Until I dug around today I wasn't aware quite how much some of the forces are using various forms of social media. The Met (surprise surprise!) is lagging way behind some of the county forces.

A couple of further points I meant to mention: firstly, police forces could learn a lot from some of the better customer service case studies, like EasyJet's use of Twitter. That said, given the volume of wind-up and malicious communications which can be made via social media, care should be given to spending vast resources responding to anonymous communications and criticisms.

Care must be given to who is given access to official social media streams, and how it is audited - police forces don't want a Vodafone incident.

Lauri Stevens (thanks for the retweet) is an expert on such issues Stateside and has written plenty of articles on the subject, including a terrific one here about the social media reaction to the recent G20 summit in Toronto. She makes several important points, which have given me a couple more thoughts.

There will always be huge volumes of social media conversations surrounding police activity, and most of them will be negative. From opinions at a micro level ("why didn't the police answer my call quicker?") to the macro ("police are terrorising innocent civilians" or simply "ACAB"-type posts), there will be thousands of rational and irrational opinions given every day. Police forces had better have a thick skin. The measurement/monitoring aspect of things can give a tangible metric of how opinions can be changed by a combination of communications and practical operational techniques changing. For example, an analysis of social media chatter around the May Day protests - where plenty of opinions are voiced about police - could be done one year, measuring volume and overall sentiment of conversations. This could be repeated the following year to give quantitative comparisons.

Lauri Stevens says "engagement is king", which is true in my opinion, and praised Toronto Police for communicating with "anyone and everyone who engaged them". This may be shooting themselves in the foot. ocial media is rife with hyperbole and hysteria; there will be many arguments which are unwinnable, simply because they are with people who are Always Right. The recent campaign by Greenpeace to bombard the Nestle Facebook page provides a case in point; police social media strategists might do well to take some tips from this article.

Finally, a word on a one-stop-shop case study: PC Ed Rogerson's Twitter page. No comment required; it's brilliant. Not sure how many officers would have the inclination do do likewise, and there should be some pretty strict regulations to ensure nobody goes off message (I am uncomfortable with officers updating their Facebook status via their phones whilst on duty) but Rogerson shows how it should be done.

Live update: as I watch the dramatic events unfold in Rothbury with, I must admit, a little bit of an excited schoolboy thrill, how about this for a use of social media. It was instantly retweeted extensively - I wonder if it was actually an effective way of getting their message to the media?

Scumbags? Maybe I think so too, after all

One thing I've never been comfortable with is police officers referring to virtually everyone they meet as either "idiots" or "scumbags". The former refers to anyone who's had more than four pints, the latter to a rather hazy concept of "bad people" who police deal with on a regular basis. I've always thought of "scumbag" as a lazy term that doesn't take into account all kinds of social problems: drug addiction, homelessness, alcoholism, mental health problems, broken homes, violent parents or carers, poverty. Many police officers throw derogatory descriptions around willy-nilly, which I've often thought is wrong. However...all it takes is to see things from a different point of view, and the cynical part of you takes hold. That happened to me a few weeks ago, just before Christmas.

I was punched in the face - in a post office enquiry office at 7am. Not exactly how I had the morning planned. When I'm asked for money I'm usually fairly brusque with my negative responses - I rarely get an "oh but pleeease". This morning, however, was a different story, and after I had been asked fairly aggressively for money, and told the chap firmly but politely that I wasn't giving him anything, he called out to his mate. At this point I realised I was in a dark, deserted cul-de-sac, and my heart rate increased quite a bit; I made a quick evaluation of the situation and decided I wouldn't hang about to engage in furher pleasantries and economic debates, but rather find a little space to make a quick phone call.

The only place where there would definitely be light, and hopefully some other people, was in fact my destination at the end of the cul-de-sac, where I was off to pick up a package (some Swedish music: Hans Jorgen Alsing's Vai Alsing Da'r and Har ar en Samba til Dej by the delightfully named Samba Group Bananas. 1980s European Brazilian fusion was not uppermost in my mind at this point, I have to admit, and when I saw the two gentlemen running after me, I was glad that I knew the way through the maze of the post office depot car park.

To cut a long story short I ended up taking a right hook to the right eye socket while still trying to get through to the 999 operator. Brent police were superb in their handling of things, made several arrests and were on top of things. Unfortunately, despite having seen both of the would-be robbers, and arrests having been made, the ID parade was a horribly stressful affair. I never found out for certain if I got it wrong, but I must assume that I did, as the case has been NFA'd for lack of evidence, and those lowlifes will be able to carry on robbing people at their leisure for the time being. A little old lady in the post office said to me "I'll be scared to walk around on my own"; rather foolishly, before I had time to think, I said "yes, you'd be right". The poor thing nearly collapsed. But if a confident 26-year-old bloke takes a punch for his troubles to hang on to his own wallet at 7am, will a pensioner be immune?

I'm a fairly fit, reasonably confident, mid-twenties male who can look after himself, and I felt quite shaken up afterwards. The other victims that morning were apparently more shaken up than I was. The only positive I can take is that I often deal with victims of crime myself, and it's a reminder of just how vulnerable and helpless they can feel - for that I'm glad.

Scumbags? I might not quite go that far just yet, but I can see why the description might be applied.