Daily Mail in story burial shocker

Here's an interesting thing if you're a bit bored. The Daily Mail's web site reported on Sunday that the bright green Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras installed by the Highways Agency to monitor journey times have been linked into "a police database", according to an unnamed Agency official.

However, the Highways Agency page detailing its camera types claims that "The data is anonymised and transmitted to the [National Traffic Control Centre] at least every 5 minutes. Once this has been matched to a record from an adjacent camera or a defined period has lapsed the data is deleted. The only information being retained being the average journey time for that section at that time. No one has access to the full number plate data." So, it's anonymous and used only for the purposes of measuring traffic flow. Am I the only one to think that something doesn't add up here?

However, at the time of writing, this story hasn't been reported anywhere else that I can find, and has been removed from the Daily Mail's RSS feed. But if, as the Mail reported, "Thousands of CCTV cameras across the country have also been converted to read numberplates – as have mobile cameras. Police helicopters can spot plates from the air and officers have live access to London’s Congestion Charge cameras," then there's a major scandal brewing here. It's a huge worry for the vast majority of us law-abiding people to be spied on wholesale, and 29 predictably indignant Mail readers have already left comments on the story.

So, is this story, by Jason Lewis, mere speculation? After all, it contains little hard factual content. Who was this official who seems to have spilt the beans, for instance? What would the Association of Chief Police Officers be doing with $32 million of "government cash" for the project? Is the newspaper simply stirring the pot or is the Highways Agency saying one thing while allowing its ANPL cameras to secretly be used for something quite different?

I think we should be told.

Think of the children!

Cerrie Burnell is a kids TV presenter currently working for the BBC's CBeebies channel. I say currently, because even though she seems like a perfectly nice person, some parents want her removed from their screens. Their reason? Her right arm ends in a stump just below her elbow.

According to a report on the Digital Spy media web site, parents are voicing their objections on the CBeebies message board. "Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?" wrote one. Other comments are in the same vein. Can you imagine being Burnell herself and knowing what some parents think of her? It must be heartbreaking.

The kids these people claim to be protecting have clearly dealt with Burnell's disability - as has the rest of society. Perhaps some are actually fascinated by her arm. They're definitely more aware that we're all different in lots of ways, not just skin colour. Are they freaked out? I think not. The proof? Not one poster is claiming that their kid is actually upset about Burnell's presence on-screen. I think these posters are expressing their own aesthetic disgust, and justifying it as a child protection issue. That's far uglier than any physical disability.

In a modern, inclusive society where every reasonable person has a chance to shine, there's no place for this kind of meaningless aesthetic bigotry. People have disabilities. It's part of the human condition. Arms, legs, eyes, and many other body parts don't always look perfect. We're all freaks of nature and circumstance. Especially bigots.

Happy birthday Charles...

It's the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin today, the first man not only to describe the way that species evolve from one another, but to provide a chain of evidence to support his argument. This is a remarkable achievement; at once both an elegant and inspirational idea while being one of the simplest a human mind has ever had. It has no conditions, no special pleading, no supernatural entities guiding it. Just a long series of almost imperceivable mutations blindly offering up alternatives for members of each successive generation of a population of organisms, and possibly offering an advantage that enables one or two to cope with changing conditions oh so very slightly better than their siblings. Evolution + time = the modern world.

It's both a seemingly mundane and yet entirely awe-inspiring idea. And, while no one with a proper scientific training would ever completely rule anything out, there's an overwhelming and indeed growing weight of evidence to suggest that old Darwin was bang on the money first time. The discovery of DNA and its replication errors, the use of selective breeding, the constant battle against pathogens that adapt faster than medicine can thwart them; evolution is becoming more relevant every day. Philosophically, the only constant really is change.

What I find personally fascinating about evolution, however, isn't that people feel uncomfortable with the idea that we're part of the fabric of the universe we inhabit, rather than having been declared special and plonked here by some god or other, but that the argument in favour of so-called creationism itself has *evolved* significantly over the past few years as it tries to find an attack that will work against a mere idea. The irony is lost on so many people, and yet evolution is something that hasn't had to change to meet that challenge. It just explains, consistently and calmly, how come things are so.

"Theologians," wrote Lawrence Krauss in last week's New Scientist (p25),"have an obligation to attempt to understand the knowledge about the world that has been gained through science, because only through such knowledge can their theology possibly be consistent." One way of marrying science with faith is in accepting that science showcases creation, explains it and gives man an insight into "the mind of God", as Hawking has it. Rejecting science using its products and applications is at best a cynical, paradoxical exercise.

So, happy 200th birthday Charlie.

Surveiling the Innocent...

"Wacky" Jacqui Smith, the UK's Home Secretary, has written a letter to The Guardian defending our country's growing surveillance culture.

She says that CCTV has "helped to reclaim our town centres and public spaces for the law-abiding majority." In fact, with CCTV so ubiquitous, few consider it. Go to any town centre at closing time to see what stupid crimes are committed right in front of CCTV cameras. Indeed, some councils have started equipping them with loudspeakers to remind people they're being watched and that they face prosecution. So, what CCTV has actually done is made it easier to convict people after a crime has been committed.

Smith also defends the DNA database. "Each year," she writes, "literally hundreds of homicides and rapes are resolved with the use of DNA matches." Again, this detection is a marvel of modern technology, but it is always used after the fact. There are no statistics for crimes not committed because of CCTV or DNA matching, and so for the Home Secretary to imply that there's a quantifiable figure is, well, it's bogus.

In the same way that people don't think about CCTV, they don't think about the DNA they leave everywhere they go. After all, would there be any vicious rapes or murders of strangers if it were foremost in their minds? There's no doubt that DNA evidence and CCTV have caught thousands of dangerous criminals, but I don't understand why Smith can't understand that the opportunistic way genetic identities are also collected from the innocent who happen to come into contact with the police as part of their investigations is deeply odious to a society whose traditions include a strong sense of personal privacy.

CCTV and DNA databases are detection devices. Their ubiquity means that they're "invisible" and are therefore useless as crime prevention measures. Insisting to the contrary doesn't make it so. However, there's some good news. "In December I announced immediate steps to remove the DNA of children under 10 from the database, and set out the case for greater flexibility and fairness in the system," wrote Smith.

That's a good start, but if you've done nothing, why should the state keep tabs on your genetic identity "just in case"? To me, as a reasonable, law-abiding Englishman, and even though I'm not on this database, such arbitrary recording feels genuinely and deeply wrong. You should be free to go about your business without such a record. After all, the presumption of innocence has no statute of limitations, which is something that records in the DNA pertaining to the innocent must have in a decent, fair society.

Old Pets As New...

It's been ages since I posted. Maybe I should be using that Twitter thingy...

Anyway, I recently heard about a company in South Korea cloning puppies for people who have lost their beloved pets. This seems at first sight to be a great idea, the first of what I'm sure will become a long succession of "undo buttons" on life, but I'm not so sure.

Does anyone remember Dolly the sheep, cloned by the Roslin Institute in 1996? Dolly died early of a progressive lung disease found in much older sheep. The underlying problem is that genomes age, and as they do they become less able to repair themselves, leading to age-related diseases such as cancer, arthritis and so on. If you take the genome of, say, a five-year-old animal and create a newborn clone from it, that clone starts with a genetic age of five. It ages prematurely.

I can't help thinking that the joy felt by owners who have their dead pets cloned using today's techniques will be short-lived as they realise they may have created a replacement condemned to suffer an early death.

Is this the world's simplest ATMega8 development Board?

Here's my attempt at creating a development board for the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. I'm rather proud of it. It has no external electronic components; just some bits of wire and 6 pins creating the header for the programming cable. When hooked up to the PC with a Pololu USB to serial cable, it connected to AVRStudio 4.0 first time to have its ID read. It works, in other words, and I feel rather chuffed.

Why is this important? Well, microcontrollers are very special little computers, designed for running embedded applications - everything from the injectors in your car to your DVD player and beyond, to cool robots. They contain a small amount of memory into which you upload your program and store data. The memory is, get this, non-volatile! This means that you can switch off the power, and when you turn it back on, the program is still there!

Microcontrollers also have plenty of pins designed to be connected to other components, such as transistors to drive motors, directly to LEDs and LCD displays, etc. Most models can also measure analogue inputs from sensors, etc. Instead of learning electronics in any great depth, they make it possible to control things quickly and cheaply directly in software. Change the program, change the way the rest of the circuit functions. What's more, they're manufactured in their hundreds of millions each year, so the cost of that chip in the picture, despite being a real, functioning 16MHz computer in its own right (delivering nearly 16MIPS if you're interested) was just £1.73 retail from Rapid Electronics.

All this may seem unforgivably geeky, but there are a lot of people beavering away in sheds and on kitchen tables doing some genuinely cool things with mocrocontrollers. I'm almost at the point of doing the unthinkable and dropping my lovely Arduino robot controller and starting my robot head project again by "going native" by simply programming the chips directly for insertion into the "head".

Life at The Sun...

The Sun reports that NASA has found life on Mars.

"ALIEN bugs are responsible for strong plumes of methane gas detected on Mars, it was claimed tonight. Nasa scientists say the gas emissions could have either a geological or biological source - as The Sun exclusively revealed today."

Exclusively, eh? Hmmm... In two sentences the hacks go from declaring life being found to offering two possibilities: life or geology. But since when has geology been life?

Here's the actual skinny form NASA: "Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

Finding life on Mars would be profound. Life at The Sun would be more useful. Still, no need to let facts get in the way of a good story, possibly the story of the age.