Monthly Archives: September 2011

‘Naked Rambler’ jailed again

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The short version of this story tells of an eccentric rambler who, attempting to walk from Land’s End in the far south-west of England to John O’ Groats in the far north-west of Scotland, keeps getting jailed in Scotland for refusing to wear clothes.

The slightly longer version illuminates the story of Stephen Gough, or the ‘Naked Rambler’ as he has come to be known – a former Royal Marine whose conviction has gradually made him into something of a ‘career nudist’. Gough had already successfully completed the 1,200 mile (1,900km) route twice wearing nothing but socks, boots and a rucksack: in 2003-4, when he was arrested multiple times but each time released almost immediately; and again in 2005-6 accompanied by his then girlfriend Melanie Roberts when he was arrested in Scotland and spent 3 months in prison in Edinburgh before being released to complete the walk (naked of course).

In May 2006 Gough was arrested at Edinburgh airport after undressing on a flight from Southampton to Edinburgh and in August 2006 he was given a 7 month jail sentence. On 18 December 2008 he was convicted of breach of the peace and jailed for 12 months. In July 2009, standing in the dock naked, Gough was jailed for another 12 months for breach of the peace, plus 4 months for refusing to dress for the trial. On 8th February 2010 he was convicted of breach of the peace and contempt of court again and sentenced to 21 months imprisonment. Having served half his sentence, on 25th November 2010 he was found guilty of breach of the peace, having been arrested less than a minute after his release, trying to walk naked from the gates of Perth Prison and sentenced to 15 months and 26 days. On 24th August 2011, Gough received his sternest sentence yet: 657 days in prison after having been arrested again on being released from Perth Prison.

At the time of writing, Steve Gough has spent most of the past five years in prison, much of it reportedly in solitary confinement. Gough can be said to have been the architect of his own misery – he’s had no shortage of opportunities to put on a pair of pants and walk free from court or prison. However, in light of the fact that a man has spent five years in solitary confinement for nothing more than refusing to cover up, some reflection might be in order. The role of the judiciary is presumably to ‘protect’ conservative or vulnerable elements of society who might find Gough’s appearance on footpaths and roadsides disturbing… Yes, ‘disturbing’. Gough has never threatened anyone, nor does he flaunt his nakedness in order to shock or upset. Neither his motives nor appearance are sexual, and for every person who finds Gough’s appearance ‘disturbing’, there are surely many more who find it thought-provoking and refreshing (as well as amusing).

When on 9th April 2007 Gough was cleared of charges related to his refusal to dress upon being released from prison in Edinburgh, the ruling judge, Isobel Poole, found that there was no evidence of “actual alarm or disturbance”, adding “I can understand this conduct could be considered unpleasant to passers-by had there been any but there is a lack of evidence to that effect.” He was however still jailed for contempt of court.

At his trial in July 2009, Gough was castigated for having cost the taxpayer “many hundreds of thousands of pounds”, though for him the costs seem far greater. He’s reportedly spent much of his five years of incarceration in solitary confinement. A photograph taken of Steven Gough as he was released from Perth prison last month (seconds before being re-arrested by police) is of a harrowed, gaunt man who bears little resemblance to those taken in 2005 of a healthy and determined Gough has he walked the trail in 2005.

This isn’t a plea to ‘raise awareness’ of the plight of the Naked Rambler. Steven Gough is stubborn, most probably benign, definitely determined, and probably saying something very important. While Gough – a man with distinctive beliefs about walking in the open air – refuses to ‘cover up’, Muslim women in France find themselves banned from doing just that. While neither Gough nor French Muslim women are a danger to anyone by virtue of their mode of dress (or lack thereof), social climates of intolerance towards them are justified and fuelled by governments who seek their erasure from ‘free’ society through the use of violence in the form of threatened and real incarceration. For continuing to contest this intolerance and violence at the expense of the freedom he so obviously enjoys, the Naked Rambler demands our attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gough
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-14649394

Purging 9/11 – 10 years later

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The Guardian’s release today of ostensibly new footage of the World Trade Center collapse provides us with yet another impotent reminder that the earth shattering, potentially paradigm shifting spectacle we witnessed almost 10 years ago still lingers.  Two major wars in the interim have created their own horrors, and elicited ‘appropriate’ media and wider social responses, yet they have not succeeded in quelling the many questions that remain unanswered from that uncannily strange day in early September, 2001.  Sadly though, the event historicised simply as ’9/11′ has receded from the critical gaze of many of us, even those of us who know deep down that something incommensurable happened that day – something that has not yet been reconciled.

The new footage made me think to check the page of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a movement of people who still dispute the official line on 9/11 – namely that the twin towers collapsed as a result of being struck by aircraft.  In a nutshell, the argument of the movement centres on the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center site, which went down some hours after the twin towers, despite not having been hit by any aircraft, and having sustained only superficial damage from the fallout of the collapses of buildings 1 and 2.  Of course, there’s no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding ’9/11′, many of which are as outlandish and misguided as they are purported to be.  What makes this movement stand out, however, is that it espouses the critical and rigorous views of literally thousands of experts in fields of architecture, engineering, building design, demolition, and many other professionalisms where a rigorous scientific approach is demanded.  Nevertheless, an open mind is needed to consider the possibility that 9/11 is not what we commonly accept it to be; even those of us with a normally critical take on states and governments find such a proposition uncomfortable and disturbing.  However, sufficient evidence exists to suggest that all three WTC buildings were brought down using carefully planned and controlled demolition techniques, though adherents to such ideas are still routinely branded as conspiracy theorists and nut jobs.  As a human geographer operating very much within the ‘mainstream’ I have read and thought widely about how societies are put together, how accepted doctrine takes hold, how facts are defined as such, and I am interested in why, given such persuasive evidence, so few people are prepared to question the official line on 9/11.

To understand why, we need to acknowledge that our personal and social identities, and the wider social norms that we inhabit in our everyday lives are neither as immutable nor stable as we often like to think.  Everything we think we know about the world comes about as a result of a continuous process of flux and conflict; structure and fixity.  It is within these negotiations, within these processes that rights and wrongs, facts and fictions, and everything else we think of as ‘knowledge’ is forged.  The same is true of the practice of science – an institution we turn to for certainty, stability and immutability.  In his seminal 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a wide ranging theory to explain how and why scientific revolutions take place.  He noticed that besides the commonly accepted idea that scientific knowledge is developed by building upon the theories of past scientific studies in a scientific paradigm (meaning an era, and the ideas and knowledge that characterises it), once in a while scientific discovery undergoes a crisis – typically when a new discovery is not supported by, or contradicts, the body of knowledge that precedes it:-

A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn’s view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. (Wikipedia article)

The important part of this proposition is that it indicates that scientific progress is made not against an external backdrop of cold, hard facts, but rather upon the need to maintain an internal logic, in accordance with a ‘world view’ or paradigm.  There is nothing heretical or outlandish about these ideas; they are widely accepted by scientists (apart from a few zealots).  Although Kuhn was writing about scientific discovery there is nothing in his ideas that makes them the exclusive domain of formal or professional scientific endeavour – this is not how science works, per se, but how society works.  Society undergoes paradigm shifts all of the time, though these are usually very minor and relatively inconsequential by their nature.  Think of fashions that change year on year in clothing, consumer goods and social customs, and the way in which we shun or poke fun at those which no longer conform or ‘make sense’ at the present time, in the present paradigm.  Throughout history however, much bigger events have happened, though less frequently, such as the twin discoveries that led to the acceptance of the knowledge that the earth is neither flat, nor the centre of the universe.

What all this indicates is that the likelihood of a paradigm shift is inversely proportional to the sum (roughly speaking) of the weight of accepted doctrine and magnitude of the disruption or anomaly.  In other words, small anomalies against a relatively flexible body of knowledge, or world view, is likely to result in a fairly swift and undisruptive paradigm shift, whereas a big anomaly, especially if it occurs against a backdrop of a highly accepted world view is less likely to happen.  So it is with the event we know of as ’9/11′.  It’s big, because it calls into question so much of our iterative, layered knowledge – knowledge of essential (though flawed) goodness and honesty of the governments of the developed, free world – upon which we build meaning in our individual lives.  Despite the healthy distain most of us have for our governments and their processes, the possibility that these authorities are so starkly at odds with our espoused moralities is difficult to comprehend, and deeply frightening.

The key question for me is whether 9/11 will ever cause a paradigm shift.  Nine years on, it seems the overwhelming consensus is still denial, and acceptance.  If the event ever is seriously reappraised, it seems to me that this is likely to take place safely in a historical frame some time in the future; when historians will be enthralled and fascinated by the fact that two of the tallest buildings on this earth, complete with their occupants, were felled for political reasons, and that very few people took any notice.

[this is an incomplete article written in a hurry. Comments and suggestions are always welcome]

Weeding out Conscience – Milgram’s Test of Exemplary Character

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Two articles appeared in the British media this week that compliment each other in interesting, and chilling ways.  The first, published in The Independent is written by Dr. Michael Mosely to advertise his new documentary on Stanley Milgram; a psychologist who carried out a particular type of experiment from the 1960s to 1980s designed to explore social responses to authority – the findings of which remain both fascinating and shocking today.  In summary, Milgram found that in a structured environment, and given a structured exercise to carry out, two thirds of ordinary people would push a button that they were duped into believing would administer a painful electric shock to another ordinary member of the public sitting in a nearby room – out of sight but within earshot.  Nobody was actually physically harmed in the experiments, but the results indicated that two thirds of ordinary members of the general public would follow the rules of the experiment even though they were knowingly and repeatedly causing extreme suffering to someone in the next room whose screams they could hear; some went as far as to administer a shock which they then believed had killed that person.

Much has been written about Milgram’s test in the interim, and on related work that tries to explain relationships between individual agency and social/institutional structures.  I am familiar with a tiny fraction of this material.  An important piece of related work was Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.  In it, Bauman tries to answer a question many have struggled with since the second world war – how could the mass exterminations of the holocaust have happened?  In short, Bauman argued that the holocaust was systematic – that it was made possible by the ways in which ‘big picture’ knowledge (i.e. Of extermination) was divided into smaller, seemingly innocuous tasks; exemplified repeatedly in the Nuremberg Trials by Nazi facilitators accused of genocide, who overwhelmingly were ‘just doing their job’.

A second article in the British media this week relates to government responses to the fallout from ongoing releases of ‘whistleblower’ information by WikiLeaks.  The BBC reported (here and here) that the White House has ordered the creation of ‘Insider Threat Programmes’ in a variety of government departments, aimed at spotting and ‘weeding out’ potential whistleblowers to ‘prevent future embarrassment’.  The approach of the programmes is to look out for behaviours that point to a “certain type of person”, says Dawn Capelli, technical manager of the Cert Insider Threat Centre, and that these types of people are often identifiable from certain signs; for example with “relative happiness” being a sign of a ‘trustworthy’ employee, and “despondence and grumpiness” pointing to a propensity to blow the whistle: “Sometimes they deliberately start sabotaging someone else’s work,” says Capelli.

Of course, “sabotaging someone else’s work” is pretty much what one-third of Stanley Milgram’s subjects did.  Having decided that what they were doing was causing pain and suffering to others they refused to continue the experiment, regardless of the rules they would be breaking, and despite the pressure from the experimenters and technicians to continue the experiment.  This pressure for people to conform, and to carry out the systematic requirements of their role is extremely powerful.  For Milgram’s subjects it would have taken a significant amount of resolve to walk out of the experiment, and yet for these people their role was relatively simple: as voluntary participants, any of them could ostensibly walk out at any time.  For others it isn’t so easy to walk out; the pressures, and stakes, are far higher.

Thus seems to have been the case for a 23-year old former intelligence officer, Pte Bradley Manning, who today remains in solitary confinement and in deteriorating physical and mental health as he awaits court martial this year for the suspected release of classified information to WikiLeaks relating to atrocities committed by American troops in Iraq.  An American citizen, Manning was brought up here in Wales before he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to fight in Iraq.  He is said to have been increasingly troubled by the intelligence information he saw while in Iraq, and allegedly leaked some of this data to WikiLeaks, data which included the infamous and shocking video of a helicopter gunship attack which killed 12 civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007.

If Manning did indeed leak this information, he would have been largely aware that the consequences of his being found out would be extremely serious, but he (allegedly) did it anyway, and in doing so joined the same minority group of conscientious Nazi saboteurs who helped to break the social and institutional structures that enabled the kind of systematic genocide of millions of innocent people that Bauman identified.  Yet, in the present day, the governmental response is to ‘weed out’ conscientious objectors, to replace them with “happy” people less likely to blow the whistle when they encounter war crimes, or genocide.  The result will be increasingly Orwellian governments populated by people content to be scrutinised and ‘just do their jobs’, ‘happy’ to press the button, regardless of the suffering it will cause.

14 indispensable desktop applications for students, writers… and anyone else (and they’re free)

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During a recent re-installation of Windows, I was pretty surprised at the range of software I’ve become accustomed to using without really thinking about it. That’s mainly what this post is about; and it’s the culmination of many fruitful and fruitless hours spent researching, using, breaking, and abandoning various lines of inquiry. Here follows the software I take for granted…

  1. Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org; available for Windows, Mac, Linux)
    It’s the plugins that do it. These days web standards have converged a lot, and to a large extent, a browser is a browser. But the number of useful plugins available for Firefox are what makes it stand out. It might not be quite as fast as Chrome, but I couldn’t care less about a few nanoseconds here and there.
  2. Adblock Plus (add through the Firefox plugins manager; platform independent)
    A Firefox plugin, it blocks ads. Your web browsing experience instantly becomes more serene. Simple as that.
  3. Zotero (http://www.zotero.org; platform independent)
    Although they’re in the process of writing a stand-alone application, Zotero is actually a plugin for Firefox. It’s extremely easy to install, and allows you to manage a growing list of references, along with file attachments (like PDF documents) and written notes. Some kind of reference manager is vital for anyone in academia, and most people use Endnote, known as the industry standard. It’s expensive, and in my view not as good as Zotero, which is free! One of the best things about Zotero is that it is cloud-enabled. All of your data is stored on your own PC, but it’s also synchronised online. This means that your references are always backed up, and that you have access to the latest copies whether you’re on your work PC, home PC, home Linux, Mac, etc… I’d be in trouble without it.
  4. Zotero Word/Openoffice Plugins (http://www.zotero.org; platform independent)
    Zotero isn’t just a database for storing references, it’s also has (separate) Word and Openoffice plugins, which means you can directly insert items from Zotero into your written papers. Zotero will also write the usually time-consuming bibliography for you, in less than a second!
  5. Xmarks (http://www.xmarks.com; platform independent)
    Another Firefox plugin, Xmarks synchronises my Firefox bookmarks so they’re backed up and available on any PC I use.
  6. Allway Sync (http://allwaysync.com; available for Windows only)
    So you have a folder containing a bunch (about 8Gb) of files (let’s call it a Ph.D thesis) that you might edit at work, or you might want to edit at home. You might knock out a draft at home over the weekend and want it available at work on Monday. Fine, if you’re able to keep track of what you’ve edited, which is the new copy and which is the old, but if you’re human, and fallible, one day you’re going to get confused, and start to believe you actually have two Ph.Ds, each with subtle and unquantifiable differences. This is a bad sign. So, how did I overcome this? With a nice, simple, reliable piece of software called Allway Sync. Install it on your work, home, and anywhere-else PCs where you keep a copy of your work folder(s), and every time you’ve finished a day’s work, pop in your USB-stick and let Allway Sync do the work of figuring out which files have changed, been deleted, added, and the rest. Back at home, do the same before and after you start work to ensure you’re always working on the same copies of your files. This is also a pretty good backup solution: at any one time you’re going to have 3 copies of all of your files: at home; at work; and in your pocket. Pretty good insurance.
  7. Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org; available for Windows, Mac, Linux)
    We’re all prone to losing things from time to time, particularly when that thing is the size of a UBS-stick. But when that small thing contains your entire Ph.D thesis – 3 years of your life – you’d better do something to protect it. Losing your USB key shouldn’t be a problem in itself, because you’ll have two other copies of your work (if you’ve been sync’ing it as above!), but perhaps you don’t want the lucky finder to see the last 3 years of your life – all of your papers, drafts, dead-ends, results, as well as confidential material. Enter Truecrypt. Truecrypt effectively ensures that the data stored on your USB stick is indistinguishable from random data: it’s encrypted, very strongly so. Using Truecrypt means there’s one further step you have to go through when sync-ing your USB stick, but it also means that, should someone find your lost USB stick, it’s essentially useless to them.
  8. PDF-XChange (http://www.tracker-software.com; available for Windows only)
    PDFs are everywhere. They’re a pretty handy way of sharing and reading documents formatted for paper, and they can’t be avoided. Fortunately the industry standard application for reading them – Adobe Reader – can. Adobe are well known for making some pretty decent applications: Photoshop comes to mind. But their flagship PDF reader is anything but decent. What ought to be a small, efficient fast application is a behemoth: one that is slow to load and constantly pesters you to update it. My recommendation for an alternative to Adobe used to be Foxit Reader, but a combination of bugs and inadequacies (particularly with printing comments) has led me to drop it. PDF-XChange is what a PDF reader should be. Small, fast, fully featured, and (as with every other application on this page, in case you hadn’t noticed), free.
  9. Cute PDF Writer (http://www.cutepdf.com;available for Windows only)
    So you can read PDFs. What if you want to create them? Cute PDF Writer does what it says. It’s a virtual printer, to which you can print any document, and it pops out as a PDF. Simple and effective – but make sure you decline permission to install the useless ‘Ask Toolbar’.
    (note: I used to recommend the open source PDFCreator, but now advise you to steer well clear. Although open source, it installs a lot of unknown and mysterious bloatware without you asking. PDFCreator is now, sadly, a horrible piece of bloated and untrustworthy software.)
  10. Google Calendar Sync (http://www.google.com; available for Windows only)
    On the desktop, Outlook is still an essential application for many people, but what if you want to sync it with your smartphone? Through Google Calendar, that’s how. Most smartphones today will happily sync their calendar data with Google Calendar, but how do you sync your Google Calendar with your Outlook? Yep, you guessed it. GCS is a small application that sits in your system tray and quietly, reliably, keeps your Outlook and Google Calendar in check.
  11. GO Contact Sync (http://sourceforge.net/projects/googlesyncmod/files/; available for Windows only)
    This does the same as Calendar Sync for your contacts. It’s not a pretty application, it throws up cryptic error messages from time to time (particularly when you ‘wake’ your computer), so it isn’t perfect, but it usually works, and it’s free!
  12. F4 (http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/f4.htm)
    If you’ve ever had to transcribe a lot of audio you’ll know how time consuming it can be. Despite the wonders of modern technology, there’s still no substitute for sitting down and typing it out manually – if you’ve ever tried to use voice recognition software to do this, you’ll have been disappointed. The old-style professional tape-based transcription machines used to have a foot pedal to play, pause and rewind the tape, and these days you can get USB foot pedals that interface with your transcription software, but unless you enjoy getting cramp in your foot, such things are unnecessary. F4 is a free piece of transcription software that cleverly puts the play, pause and rewind (a preordained number of seconds) functions under one key – unsurprisingly the F4 key. I’ve transcribed in lots of different ways, and this is by far the fastest. Remember to save your work though. F4 is a simple piece of software and doesn’t have all of the clever autosave/recover functions of a fully-fledged word processor.
  13. Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en)
    A great little vector graphics application for drawing attractive, and scalable illustrations and diagrams.
  14. Skydrive / Google Drive / Dropbox
    The piece of mind of having all of your files sync’ed and backed up, wherever you decide to work, is priceless. I’ve tested all three of the above and believe Skydrive to be the best, and cheapest.