Monday morning

Another cold morning, after a relatively mild week.

Grass crunching underfoot. Early bird song ricocheting off hard frozen hoar frost casings on every surface.

(Now playing: Melanie Safka, "Chart song", As I see it now.)

The problems of peace keeper crime

What to do when a solution becomes a problem? I see no alternative to UN peace keeping operations (or, rather, no alternative which would not increase the sum of misery in the world), but peacekeepers, like any group of military personnel (or bureaucrats, for that matter ... or any group of human beings), are not going to be 100% plaster saints. Peace keeper crimes are a real problem which cannot and must not be ignored, and one with an increasing public profile.

Pursuing a data analytic brief relating to peace keeping effectiveness measures, I've happened across two papers dealing with accountability approaches to the problem. Both are worth reading if you have an interest in this area; I reproduce the abstracts here, and leave it to you to follow the links if you wish.

1: Odello

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations have been increasingly deployed in many crisis contexts. The practice has been established by the UN to ensure peace and protect victims of different types of armed conflict. Unfortunately, during the past ten years, several cases of serious human rights violations committed by peacekeepers against people who should be protected by them have emerged. The UN has gone through a widespread analysis of the issues involved, from the managerial, administrative and legal points of view. The 2005 Zeid Report has provided the basis for further action within the UN system. Since then, several policy and legal measures have been discussed by relevant UN bodies and organs, and some new developments have taken place. This article offers an account and an analysis of the different steps taken within the UN to face difficult cases of misbehaviour, including human rights violations, which may lead to forms of criminal conduct. It takes into consideration the suggestions provided by the Zeid Report and subsequent UN documents. It focuses on legal developments and discusses the main problems in understanding the legal complexity of this phenomenon. The article includes updated documents and proposals that have been discussed and adopted until the most recent reports in 2009.

2: O'Brien

Personnel involved in United Nations (UN) peace operations have been found to commit misconduct, some of which amounts to criminal conduct. The UN has been working to establish a disciplinary system which will prevent and punish any misconduct by peace operation personnel. However, the UN cannot prosecute criminal perpetrators. Criminal jurisdiction can only be enacted by states and the International Criminal Court (ICC). This article seeks to analyse how Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the ICC can be used to prosecute commanders and superiors of a UN peace operation for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The application of Article 28, however, is not straightforward, due to the complexity of the command, authority and control structure of a peace operation. Examination of both military command and civilian superior responsibility is undertaken, including recognition of the cross-over of the roles of military and civilian commanders and superiors in peace operations. While this article argues that prosecution under command and superior responsibility is essential, the complications that may arise with the application of such responsibility are recognized and directions for the prosecutor offered.

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1. Marco Odello, "Tackling Criminal Acts in Peacekeeping Operations: The Accountability of Peacekeepers" in Journal of Conflict Security Law, 2010. 15(2): p. 347.
2. O'Brien, M., "The Ascension of Blue Beret Accountability: International Criminal Court Command and Superior Responsibility in Peace Operations" in Journal of Conflict Security Law, 2010. 15(3): p. 533.

Analytically speaking

My first Damascene vision of what a wonderful tool data analysis can be was not in the physical sciences. In a holiday homework assignment, when I was fourteen, a maths teacher* asked us to explore, using what he had taught us that term, the suggestion that Shakespeare’s Hamlet might have been written by Marlowe. Two weeks of miscounted words, syllables, and parts of speech later, I understood the sheer intellectual thrill of using statistical analysis to explore the unknown.

Linguistics is a word used in many ways by different constituencies, but they have in common the scientific study of (usually, but not always, natural) language. This plurality of meaning makes it representative of language in general. Like all the words which make up natural languages and other means of human-to-human communication (including, for example, financial currencies) it is, to the exasperation and intrigue of science, an “arbitrary signifier”. Its meaning lies entirely in the intersection set of associations between those who transmit and receive it, and is defined by difference from what it is not rather that what it is.

The lure of the unknown is science’s greatest romantic pull. It can be along the banks of the Amazon or the Congo, it can be on the inaccessible ocean floors or in other galaxies, it can be down in the subatomic or up on the macrocosmic. But it can equally well be in the vast and ever shifting jungles of arbitrary sign systems with which we attempt to communicate that we seek and find – and scientific computing methods are just as central there as in more physical arenas.

At the same time, these qualities of language have strong practical importance. Language is how we become fully human – whether or not it is an attribute unique to our species, as consensus suggests, it is certainly a powerful component in our dominance. It is how we become socialised and acculturated. It is how some of us make the long climb from newborn tabula rasa to mature professional scientist – encountering, along the way, what Evelyn Rodriguez-Alamo^[1] called “ the content and the vehicles of learning and scientific research for the 21st century”. Analytic approaches to language underpin the effectiveness of learning. Viewed from another perspective, language is how organisations are structured; analysis of effectiveness depends upon linguistic assumptions. As well as being itself an inviting subject for scientific enquiry, then, understanding how language does and doesn’t work is vital to both efficiency and outcomes for every stage and component of the context within which science happens.

Computerisation of linguistic data analysis can be traced...[more...]

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* Mr Ernest Cothey: with affectionate respect.

1 Evelyn Rodriguez-Alamo, "The Conflict Between Conceptual and Visual Thought and the Future of Science" in Social Science Computer Review, 1995. 13(2): p. 207.

It shouldn't happen to a tyrannosaur...

Uncovered, today, in a well known and respectable bookshop ... a clear case of cruelty to dinosaurs:

Religious agenda

“I think I'm going to have to become a Methodist, Felix” said my friend Beryl, this afternoon.

Startled (since she is a lifelong devout Roman Catholic), but not wanting to influence what must be a difficult decision of conscience, I tried to keep my voice neutrally interested as I asked “Oh; why is that?”

“Because the Catholic church hasn't been able to give me a decent diary, this year!” she replied with some asperity.

Pieces of intelligence

In the wake of Shake, rattle and custard came, from my brother a couple of weeks back, recommendation for light hearted verse of an entirely different ilk.

Pieces of intelligence: the existential poetry of Donald H Rumsfeld takes extracts from Rumsfeld's public utterances and presents them in verse form. It was published several years ago, when laughter was the only available defence against the blind man's buff juggernaut of international will to war, but I hadn't seen it until now. The laughter is just as welcome now as then, though, and I recommend it.

The book is divided into sections: "Twelve sonnets", "Lyrical poems", and so on. Don't take them too literally; the sonnets are not sonnets at all, the haiku not really haiku; but they nevertheless (perhaps even as a result) add to the depth of the humour.

Here are some extracts.

§ VI: Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for Saddam. Free verse.

Iraq

It's an enormous country.
You know, it's bigger than Texas,
Or as big, I guess.
I haven't looked lately,
But it is a very big place.

Dec. 23,2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Page 73

§ VII: Songs of myself.

Rappin' 'Bout My 'Tude

I don't get —
I don't get furious.
No!
I get cool.
I get angry!
But not furious!
Yeah!
True.

April 10, 2002, Interview with Martin Kalb
Page 103

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• Hart Seely, Pieces of intelligence : the existential poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. 2003, New York: Free Press. 0743255976.

Mathematica 8

There are a lot of reasons to enthuse about the new release of Wolfram Mathematica; across the board and not least (from my point of view) the statistics and probability coverage. The headline, however, has to be extended integration with Wolfram Alpha, particularly the use of the linguistic interface to provide natural language lookup.

Most computer algebra packages are working towards increased intuitive access to their power, bringing their methods into the hands of more potential problem solvers, using better entry methods. What is different here is that the user can bring experience or understanding from many other environments and have it interpreted into annotated Mathematica syntax, both enabling and educating in one go.

As a simple example... [more...]

OriginPro 8.5

With the latest incremental version update (8.1 to 8.5, now at service release 1), OriginLab’s increasingly versatile data graphics package sees useful improvements and new developments in a number of areas. Most of them are common to both Origin and OriginPro, though the 2D FFT Filter is restricted to the Pro version.

One, perhaps apparently peripheral to the core function at first sight, but valuable to scientific users as part of a thorough documentary regime quite apart from straightforward communication, is embedding of external OLE dynamic objects. This is primarily aimed at MS Office users bringing over their material from Word or Excel, but when explored works well for every supply application I tried – from graphics programs through PDFs to live material being processed in other data analysis packages.

Particularly beguiling is having live, editable equations in the same page as plots...[more...]

My dear, I was literally metaphorical...

We all have our private irritations and exasperations, which may not be reasonable but are nonetheless real. Many of mine lie in the use of words, and telling which are reasonable and which are not can be a grey area.

Language is, I passionately believe, an evolving thing and we cannot tie it down with rules. Words change their meanings ... get used to it. On the other hand, its richness and complexity rely on the existence of rules ... the rules can (indeed, must) change with time, they can be broken with magnificent effect, but like (to borrow Robert Frost's analogy) a tennis net, we do need them. If they break down entirely, or even change too fast, the glorious moderated anarchy which is language falls apart and becomes a puddle on the floor.

My reason for wittering on like this is, of course, a particular exasperation which has just happened by ... though in this case it's amused me rather than irritating. Over a long period, now, I've noticed (and generally restrained my irritation over) misuse of the word "literally", for example “I was so embarrassed, I literally died!” Today I've heard the converse: “I was so frightened, I was almost metaphorically looking over my shoulder!”

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• "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." Robert Frost, in an address to students. 1935, Milton, Massachusetts: Milton Academy.
• "I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." In an interview with Edward C Lathem, 1966. (Manuscript, part of the boxed Papers of Edward C. Lathem, 1913 - 2009, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College)

Brandtification

The new Bill Brandt books are exerting an influence on me, I suspect...