promoted by many including Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, and Gordon Brown...is substandard...used "unjustified methodologies" to reach its conclusions and was "overly reliant" on weak online sources and media reports, with some sections referencing only Wikipedia.

Although sources are referenced...the report lifted "significant passages of text" word for word.

When I pointed out the obvious and serious problems with the report, I was expecting BIS to simply apologise and drop it. However, they chose to defend the report - after which, THES took an interest.

Even after the THES piece, BIS continue to stand by this report: telling THES that

the report was a "speculative look" into the future intended to spark public interest in science and did not inform policy or affect funding decisions.

Responding to THES, Rohit Talwar

maintained that citing websites, news reports and blogs was "accepted best practice in horizon scanning.

Of course, the UK government is free to publicise and commission whatever research they want. However, it is unfortunate if they choose to focus on such poor research - even after its quality is pointed out to them. BIS's role in here is especially worrying, given their major role in universities and research.

Further reading
I found Zoe Corbyn at THES very thorough, and am pleased with the story which has come out. It's worth noting, too, that a number of other people have looked at issues around BIS's Science: So What campaign. 2020 Science offers a good take on the science communication aspects of this, while Gimpy's Blog and 10minus9 both look at aspects of the science of Fast Future's report. Kylie Sturgess used TurnItIn to find lifted passages of text in the report. It will be interesting to see how this story develops - if BIS continue to use this report, there will be plenty of opportunities for others to add their voices to this debate.

a small group of radicalised [Islamist] young men now constitute the single biggest threat to our national security

to convince the public to refuse to be terrorized. What frustrates me most about Abdulmutallab is that he caused terror even though his plot failed. I want us to be indomitable enough for the next attack to fail to cause terror, even if it succeeds. Remember: terrorism can't destroy our country's way of life; only our reaction to terrorism can.

For what it's worth, I do think there are more significant threats to British security (at least in the medium-term) than small groups in the UK who are prepared to use violence in the name of Islam: climate change and geopolitical issues around British foreign policy both raise significant concerns, for example. It is also important to consider how 'security' is defined: according to some definitions, issues such as poverty and domestic violence would also be significant concerns. However, I very much hope that Taylor is proved right here: if these small groups are our most significant security threat, then these are remarkably safe times to live in.

from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.

But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.

in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.

The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" and quantifying the subject was "extremely difficult". Their final estimate was "very approximate", "subject to a very large margin of error" and "should be treated with great caution" and the figure of 3,812 "should be regarded as an upper bound".

In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ignored the speculative nature of the assumptions behind the figure, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and then rounded it up, declaring to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."

The Christian charity Care announced: "In 2003, the Home Office estimated there were 4,000 women and girls in the UK at any one time that had been trafficked into forced prostitution." The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 ... there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem." Anti-Slavery International joined them, converting what the Home Office researchers had described as a "very approximate" estimate into "a very conservative estimate".

The Home Office, at least, having commissioned the research, was in a position to remind everybody of its authors' warnings. Except it didn't.

In March 2007, it produced the UK Action Plan on Human Trafficking and casually reproduced the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers' cautions.

In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, [Labour MP Denis] MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."

There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.

Two months later, in another Commons debate, MacShane used the same figure, but this time he attributed it to the Daily Mirror, which had indeed run a story in October 2005 with the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on the Streets of Britain." However, the newspaper had offered no evidence at all to support the figure. On the contrary, the body of its story used a much lower figure, of between 2,000 and 6,000 brought in each year, and attributed this to unnamed Home Office officials, even though the Home Office has never produced any research which could justify it.

MacShane was not deterred.

"I used to work for the Daily Mirror, so I trust the report," he said.

Extensive use and analysis of various data can - when done without appropriate caution - create serious problems. As Davies argues:

The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.

Politicians and religious groups still repeat the media story that 40,000 prostitutes were trafficked into Germany for the 2006 world cup – long after leaked police documents revealed there was no truth at all in the tale. The Daily Mirror's baseless claim of 25,000 trafficking victims is still being quoted, recently, for example, by the Salvation Army in written evidence to the home affairs select committee, in which they added : "Other studies done by media have suggested much higher numbers."

Somewhere beneath all this, there is a reality. There have been real traffickers.

These data are important: they can help shape our political reality. Such numbers and estimates are almost never simple: they need to be treated with considerable care, and it is important that politicians, campaigners and journalists should do so.

I would like to cover this in more length, but too much on at the moment (hence why blogging has been thin on the ground lately). In this case, though, I thought I should get a link up while the programme is still available for download.

These ethically and legally dubious News of the World tactics invaded the privacy of thousands of individuals: including the senior government politician (and then Deputy Prime Minister) John Prescott. This story has been linked to a number of senior figures - including the Conservative Party Press Chief (and former News of the World editor) Andy Coulson.

In his novel take on Hegel, Slavoj Zizek has argued that change may can occur through the 'slow seeping of spirit'. A change - such as the increasing unacceptability of homophobia -seeps slowly through our social reality, without being particularly noticeable at the time. There reaches a point, though, where one looks around and realises - after the change has taken place - what has happened: in this case, it now appears that a more accepting attitude to gay men and women has come to dominate 'mainstream' public political discourse.

the soldiers had captured nothing more than a giant pile of mung beans, a staple pulse eaten in curries across Afghanistan.

Embarrassed British officials have now admitted that their triumph has turned sour and have promised to return the legal crop to its rightful owner.

Worringly, the Guardian also reports that

The pulses also fooled Colonel General Khodaidad, Afghanistan's minister of counter-narcotics, even though the spherical black beans, about the size of small ball bearings, looked nothing like poppy seeds. When shown the mung beans by the Guardian, he said they were a strain of "super poppy".

If indeed the sacks did contain 1.3 tonnes of mung beans, then they would have a street value of $1,300 – not much, but a major blow to any farmer if the British had followed procedures and destroyed the beans.

the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation

we have already announced to the world our position to silence our guns to save our people

the victory has come at a high price in terms of civilan life and damage to Colombo's international reputation. According to UN figures, an estimated 7,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed between 20 January, when a military offensive pushed back the rebels into a tiny enclave in the north-east, and 7 May.

"If the Tigers' leadership is removed or killed in a government assault, it's easy to imagine one of the newly energised generation stepping in to fill the void," said Robert Templer, of the International Crisis Group thinktank.

"The dream of an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka resonates powerfully across the diaspora and will certainly live on even after the defeat of the LTTE as a conventional military force. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Tamil civilians – while their family members watch from afar – is a recipe for another, possibly more explosive, generation of terrorism."

I hope that this will be the end of the violence in Sri Lanka. However, it would be wrong to assume that peace will follow the end of the Tigers.

reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

I have been pleasantly surprised in how well this works. It's still far from perfect - for example, as Tin Hat acknowledges, there is a lot of content on the Internet that they don't cover - but does look like a really useful tool.

Whether or not one supports the UK's possession of nuclear weapons, it is clear that these weapons have the capacity to wreak destruction on a very large scale. These are de facto weapons of mass destruction - even if (as seems very likely) almost all of those who support the UK's possession, maintenance and development of such weapons do so in the genuine hope that they will never need to be used.

Mincing words about the destructive capacity of Britain's current and future nuclear weapons is not helpful. When debating these weapons, it is important to remember what they are capable of doing.

Doing anything [other than create forensically copied disk images of the seized] computer or mobile phone etc. amounts to tampering with the evidence, which will make it useless in Court, and requires disciplinary action or criminal prosecution of the police or others who were involved.

A "search" for "Shami" on the original computer, could just as easily have been an attempt to plant forged incriminating evidence or to destroy or tamper with something that might establish the alibi of the accused.

However, I contacted Green to query this - and he very helpfully made clear that

they told me which words they were searching before they searched

I find security - in the broad sense - fascinating, and have noticed a striking issue with the web security of Alliance and Leicester (part of the huge Santander banking group). Clearly, online banking is a very useful service, but also carries certain risks: everything from high-tech problems like keyloggers, to much more mundane issues like people writing down their log-in details and sticking them to their computer. As Bruce Schneier argues

Security is a trade-off...There's no such thing as absolute security, and any gain in security always involves some sort of trade-off...It makes no sense to just look at security in terms of effectiveness. "Is this effective against the threat?" is the wrong question to ask. You need to ask: "Is it a good trade-off?"

However, the implementation is problematic. The bank's system needs a specific one of these four pieces of memorable information to be entered before the account can be accessed, and users are not told which one: they have to guess. After three incorrect attempts, online access to the account will be blocked. This means that, even if a user knows exactly how the system works (the website does not tell them) and does not make any typos, they stand a 1/4 chance of being locked out of their account on any given access attempt. There are also additional issues: for example, dates must be entered in a specific long format (e.g. '6 September 1994') rather than a standard UK format like dd/mm/yy. When enhancing security means that legitimate users will likely be locked out on more than 1/4 occasions, this is not a good trade-off.

The poor implementation also, in itself, raises additional security risks. For example, if a keylogger has been surreptitiously installed, this will give hackers access to additional personal data. Also, if users get used to entering multiple different pieces of their memorable information on any given access attempt, they may be more ready to do this if they are tricked into going to a phishing site. This is therefore a poor security trade-off for numerous reasons.

I have mentioned this issue to Alliance and Leicester on the phone, and will e-mail them a link to this post to make sure that things are clear to them and to give them the opportunity to comment. It will be interesting to see whether they act to fix this problem.

It seems that complex regulations which are implemented (or which people attempt to implement) in diverse ways can bring some rather striking results.

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists...The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Among the revelations, which we encourage the press to review in detail, is Jordan's presence as secret member of the US lead occupation force, the ISAF.

You can read the documents in question in full here.