There was great excitement at work yesterday when I updated the University of St Andrews homepage to advertise some exciting news related to economics, which was my chosen subject in a previous guise. A public lecture is being given by Professor Eric Maskin on the subject of how Members of Parliament should be elected. Very […]
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University
Another attempt to start reading more
This week, I have decided to make another attempt at reading more books. I read stuff all the time, but almost all of it is on the web. A few hundred words at a time. Lots of breadth but not much depth. I have never done much in the way of reading books. Fiction is […]
Is it worth voting?
If, like me, you have a reputation among your friends for being particularly knowledgeable about politics, you probably find that when election time comes they turn to you for advice on how to vote. But while I may have more interest and knowledge in politics than some of my friends, I am not really the […]
There is a good reason for the lack of updates
I don’t often write about myself here these days. Despite the fact that I went to all the effort to set up a personal website, I do think it is a tad self-indulgent to bang on about myself. However, some readers may be interested in recent developments in my life. Regular readers will know that […]
Anyone but the Tories?
This is the accompanying article / transcript to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion, a humorous lefty / skeptical podcast. You can listen to the full podcast below. This year’s party conference season has now finished, and attention turns to the General Election that will held some time between now and […]
Five disturbing things about democracy
Here it is: that post I’ve been sitting on for upwards of a year. Before I start, I am going to make a few introductory notes about what I do and don’t mean when I call democracy disturbing. I find that all too often debates about this subject are clouded by dogma, which leads to […]
Social ladder
One of the problems with social networking sites is that not everyone is on the same one. Thankfully I don’t find myself having to login to MySpace any more. But I would drop Bebo at a moment’s notice if I could get away with it. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends — particularly those from […]
Spare part
I see that the BBC’s iPM blog is asking for the human stories behind the current unemployment figures. Well, I am a human face of two recent news stories. As readers are no doubt sick of reading by now, one of those stories was the loss of around 27,000 jobs at Woolworths. The other is […]
Sleeping patterns: update after nine months
I’m not sure how this post will be taken. The first update got 20 comments, the second one got zero. It does seem a bit self-indulgent. But I promised to keep you updated on the experiment so here it is. If you missed the original posts, basically I made it my new years resolution to […]
The SNP dimension
To the extent that the SNP’s current electoral popularity is due to pro-SNP (rather than anti-Labour) effects, it must be remembered that there is much more than independence at play. Does an SNP success in an election mean that Scotland has suddenly converted to the cause of independence? Of course not. Firstly, support for independence […]