However, there’s a more important question here – are the Indian cricketers correct? Does the technology actually work acceptably well?

Putting the case for the negative is Greg Baum in the Fairfax press today, citing a couple of cases where Hawk-eye’s predictions were inaccurate – the case of Phil Hughes in Sri Lanka. In this case, the developers of Hawk-Eye acknowledged a mistake was made, as the ball had not traveled the minimum distance (40cm) after pitching to allow Hawkeye to make a sufficiently accurate prediction of the ball’s trajectory.

For what it’s worth, it’s my strong suspicion that Hawk-eye gets it right far, far, more often than umpires do; furthermore, it has improved the game by correcting some of the more egregious umpiring errors. But my confidence in saying so has to be somewhat limited, because the detailed workings of Hawk-Eye remain proprietary, as do the testing protocols used by the ICC and the makers to demonstrate its accuracy.

The key unknown for me is how Hawkeye’s software calculates the flight of the ball after impact with the pads. Does it assume a “generic” cricket ball, and, if so, do the trajectories of a brand-new, old, or damp ball differ through the air enough to matter? How is “swing” modeled – do they assume a constant angular deviation? Does the system routinely perform any consistency checking, by making predictions based on the ball’s early trajectory and comparing them to the actual track of the ball?

My guess is that the Hawk-Eye system, over the ten years that it has been developed, has had most of the bugs ironed out of it and deals with the issues raised above in a reasonable manner. But we just don’t know. The most detailed public description of Hawk-Eye’s technology is this document from the company, which clarifies some issues – notably that Hawk-Eye’s LBW predictions are based only on what happens after the ball bounces – but doesn’t deal with the questions I’ve posed above.

Using the Decision Review System means that Hawk-Eye’s algorithms are, effectively, part of the laws by which international cricket is played. As such, they should be public, and the testing by which their accuracy has been established should also be public, so it can be subject to external review. If Hawk-Eye’s intellectual property needs protecting, they have recourse to patent law. Or, for that matter, the ICC could simply use a few million of the billions of dollars of Indian TV revenue to buy out the IP rights.

But it’s just not acceptable to have cricket matches decided by algorithms that approximate the motion of a cricket ball, when we don’t even know what those algorithms are.

Exhibit one: Julia Gillard advocating a change of Labor policy which would allow uranium sales to India. I’m not a Labor Party member, and it’s always puzzled me how certain issues must seemingly receive the imprimatur of the national conference, but not others. Presumably, if Julia Gillard feels comfortable to advocate for it in public, the fix is in – or, at least, the fix will now be arranged.

It seems that, again, the substantive irrelevance of this policy needs to be pointed out. When Australia had the procedural to actually restrict India’s access to imported uranium back in 2009, we squibbed it. India already – with our concurrence – buys uranium from other suppliers on the international market. Whether India buys it from us is 99% symbolism.

The trade-offs of that symbolism are quite complex – the integrity of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty vs. the realpolitik of a rising India. Underlying all of this is the American desire (India’s ability to import uranium came largely through a bilateral deal with the USA) to tighten security alliances in what looks not altogether like a containment strategy against China. The unwisdom of this strategy, and what Australia is doing, and should do about it, will hopefully be the topic of future posts.

Within the Labor Party, of course, positions on uranium sales to India seem largely split along the lines of broader opinions on uranium mining and nuclear power more generally.

For mine at least, the foreign policy direction that Julia Gillard seems to be happy to lead Australia in is far more of a concern than a long-foreshadowed fait accompli surrounding whether India gets its yellowcake from us or the Canadians or Khazaks.

The stated reason why Australia doesn’t currently sell uranium to India is that it hasn’t signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which virtually every state has signed up to except India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea (who withdrew in 2003, though that withdrawal is not accepted by much of the international community). Under the terms of the treaty, only the USA, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the UK, France, and China are allowed to have nuclear arsenals, though they are supposed to work towards disarmament. Other countries are not permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Were India to sign, they would be obligated to dismantle their nuclear arsenal.

As such, the chances of India signing the NNPT as it currently stands are minimal – and, frankly, not without some justification. But the alternative – modifying the NNPT to allow India to join without giving up its arsenal – is also a non-starter. So Australia has taken the principled position, thus far, and refused to sell uranium to India. Pat ourselves on the back. We stood up for nuclear non-proliferation.

Except, when it actually mattered, we took an entirely different view.

The Nuclear Suppliers Group is an intergovernmental grouping of the major supplier nations of “licit” nuclear material. As part of a deal between the United States and India to allow the sale of American civil nuclear materials there, a waiver from the NSG was required. If Australia had seriously wanted to restrict the supply of uranium to India, it could have opposed the waiver at the NSG. In 2008, the waiver was approved by consensus. Russia now sells uranium to India, and Canada is preparing to do so.

Uranium is a fungible commodity. Australian, Canadian, Khazakh, Russian, or Upper Voltan, it all burns the same. Whether Australian uranium specifically ends up in Indian reactors makes little difference. We had the chance to restrict the supply of uranium to India in 2008, and we folded.

As such, any debate about changing Australia’s own policy on uranium sales to India is almost exclusively about politics – the politics of the Australia-India relationship, and the politics of uranium mining in Australia. Its substantive effect on the industry, here and in India, will be negligible.

On top of that, collecting fuel for these stoves is time-consuming – taking people, mainly women, away from other activities. The deforestation for fuel obviously contributes to CO2 levels, and when smoke escapes into the wider atmosphere it contributes to global warming through black carbon.

So it’s good to see Hillary Clinton launching (and committing 50 million dollars of American funding to) the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The Alliance’s goals are summarized below:

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves envisions a world in which clean cookstoves and fuels erase this unnecessary loss of life. To jumpstart progress towards that ultimate goal, the Alliance is targeting the adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels by 100 million households by 2020. The Alliance will target the key barriers to the development of a robust commercial market for stoves including common standards, supply chain development, strong stove performance monitoring and evaluation, and consumer awareness.

The risks and costs of inefficient, dirty cooking stoves have been known for a long time. I can’t dig up a reference, but I seem to recall reading that in the late nineteeth century a campaign, mostly led by women, saw the development and widespread deployment of clean (or, at least, flued) stoves and heaters throughout the industrial world. But bringing such developments to the developing world will be challenging.

Some perspective on the issue can be found in this article by several Indian academics on an Indian program with complementary aims.

The first is that the issue is in large part one facing the rural poor. Like many of the most acute health issues facing the developing world, simply being richer will ameliorate many of them. But completely eliminating general rural poverty remains a long-term project – getting safer, more efficient stoves to the poor is something that can be done in the meantime.

The second is that while cleaner stoves have many potential benefits beyond cleaner indoor air – for one thing, they can potentially pay for themselves very quickly by freeing up time spent gathering fuel for more productive activities, many previous efforts at improving the efficiency and cleanliness of cooking stoves have failed. For instance, one idea that comes up repeatedly in this context is using solar cookers. Unfortunately, nobody uses them. As this interview with a proponent explains:

The type of food cooked is one on the main cultural issues; our food requires cooking, frying and all these can not be done with one single type of cooker.

Of course, Parabolic cooker or Scheffler’s can perform all tasks, but they are costly. In fact in Andhra, some villages are depending on Parabolic type of solar cookers for preparing tit bits for selling in the local market.

Cooking outside in the sun is not popular and in summer it would be difficult.

Most of the families, including farmers and daily laborers, prefer to cook food early in the morning, so that the members can carry food to work, and this is not possible with solar cookers. Besides eating food cooked previous day is still a taboo in villages as well.

Another important issue is the failure of solar cooker due to cloudy weather. Even if this happens on a single day, it is a big deterrent.

These were some of the cultural issues I faced some 30 years ago when I had launched solar cooker campaign. They still linger as it is very difficult to get over old habits and customs.

The global alliance, at this stage, hasn’t yet got a lot of material on their website about how they mean to tackle these issues beyond a focus on assisting the private sector rather than direct action. This should, in theory, help – if people are trying to make a quid out of selling these stoves to consumers, they’ll need to meet customer preferences if they want to stay in business. You can also make a cheap shot at the difference between the scale of the problem and the scale of the response – the $50 million in seed money constitutes roughly one quarter of the daily spend on the US military deployment to Afghanistan.

But it’s a start. Let’s hope that this effort actually goes somewhere.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in the kind of technologies that might be applied, have a look at the Ashden Awards, particularly their report on some of the issues, including barriers to adoption. Hat tip to Ken Lovell in comments.

More update: dk.au points to a post on Aidwatch which also discusses some of these issues – notably, the importance of user-centered design and good marketing.

For the first time in history, the Australian outcome means that every key ‘Westminster model’ country in the world now has a hung Parliament. These are the former British empire countries that according to decades of political science orthodoxy are supposed to produce strong, single party government. Following Duverger’s Law their allegedly ‘majoritarian’ electoral systems (first past the post and AV) will typically produce reinforced majorities for one of the top two parties.

Leaving aside New Zealand, which has not had a single member constituency system since 1996, Britain now has a Coalition government, as does India, and Canada has had minority governments since 2004, with three general elections failing to give any party a majority. These four polities all use first past the post voting, which in theory is supposed to produce inflated seat majorities for the party with a plurality of votes, and thus ensure that a government can rely on a parliamentary majority.

In all cases, the party system has been fracturing – both regionally and in terms of the percentage of votes won by the two major parties – for some time.

So, we’ve joined the rest of the “Anglosphere” and the largest democratic nation in the world, India, whose parliamentary institutions are based on the Westminster model.

As Mark Wakeham from Environment Victoria puts it:

The fact is, because brown coal is more polluting than other fuels, exporting it to developing countries will increase their emissions and lock them (and the world) into a dangerous emissions trajectory, thereby destroying attempts to negotiate a safe climate deal globally.”

So why is the Victorian government so anxious to have coal leaving the Port of Hastings? Ross Gittins’ recent column hints as to one reason – the Australian dollar seems to be on the up-and-up for a good while:

But whether or not we do, the likelihood is that over the coming decade and more it (RM: the Aussie dollar) will exceed parity (RM: with the US dollar). The days of the Pacific Peso look long gone.

Is that good news? Yes if you like overseas travel and buying things on the internet. Yes if you’re in mining, industries associated with mining or even just live in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia.

But no if you’re in farming, manufacturing or local tourism. Just as the Chinese and Indians are in the process of transforming their economies over the coming quarter century, so our part in that process will involve significant change to the industrial and geographic structure of our economy.

In a nutshell, the manufacturing sector, particularly the car industry – and arguably more important to Victoria, the education sector, which is Australia’s third-biggest export earner – are likely to find it increasingly difficult in a world where high commodity prices pushes the Australian dollar higher. So it’s unsurprising that the Victorian government is dead keen for Victorians to get into the carboniferous mud exporting racket. The long-term global emissions trajectory? Not John Brumby’s problem.

The ABC report suggests something along the lines of the Collins-class: a European-designed, conventionally powered hull, with American combat systems. Perhaps the greatest step change in technology from the Collins will be an air-independent propulsion system to allow them much greater underwater range. A key question left unanswered in the ABC news article is the proposed armament – will these new boats be equipped with long-range cruise missiles in addition to the current torpedoes and anti-ship missiles?

In any case, if the report is accurate, it’s an interesting indication of where the government’s defence priorities lie. You don’t use submarines for disaster relief, conducting stabilization operations on impoverished island states, stopping illegal fisherfolk, or joining Coalitions of the gullible Willing. With a very few exceptions (mainly involving intelligence gathering of various sorts) these boats are designed for one purpose – conventional war against well-equipped navies. So, yes, we’re in the planning stages to spend an enormous money for that contingency, or at least to deter anyone from thinking about doing so in Australia’s vicinity. The context here is, of course, the general increase in submarine purchases around the region. India is currently building new submarines, and purchasing three Russian nuclear-powered subs. China is, similarly, expanding the size and capabilities of its fleet. Most pertinently, Indonesia is also buying subs. Whether this justifies Australia radically expanding its own submarine fleet is, of course, a pertinent question.

Aside from the justification of such a garantuan spend, there’s another important question. Given that Australia is struggling to crew the submarines we currently have, how in the hell are we going to find suitably qualified people to sail a fleet twice the size?

Arjun Appadurai writes about the twin globalisations of Islam and Hindutva, and Mumbai as a flashpoint for a range of global currents, and asks whether its resilience is infinitely renewable. Sumit Ganguly believes the death of secular India to be exaggerated, while Dipesh Chakrabarty reflects on the future of Indian democracy. Vijay Prashad examines the historical legacy of Mumbai’s diversity. Nicole Greenfield links to some noteable commentary, and Laura Duane looks at the targetting of Jews in India.

None of these pieces is easily reducible to talking points and all resist inscription into a grand narrative of “the West versus the rest” or “global terror”. All are worthy of a read by anyone seriously interested in what occurred in Mumbai and what it portends for the future.

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict – through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project – on cities and war – I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity.

The whole article can be read here.

Elsewhere: At the Global Sociology Blog, there’s a complementary post from SocProf where she also takes a look at Sassen’s work in the context of Mumbai as a space of globalisation.

THE slaughter in Mumbai was a barbaric attack not just on India, but on us. On the West.

Now, I don’t think that the reflex response to the desire to prematurely ascribe blame to Al-Qaeda before the facts are known should be to rush off in the opposite direction. But it did interest me that many of the television reports a few nights ago sought commentary from experts in terror studies, rather than sourcing those who have a deep knowledge of Indian and subcontinental politics and history per se. This in itself ties in with the desire to write one single narrative of international terrorism, as the terrorism experts in question are usually best informed about Middle Eastern and South East Asian affairs. This in turn both ascribes more unity to international terror networks than actually exists, and turns them into an immediate and default suspected cause, no matter what the specificities of the political and social environment in which attacks actually occur.

Anyone with anything more than a passing acquaintance with Indian politics, society and history, though, would know that it’s quite possible, even probable, that the attacks’ causes lie in factors such as the increasingly weak Indian central government’s inability to control its territory and monopolise the use of violence, and the inability of either the justice system or the state (even after the Congress-led coalition defeated the BJP) to prevent inter-communal violence and massacres such as those in Gujarat in 2002 or hold anyone to account for them. Political violence in India recently, it’s also worthy of note, has often been directed as much against Christians as Muslims, and what we may be seeing is the emergence of what are basically pogroms on a much bigger and more organised scale. The role of the Shiv Sena Party in the governance of Mumbai itself, a party which has called for the formation of Hindutva suicide squads and an ethno-religious sectarian neighbourhood cleansing program in the city, may additionally be a factor.

One shouldn’t rush to judgement. And one shouldn’t do that also for reasons of preserving an awareness of the horror of the deaths and injuries that have been inflicted in Mumbai and some more respect and dignity for the victims than instantly transforming them into political footballs. But if causes are to be sought, and they should be, both the Pakistani connections to violence and the emergence of terrorist movements pushing back against the nationalist pogroms may well be found in time – after the facts are in – to have been at work in these tragic events.

Elsewhere: Crooks & Liars, The Independent and Boing Boing.

Update: Shakira Hussein in Crikey.

Update: The Blair/Bolt Watch Project, Guy Beres and a roundup of citizen journalism at The Guardian.