Tag Archives: Wokingham Times

Politics

Naughty Naughty

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The main story on the front page of the Wokingham Times caused some amusement today. If you live locally you may be aware of an ongoing local issue over a proposed move by the local football club to Cantley Park. As part of the move, they are proposing to build a 250 seat stand for the supporters. On the one hand you have Cantley residents who are objecting to the move, and particularly the seating as it will bring an increase in traffic to their area, and on the other you have people involved with the football club arguing that the local residents are overeacting.

Anyway, as their contribution to the issue, the Wokingham Times has been running a web poll on their website to guage opinion for and against the proposal, the intention being to publish the results. However, their web polling functionality is not exactly advanced, and certainly not secure – indeed anybody with cookies disabled will be able to vote multiple times. Needless to say, that is precisely what has happened. For the ‘Yes’ campaign there have been a number of multiple voters, with the most being 80 from one user. However the prize goes to someone who used their corporate Blackberry to vote ‘No’ a grand total of 664 times.

As a result, the Wokingham Times has replaced their story giving the results with a general grumble about web cheats, and not surprisingly declaring the vote null and void. Having said that, aside from being a lesson in the reliability of web polls as a guage of public opinion, what it does show is quite what strength of feeling there is over the issue on both sides.

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Wokingham Times Still Talking Pornography

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After last weeks big front page story on Winnersh being top for searches for ‘pornography’ on Google, on this weeks Wokingham Times the story again makes the front page, abeit in a small part of one column, with what is as close to an admission that they got it wrong as I think the paper is going to get.

Alongside my posting on the subject last week, I also e-mailed a similar explanation of how Google Trends works to the editorial e-mail address of the newspaper. I was careful to not explicitly criticise the paper, however I expect that even the most hardened newspaper editor would probably be a little embarassed having spent a lot of time getting interviews with locals on something that was effectively misleading data from Google.

The latest article does mention the Google ‘best guess’ location algorithm – the source of the high marks, without actually expanding on how it works, nor mentioning the ‘normalisation’ of the figures that occurs to take account of location size. It does mention that the cluster of high-tech companies – including a couple of big data-centres – as a possible cause the high figure. However for residents of Winnersh it is still written from the point of view of there being an above average number of people searching for pornography, primarily because it is written as a report on online discussion on the subject triggered by their article, and the associated details of the discussion, rather than being a correction of a previously incorrect story.

Having said that, the paper this week isn’t all bad. St James has a nice little article talking about the new guide to the Churchyard we’ve just produced, including pictures of some of the significant graves, the author of the guide with Rev Richard, and a nice shot of the Church too.

Computers/Technology, Programming

A Slow News Day?

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Don’t you just love local newspapers. It has obviously been a slow news week this week, as the main headline on the front of the Wokingham News this week is ‘Village’s Posh Porn Surfers Top UK Table‘.

Essentially, the whole basis of the article is that someone at the paper has been playing around with Google Trends that relates search terms to the apparent location of the person performing the search – the paper has put the word ‘pornography’ into the engine, and found that Winnersh, a village between Wokingham and Reading has come out top. You can see the results on Google Trends here. Interestingly, the BBC have a similar article giving Birmingham the top place for the word ‘porn’.

The paper really went to town on the whole thing, even interviewing a local sex therapist about this apparent proportionally higher level of people interested in pornography in Winnersh.

However all is not as it seems. The BBC article highlights the flaw in the data:

Google uses IP address information to make a “best guess� about where the queries originated.

Unlike a phone number, the IP address someone uses on the internet is not closely tied to a particular place. For example looking at my phone number, you can establish that someone lives in and around Arborfield, as their number begins 0118 976. Equally you know that someone lives in Finchampstead or Eversley because their numbers begin 0118 973. However if you look at my IP address, it is registered to a company in Rochdale in Lancashire – there is nothing associated with the address that would indicate that I’m actually near Reading. This is the source of the problem – there are lots of high technology companies clustered around the Thames Valley, indeed there is a large technology park at Winnersh Triangle so therefore there are a lot of companies whose internet access goes through Winnersh. Indeed, stick a few different search terms into Google Trends and see how frequently the same cities come up, not because their internet use is higher, but because they have major internet companies in the area. Take a look at this list which includes the NTL datacentres, and note how frequently all the places that they have datacentres turn up on the Google Trends list.

So in effect, the story is total rubbish. Having said that, it did give the local paper a good story, and us a good deal of laughter at work at the reactions of people who actually live in Winnersh.

General

Published

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So I’ve managed to get a letter published in the local paper!

Basically, when we got last weeks local paper, the first letter I read on the letters page was from a reader complaining at the endless succession of letters from local politicians that had been published in recent weeks. Essentially there are two big local issues, the housing allocation, and the fate of Emmbrook School – and the two big groupings on the council don’t agree, and are blaming each other for the housing issue, and arguing over the school.

Anyway, having read, and agreed with the content of the letter, elsewhere on the page I found two long letters from a couple of Conservative members of the council putting their points again on the two issues, and then both launching into a ‘Liberal Democrats were unfit to represent the local people’, in much the same way as the Liberal Democrats had done in previous weeks, and the Conservatives before that.

As I suspect do most other people, I find the whole thing pretty tedious, and whilst my grandfather was an active local politician, I’m really less than impressed at the bunch we have around here.

Anyway, I was suitably annoyed, so I sent off the following by e-mail:

It was with some interest that I read Derek Harding’s letter in this weeks Wokingham Times calling on the Wokingham Councillors of all parties to stop having ‘ping-pong’ debates in the letters page of the local newspaper. Having read that letter first, it was with some surprise that reading the rest of the letters I found not one, but two diatribes from councillors Cowan and Browne, as further contributions to the increasing tiresome ping-pong arguments that have been carried on in the letters page over recent weeks. As before, rather than just content themselves with addressing the issues, both Cowan and Browne, as with the Liberal Democrat councillors before them, cannot resist more of the tedious, hyped up mud-slinging of their previous letters – one declaring the Liberal Democrats to be failing as an opposition, the other as being unfit to represent the residents of Wokingham.

To be honest if the recent examples in the letters page of the Wokingham Times are anything to go by, the labels could equally well be applied to either group, and I am not in the least surprised by the general disinterest and low turnout that we get come local election time when this is the choice that we are given. Certainly as a resident who is represented by one of the main source of the letters, and someone who has had Mr Cowan on my doorstep in the past asking for me to vote for him, the recent performance in the letters page has left me less than impressed. What Wokingham needs for councillors are people who know how to act like adults, and can do their duty by representing their residents properly dealing with the very real issues that face our area, rather than carrying on this school playground name calling masquerading as political discussion has been paraded through the Wokingham Times letters page in recent weeks.

The letters page of the Wokingham Times should not be allowed to be used as a resource for a free party political slanging match by these local councillors. Both the Wokingham Conservatives, and Wokingham Liberal Democrats have websites, and also regularly distribute printed newsletters to homes in the district. Both of these are methods by which the politicians can distribute their messages rather than wasting space in the paper. The letters page should primarily be a place where we the local people, the people these councillors have been elected to represent should be able to make our opinions known.

The letter has been printed in the paper exactly as written, aside from some reformatting, and breaking it into more paragraphs. Although amusingly on the page it comes after two responses to last weeks efforts from the Conservatives by two Liberal Democrats. Someone on the paper trying to stir things up? Conservatives read the two Lib Dem responses, then my letter which basically tells them to start acting like adults? I wonder.

So the real test though will be to see next weeks paper to see how the various parties react… Will the Conservatives respond to the Liberal Democrat letters and carry on the stupid arguing? Will they respond to my letter? Or Both? Any of those responses I think will prove my points. Of course I equally well could have totally misjudged the mood and I’ll get flamed by a load of people who like all the letters.

Anyway I’ll wait and see what happens…