The last time the overarching idea was what information is captured by the structure of the Chinese script itself in terms of phenology, right? And then that led us to, I mean, through this kind of spiral process, let's say, we say, oh, it's the rhyme and the position of articulation of the initials. And then we find cases where we think, we're using the middle Chinese reading to say that's not true. But then we come up with proposals that make it true. So then it is true, yeah. So now the question that I wanted to ask is sort of how do we, I mean, in a sense, one of the disadvantages to non-synologists using Chinese data is that the Chinese characters are inscrutable. So one question that is, how can we kind of transliterate Chinese characters to actually represent what phonetic information is in them? And one way of putting that is like to model the experience of reading on the part of an old Chinese speaker. Yeah, we're an old Chinese reader. So that's my goal is to find a romanization for Chinese characters here. And this is, you know, thank you. You've read potentially an article that I wrote to 2015 about this because I assigned it. And my thinking basically hasn't changed, but I sort of put it aside for a while and then now I'm trying to do it more comprehensively with the intention of then using that from here on out. Yeah, although I think I haven't actually succeeded that so well because it's not working and it doesn't even matter that often. But so we remind ourselves of the Chinese hypothesis. So characters with the synchronetic would rhyme in the charging and have homo-organic initials. And then another way of putting that same observation of, you know, that a Chinese series specifies a rhyme and initial is that it specifies a syllable type. So each shi sheng series should specify a syllable type. So just giving an example, you know, this is a series we've seen before. So looking at the middle Chinese reader, we have yeah, and yeah, and yeah, and yeah. Now, if I take these back to old Chinese and you see what's there, but I should say like this is intended as kind of heuristic for the time being. So I'm just projecting the initials back according to the lecture that I gave yesterday. And then the rhymes you would not have any way of knowing that that final yaw was there. But I thought it was better to put it there than to make you think it wasn't there.  So one shi sheng series, one syllable type, and then this is another series we've seen before, where now, you know, I'm reconstructing, let's say the paloals to back to dentals and the red flexes back to then to fall by a meal of life. And then we can say that this series specified a syllable like two, yeah, so there you go. I think I've got a couple more, yeah. So here's another one. You know, we looked at it last time in terms of motivating the reconstruction of voiceless resonance, but now I'm looking at it just to make the point that this become character, this phonetic, specifies the syllable knock, yeah. So now the, so someone online, you haven't muted yourself and we're getting a little bit of feedback, so we can check that if you want. But now I'll point out that it's a little bit more complicated than that and you know this already, that series have sub-series, yeah. So here's some series, okay, right? And a character like this means some more being pronounced like a pay that means something like closing, right? So yeah, sorry, I haven't gotten to sub-series yet. I'm just telling you about where Romanizing, right? So I propose a Romanization that captures these two features. So it's pronounced something like pay, so we write pay, P-A-Y, yeah. And then it means something to be closing, so I would recommend to them in the superscript. Now, some people have questioned my choice of Latin for this, but I think it's perfect for three reasons. One is it's not Chinese, one is that it's not English, and one is that Latin serves a similar purpose in Romanizations of other languages like, I don't know, I should have checked this, Lydian maybe, Pyroglyphic, yeah, Pyroglyphic Lydian, yeah. So if you don't like it, then you can lead your life however you want to, but I think there are certain advantages to Latin here, yeah. So, but I do think that this is too long, right? That if you read a whole document and every time you have this little semantic radical, you saw this as a whole vestimentum, then that would get tiresome. So instead I say just vest to save space, yeah. Now, for you to know all of the different semantic abbreviations that I propose, I would have to share a document with you that 2015 article has like 20 of them, now it's sort of up to 50 or something, but I'm very happy to do that. So now let's look at this series again. So here I have, this is the kind of mother character of the series, so it's specified the syllable type and then the middle Chinese is the reading in the middle Chinese of that specific character, right? Okay, so then we have our friend vestimentum, okay, and then we could have tumulus, okay, and you see the point is I'm writing them all pay, right?  So I think as a romanization of the character, we should just write the syllable type and the semantic, yeah, so here's tumulus, okay, and then there's monos, and then I'm assuming, I've tried to choose Latin words that are obvious, like that I think anyone who knows modern European language will know, so I hope that works, right? And then here's pedispe, which doesn't get shortened because pedis is already pretty short, and then lapispe, generally speaking, I at least cut off the case endings because I don't think it's very important for the romanization of Chinese, whether you look up what the gender or something was, or if you get a fancy class of it in Latin, and also the stem is what you'll know from the modern European language, right? So this is my proposal of it, you can tell me whether you think it's nice or not, yeah? So now we can do the same with this one. So we have your core, q, and then we have granun, q, and then gema, q, and serpen, q, yeah. If there's, I mean, I don't know, if anyone wants me to say more, like to point out that gema means gem or something, then I can do that, but otherwise, assuming that some of you know the Chinese characters, some of you know the Latin and the semantics aren't why we're here anyhow, yeah? Okay, and then yeah, so last of the examples, just to be systematic about it, so this one's not, right? So then we have pico, not, and bangus, not, and not orbs, and now why have I moved it over here? It's because it's on the right, yeah? So I'm also telling you the sort of structure of the character with this realization in a similar way that we do when we won't nice marry, right? Okay, and then here's femina, not, and then that's what, you know, this series would look like romanized, yeah? Okay, so now I move on to sub-series, and this is, I don't know, I think being able to capture this kind of structure is one reason why I like to romanize them, you know, to remind ourselves that the Shesham series aren't flat, and this romanization can capture the kind of nested structure of the Shesham series. Okay, so this, we looked at before, right? This is, so we've seen this in the context of reminding ourselves, or I'm reminding you now that we've seen this Shesham series in the context of me describing the fact that there isn't a B distinction, right? So these characters are A characters, and those characters are B characters, and then these are the Middle Chinese readings that we've seen before, yeah? So now we try, we can romanize them. So the first one is Q-A-Y, yeah? But then all of the characters on the right here are type B syllables, yeah? So then I think we can actually, you know, again, sort of inspired by Sumerian in terms of convention, we can say that the K-Magnum, yeah? is equal to K with superscript B, where the superscript B is telling you that this phonetic is specifying that it's a type B syllable, yeah? So when an old Chinese person was reading, we can, you know, presume that if they saw this character, they knew, oh, it's syllable type K, and for A, right? And it's a type B syllable, whatever that was for them, okay? That information is built into the structure of the characters, okay? So now I'm looking at this series, which we've seen before, it's the knock series, right? So now it has this kind of graph, this network diagram, and it has this sub-series. Now we look at the romanization, not the romanization, sorry, the middle Chinese readings of these characters. And over here, we have nia, knock, nia, chiak, nia, chiak, chiak, nia, chiak, okay? So they're almost all type B, but this one's type A, so actually, it's not telling you anything about type A and B, but it is telling you that the syllable is somehow not, yeah, coming off of, that's, you know, you have to be explicit about it. If a character like this one is built from this, as it's phonetic, all it's telling us is it's syllable type is not, right? Whereas we go over here, and we have nick, and we have peck, and we have nick, nick, yeah? And then these are different vowels, yeah? Now, you can't know yet what those middle Chinese vowels go back to, but the answer is a schwa, yeah? So these are our sort of provisional reconstructions where, you know, we should say they're not necessarily back in our character constructions, they're heuristic reconstructions for this slide, right? But so we have b-knock, a-knock, b-knock, b-knock, yeah? But then over here, we have this schwa, yeah? So in a sense, we have a violation of the Sheshen hypothesis. If, you know, you're going from like this character to this character, you'd say, oh no, this is a problem because the rhyme here is not, the rhyme here is, sorry, the rhyme here is a-knock, and then the rhyme here is a-knock, right? But, you know, I'm going to propose it sort of historically speaking, the first time, or I mean, this is a sort of a fantasy, you know, we don't know the person who did it, but we're seeing evidence of it, right? The first time someone had to write this little knuck with the schwa, there already existed some character for knuck, and so they said, oh, well, you know, I guess I should use the wrong vowel, right? But added some, you know, indication of the phonetic in order to specify the morpheme in question, and then that becomes a new, you know, sub-series in this case that specifies the different vowel, right? So if we're going to romanize it, then we say that this phonetic character is knuck, and then this one, which seeing an ass, this is what I want to capture, is that these sub-series are kind of genius-faced, right? They look back to their own mother character, in which case it's knuck with latter, now which is like the kidding or something like that. But then as a phonetic in its own right, it's specifying that the vowel is schwa, and one thing I think that this captures, which is an important thing methodologically, but I just think that's also true, which is a Chinese character can always be uniquely analyzed as having two components, one phonetic and one semantic. So there's a, you'll hear about if you read around, oh, this character has two semantics, or this character has two phonetics, and actually Shuxiang wrote the show in J2, he talks like that sometimes. But I'm proposing that we should only have recourse to that in extremists, right? That if it's possible, if you look at a character like this, you may say, oh, it has, oh, sorry, if you look at a character developed from this one, let me say, we go back and say, like if you look at this character, you might say, oh, this in the middle is a phonetic, and then there are two semantics, or you might see it as having three parts somehow, yeah? And I'm saying don't ever do that, right? Always decide this character has two parts unless it's one of the basic characters like this one. There are either a character, is the kind of mother of a whole series, or it's composed of two parts. Those are the only two options. But sorry, some point, is it like the map also like composed of two parts because it has like grass on top of it, so would it be also possible to divide it? Okay, it'll like be like paste by paste, paste it, yes, right? But then, you know, you don't need, so this is grass on top of a stone, right? So your options are these grass, the bed, and stone, the cemented, where stone, the bed, and grass, the cemented, and I'm not an expert in geography, but my understanding of this character cannot be analyzed in that way. So instead, you should see it as grass on top of a stone. Yeah, and then if someone knows what it actually means, this means like similar or something, right? Is that, it's wool, yeah? Is it like longer than I use? Yeah. Yeah, it's wool. Yeah, which means that it's similar. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't remember, you know, generally speaking, the kind of mothers of phonetic series actually go back to Oracle scriptions and can be seen as iconic, right? Which is to say like, actually, this is kind of what my evening lecture was sort of about two years ago at the summer school, is if you have like, gosh, what's a nice example. The question is sort of, the moment you use the Rivas principle, which is this principle of, you know, like writing the English word I, first person pronoun, if I write it with a picture of an eyeball, right? That's the Rivas principle, right? And all phonetic, what do I even call it? All phonetics, all semantic determiners are applications of the Rivas principle, right? So the moment you use the Rivas principle, you're not in the realm of the iconic anymore, right? But if you're in the realm of the iconic, it's not correct to analyze things as having some components. Let me make an example. Maybe there's a, is there a, no, I can't draw, okay? So no, here's something, yeah? So let's say I have this, and it represents the morphine in English, vowels, yeah, okay. And then I have another character, what's called a character, and this one, maybe we will say it represents door, yeah? I don't know anybody English vowels, so. Forgive me. That's star. Anyone, okay. I'm going to the house again. So the point I'm making is to analyze this, so we're in Oracle bone land, right? To analyze this when it's still iconic, as like somehow composed of the simple house is a mistake. It's not, it's a drawing of the door, right? Okay, yeah, I can think of this. Yeah. It's just like a grass on top of a stone, and lots like grass and stone.  And my rules are the only way to split a Chinese character is you have to end up with one half that's a semantic and one half that's a phonetic. So if you can't do that, you're not allowed to split the character, regardless of what you're tempted to do, you know, in your fantasy life, right? And here too, it doesn't work pretty smoothly, but you're saying well, it's just one little difference, so. Oh, this is, no, like, so you're asking about this violating the traditional hypothesis. Yeah, you're right. This violates the traditional hypothesis. So, so now the question is, if we were a Popperian, we would have to say we have falsified the hypothesis. It turns out that doing Chinese historical phonology is impossible. Yeah. Okay, goodbye. Right. Well, this is just like, extension of your thought that some characters are not opposite. But you could also say that this, the blue group is not wrong.  So, I mean, if you do it there, if you do it in the left, you could also do it in the right. Yeah, I see what you're saying. And this is how I would say is, is a, you could say this character has an arbitrary relationship with this character. This one is the mother of the not family. And this one is the mother of the not family. And they have nothing problem otherwise, right? That would be fine with me. And actually, I would say that in a sense, this is that we have, you know, like, like in other realms of linguistics, people have two inclinations. There's the lumpers and there's the splitters, right? So if you're a lumper, generally speaking, you would say this is all one shesham series now. And if you're a splitter, you'll say, this is one shesham series. And this is another shesham series. And I'm sort of trying to say, I think we can have our take needed to, by recognizing that shesham series are structured. Yeah. And then, now we still have the problem that this series violates the shesham hypothesis. But I think we can kind of at least, how can I say like circumscribe the parameters of violation, which is that the only edge that's actually violating the shesham hypothesis is this one. Does that make sense? It's because, because like, like this and this, like the same wrong. This and this have the same one. This and this have the same one. This and this have the same one. This and this have the same one. This and this have the same one. So it's only here. It's only this connection where we're, where we're violating the shesham hypothesis. And then I think that, you know, the explanation ultimately is historical, which is like somebody wanted to write enough. And they only have not available to them because, you know, because the, the paleography of Chinese character was not born full grown out of the head of Zeus, right? It needed to kind of, feel from stone to stone. To use a Chinese saying. And that means that we sort of expect there to be some moments where they had to violate the rules in a sense, right? But partly actually, this is my, let's say, this is my attempt, if you like, to sublimate the shesham hypothesis, right? Which is say like the shesham hypothesis allows us to get this far. And then we see what is actually the relationship between members of a shesham series. And that sometimes it specifies more than home organic initial and rhyme, like we saw with the AB distinction. Yeah. And sometimes it, in a sense, specifies less because, because this character, if you think of it as the mother of this whole thing, you know, would have to have like an under specified value, right? But the other thing I would say is come on, schwa and are, are not, it's not, it's not like, you know, O and E, you know, and I think there, there is a rationality to it in that way. We're like a kind of pragmatic rationale. Somebody needs to write not, and they turn to not, they don't turn to no or to, you know, sprung or something. Yeah. But the, yeah, which is to say, and this is what Axel Schussel would say, there is no shesham hypothesis. It was an entirely contingent, pragmatic history, right? Like individuals were trying to write words and they made pragmatic decisions based on what words had already been written. And there's no way to divine principles. Yeah. And I think that has a kind of moment of truth to it. And we're seeing that here. But on the other hand, we need a shesham hypothesis because, because we can't ask the people, you know, what they were doing. So we need to have a sort of strong phonetic hypothesis and then see where it has to be violated. Yeah. And then is, and if those violations are kind of costly or not. Yeah. And then I think one thing that you'll realize is like, I've had to give up the shesham hypothesis here. Right. Whereas other people would say, yeah, well, vealers and glottals occurring in the same series is also a violation, but you know, these things happen. Right. So it's a question of like, which kind of for aesthetic reasons, which violations do you tolerate? Yeah. And then I'll give you an example from my childhood, which is I was told, you can't divide by zero when I was like, whatever, seventh grade. Right. And I felt like this was, this was, you know, oppression. It's like, no, I want to divide by zero or I at least want to be told something other than, you know, you just can't do it. Right. So then in college, I find out of course you can do it if you want. Right. The, but it has certain negative consequences, which is that like all numbers equal all other numbers. Right. So like, basically if you, if you have a system where there's only one number, which you could call zero, then you can divide by zero. Yeah. But you can't do anything. You can't count, for instance. Yeah. So, so I think I would say the same thing, which is like, like, like, how can I bring it back to this is like, if, so I think the uvular hypothesis, I think that in that case being dogmatic and sticking to the restriction hypothesis is still profitable. I think it's still adding, you know, insight. It's still sort of juicy to embrace the uvular hypothesis. Yeah. Whereas here, what would the analog be? The analog would be proposing a new vowel or something like, like how would we manage to make the decision hypothesis work in this case? I don't think there's, I don't think it's worth it. It doesn't look promising to me. Instead, I think it's better to say, look, sometimes they violate the decision hypothesis and it's not a good deal. Yeah. But I think that this test of like, you know, like Axel Trusfield would say to, to bathroom cigar about the uvular hypothesis, you would say, look, sometimes they violate the decision hypothesis. It's not that a good deal. Right. I say that about this case, you know, when is it okay to say that, when is it not okay to say that that, like that will, that's either an aesthetic choice, or you can say history decides the history of the discipline decide. But here, it's nice for you that the, the ones with Trump cluster. Exactly. So yeah. Yeah, it's not, not random. Yeah, exactly. You're messing with the. Extra. I think it's, I think the next thing here is doing a good job of letting you have your opinion to that. Right. Yeah. That's why I'm trying to sell you on the idea. So anyhow, so we can romanize here. Not. And I'll, I'll show this slide. Yeah. So let's do along. So yeah, so this is how, you know, now I'm representing this, this process of next game. Right. So we have here, not and then. So deep though, but I give her the endings of. Not. And then this leftover map equals no. And then we can have soul note and we can have not for, and so on. And then you always are getting an analysis of the character as opposed to one semantic and one finite. Right. And then just to point out that we have some theories on. Okay, but in this case, I can't figure out any reason for it. So I'm just using a subscription. Right.  And then we have. Okay. Then we have this one. Okay. And then you put a pen underneath it. But I don't know why I did that. Like, I, like. As far as I know, there's no, there's no phonetic further phonetic specific agent is being made by them. So in those cases, I was indexed with a number, but maybe, you know, you will figure out a reason for it. And this is another reason that I think this kind of romanization is good at, which is the sort of thing that people, you know, do in Sumerian is then we can, then we can have an article where you say, I think pay two should actually be whatever. You know, some further specification. Okay. So, so just this is, you know, I think a nice way of kind of presenting a Chinese character. We have the character itself, the representation of the character, right? So that keeps telling me the analysis of the character into it's semantic and it's phonetic. And, and then the middle Chinese transcription. And the nice thing I think about this presentation is, if you know a little bit about Chinese, then using these two, you can reconstruct the, the old Chinese. Okay. But in this case, we know that it must have an R in the middle, and it must be accurate. So then we, we, we with Roman, sorry, we reconstruct, you know, star, T, H, R, I, W. And then I think that's, I don't know, that's one thing that I find frustrating in general when I read historical linguistics is when someone gives me a star form and I don't have the power to generate that star form myself on the slot, right? And then, you know, the answer is usually, well, you know, if you study as my PhD student for 10 years, then you'll know why I reconstructed that way. And so this is my attempt to also kind of shorten that distance is if I give you the Romanization and the reading, then, you know, relatively easily, you should be able to generate a, at least acceptable old Chinese reconstruction yourselves. Yeah. Yeah. And I promise to use this convention hereafter, but I'm actually not going to keep that promise very well. Yeah. Okay. So now your first assignment. Choose a Shenzhen series and then Romanize the series following my conventions. Yeah. Okay.  Yeah. And then I'll just tell you how to do it. Well, you could use my 2015 article to get some Latin abbreviations, but I don't think it's a big deal, right? Like you can use different Latin than I use, or you could do it in Swedish or something. And as far as where to find Shenzhen series, you know, if you have a favorite place, please go there. But I have made a wiki book that you can find by Google and something like GSR phonetic series or something. GSR is for the dramatic aesthetic of essence, which is a book by Anna Carlgren. And it lists all everything important to the Shenzhen series. And then that will also link you to other wiki books. So I've made one for Carlgren, one for Schussler, and one for Baxter Cigar, trying to present about 9000 characters in each case according to the analysis of those different authors. Now, they're flat, right? Like those authors present their flat series. And then generally speaking, Carlgren is a splitter and Schussler is more of a lumber and Baxter Cigar is more of lumber still. But then you can do the amastic, the whole point of the assignment, right? You can do the substructure analysis yourself just based on inspection, just based on how the character looks on your computer screen. So that's an assignment that I proposed. And that's the end of this presentation about Romanizing Chinese characters. Are there any questions? We should Romanize like the modern Chinese pronunciation. I'm not sure what you mean. Like Romanizing the characters. I mean, I don't quite understand the question. This is a modern Chinese Chinese series. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of this new book, a number of computer makes will, will be correct. Yeah. And there are notes actually on my Wiki book about places where people disagree, but not very confident. Yeah. And then it might be that, you know, that. But like, sometimes. Characters end up looking similar for purely graphic reasons. Sometimes. graphic historical reasons, which is saying there are some risks involved in using, you know, purely modern forms of the characters, but no one is going to die. So the risk is very small. It's just an exercise for, you know, an assignment for tomorrow. Yeah. Or I mean also for another day if you want, but it's an assignment if you want to do it. Okay. Any other questions? Otherwise I'll move on to the next presentation. Any questions online? Yes, it's about this slide, like the last character of this slide, like the heart is like below the big one. Yeah, but why when it comes to, it comes to a purely normalization then why the heart is on the top? It's not like downstairs. Yeah, so what I actually do, and I'm not totally married to this, but I use the colon, the mean that is below. And I use the dots to mean they're next to each other, left and right. Yeah. And then I think I use a little X if one's inside the other one. That's all described in the, in the 2015 article, but I also don't think it really matters, because the only thing that matters from a linguistic perspective is analyzing it into a phoenix and a semantic. But I do think that, well, we might as well keep track of this information for, you know, for the people who are less used to reading Chinese characters. But I think that, you know, for me visually, the difference between a dot and the colon doesn't draw attention to itself. So it's kind of nice. Yeah. And it's nice to say superscript doesn't mean on top superscript means is the semantic component. Yeah, yeah. I mean if you. So I do this all using latex, and it takes me hours and hours and hours. I would make it encourage you even to do it by hand. Yeah, hi, sorry. I still don't understand how we are supposed to make the transcription so we just for instance in Pleco like we look for classical Chinese character like, and, and then we go from there like I don't understand. Okay, here's let me just do one here actually. So this is Google. So I type in something like GSR character. PSR care PSR character wiki book. Hopefully this works. Yeah, character list for carbon's GSR so this is a wiki book I made. So, I'm just going to click randomly at the top is the cross reference to just like but I'm going to click randomly. Okay, so here's series 53. And then it's who who who who who yeah. So now you know it's a uvular series. Yeah. So, now, the first problem you'll have is what rhyme for reconstruct. Yeah, because you don't know. So what I suggest you do is just click on the character. And then it takes you to the wiki book entry. And then we go down to the pronunciation. And we see that. Whoops. We see that. Backstreet cigar reconstructed with an up. Yeah. And John, John, Sean from also reconstructed with an up. Yeah. So now, I mean, you might want to check one other character in the series or something that. But now you're already at the point where you can say this syllable type is q a right. Okay, so then if you want to romanize things. So let's go back. Like if we want to romanize this one, the third one. So 0053 be if we want to romanize that third one, it's going to be a birdie under the phonetic. Yeah, so then it would be car colon office. Yeah. So is that clear now. Yeah. Like, you can choose your favorite station series and you can romanize it. So I'm expecting that, you know, the homework might be if you just write the character, then you write the romanization. And then you write maybe the middle Chinese. And then I forget even what it was, which tone it was. Yeah, I don't get it. How the cool change to the, the, the q a on the whiteboard. So, let me take it in reverse order now for the rhyme. I just looked up the answer in wiki books. Right. I just said, back from cigar reconstruct all. And John's and Sean from Williams for off. So who am I disagree. So that's how I get the off. Right. Now the question is, how do I get the queue. The answer is I look at the series and I say, we have a mixture of stops and predictors. Yeah, we have a mixture of stops and predictors. So that's characteristic of a uv or series which is what I covered yesterday. But look, you may make mistakes, right, like, so don't don't sweat it. Shall we look at one more. Yeah, sorry. This H is the. So actually, yeah, this is a problem. This is a problem actually, this is using back through a system. Yeah, so his age is my age with the thing under it. So yeah, so there will be some problems but I think that, you know, it's good to get your hands dirty. Let's do. Let's do let's Yeah, these are some of these are too easy. Yeah. Oh, but yeah. Let's look at this one. This one's really so it'll be clear. Yeah, the fish series. Okay. So, so in this case, I'll just tell you the answer. So, yeah, this is back through reconstruction, which for me would be this. Don't worry too much about that. But in any case, it should, it will reconstruct to not be right. Because if you look at it, all of those characters are type B. And then how do you know it's off you just go look in, you know, for the answer in the the witchnery entries for those relevant characters. So this is the syllable type. And then, like, so so so fish is the mother character is just this now, but then I'll like the second one is is water and then fish. So then it's going to be awkward and then thought and then not be. I feel like there's something less than overwhelming enthusiasm for this project. Yeah. So this is a rare time that actually being session series is overspecified with the character. I know that hasn't really been as far as I know that hasn't been really well studied. And actually, like if you look at this one, Schussler and Baxter and Sagar combine these two series. So part of it's a question of like, if you're a splitter, you will tend to get less overspecified series. Whereas if you're on lump area tend to get less, less, less over Well, will you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be hard though. So watch out, because it's with an S. But you see that the fish is in there. Yeah. Yeah. So now you can see both why Carl's split it because he said it's, it's totally different initial totally been right. Yeah. But you can also see why Schussler and Baxter sort of combined because they said no look it's got the fish in it. Yeah, so we're going to do that. Yeah, yeah, they reconstructed those those that come out with an S they reconstruct now, but I would still reconstruct so so I would end up, this is, you know, just saying what would I end up doing I would end up for this series. I mean, not with no specification of a or B, because these two with the S are type, a so. Yeah, so, so I think at the, you know, at the core level what does pitch tell you, all it tells you is it's a it's a dealer nasal with the rhyme off. That's what I think. But if you're romanizing Carl's interpretation, then you would end up specifying I'd be here, but could you please show us again how you access this document and then the dictionary. Well, this document is the dictionary. Yeah. And I got to it by googling GSR character list wiki book. Oh, so this is the wiki book, and then each of the characters in it is a live link to which area. So you can click on anything, right. So like, let's actually just see what happens we can click on this, this, this one this. Yeah. And then it takes us to which area. And then we can go down to actually here you can say, which area says that it's a phonos to make a compound with fish as the phonetic, and I don't even know what this means. But as the semantic yeah. Oh, yeah, we, yeah, right. Yeah. So, so it's something that sounds like fish and something to do with me. Yeah, and then if we look at the reconstructions. So we can go down here with old Chinese back to the cigar readings for SNA and John Johnson also we construct SNA. So which area has a very six vowel school bias they always give back to the cigar reconstructions and John Johnson instructions. But that's okay with me. I don't know who did this.  There's hundreds, hundreds of characters in here. And then they also have like lots of dialect readings and teleographic information and so you know which an area is is a good place to. But one thing it doesn't give you is session analysis so that's what you know why you can go to my wiki book and then there are these links here. But anyhow that's. I don't know that's that's tells you how you can go about doing your homework if you want to do it. Yeah, which is to say for the for the initials do the best you can based on what you've learned so far for the rhymes look them up in Wiktion area and then use the session analysis, either in the program or Schuessler or backs or cigar as you find in one of the relevant wiki books, and then try to analyze one station series using my romanization so then you get the you get the initial from your knowledge. So you get the Latin from looking it up in back since you are or or jungle.  The point is just to experience the analysis of characters into phonetics and semantics in a way that is, you know, modeling the reading experience of a an old Chinese reader and potentially to explore some of this substructure right like in the in the series you choose is there a sub series. If there is a sub series, do you notice anything that that sub series seems to further specify phonetically. Yeah, that's the point.


I'll hold you to that later on. That's some point in the summer. Okay, probably just a bit of background first. I've been researching in the field of loosely what you might call the democracy for about ten years. Mainly looking at things like political participation, election campaigning, parties, and more laterally what I'm going to talk about here is political representatives, MPs and parliaments online. Most of that has been in the UK, partly because that's where I get my funding from and say they'd like you to focus on that. But we've also done comparative work across Europe and some of what I'm going to talk about today is a UK-Australia comparative project that we did. I'm hoping that some of the issues that press will talk about have resonances here and raise more general questions, especially about the nature of democracy and the net, et cetera. So, as I say, let's just go to the first one. The background to this research was originally we had a sort of two-and-a-half-year project between about 2003 and 2006 looking at parliaments and assemblies and political representatives in both the UK and Australia. We focused on Westminster and also on the federal parliament in Canberra and the relatively newly created Scottish Parliament Welsh Assembly and then also two states in Australia, Victoria and Queensland. What we were looking at, I suppose, was broadly three or four things. We were looking at how far new technologies were really facilitating changes in the role of MPs and their relationship both with their electorates and the voters, their political parties, because both countries have a strong tradition of party discipline. And their role as legislatures and policy makers and things like that. We were interested as well because there isn't much data, particularly in the UK and also in Australia, about public perceptions of all this and data from the voters' perspective and how they were using ICTs or might use ICTs to contact and monitor their representatives' behaviour. And then, bigger, broader questions, we wanted to just look comparatively what was going on. We saw factors that shape patterns of usage and behaviour online. And what, in some sense, is the big broad woolly question which I'll finish on, is what's happening to representative democracy? I'm not sure I know the answer to that, but maybe you've got some answers to that as well. The methods we used very quickly were a range of things. We've done around about 100 interviews now with MPs, parliamentary staff, you know, political representative staff. I'm just engaging in another round now between 2003 and 2008. We've also done surveys of MPs online presence so a bit of content feature analysis of their websites and more laterally, again, blogs and social network sites. And again, we've done that on... We did that in 2003, we repeated it in 2005 and I'm updating it again now. I have to say that looking at political representatives' websites sends you completely insane after a while. Originally, there was three of us doing this and I'm updating it by myself and it's like going through about 500, 600 sites. My brain gets a bit fuzzy after a while looking at these things. From the public perspective, we also used standard pretty public opinion survey data in 2005 and 2006, so we did a couple of surveys and we did some focus groups as well. I'll go through the sort of background. Let's go on and just... What I'm trying to do here is summarise five years' work into three PowerPoint slides, which is good practice but hard work for an academic room. We like to talk for hours and hours. But I'll try and just make some basic points here. We've gone with the expectation that there might actually be more interesting things going on in Australia than there was in the UK. The reason we expected that was because the literature said that's what was happening and we also thought that the geography of Australia might make a difference. You've got MPs out there with constituencies which span thousands of miles with hardly any population. We thought there might be some drivers there for them to use the technology innovatively. In fact, what we found was there wasn't a huge amount of differences between what you might call individual representatives in either of the countries and indeed there was probably less innovation in Australia than there was in the UK. I'll say more about why that might be the case later on. There's some pretty standard patterns though and I'll just highlight some of these. First of all, the growth of what you might call personalised online presence. In other words, their own websites, their own blogs, these sorts of things was relatively slow. They first started around the mid-1990s and yet even now, 2008, you've got around about a quarter, maybe even a third of MPs in Westminster Parliament don't really have an online presence. There's some characteristics to those MPs as well. They tend to be older. They tend to have been in Parliament quite a long time. They tend to have constituencies which are not electorally competitive. In other words, they're not under a lot of threat. So the incentives for them to set up on online presence is perhaps less. Same message again largely in Australia as well, I think, to a certain extent. What are they actually doing on the whole? What's your standard MP do well? If you look, I bet this is probably the same in most countries, but pretty much it's that cyber-brochian model still. That's sort of built for the broadcast era. If you looked at the site and I've looked at hundreds and thousands of them, they look pretty much the same. What have they got? They've got a page with their bio on it which tells you all the dull facts about they joined the party when they were three years old. They've done all these positions, et cetera, et cetera, and they've lived in the constituency for years and they support the local authority standard stuff.  The basic message they seem to be trying to push across is, look, this is me, I'm a very busy person, and I'm busy representing you. There you go. So that's pretty much a standard pattern for the bulk of these sort of things. The other thing we started to pick up on was what I called on the third bullet point there, the growth of template politics as well, which sort of underpins the cyber brochure message as well. This goes to the relationship between political representatives and their parties. What parties are doing, partly to counter, if you like, the individualisation of it, is to provide them with standardised information and standardised messages and content. If I can just click on that link, I'll just show you what I mean, if this works. This is a templated site of my... Well, she's not my local MP, because I actually live in Salford, but it's by the university's base. Around about a third of the governing Labour Party MPs have a site which is more or less exactly the same as this. So in all the words, it has pretty much the standard thing, it has this little map and it has, you know, a pattern about it has all these things down the side, and all they do is put a bit of personalised information in. So they can personalise it to a certain extent, but largely once you've looked at one, you've looked at 100 of them. They're pretty much the same. If you go to the Labour Party's site, there will be similar sorts of branding there, but these are mainly used for local parties and MPs. Yeah, you can do that, even most people wouldn't, but you could do that if you wanted to. So what you've got is these templated sites. And the same thing to a lesser degree in Australia as well, we came across, you know, so what you've got is standard, they look professional. Let's face it, most people are not going to look at 600 sites. Are they going to look at maybe one if they look at any at all? So they're not going to see them all. So they look sort of professional, but it's a good means of the party, but it's a long degree of control over the content. Okay, so that's the less interesting message.  And it's not only about their use of technology, it's also about their attitude to their role as well. So they tend to use the technology, they tend to use blogs, and they tend to use those sort of tools and the interactive communication tool, but they also think slightly differently about their roles and MP as well. And so some of them, when we did the interviews, talked interestingly about no longer seeing themselves as this sort of hierarchical figure where people came to for advice and help, but being part of a hub or part of a network where they didn't necessarily know all the answers, but they could maybe help direct people to other people who would, and that they were part of this sort of networked idea. So I'd say it's around about probably about 5% in both... No, probably 5% in the UK, maybe less in Australia of politicians who are using the technology in slightly creative ways. I'm wondering whether, for time purposes, I'd quite like to show a web camera. I know I showed it to a few people yesterday. I'd quite like to show a clip of that, but maybe I'll leave that to the end. Do you want to see it now? OK. Maybe a disappointment to you, I don't know. Let me just explain what's going on here. David Cameron is the relatively new and young leader of the Conservative Party, the main opposition party in the UK. Nobody knew much about David or Dave as he started calling himself, which is sort of interesting. In 2006, he produced this, autumn 2006, he produced this web camera site which hit the news and it hit mainstream media and he got a lot of coverage for it. It's a mixture of a blog and a video diary and a question and answer and all sorts of other things. One of the interesting first things you'll see about this is it's not branded in Conservative Party colours. That's the first thing. It's not blue. It's this sort of pinky mould you call it, more mauve colour, I don't know, anyway. There is Conservatives there, but you have to try sort of quite hard to see that. It's very much a personalised thing as well, which is sort of unusual in the context. It's about promoting and marketing him as a politician and not necessarily the party, which is also interesting in a UK context because we don't tend to have that very much. Let me see if I can find the very... This is the very first one. I don't know what the sound will be like on this or anything, but if you get an idea... ..just to say two words about this before it starts. This is the introduction to webcam. It's his first one. Now, it is either completely spontaneous or it's a complete mastery of marketing, and I'll let you decide which one. That's not the one, is it? Sorry, it's gone into the wrong one. Can I get down to this one? This always happens with technology. You'll never have any clips. Yeah, that's the wrong video when I played it differently, but we can't seem to get... When I did that, I played this one. Yeah, here we go. About what the Conservatives are doing, what we believe in, what you want to do, what you want to do in a minute. Can we just do this in a minute? Um, where was I? Right, we want to communicate directly. We want to tell you what the Conservatives are doing, and we want to give you behind-the-scenes access so you can actually see what policies we're developing, the things that we're doing, and have that direct link. Because I'm really keen that we can communicate with people properly. So this is webcam. This is the web camera. Sorry, this is the opening piece. Today I'm going to be talking about clean politics and telling you about the announcement of many lasers today. We're going to have some great interviews on this service, on the cane, coming exclusively to you on our website, and lots of behind-the-scenes footage of the conference. But today, we've still got a couple of days to go before the conference. Doing a lot of work on speeches and policies in preparation. I should say that nobody knew very much about camera, at least amongst the general public. The only thing they'll like you to know is that you went to Eaton, which is our top public school, and that he has this reputation of being incredibly, incredibly posh. And so this whole exercise here looks very much like, you know, the kids interrupt him. You can see the baby in the background. He's doing the washing up. It's like, I don't have a butler. I haven't got servants, and I'm really a modern guy. So, although it's different, it's also a mastery of sort of, I think, you know, modern political marketing. But it's just nice. Web camera has also been copied around Europe as well. So there's various web cameras cropping up. The other thing I think that it's worth saying is that one of the things that policy students increasingly are doing is basically monitoring their post bags. Not just the email they get in, but also the regular mail, and putting everything into databases and sorting and monitoring. And all this is about targeting and marketing and building up some sort of relationship with their electorate. Now, if they're getting thousands and thousands of communications a week, but increasingly what they're looking at is, like I say, harvesting that information and then setting up a channel of online communication, usually via email, with those people and with their constituents, so that they know that when someone writes to them on, let's say, fisheries policy, they know that that person will be interested if they've got something to say about fish, and they can do this in a sort of targeted way. And that's really what they're interested in. They're more interested in the technology as that sort of marketing and targeting exercise, especially for incumbent sitting MPs. Okay, what underlies this? This is not scientific, right? We did these interviews, we did, you know, probably about 70 or 80 interviews with political representatives. And I tried to pick out the standard sort of responses that you'd get in terms of what ICTs could do for them and what ICTs we're doing for democracy. Now, it's fair to say that most politicians don't have a thought, if you ask them, the first one we ask them about, you know, what do you think the internet's doing in terms of democracy? What's it doing in terms of your role? They sort of sat there and looked rather puzzled, because a lot of them don't use it, first of all, and the ones that do haven't really thought about why they're using it. But you could see sort of five sort of classic responses, and this is in no way scientific, though. There's administrative modernisers, and I put some quotes underneath just to illustrate the sort of things that I'm meaning here. They tended to talk about the technology in terms of efficiency gains, not in terms of democracy. It's about, you know, can I do things more quickly? Can I do more work? How do the tools help me, you know, get through the day? So there's a quote underneath there. Well, we could modernise Parliament, we could do more, and if we had screens in the chamber, we could actually get on with some work instead of just sitting there. We get text messages in the chamber, but we're not supposed to, but the speaker's not stopped it. That's how antiquated we are. So it's partly about this modernisation agenda. I said, we're interested in branding themselves and they're interested in votes. You've got the innovators, which I've already mentioned, which talk heavily about dialogue and interaction and also networking, and they tend to be the bloggers in particular.  It's exacerbating their problems, it's exacerbating their workload. So the quote under there, we asked someone about why they didn't have a web presence, essentially, and they started to go into a rant about blogs and they said, well, blogs, interactive democracy, we just haven't got the time. MPs have bursts of enthusiasm and then reality bites and it gathers dust. A couple of weeks of enthusiasm and then nothing. There has to be a hard evaluation of the benefits and my suspicion is the returns are marginal, returns are minimal. In fact, it's probably more trouble than it's worth. And there's a real core of underlying skepticism when you interview representatives about technology. And then the last one that I liked, are the fatalists. There's a lot of fatalists hanging around out there, mainly government-backed bench MPs who know their careers are going nowhere and are disillusioned with life in total. This first quote underneath there came when the tape went off, so it was the end of the interview and he just sat glumly through the interview and he said, well, we're fucked, basically. He said, parties are finished. She said, look around this place, we're sitting in this. He said, no one cares about this place. He said, we're finished. Everything's done for. Which was nice. I wish he'd done it on tape, but anyway, there we go. And then the second quote is from someone in the Scottish Parliament. I have a feeling was, he's a fairly senior figure. I forget exactly which. And he just said, let's face it, there's always going to be the lumpum proletaria. He was a left-wing MP, by the way, who think that we're all eating and drinking at the public's expense and we're only in it for ourselves. And then he said, but hey, that's democracy. And he said technology ain't going to do anything to change that. So you've got those sort of responses. In comparative terms, I suppose this is the sort of academic coming out of me here, so sorry about this, but actually one of the things that was shaping and driving and also using hurdles to the way that politicians and parlants were using it. And I tried to break these up into three things. There's the systemic level and I think I picked out two things that were important in the context of this project. The participatory and electoral context. One of the drivers for using technology in the UK or for at least getting people interested in it was the fact that electoral turnout dropped dramatically in 2001. Only 59% of the electorate turned out of the general election in 2001 and that rose only a very small amount in 2005, that's 62, 63%. And particularly amongst younger voters. And there was an air of crisis. And so politicians and think tanks and journalists all jumped on the idea that somehow technology might provide a magic bullet. It doesn't, but that was a driving force. Now in the Australian context, that's sort of masked. The problems are there, but they got compulsory voting. So you don't see that catalyst dramatic effect in terms of dropping turnout. And I think that's quite important in the understanding of these sort of things. Federalism I think would be quite important in the Australian context. You'd got competition between the states. The two states that we looked at, Queensland and Victoria, Queensland had built quite a big reputation on its e-government, e-democracy initiatives. Victoria followed suit, but wanted to be better. And there's a competitive environment going on there. The second level, institutional, organisational level, I think in order to understand politicians' use of technology and also plans, you need to know a lot about the culture and the norms of those institutions and not necessarily about the technology itself. I've listed a few things there. One thing I'd say that underlies maybe politicians' scepticism here is that every day life is politicians. And maybe it's going to take a whole generational change to shift this, but as politicians, they're not desk bound. So a lot of them don't sit with a computer very much apart from maybe on a train if they're going somewhere and have a laptop. They spend their time going to meetings. The way they've been brought up, even before being an MP, is to go to party meetings, is to knock on doors, is to do the public face-to-face stuff, kissing babies, all that sort of stuff. That's what they value. Face-to-face is the ultimate. Technology, they're not really that interested and they don't use it that much. The staff are the ones that use it for them. And so the everyday culture is not built around technology. It's not built around anything. I have to think about that because I'm always fiddling about the laptop or a computer. They're not. They don't do much of that. I'll just say one little anecdote, and this is coming out in Australia. There's no Australians here, aren't there? Well, apologies if I attempt a very bad Australian accent, but I did this interview and it was in Queensland, I think, and the politician said to me, we're talking about technology, and he said, ah, jeez, mate. He said, technology. He said, no, he said, I like to see the whites of their eyes. I want to debate with people. I don't want to look through a screen or touch a keyboard. I have to say that in Australia it does fulfil certain of the cliches. There's a macho element to it. I really want to debate, but I want to debate physically with someone, not through a computer. I'm not going to go into all of these because we haven't got time, but in the UK, one of the things that distinguished it from Australia was the external scrutiny. The federal level in Australia, I have to say, there wasn't much going on, and they weren't under much pressure to do much. In the UK, you've got My Society, which is an interesting organisation. I think some people at John Palfrey are not here. We'll know Tom Steinberg of My Society quite well. Lots of initiatives from them. We can look at those after I've finished talking, if you want to look at some of those, to pressurise MPs to do things online, but also to scrutinise what MPs are doing. And the Hansard Society also giving assistance to MPs if they wanted to blog, if they wanted to do things. So there was assistance there if they wanted it, but there was also scrutiny and pressure to do it, which didn't exist to the same level, certainly not at the federal level. And then at the individual level, what's important to MPs? Constituency environment. If they were in a marginal constituency, with high levels of internet access, you can be sure they would make use of the tools. If they weren't, if they were in a safe constituency where their majority is quite large, and maybe they didn't have a large amount of students or constituents who are often a driver for using the technology, they wouldn't make much use of it. What that does is underpins a sort of digital divide in terms of representation. I'm not going to say too much more about those. Let's just get on to the last couple of slides. So what's the public's response about this? Let's say we did survey and we did also focus group work in the UK and Australia. Just to give the basics, contacting and visiting MPs' websites and blogs on the last slide is pretty low. I think the figures for the UK was something like about 3% of the public had ever visited an MP site. I think 5% had been to the parliament's main site. In Australia, it's significantly bigger. Maybe that's to do with geography, I'm not quite sure. Something like three times as big as the UK. But it is growing. And it's growing amongst young people, because of education and using schools, prompting them to go. They wouldn't go off their own back, but they have to go through school. So there's some of that. What was interesting in the focus groups was though that the expectations and interest in online communication appeared quite high. So they expected politicians to be doing quite a lot. And they expected that politicians should have websites and should be doing and should be interacting and should be accessible. But it was a mainly sort of consumeristic approach. They weren't necessarily interested in visiting it, particularly if they had a problem they might do it, if they wanted something they might do it. The other thing to say about it was that online communication they thought was very useful and the internet was very useful and it was going to be useful to democracy. But not for them, it was always for other people. So particularly they also, if you have the focus groups there, I was going to be useful for young people. But then the young people also said, well it's not going to be useful for those people who are interested, those middle-aged, sad political anoracs who want to look at it like me basically. So it was always useful, but useful for other people never directly themselves. The people who use it the most, and this will become as no surprise I'm sure to you, are of course the ones who contact their MPs online, the ones who read the sites, the ones who engage politically online were the ones who are politically interested already, the ones who are politically engaged already. They need to be maybe 30s to mid 40s. They need to be middle-class professionals. They're the online engaged. That sounds like again that I'm describing myself. It's sort of male middle-class professional in his 30s to early 40s. The danger that MPs felt about this was that you're simply exacerbating again the participation gaps. Unless you use the technology creatively, you're simply going to amplify the voices of those who are already prominent within the system. The last point I'd say is that the parliamentary and technological environment matters. For instance, in Australia, there's real problems with broadband in very rural areas. Now, it's quite clear that once you switch over to broadband, people do a lot more things online. They go to a lot more places. They use it for longer, not surprising there. And that matters. Let me do my very last danger of talking too long. What does all this mean? I'm still trying to puzzle after quite a long time about what all this adds up to, what's there. I think what we're entering really and what we have entered is perhaps an era of difficult democracy. I think life's getting tougher for politicians and you might say good. That's a good thing. Let's make it really tough for them. But I do have some sympathies for them. They work harder than the past. Well, certainly in the UK, they work harder than they've done in the past. They do more. They spend more time answering constituents' letters. They spend more time in the constituency. They do all sorts of things. And yet the more they do, the more we hate them, broadly speaking. What is the technology? What is that fitting in with all this? Well, out of the interviews and out of other things, I think there was a number of pressures that were emerging there that MPs talked about and felt they were under. I think it's disaggregation and acceleration that it was hard to package issues anymore. The issues were appearing all over the place. Politicians weren't quite sure where they were coming from anymore. How could they fit things together? How could they build broad policy packages? The speed of everything was quite bewildering for some of them. They used to have... The old certainties are breaking down. What can they grip onto? I've already mentioned amplification. The noise levels, just in general, email is added to that. So they're hit all over the place with this stuff. But their fear was that it was amplifying people that are already pretty advantaged. They were the ones who were making use of the technology. Unless you did something about this, you were simply going to get then the third bullet increasing fragmentation of representation. You can see that because if you're in a relatively deprived constituency, that internet access is difficult, your MP also won't be doing much with the technology. You're increasingly becoming even more of a disadvantage than the constituency next door where there's high levels of connectivity, that maybe you've got a university in there as well. People are using the technology that can access services more easily. And then also what politicians were worried about was unrealistic expectations. And this comes through in the focus groups that might say that the expectation levels are enormous and then the levels of disappointment are also enormous as well. And that there is a feeling that maybe the technology might add to that. The potential remains, I think, there, just because I don't want to finish too depressingly. So I've got to say that the potential does remain there. And Stephen Coleman has talked quite a lot from former colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute about conversational democracy. And there is some potential, I think, there to make a more continuous representation that it's not just about election periods where politicians talk to the electorate. She's one of the common complaints. That you can now have a dialogue over a longer period of time. You can have a conversation, potentially that policy makers can make themselves more informed and more aware. But equally, the public can be more informed and more aware of possibly what are the restraints and restrictions on politicians as well. The potential is there to do that. But, as I say, the hurdles are pretty huge in terms of doing that. But as I say, I'm still puzzling in part about what it all means. And I think it's a good place to stop. Thank you. Here in the United States, some politicians have been doing elaborate things on the internet for years, including use of databases for targeting. But here, I think the big driver is not constituent service with fundraising. How does the need for fundraising in the country you study compared to the massive amounts of money that politicians try to raise here? Yeah, that's a good point. I say the UK is a little halfway house, but it's not through these politician sites because they're not allowed to raise money through, especially if there's parliamentary expenses going into their sites. So they're not allowed to do online fundraising through that. So it's the parties, generally, that do that. And the UK does tend to follow, increasingly at a lower level, trying to follow that American model of trying to raise money as being one of the central aims of using, especially in election periods. But through these sorts of sites, they're not really allowed to do that. Other countries, Australia, again, there's the continental Europe, for instance, where there's state funding for parties. You don't see this at all. Funding's not at mind, not necessarily much of an issue. So you can see the way that, for instance, that's a good example of the way that political rules and systemic rules have an influence on what they do online. But the UK parties now will be looking very closely at what McCain, Obama and Clinton are doing in terms of that, because that's where they get their lessons from. So the UK is always seen as a sort of now follower to the US. One thing at the Internet and Democracy project that we've been thinking about, or at least I have lately, is essentially the methodology of understanding the internet's effect on democracy. As a researcher in the UK, what quantitative or otherwise methodologies have you seen that are useful besides the anecdotal? I suppose the first thing I should say is that we try and just use a range. Is it triangulation? Sorry. In terms of quantity, I'm not a quantity person. The people I work with, Rachel Gibson and Binal, is only the quantity people on the team. So we've used the standard quantity methodologies, the survey stuff. And there isn't, certainly in Europe, there's not a lot of quantity data on internet. And it's a real frustration. There's not much from, again, the user perspective is the wrong way to look at it. There's not much there. So we've used the standard tools. The other thing we started to get to on the Australian side is also to looking at network analysis and I'm no expert on that, but also to use hyperlink calling and those sort of things. New means of mining data. We've gone for, I guess, fairly standard methods, but we've tried to go for a range, neither quantitative nor quantitative, but a lot. What we'd really like to do, but you can never get the... In the UK it's horrendous trying to get data out of the parties or the MPs and stuff. What we'd really like to do is look at the data and the traffic on the sites and things like that, but they won't give it to us. There's no way they'll give it to us. I'm really jealous of countries like the Netherlands, that parties give them all sorts of things. Fantastic. I just love that, but UK parties won't give you anything at all. But I just think a range of methodologies is possibly the key, but I think we do need good quality, quantitative stuff is lacking in Europe. Yeah, you are next. So I wanted to thank you for this research in particular because at least here a lot of what we look at tends to be from the citizen and the voter perspective and so to actually look at what are the politicians' attitudes towards the technology that's important because it's a two-way street. What strikes me about what you've described here is that the politicians, as you would expect, look at the technology in the same way that a company would look at the technology, which is what companies would call customer relationship management. I've seen governments here call it citizen relationship management, which sounds kind of ominous. I think one of the things about it is the idea that you... I think it's reinforced by the way you're describing the kinds of technology they're creating is that it's about creating a relationship between the politicians and the individual, which is kind of... at least in the States and I know that the parties work differently in the UK, especially... you know, it's just... power here tends to be more built through associations and not by individual citizens' participation so the more that they're emphasizing individual citizens' relationships before you're creating a party electorate into these kind of atomized individuals which is probably not how the electorate sees itself either. And so to some extent I'm wondering if the interesting thing that's going to be happening is going to be more how are the politicians going to take on groups that is here in the States that got moved on and these kind of large natural groups and I don't know if there's quite as much on the local level but how are they relating to these kinds of groups of people on the web and the internet rather than individual citizens? I think you're... I'm not sure I've got a good answer for that. I think you're entirely right that a lot of the way they look at it is on that individualized, atomized relationship. I'm not sure... When we did the focus groups and we didn't do enough on good angles, I was surprised how much also the citizens tended to mirror that as well and talked in very individualistic, very... What shall we say? It was an information... If they wanted it, then it was individualized information seeking that was the driver. They didn't tend to talk in... When we did the survey work also on other projects one of the things we found is that people were less interested in the networking, the participatory angle, the meeting of the people. What they were interested in was getting hold of information themselves not with the real driver. So in some ways you could say that the question was not that far apart. It appeared from the voters. What I think in terms of responding to groups I don't think we've got anything really like move on to the same... I wonder if the politicians have incentive to keep you into business. I mean I'm thinking about it. It's the most basic governance issues. It's much more powerful for me to get all my neighbors together and say we, 10 of us, 20 of us want this thing fixed and I just sent in a message. And a site like this doesn't... Even if you've got 20 of your friends to all do it at the same time you don't get any sense that you're all doing it together. I think party bosses, for instance, party leadership like that sort of individualized relations, you can see that. You can see that in terms of particularly the Labour Party under Tony Blair would have been a classic example of this. The appeal was always not to activists and to local parties. The appeal would be to individual supporters and members. That's where they aimed at because in a way that's a way of ameliorating the power of local activists and groups and the collective power of that. So that was always the aim. And you can see that reflected also in some of the initiatives that the Labour government has taken. For instance, online petitioning.  Sorry, Tom Steinberg. I really don't like that online petition site. The number 10 one. What it encourages is the idea of a direct relationship between you as an individual citizen. Okay, you can network with other citizens and you get this petition. And somehow the Prime Minister or Government department Parliament doesn't appear in the picture. That's partly their own fault because they're slower responding and they're not thinking about online petitioning. But this sort of petition's model again seems to be built very much around that sort of individualised sort of model and consumerist model as well. And I think there's competing things going on. That's why I said that the real innovative MPs and they're a handful, they also talk about it. They don't just talk about the technology. They talk about their role as a sort of network. I think that's sort of interesting. So they're much more on the Stephen Coleman conversational democracy networking dialogue model. The bulk of it though seems to be this sort of consumeristic individualist model. That's the one that seems to be winning if anything. I don't remember who's any. You seem to have somewhat of an angle of sex and orientation in terms of your research. Do you believe that the English speaking world is at the forefront of using these technologies? I hear these dim rumblings that the new parliaments like Estonia and the Bass Parliament in Spain are the ones that really, you know, they're not bound by all their traditions. They think creatively about those issues. That's exactly right. It is an Anglo-Saxon-focused project partly because it's funding that. No, you're right. New parliaments and Estonia has been one of the ones, but you can see it in a UK conference because Scotland, in this project, it's written in when the parliaments was mentioned of technology and what technology can do. Underlying that was the attitude of the Scots as well is that we're not going to be Westminster. So we're not going to be Westminster and we're not going to be like the Westminster model and we can use technology to build a new politics. And I think that's entirely right. I think more interesting things could well be happening what they are happening in New York homes because they're not high bound by this culture and this tradition. Westminster is terrible. Which might give you an insight into Westminster. I did an interview with one MP and I was asking about why Westminster was so painfully slow to get anything done apart from the fact that there's about 36 committees that feel anything to do with this. He said, look, what you've got to understand about this place is that some people think that the abolition of top hacks was a radical step forward. So that explains the pace of change in this place. But you're right. Where you've got new parliaments and they're not high bound by these traditions and they can create it and they can create, you know, a technology sort of built in rather than grafted on, it's much easier. The Australian one was quite interesting though because the federal parliament in Canberra is a relatively new parliament building, the 88, something like that. So it was built sort of for the computer era, sort of, just about. But the problem there was that there was no drive to modernise parliament because they felt the building was already new and they'd already, you know, it was sort of modern anyway. Whereas in Westminster, at least there was a modernisation drive which was promising them to think about technology. So there's a sort of half-way house. But the trustee question is right, I think. New parliaments, it's sort of easier for them to do it because they can build it into the fabric rather than graft it on. If I could just ask one other question, think of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hansard Society as sort of major players. But I also get the sense that there's more of a tight-knit culture among people that study e-democracy in Britain and in the United States. It's a very small world. There's some of the organisations I've mentioned here. We're talking about a handful of individuals. So Tom Steinberg's name keeps cropping that all of my society initiatives, it's a relatively small group of people. It's the same in the academic world as well. I meet the same people over and over again. It is a small world. You can see that play down. They're all gathered around London as well. What do you make of the 10 Downing Street Twitter feed? I haven't looked at that closely. I know that Twitter first has only just emerged last year when the deputy leadership of the Labour Party campaign started using it. I'm not quite sure what to make of that yet. I think it's probably just the... At this stage it's probably just a knee-jerk. Here's the technology, let's try. Because that's often how they start. It's just something new, let's jump on this. I don't know. To me it's not very surprising that there wasn't a big political fight for the blogs because there was no intent to have political change. It's just about increasing the efficiency of existing systems and increasing the electability of the people that are writing these blogs. It's not really a dialogue. It's about people being able to present their message, maybe get some advice and consent from various activists, but why would it change anything? That would be surprising, based on this design. Except if you look in the literature. A lot of the distance between the literature and then I said this yesterday, the distance between the literature and then what's going on is enormous. Can you get all this hype about what it can do and people talking in very high level terms about democracy? I suppose to be fair actually, for instance in the UK I said after the 2001 election when turnout dropped, it was a panic basically. And people were latching on to anything there. So people did have quite, initially have quite high expectations of what technology might do, but you're right when it gets into the real world of what people are interested in. They're interested in much lower levels of aspirations, what they can do for them. Can they get some votes out of this? Is the ways of making life easier on a daily basis? All those sort of things. But it's the disjuncture, which is one of the reasons why we sat out to do some of this research, is that there's simply no empirical evidence there. There was a lot of speculation and there's a lot of high level theorising, but not much empirical evidence. There's still pretty patchy in terms of what we've got. So would you say that this means, you're not saying that the internet has limited potential, which is why you're saying that blogging, politician blogging has limited effect, or how broadly would you apply your results? Sorry, sir. Obviously it seems like the results of political blogging are pretty negative from the perspective of improving, based on your research. Nothing much really changed. Does this make you pessimistic about other kinds of technology, like the Downing Street Twitter feed or something, or you think it's just this particular... Probably it's politics that's got a change and not the technology. Intelligence can make a little bit of difference around the edges, but I said at the end there that we're entering an era, and I don't think politicians really tonight have got a grasp. They've got to relearn how they represent people. They've got to relearn how to govern or govern us. And at the moment, I don't think they know what they're doing. They're struggling and searching around the... The old certainties have gone from them, but they can't latch on to anything new. So the technologies can be a useful tool, but most of them don't really have a strategy for using them anyway. Will they make a difference in that high-level aspirational terms? No, because that would be unrealistic. I think they can contribute at a local level, for instance, and I showed people yesterday there was a guy called Tom Watson, one of the first bloggers. He didn't start it with high-level aspirations of creating a new form of democracy, but he says it's made a change to him in the way that he relates and also the feedback that he gets. So I think it's about maybe scaling down some of the expectations and then putting together all these little changes and seeing what happens, and also the indirect effects. The political world is very slow to change. If you look around, things are changing pretty massively and amazingly in some aspects. Eventually, the political sphere will have to at least play catch-up. There are lots of questions, and I have no idea now who is first and who falls inside. I'm going to jump in. I'll do the jump in. Go ahead. I just wanted to try taking the focus off the politicians, because they're not going to change and don't have much incentive to change. Can we force them to be more open, more transparent, so that citizens have better access to the information to create the MySocieties and the blog posts for them that allow the public to focus around? Yes, and that's already happening to a certain degree. I think MySocieties stuff has opened up certain things. Shall I just tell you a little downside to the MySociety type approach that you may or may not be aware of? MySocieties, through analysing the way that MPs vote and what they speak on in Parliament, and they've got all this data about how often MPs speak in Parliament and what they do and how they respond to constituents, they created, I think, league tables. Who were the best responders who weren't? All this sort of thing. It's quite funny to see MPs being hoisted by their own tar, because they like to enforce league tables on every other sector of the community. The downside to that was people started to notice that MPs were interjecting in debates with no apparent purpose, just getting up, making a little comment and sitting down. And so there's some sort of anecdotal evidence, well not anecdotal evidence, because some MPs have admitted it, that all they're doing is something to raise the profile up the tables. So you've got to be slightly careful there. But yes, I have some sympathy with MPs there as well. I do think that they make life tough for themselves, but also they've got a tough job. But yes, they're not going to do it of their own free will, necessarily. So you are very careful on not providing a specific criticism of very similar five or six hundred percent of MPs. If you are elected as an MP tomorrow in a non disputed district, what would your website look like? It would probably look like this, if I'm honest now. Because again, it goes back to incentives, doesn't it? What is your incentive to do? If your majority in the UK, for instance, is 10, 15, 20,000, and you're probably going to be elected for the next 20 or 30 years, what's your incentive to actually do an enormous amount? Okay, you can be conscientious and do things, but at the end of the day, you're going to probably prioritise still the things that you think make a difference. Now, the reason why perhaps they don't spend as much time as we might think they should on websites is that they still believe, for instance, that local newspaper coverage is far more important than having a glossy or interactive or nice website. So they'll spend their time, and this is probably what I'd do to begin with, is to spend your time getting press coverage and name recognition in the local press.  They don't know your name. So constantly for the next four years, what you've got to try and do is try and just raise your name profile and just make sure that you mobilise the people necessary to keep you being elected. So if I was being cynical, that would be what I'd do. If, on the other hand, I wanted to do something more interesting with my website then, I think I'd start thinking about the dialogue model and the interest. Whether it be blogging, I don't know. The social networking thing that the representatives have just jumped onto in the UK and Australia is sort of interesting. There's a few interesting things going on there. But it's too early to say how that's going to play out. There was an example in here that I could have shown. There's a guy called Steve Webb, appropriately named, who has been probably at the forefront of some innovative technologies. And he now has, he's on both MySpace and Facebook, and he has something like 2,300 friends, which for an MP is quite a lot. They're pretty friendless people aren't they? But he has a distinct strategy.  Now students, of course, tend to disappear off to other constituents. They're probably still entitled to vote in his constituency, but a lot of them don't. That's the problem. One way of keeping in touch with him, he's decided, is through Facebook. And he has now quite a large number. He claims to have over 1,000 of his own constituents, which is quite a lot, you know? But only as he got this network, he's also, he claims, consulting them online about issues and getting feedback. And he thinks that he's hitting now, especially with this younger student group, he's hitting people that wouldn't normally communicate with them, which I think is sort of interesting. But of course he's underlined it. He's driven for electoral purposes. He needs to communicate. He's not always, he's actually built his majority, so that's one of the things he's been doing, he's built part through this sort of contact model. So there's two elements to that. One is a crude electoral one, but also he does have, I think, I think he has a genuine interest in also building those sort of networks. And I think that's interesting, and it's going to be interesting to see how that, it's relatively early to see how that works. So that's something I probably want to look at as well. Hello. How are you? I'm very well. Good to see you. That's a surprise. You've looked at several countries, and would you say that of two functions, one has clearly dominated, but the question is why. One function transparency, which is what sort of the academic approach to the internet and those sort of components of the internet as a democratic tool, but the other is publicity, and particularly one-way publicity. One explanation is that obviously those who are in charge don't want to change. But is there more to it than that that's led to the publicity becoming the primary function of the internet? Maybe it goes back to this idea about the culture of politicians, and I said about it, maybe it requires a generational shift. Most politicians aren't like the world over, but the average age of a politician both in the UK and Australia is somewhere in the early 50s. What you might call here digital immigrants, if that is some of them that can use the technology at all. I think we're not going to see that sort of, what I'm saying is they still then relate to that broadcast model, that sort of publicity, the top town, the press, the way you do business is this, and it's a sort of hierarchical model. That's what they've grown up with, that's what they used to. You can see a slight shift amongst the more recently elected younger ones. The people who've used the technology before they came to Parliament, they've used it in a work context. They have a slightly different outlook on it, but it's going to be what? Maybe another 20 years before we see people who've grown up from birth with the technology who perhaps think about it in different ways. I know you've got projects here on digital natives, and I'm just struck by the, I mean, for instance, my students, the way that they use the technology compared to me, it's just so different, and I'm sure I don't understand a lot of the things that they really do as much as I might try, and I think that mindset is going to require generation. Don't you think they might adopt the institutional approach? One of the things I didn't mention here, but in the context of it is, it depends on what one Australian described to me as the churn factor. So what he said was, if you just get at each election relatively small numbers of new MPs coming in, they'll be institutionalised into practice, and that's what tends to happen. If you get a huge turnover, like we did in 97, and I think in the Australian context the last election might have made a difference as well, if you get a big turnover then you tend to get shifts in attitudes. So 97 was important in the UK because you got a whole new generation of MPs who were younger. They came to parliament with expectations about the technology. First of all they came expecting that they'd get a laptop and that they'd be able to do things and when they got there there wasn't even a plug on the wall. So they had to do something about that. So there was a generational search. It sort of depends, they can get institutionalised fairly quickly and that's the complaint of some of them, but I think if you get those churns, as it were, you can then get a job forward and a difference in approach. But the norms, cultures and rules are pretty heavy in a place like Westminster they do become like residents of the old-fashioned mental institutions which are relevant. They are ingrained with the culture and the audience is getting smaller and smaller and longer I speak the more people drift away. Are we done? I guess we'll wrap it into offline conversation. So you tell us where you're going. Thank you very much.


Welcome to this course on data structures and algorithms. In this session, we will take our discussions on queues further. We have another example to illustrate the use of queues. This example refers to what we call a Mumbai Vada Pav restaurant. Vada Pav by the way is a popular dish in western India. And of course, this restaurant like all other restaurants says not just Vada Pav, but many other items. Let us begin with an overview of the restaurant. The restaurant has fixed food items in the menu and there is one counter in which customers queue up to place orders. We assume that each customer can place order for at most 10 items and each customer must specify the quantity to be purchased for that item. Next, let us look at the behavior of the customer. Every customer arrives and stands in a queue, places order on his or her turn, gets a token ID and the cost to be paid. Pays that cost, collects the token ID and waits at a different table to collect the order when it is ready. We will need some data structures to represent various entities. So, we know that the restaurant maintains information about complete details of the menu. Menu has multiple items. So, we will assume that we have a food ID. We have the name of the food item like samosa. We have rate per item like 15.0 rupees. We will use structure food info to maintain this information. So, this is an example of typical data in the structure food info. You have food ID, you have food name, rate, etcetera. Now, we will have to use queues. The first queue, which is very obvious, is a queue for customers. As we already observed, a customer comes in a queue and when his or her turn comes, places order by giving multiple food IDs and quantities. Then, at the end, gets the token ID and cost to be paid. So, at the end of this queue, customer has got a token ID and presumably he has paid the cost. Next, we will presume that the person at the counter passes on that order to the kitchen and kitchen prepares that item or that order and sends it for another queue, which we call order dispatch queue. In this order dispatch queue, we will simply have token ID, which implies that once an order comes in the order dispatch queue, that particular token ID order is ready to be collected by the customer. As I mentioned, kitchen itself will have to store information about orders. So, we assume the following. We assume that each order placed by a customer is sent to kitchen. Now, what is the pertinent information for us at this juncture? The pertinent information is that token ID and time required for preparation of that order. Of course, there will be many more details, but we will ignore those at the moment. We presume that kitchen will prepare the ordered items, different time will be needed to prepare an order and the orders may not be prepared necessarily in the sequence of their arrival. So, as I mentioned, for now we use a simple array to represent kitchen operations. Each element of the array has token ID and time for preparation, which again will arbitrarily assign in this demonstration. We store every element of order queue in this array as order is placed. So, at the end, data structure in the kitchen array will have all orders that have been placed. For now, we will allocate an arbitrary time for order preparation for every order. Again, as I mentioned last time, in real life when we are simulating a true restaurant, we will have to generate a random number for the order preparation time based on various parameters like the items ordered, etcetera. Let us demonstrate this entire process. So, here is the person from the restaurant standing here waiting for customers. The customers come one by one. Let us assume that there are four customers who have joined this queue. The first customer is placing the order. When the order is placed, the customer will specify food ID and quantity. He gets, let us say, token number 1001 and cost is, let us say, 165. Order is placed. Now, preparation is started in kitchen because the order is sent immediately to that array for kitchen which stores all the orders. This customer comes and waits at this table waiting for the order to be disbanded. The next customer saying thing happens. Note that the second customer has a smaller order cost, but there are many items to be prepared. Obviously, this may take much longer to prepare than other orders. Here is a third customer. He has only one food item. Here is a fourth customer. He has only one food item. At the end, all four people have collected their coupons. Their orders have been placed and they are waiting at the table. As we notice, all items are being prepared in the kitchen. Now, this is the place where in our demonstration, we shall assume some arbitrary time for order preparation according to which the orders will be dispatched. Let us look at the kitchen order dispatch queue. Let us assume that the first order to be prepared is 1001. That comes in the kitchen dispatch queue and this person who is standing for with token number T1001 is happy to receive this order. Let us assume that the second order which comes in the queue is 1003. We have already indicated that different orders may take different preparation time. So, this time it is T1003 who gets the order fulfilled. Next comes, let us say T1002 and this customer now gets his order. Last is T1004. In short, we notice that the orders may be placed in a certain sequence such as token number 1001, 2345, etcetera, but the kitchen dispatch will depend upon the time required for preparation of each order. Once again, we have taken all images from open clipper. They are all in public domain. So, you can feel free to use this. This session to conclude has indicated the organization of a typical restaurant where customers queue up to place orders and then wait for their orders to be fulfilled. We have demonstrated that we can do that using two queues. The first queue is the customer queue and the next queue is the order dispatch queue. Again, in this illustration, we will assume arbitrary times for completing the order preparation and we have used arbitrary item codes and costs. Frankly, the item codes and costs are not relevant in this demonstration because we are concentrating on use of queues. In the next session, we will see how a simple C++ program can implement this Vada Power restaurant operations of our example. Thank you.