I'm Back + Dan's quick guide to SEO

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while, it’s been a busy few months and it seems like now’s the time to get going again. So why haven’t I been posting? Well, first I fell out of the habit and then I started working as an intern for a small fundraising company called Giveacar, which has been very interesting, but has left with little spare time. This is in part because its 9-5 but mainly because I’ve been sleeping on friend’s sofas. Thank you James and Amy!

Now the key thing about an Internship is that it is a learning experience. If it isn’t then it’s a waste of time and exploitive. Some people argue that Internships are exploitative anyway, but that’s an argument for another time. In this post I intend to show off one aspect of what I’ve learned and maybe impress any future employer’s miraculously reading this post (hint, hint).

That aspect is the importance of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Basically the ways of making sure that your website appears in one of the top spots on Google for any relevant searches. This is for an obvious reason, if your website comes up top of a search then it will get more people visiting it than its competitors and vice versa, if your competitors are higher than you then they are getting the customers.

For example with Giveacar we want to be number one when it comes to ‘donate my car’ at least when the searcher is in the UK. Now you may notice I’ve hyperlinked the search term just then. That’s because it’s an anchor text. This means that it is a phrase that I want Google or Yahoo or any other search engine to link with my website. This means it’s far more useful than just putting in the URL because it tells the search engine that these words are relevant to the site. Whereas putting in the URL increases the number of links to the site but then fail’s provide any context.

Now the thing I find really interesting is that because Google wants to provide it users with a useful search term it actively tries to prevent people just churning out hundreds of thousands of links to their site on hundreds of completely unrelated websites. This means that they have done two things. First they made sure that the algorithm they use to sort sites is secret. No point in having it if people can work out how to game it. The second thing they do is rate links. So a link from a site with authority, that is a site with a lot of people linking to it and treating it as a trusted resource, is a lot more valuable than one from a site without. Similarly if a lot of people are making deep links (links to webpages that aren’t you’re home page) to your site that’s better than just a lot of links. In fact many websites have ‘nofollow’ links, which means that Google just discounts them when it comes to ranking websites.

So in a nutshell the challenge of SEO is to get a lot of high quality links to a website. Of course these are often hard to get. So there are several different ways to generate links. The first and most basic of these is to make sure that your site actually has a lot of high quality content. Articles that people want to read, a good service and so on. If the content is good enough then people will link to you. Of course this should be one of your objectives already, after all who wants a crap website? This however is not enough on its own. There is no point having a great website if no-one knows that it is there!

So you need to create some links of your own one way is to submit article to article site such as www.articlepool.com. These sites only accept articles of a high enough quality to ensure that Google counts links in them towards its rankings. This means that submitting to them is a somewhat long and arduous process. In addition it can take several days or even weeks for your article to get approved.

A second approach is to try to get your website into directories. These can either be free or paid, and there is an extent to which you get what you pay for. But they are also a lot quicker and easier to get onto than article sites. So they are certainly worthwhile. A good source of these can be found at info.vilesilencer.com.

You can also use social media to encourage other people to link to you. Post links to your articles and services and if people like them they may link them on their own blogs and websites.

The most fun way I’ve found so far is Squidoo. This is similar to an article site combined with a social networking site. Using this site to write articles (called lenses) you can also rate other people’s articles, start and participate in debates and generally get your name out there. You can also link to your own site safe in the knowledge that it’s considered high quality. However Squidoo will delete any article that appears too much like spam, and possibly your account so be careful.

So that’s my quick(ish) guide to SEO. After Christmas I’m going to look to do a couple of articles, one considering the ethics of Internships and one on charity marketing. So if anyone has anything to say about this post or those, please do. It feels good to be back.

In which I take on Stephen Hawking

As some people may have noticed Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have a new book out on the 9th September called The Grand Designer; an extract of which was published in the Times’ Eureka supplement. Now I admire and respect (Dr.?)Hawking but in this extract they make the following claim which really annoyed me.

“How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? … Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. [Emphasis mine]Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Now aside from the fact that I spent the last three years of my life studying philosophy why did this statement annoy me? The most glaring reason is that betrays either a lazy use of language or a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy. Philosophy is a very broad subject. It is usually divided into four main branches: metaphysics, ethics, epistemology* and language. Now I could understand if they wanted to claim that metaphysics was dead. It is in area which has ceded a lot to science and is likely to cede even more. (It is also incredibly abstract, dry and difficult.) But metaphysics is only one branch of philosophy. If he is claiming that ‘science, particularly physics’ has also killed off ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language then he is saying something truly bizarre! So they are either lazy because they fail to make the distinction between a branch and the whole of the subject, or ignorant because they don’t know that there is a difference. I suspect it’s the latter and hope it’s the former.

Now it may or may not be true that metaphysics is dead. Hawking is far from alone from thinking this, for example many Kantians (philosophers who are inspired by Kant’s philosophy) regard metaphysics as a hopeless endeavour. Not only dead, but stillborn. I don’t have the expertise to argue this one way or another.
A second reason is that a few paragraphs later the authors are engaging in epistemology. They quickly explain that because modern physics can not proceed by direct observation; and to deal with this they decide that:

“We shall adopt and approach which we call model-dependent realism’. It is based on the idea that brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it… the quality of reality or absolute truth.”

If philosophy is dead why are engaging in it? Moreover this extract illustrates one of the reasons why the philosophy of science* is still important. The counter intuitive nature of science, particularly physics’ findings requires epistemological investigation to explain why it is that these findings are valid. Sorry for the long rant, but I think that this is an important issue. It would be tragedy to abandon the centuries of thought that have gone into western philosophy and have contributed ( and continue to contribute) so much to such wonders as science, the enlightenment and parliamentary democracy. Also I suspect this book will be very interesting and informative, so its a shame to see such a mistake so early on.

*The study of how we know things.
*The study of how science works and epistemological consequences.

Could boxing reduce antisocial behaviour?

One of the classic sporting stories out there is the ruffian made good by virtue of learning to box. A classic example is stories such as this and this. But I feel that you have to ask some searching questions about this narrative. In the long run does a violent sport such as boxing prevent or encourage violent behaviour? My suspicion is that in most cases it helps prevent violent behaviour by giving people confidence, discipline and something to do. But it also brings with it exposure to other violent people, and training in how to fight. In addition there is a risk of brain damage.
So how can we answer this question? I’m not aware of any specific research into the issue, but I think there are some clear ways we can answer it. The first would be to find out what percentage of violent criminals are boxers and compare it to the population as a whole. So for example if five percent of violent criminals are boxers and five percent of the general population are, then that would suggest it has no impact. If there is lower percentage of boxers among violent criminals then that would suggest that boxing prevents violent crime and if there is higher percent then it encourages it. However this by itself would risk falling for the fallacy of suggesting correlation implies causation. I suspect people who are drawn to boxing tend to be more violent than those who aren’t. Another way to investigate would be to follow the lives of some of the students of the previously mentioned projects. I would love to know more. Particularly as this article highlights the anecdotal evidence is good.

Of course just opening lots of free boxing gyms won't solve violent crime and antisocial behaviour by itself. But it strikes that this option really should be researched.

Eh?

A recent article from the BBC claims in its subtitle that “Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force behind evolution.” Now if this is true then it’s pretty revolutionary. However when you read the article it fails to show anything which suggests Darwin was wrong.
What the article argues is that the main driving force behind evolution was the opening up of new ecological niches. The example they give is:
“… When birds evolved the ability to fly, that opened up a vast range of new possibilities not available to other animals. Suddenly the skies were quite literally the limit, triggering a new evolutionary burst.”
Now the article itself has a quote from Prof. Stephen Stearns which show’s the problem with this argument.
“… In general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?"
It seems fairly obvious to me, a philosophy graduate with only a layman’s knowledge of evolution; that even if ‘an evolutionary burst’ occurs when a new ecological niche opens it still requires competition to persuade species to occupy the space and to diversify once they are within it. So the subtitle seems to be at best a lazy error, or a worst dishonest. So why did they do it. My suspicion is that it was an attempt to try to get more hits by tapping into the supposed ‘evolution-creation controversy’.
And yes I feel very comfortable talking about a supposed ‘evolution-creation controversy’ because there isn’t actually a scientific one. There might be a political one in the US, but the truth of evolution is as close to proven as the theory of relativity or germs.

Facebook Places

We all know Facebook, and most of us use it. However it has hardly been without its controversies. Most of these have been around the collection of data about its users, both overtly and covertly. However the latest one, for US users at least is an application called ‘Facebook Places’. This app lets US users share their location in real time with their friends and any marketers who happen to be interested. Now whilst I can see the whole invasion of privacy thing; my objection to this is not so high minded. My objection is that like 99% of Facebook apps it’s boring. I’m afraid to say that even if you’re my closest friend I’m not that interested in having a record of everywhere you went today. For that matter I’m pretty certain that you don’t want a record of everywhere I went today. If you’ve got an interesting story to tell or somewhere to recommend, or if we’re catching up; then sure lets have a chat about it. But that’s the point. What you did today is for small talk over a pint or dinner in the evening. So my suggestion ignore Facebook Places, because it’s just plain boring.

Offence and Freedom

An issue that I have noticed occurring very frequently at the moment is the relationship between freedom and offensive speech. In fact it is not just offensive speech but various other actions that whilst doing no physical harm, are seen as offensive. A far from exhaustive list of related controversies include the ban on religious hate speech, Danish Cartoons and most recently the building Cordoba House near Ground Zero. So this raises two questions, first what makes words or actions offensive and secondly how should we react to offensive speech and actions. The definition of offensiveness is that it causes ‘anger, displeasure or injury’. For the sake of this discussion I’m not concerned with actions which cause physical injury, as we can generally accept that they are wrong, with a few exceptions. What interests me is the causing of anger or displeasure.
I also want to make a distinction between legal and moral, two things that are surprisingly often confused. For this article legal refers to the laws that governments make and moral refers to what individuals should or shouldn’t do. (Of course both these definitions are sketchy, but this blog post is not an academic essay.) What I want to argue is that individuals are morally obliged to try to avoid unnecessary offence, but that this should not be a legal matter. In other words it is wrong for me to call someone a prick but it should not illegal for me to do so. Why? There are three reasons I shall go through.
The first reason is the subjectivity of offence. Say I’ve go two friends, Dave and Mike. One evening, down the pub I greet them by saying ‘how are you two bastards doing?’ (Not the best banter ever I realize, but what can you do?) In this example Dave responds with a witty response, but Mike finds my greeting offensive. (We needn’t go into the reasons why.) The point here is which one, if either is in the right? I didn’t intend to offend either but the fact is I did. Now is this offensive, or is that just the case that Mike cannot take a joke. It seems to me that the answer is both; it offends Mike because he cannot take the joke and that makes it offensive. This illustrates one reason why it offence should not be a matter of legality. We frequently give offence without meaning to, and in ways that offend one person but not another. How therefore is the law, which by nature must deal with a large number of humans, supposed to regulate this?
Related to this is the second and to my mind most important reason. Offence is frequently an unintended consequence of criticism. Willingness to give and recive robust criticism is vital to many endeavours. Who hasn’t been told things that they are doing wrong, or could do better? Similarly if I disagree with your point of view, then the way for me to try and convince you, is to criticize that view whilst offering reasons to follow mine. Of course not all criticism is seen as offensive but it can be hard to predict what will be. There is also the fact that sometime the way to make a point is to do it in a very direct and robust value. If you try to soften a criticism you can obscure the point.
The third reason is that we are not talking about physical injury here. I would also include things like defamation whereby there is an obvious harm and a clear test as things we can legislate. But when it comes to statements, critcisms and actions, where the worst they do is insult and which aren’t lies then it seems that there are two things to be done. The first is to grow a thicker skin and the second is to try to avoid and challenge offence, but to do so individually and with words rather than anything else. An issue that I have noticed occurring very frequently at the moment is the relationship between freedom and offensive speech. In fact it is not just offensive speech but various other actions that whilst doing no physical harm, are seen as offensive. A far from exhaustive list of related controversies include the ban on religious hate speech, Danish Cartoons and most recently the building Cordoba House near Ground Zero. So this raises two questions, first what makes words or actions offensive and secondly how should we react to offensive speech and actions. The definition of offensiveness is that it causes ‘anger, displeasure or injury’. For the sake of this discussion I’m not concerned with actions which cause physical injury, as we can generally accept that they are wrong, with a few exceptions. What interests me is the causing of anger or displeasure.
I also want to make a distinction between legal and moral, two things that are surprisingly often confused. For this article legal refers to the laws that governments make and moral refers to what individuals should or shouldn’t do. (Of course both these definitions are sketchy, but this blog post is not an academic essay.) What I want to argue is that individuals are morally obliged to try to avoid unnecessary offence, but that this should not be a legal matter. In other words it is wrong for me to call someone a prick but it should not illegal for me to do so. Why? There are three reasons I shall go through.
The first reason is the subjectivity of offence. Say I’ve go two friends, Dave and Mike. One evening, down the pub I greet them by saying ‘how are you two bastards doing?’ (Not the best banter ever I realize, but what can you do?) In this example Dave responds with a witty response, but Mike finds my greeting offensive. (We needn’t go into the reasons why.) The point here is which one, if either is in the right? I didn’t intend to offend either but the fact is I did. Now is this offensive, or is that just the case that Mike cannot take a joke. It seems to me that the answer is both; it offends Mike because he cannot take the joke and that makes it offensive. This illustrates one reason why it offence should not be a matter of legality. We frequently give offence without meaning to, and in ways that offend one person but not another. How therefore is the law, which by nature must deal with a large number of humans, supposed to regulate this?
Related to this is the second and to my mind most important reason. Offence is frequently an unintended consequence of criticism. Willingness to give and recive robust criticism is vital to many endeavours. Who hasn’t been told things that they are doing wrong, or could do better? Similarly if I disagree with your point of view, then the way for me to try and convince you, is to criticize that view whilst offering reasons to follow mine. Of course not all criticism is seen as offensive but it can be hard to predict what will be. There is also the fact that sometime the way to make a point is to do it in a very direct and robust value. If you try to soften a criticism you can obscure the point.
The third reason is that we are not talking about physical injury here. I would also include things like defamation whereby there is an obvious harm and a clear test as things we can legislate. But when it comes to statements, critcisms and actions, where the worst they do is insult and which aren’t lies then it seems that there are two things to be done. The first is to grow a thicker skin and the second is to try to avoid and challenge offence, but to do so individually and with words rather than anything else.

Affirmative Action and Discrimination against Whites

I know a couple of people who have claimed that because of positive discrimination it is now the case that White men are now face more discrimination than any other group. I think this issue is worth looking at for a couple of reasons. Firstly the most recent statistics I could find at the Office for National Statistics website show that the only group with a higher rate of employment is that of White women by around 1%. That is to say roughly that for a group of 100 White men around 95 would be employed whereas for White women it would be 96. In contrast the unemployment rate for most non-White groups was two or three times that. The sole exception was Indians at around 7% for men and 8% for women. This strongly suggests that discrimination against white men is likely to be marginal at best.
The second statistic I want to look at is the percentage of the population in managerial and professional jobs. Unfortunately these stats are only broken down by ethnicity and not by gender but they are still revealing. The most likely groups to be employed in managerial and professional jobs are in order Chinese, Indian and Whites. The least likely groups where Black Caribbean and Black African. As these jobs tend to be better paid than others this again suggests that there is little if any evidence of discrimination against White Men.
Of course these statistics are six years out of date and come from before the recession. It would be more interesting and illuminating to study statistics from 2008 or 2009 but as those are yet to be published we will have to stick with these. The other point to make is that my statistical analysis is crude at best. (Perhaps someone with a better understanding could crunch the numbers for me?)But given what we’ve got it suggests that White men do not need to fear discrimination. This raises two questions; the first is why do White men feel that they are being discriminated against? The second is whether the employment statistics show a case for affirmative action?
I suspect the answer to the first comes from an atmosphere whereby affirmative action schemes and minority pressure groups have received a lot of media attention. The effect is to create the impression of discrimination despite the lack of actual cases of it. Of there is some discrimination against White men put in proportion to the discrimination experienced by other groups it is small.
The second question I don’t feel able to answer, however it strikes me that there is a simple test for exploring whether there is a problem. If we assume that that there is no difference between ethnicities then we would expect business to have a roughly representative pattern of employment. Of course there are cultural and historical differences between ethnic groups so we should not be surprised when we find a group over represented in profession and under represented in another. However this lack of representation should be taken as a sign that there is something to investigate. Of course sometimes it may be obvious why this is the case. We would not expect to find many Pakistanis working behind a bar because most Pakistanis are Muslim and therefore regard bar work as haram (forbidden) but other times there may be a case of discrimination.

David Mitchell and the Burqa

In this blog post (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/25/david-mitchell-burqa-ban-tattoos) David Mitchell manages to capture rather accurately what I think is wrong with arguments to ban the burqa or tattoos or for that matter anything which does not directly harm another person.

This seems to be a rather important issue as one of the fundamental cornerstones of liberal thought. (Liberal in the traditonal sense rather than the mordern.) Is that the goverment shall not restrict an individuals freedom untill the point when that freedom violates another. So for example I am free to learn boxing, and indeed use it but I can only do so in a specified area against people who consent to fight me. I'm not allowed to go up to someone on the street and beat them up because then my freedom to punch is less important than their freedom not to get beaten up.

Thoughts on Isreal Palestine

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an issue that seems to generate an unusually high level of controversy compared to many others. I’m not particularly interested in why this is, but I thought a look at the various stances would be interesting. This comes in part from the observation that so many of my friends and family have passionate and vastly differing views about it. For the sake of this article I’m going to make distinction between stances and views. Stances I will take to mean that extent of support that an individual gives towards one side or the other, whilst the view is the side that they support. So for example the first stance that one side is always right and the other always wrong. So this stance can have either a pro Israel view or a pro Palestinian view. For the sake of convenience I will use (I) for Israeli and (P) for Palestinian to refer to these respective views.

I suspect and hope that few people actually hold the first stance. At least in principle it should be obviously wrong to anyone who is capable of rational thought; why? Because both sides are human and will therefore make mistakes, act out of spite rather than a sense of justice and so on. For those who do hold such a stance it seems that a debate is unlikely to be productive because they have already decided the answer. There is a slightly more rational way that this stance may be articulated, which is to say that the respective cause is such that any action is justified in furthering the cause.

The second and more interesting stance would be that one side’s cause is right and the other side’s is wrong. Those who hold this stance acknowledge the possibility that their side might perform actions that are wrong, even if they deny the actuality of it. So for example (I) might think that the Israeli cause is correct but that the Blockade of Gaza is wrong. This stance could be held in a variety of different strengths so for example (P) at its strongest in this stance would say that every action taken so far to advance the Palestinian cause is justified but would accept that there would be some possible actions that shouldn’t be taken. In contrast (P) at its weakest would hold that whilst the cause is justified nearly all the actions so far undertaken have been wrong.

The third stance is the ‘plague on both your houses’ stance it quite simply states that both sides are as bad as each other. I have a strong suspicion that many who adopt this stance do so to avoid actually having to argue about the issue; an understandable motivation given the passion with which it is usually debated. At this point I would need to point out that an error I have deliberately been making. I have talked about the Israeli and Palestinian cause as if each one was a single unified thing. This simply isn’t true. There are a variety of Israeli and Palestinian causes with different objectives and motivations. The reason I have allowed this to slip by is because its a blog post not an academic essay!

But I need to remind you of this for the final stance I shall outline. This stance is that neither side is simply right or wrong but rather that there are several causes and some causes are justified and some aren’t. So for example someone with this stance might hold that Israel is right in aiming to provide a homeland for the Jewish people whilst at the same time Palestinians are right in feeling that their land has been stolen. Now I feel that this is probably the write stance to adopt for a couple of reasons. First I suspect it is the closest to reflecting the actual situation. To dismiss Palestinian grievances or Israeli worries about security would be foolish and fail to appreciate both current issues and historical grievances. The second reason is that it seems like those who hold this stance will have the best chance of reaching agreement and proposing a compromise. So this is rather long but here is a simplified version of my thoughts on a situation that I’m totally unqualified to talk about. Lets see how many people I’ve offended ;-).

Up again

I know no one is reading this yet, but I thought I'd restart this blog as a current affairs-philosophy style thing. So hopefully I'll get some readers at some point.