Evidence? Who needs it?

"You will be all too aware of the importance we must now place on acting quickly – often in the very early stages of investigations and before evidence has been gathered – to disrupt terrorist activities. This is the rationale for the additional legal powers your senior officers have requested and which I am now taking through Parliament."
- Jacqui Smith explaining to police chiefs yesterday why she is trying to obtain powers for terrorist suspects to be detained without being charged for up to six weeks. (My emphasis). Nearly enough to make you wish you had a constitution.

From Russia

Quietness on the blogging front is due mainly to a lack of illustrations stemming from the fact that I managed to leave my camera in London (rushing as I was out of the house when I realized that as of 1am the morning I left, we were now in BST, so it was an hour later than I had thought). Photographic evidence will have to wait, but I have been enjoying the following:
-A fancy-dress Vivaldi concert - 'a virtual journey to Venice' - featuring a string quartet decked out in period costume (including wigs and masks and such).
-Spotting an American "scholar" playing Solitaire on his laptop in the newspaper library.
-Peter the Great's bizarre collection of deformed things in jars, supposedly created in order to educate people about the natural and physical (as opposed to supernatural and spiritual) causes of deformity, along with some stuff collected by an enthusiastic anatomy popularizer with a passion, and prodigious talent, for embalming. (If it sounds like the plot of a weird East European arthouse film... well it's not far off).
-Restaurants where firearms and personal stereos are considered approximately equal as inappropriate accessories.
-An unsurprisingly uncontroversial Olypmic torch procession on Saturday, in which the Russians rather ingeniously (one might say, rather characteristically) totally ignored anything to do with China and Tibet, and made it in to a celebration of Russian national pride. Well, why not? At the same time, I'm rather impressed with what was achieved in London and Paris - not least by the magnificently successful efforts of Paris' municipal officials to embarrass the Chinese in a symbolically, rather than physically, violent protest of hanging a banner from the town hall, forcing the procession to be cut short.

A photo of me at fancy-dress Vivaldi (although not in fancy dress) is forthcoming...

And now back to the mountain of material about cholera which is my official purpose for being here...

Wikipedia policy

"I like Wikipedia and often find it better than other encyclopedias. My colleagues say that is because I am trained to judge, but students aren't yet and can't be trusted with it. I say, they read all sorts of stuff all the time, they listen to talk radio, why should this be off limits?

I don't let people cite *any* encyclopedias as ultimate sources of truth, so the university's specific prohibition against citing Wikipedia in theses and dissertations doesn't affect me or my students. Encyclopedias are, however, great first reference sources. That includes Wikipedia, I have found."

- Professor Zero

Precisely correct. The other day someone asked me what 'hegemony' was. I gave an answer, which on reflection I thought was too vague, so I thought I should go and look it up. I nearly went straight to wikipedia, then, fearing that what it had to offer would be too tendentious and thrown in to confusion by arguments among Cultural Studies undergraduates, resolved to go and find a dictionary of political thought. I found two, though neither of them were much good (Roger Scruton's excellent handbook was nowhere to be found) and both carried appalling definitions of hegemony. So (surprisingly enough) did a dictionary of Marxism. So I dug out the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, only to be disappointed again (in this case, this otherwise first-rate reference work was showing its age - a lot has happened in the last 40 years as far as hegemony goes). After all that I went on wikipedia after all, and got a definition which was a long way from perfect, but a lot better than any of the others I had found in 'respectable' publications.