How not to extradite…

Britian in EuropeSo earlier today, UK Human Rights blog reported that the UK courts stated that Sweden’s application for the extradition of Julian Assange was valid and that he should be returned in custody to Sweden. I thought and hoped the case would hinge upon the fact that the Swedish prosecutors had not charged Assange and as such the UK would reject the extradition. The European Arrest Warrant should not be allowed, and I understood wasn’t permitted unless there is a case to answer in court. It seemed to me that it had been issued by the Prosecutor’s office in order to “help them with their inquiries”.

The UK’s ancient “Habeas Corpus” rights today ensure that people can only be held for a very short period of time before being charged, unless the courts permit longer due to terrorism concerns, the result of a shameful piece of legislation by the last Government.

I am not sure we should extradite anyone to permit questioning, i.e. we shouldn’t allow foreign police to go trawling for evidence in a way that we deny our own police.

So advice to Mark Stephens, “Stop fannying around about fitness for office, look at the case; are they ready to prosecute or not?”

I am afraid if they are, games up! …

My first Blackberry, bit late I know

It seems that my announcement that I have adopted a Blackberry and in doing so abandoned my Android based HTC aroused some interest. On the one hand you have an open source based operating system, java based apps, produced by an agile company that does no evil, on the other hand you have the epitome of the corporate suit’s pocket billiard cue rest. (Although I am informed that it’s IM app is the chat carrier of choice for today’s yoof!). …

Pivoting with medians and filtering frequency distributions in Excel

This was originally written as a note on how to build tables with complex values i.e. values other than those supported in pivot tables.It focused on using range names and countif[s]/sumif[s]. One of the side effects was to document the use of range arrays and functional filtering. i.e. specifying an array within a cell and filtering the values down to one. This later piece of functionality has caused me to return to this page more frequently than the table construction. I have amended the tags and inserted this paragraph as finding it proved harder than I wanted.  …