Joe's Jottings

Author: Joe

  • Meanwhile, back in June…..

    Originally a Facebook Note, June 8th 2009, after the EU Elections….

    The problem with democracy is that sometimes it allows people to vote for folks that you personally don’t want to gain any sort of power. Unfortunatley, that’s democracy for you. She can be a total bitch. FWIW, I voted for the Socialist Party inspired ‘No2EU – yes to democracy’.

    There is an old latin saying – Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est – the wrath of the gods may be great, but it is slow – that we can perhaps borrow and replace gods with people. To everyone saying how disgusted they are with their regions, their countrymen, stating people are idiots, etc. I ask them to think about the following.

    From 2003 (beginning of the Iraq war) through to this weekend, the major parties in the UK have singularly managed to ignore or disregard the concerns and criticisms of voters. The Government has thundered on, ignoring calls for inquiries on numerous issues, ignoring the fears and concerns of voters on a number of issues, whilst keeping their “heads down in the pig bin, saying ‘Keep on digging’”, in the words of Pink Floyd. I’ve lost count of the number of people and groups who’ve asked the Government to reconsider their policies on things like immigration, ID cards and personal privacy, civil rights and freedom of expression in the UK. Phillip Pullman put it better than I can… http://www.joep.communityhost.org.uk/?p=71

    We’ve recently had the financial debacle and then the site of MPs ignoring repeated requests for over 18 months to release details of their expenses.

    And people wonder why voters voted the way they did? After the Government and major parties have acted with such hubris and contempt?

    To be honest, we’re lucky this morning that we don’t have a handful of BNP and far-right groups holding seats all over Europe.

    Voters used the only power left to them to get the attention of their leaders – the one thing that, as yet, New Labour haven’t removed from us. The power of the ballot. And when people used it they no doubt considered how they’d been ignored, taken for granted, treated as idiots and generally regarded as sheep who would quite happily vote for the famous ‘rosette on a dog’ representing the major parties.

    Guess what – they didn’t. They said ‘Listen. We will not go this way again with you. You repeatedly ignore our concerns. You treat as as children and with contempt. Listen. We’re going to take the one course of action that will get your attention. We will vote for the parties that you and all those with a vested interest in the current system don’t want us to vote for’.

    And that’s what they’ve done. Vox populi – the voise of the people. Keep on ignoring that voice – so apparently quiet in Westminster and Islington and the in inner circles of New Labour and the other major parties – and this will keep happening.

    My final question – what are WE going to do about it? Many of you will know I’m a Libertarian – I believe in small government, and maximum involvement of the people in that governance. Wearing badges and shouting slogans and signing petitions is not enough. Wherever you live there are going to be issues in YOUR community that need tackling – social and political issues that left a mess for long enough will provide more grist to the mill of those on the extreme right and left who want to remove freedoms from us all.

    Get out there and start fixing YOUR community and YOUR society. Listen to the people who’ve said ‘Enough’s enough.’ Work with them to address those issues that they’re concerned about and maybe, just maybe, we can collectively remind all politicians that they’re there because we give them the permission to be there.

    If you need to blame anyone, need to feel ashamed or disgusted with anyone – just look to Westminster. Briefly – don’t dwell on it. Then look back to wherever you are and start fixing this mess.

  • Wolfram Alpha – too early released or over-hyped?

    In case you’re saying, “Wolfram what?”, here’s a little reading:

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/does_wolfram_work.html

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8052798.stm

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/may/18/wolfram-review-test-google-search

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/wolfram_alpha/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/18/wolfram_alpha/

     

    OK – I’ll start by announcing a vested interest here.  I occasionally write software that attempts to make sense out of straight English questions and phrases, and then by cunning trickery makes the response from the program appear ‘sensible’ as well.  So I know something about how to make software appear smarter than it actually is.  And I’m afraid that at first glance I regard Wolfram Alpha as over-hyped, under-delivering and pretty much unsure of it’s position in the world.

    But, the folks at Wolfram Research score highly for getting the coverage they’ve managed!

    WA is described as a Computational Knowledge Engine, rather than a search engine.  However, it’s raison d’etre is to answer questions, and nowadays any piece of software on the internet that does that is always going to be regarded by users as some sort of search engine, and the ‘Gold Standard’ against which all search engines tend to be judged is Google.  So, first question…

    Is it fair to compare WA and Google?

    Not really, and Wolfram himself acknowledges this.  WA is regarded by the company as a means of getting information out of teh raw data to be found on the Web, and it does this by having what’s called ‘curated’ data – that is, Wolfram’s team manage sources used for the data and also the rpesentation of the data.  This makes it very good at returning solid factual and mathematically oriented data in a human readable form. 

    Whereas Google will return you a list of pages that may be useful, WA will return data structured in to a useful looking page of facts – no links, just the facts.  And a list of sources used to derive the infromation. The results displayed are said to be ‘computed’ by Wolfram Research, rather than just listed as is the case of a search engine.

    Is it a dead end?

    WA relies on curated data – that is, a massaging and manipulation process to get the existing web data in to a format that is searchable by the WA algorithms and that is then also presentable in a suitable fomat for review.  This is likely to be a relatively labour intensive process.  Let’s see why…

    In a perfect world, all web data would be tagged with ‘semantic tagging’ – basically additional information that allows the meaning of a web page to be more explicitly obvious.  Google, for all it’s cleverness, doesn’t have any idea about the meaning of web page content – just how well or poorly it’s connected to other web pages and what words and phrases appear withjin the page.  They do apply a bit of ‘secret sauce’ to attempt to get teh results o your search closer to what you really want, assuming you want roughly the same as others who’ve searched the Google search space for the same thing.  Semantic tagging would allow a suitably written search engine to start building relationships between web pages based on real meaning.  Now, you might just see the start of a problem here…..

    If a machine can’t derive meaning from a web page, then the Semantic tagging is going to have to be human driven.  So for such a tool to be useful we need to have some way of ensuring as much web data as possible would be tagged.  Or, start from tomorrow and say that every new page should be tagged, and write off the previous decade of web content.  You see the problem.

    What the WA team have done is taken a set of data from the web, and massaged and standardised it in to a format that their software can handle, then front-ended this system with a piece of software that makes a good stab at natural langauge processing to get the meaning of your question out of your phrase.  For example, typing in ‘Compare the weather in the UK and USA’ might cause the system to assume that you want comparative weather statistics for those two countries.  (BTW – it doesn’t, more on this later)

    The bottom line here is that the data set has had to be manually created – something that is clearly not posisble on a regular basis.  And a similar process would ahve to be carried out to get things semantically tagged.  And if we COULD come up with a piece of sofwtare that could do the semantic analysis of any piece of text on the web, then neither of tehse approaches would be needed anyway.

    In a way, WA is a clever sleight of hand; but ultimately it’s a dead end that could potentially swallow up a lot of valuable effort.

    Is it any good?

    The million dollar question.  Back to my ‘Compare the weather in the UK and US’ question.  the reason I picked this was that WA is supposed to have a front end capable of some understanding of the question, and weather data is amongst the curated data set.  I got a Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input. response.  So, I simplified and gave WA : “Compare rainfall london washington” – same response.  I then went to Google and entered the same search.  And at the bottom of Page 1 found a link : http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=349393 that had the figures of interest.  Now, and before anyone starts on me, I appreciate that the data that would have been provided by WA would have been checked and so would be accurate.  But I deliberately put a question to WA that I expected it should be able to answer if it was living up to the hype.

    I then gave WA ‘rainfall london’ as a search and got some general information (not a lot) about London.  Giving ‘rainfall london’ to Google and found links to little graphs coming out of my ears.  A similar search on rainfall washington to Google gave me similar links to data on Washington rainfall.

    WA failed the test, I’m afraid. 

    Will it get better?

    The smartness of any search tool depends upon the data and the algorithms.  As we’re relying on curated data here, then improvements might come through modifications to data, but that might require considerable effort.  If the algorithms are ‘adaptive’ – i.e. they can learn whether answers they gave were good or bad – then there might be hope.  This would rely on a feedback mechanism from searchers to the sofwtare, basically saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.  If the algorithms have to be hand crafted – improvement is likely BUT there is the risk of over-fitting the algorithms to suit the questions that people have asked – not the general searching of what MAY be asked.

    And time passes…

    As it turned out, this post never moved from ‘Draft’ to ‘Published’ because of that thing called ‘Life’.  So, a month or two have passed, and I’ve decided to return to Wolfram Alpha and see what’s changed….

    Given the current interest in the band Boyzone, I did a quick search.  WA pointed me to a Wiki entry – good – but nothing else.  Google pointed me to stacks of stuff.  Average rainfall in London got me some useful information about rainfall in the last week.  OK….back to one of my original questions ‘Compare rainfall London Washington’ – this time I got the London data with the Washington equivalent on it as well – sort of what I wanted.  Google was less helpful this time than back when I wrote this piece.

    So…am I more impressed?  Maybe a little.  Do I feel it’s a dead end?  Probably, yes, except in very specific areas taht might already be served by things like Google and Wiki anyway.

    Do I have an alternative solution for the problem?

    If I did, do you think I’d blog it here and expose myself to all that criticism? 🙂

  • Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

    I don’t often have much to say in favour of Phillip Pullman, but this is a fantastic article, IMO.  He encapsulates so much of how I feel about the gradual erosion of our rights in the UK.  Now…and disturbingly…this piece was ‘vanished’ from the Times’ website for a while – no explanation, no reason. It eventually re-appeared. Concerning, no?

    I believe this to be one of the most important articles I’ve seen online for some time, and feel stronlgy that it should be widely read.  So, just in case it disappears again, I’ve taken the liberty of posting the full item as a Blog post here.  As an intresting aside, as I’m typing this I’m watching an episode of ‘The X Files’ in which Mulder says “…too many others know what’s happening out there. And no one, no government agency has jurisdiction over the truth. ”

    PHILIP PULLMAN:

    Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

    The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

    We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness – the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

    We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation – after all we have an Established Church – or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

    The new laws whisper:

    You don’t know who you are

    You’re mistaken about yourself

    We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

    We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

    And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

    The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

    Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

    Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

    So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

    And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

    So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

    What we want from you is acquiescence

    The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

    You are not to be trusted with laws

    So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

    We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

    You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

    You do not need to hold us to account

    You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

    Who do you think you are?

    What sort of fools do you think we are?
    The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

    And the new laws whisper:

    We do not want to hear you talking about truth

    Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

    We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

    We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

    Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

    We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

    You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

    We do not want to hear you talking about justice

    Justice is whatever we want to do to you

    And nothing else

    Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

    We want to watch you day and night

    We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

    We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

    We can see you have abandoned modesty

    Some of our friends have seen to that

    They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

    In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

    We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

    We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

    One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

    We know who our friends are

    And when our friends want to have words with one of you

    We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

    It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

    It is for us to know what your offence is

    Angering our friends is an offence

    It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

    Inconceivable.

    And those laws say:

    Sleep, you stinking cowards

    Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

    Freedom is too hard for you

    We shall decide what freedom is

    Sleep, you vermin

    Sleep, you scum.

    Philip Pullman will deliver a keynote speech at the Convention on Modern Liberty at the Institute of Education in London tomorrow

    http://www.modernliberty.net

  • Am I a twit not to Twitter?

    OK….I remember a year or so ago saying i’d never join Facebook, and then making myself look a pudding within a month or so when i started using Facebook to keep me in touch with friends after I stopped using another online service.

    Now, around the same time I also made a brief investigation of the Twitter service – some more information here.  Whilst I can’t argue that it’s popular, and has attracted a vast amount of traffic and interest, including being used in the Australian bushfires and the Mumbai terrorist attacks, I’m still yet to be convinced of the value of telling the world precisely what I’m doing in 140 byte chunks.

    Let’s face it, I’m too busy / idle to maintain my Facebook status more than once a day on average, so the idea of me managing to ‘tweet’ happily several times a day on the Twitter system is probably minimal.  And I’m not convinced of the overall value of most of the content that seems to be generated on Twitter; allow me to explain.

    Too short!

    To begin with, 140 characters is shorter than an SMS message, and unless you’re skilled at putting highly informative short messages together, the informational content of such messages is limited purely by the size of the message, unless you send a string of such messages.

    Too distracting!

    We then move on to whether Tweeting encourages the attention span of a boiled potatoe; it’s a disruptive technology in all the wrng ways – it simply disrupts your attention by a string of pointless inanities appearing in your Phone, Twitter client or web browser.

    What does it do that other media doesn’t?

    In terms of brevity you have SMS messages or Facebook statuses.  In terms of information content you have Email, blogs or Forum posts.  Tweets are ephemeral – they’re not naturally persistent and are as short lived as real birdsong.

    So, what the Hell is it all about?  I’m aware of the use of this sort of technology in crisis situations but is this genuinely making appropriate use of the available technology?  I’m yet to be convinced that Twitter is anything but another toy for the technorati, and one whose lifespan in it’s current form is probably going to be limited by the emerging financial realism in the world.  I’ve heard of alternative uses – people using hardware to automatically place Twitter messages in to the ‘twittersphere’ form such things as potted plants and the old standby of IT departments, the drinks machine.  These messages are then picked up by a piece of software listening on Twitter for ‘tweets’ from the appropriate account.  This is nothing different to using UDP packets, for example, but at least there’s a more easily accessible interface here.

    But I’m not convinced – someone, anyone, convince me of the value of this application, PLEASE!

  • You pays peanuts…..

    And you get monkeys.

    I assume most of us have heard this phrase. It’s become almost a mantra with me in my professional life because the last 6 months have exposed me to an interesting aspect of the freelance world that I’ve not been aware of until now; the fact that there are a Hell of a lot of people out there expecting a lot of work for next to nothing!

    Allow me to elaborate…I get most of my work through ‘word of mouth’ – this has always been the way and after 20 odd years in IT it seems to have worked well. But I still like to chase the odd new client – after all, nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been sat on, as they say. In many ways, the availability of Internet web sites that allow people wishing work to be done to advertise their requireents for people like me to pick up the jobs should have ade things easier, but it hasn’t.

    In fact, I’m beginning to regard such sites as one of the worst things that has happened to ‘professional’ freelancers and contractors, because they have totally distorted the market. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a firm believer in market forces but these sites are actually pushing the markets for freelance development work to the brink of extinction. And this isn’t going to be a rant about out-sourcing…

    My concern is that people are posting requests for work like the following:

    “Develop a highly interactive and very aesthetic media review website. A good example is Yahoo! TV. The site is going to cater for commercial considerations i.e web ads. Want a site that would load fast as well.
    Hence, beautiful but efficient. Must do the job. “

    This is a real advert, tweaked for punctuation and spelling in two places.  Now – this isn’t a hobby site, it’s not a charity.  The poster is open in that there will be advertising and will be catering for ‘commercial considerations’.  That’s the full ‘job brief’ against which people are expected to bid, by the way.  Now, let’s assume that we can put something together like the Yahoo TV site – here and ignore the content and imagery side of things for now.  It’s got forums, photo galleries, all sorts of cute stuff.  I wouldn’t even want to try tackling it – a wise man knows his limitations, after all.  But I can guess the sort of development time – you’re looking at the minimum of 2-3 man-months here, I’d estimate.  

    And the suggested budget?  £250.  Yes, Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds.  No missing zeroes.

    I cannot imagine the most desperate out sourcer being willing to work for that sort of money, let alone a programmer in the UK, US or Europe.

    Oddly enough I came across this today:

    http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5483244.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

    An article in the Times dealing with Amazon’s Turk’ project which harnesses the available time of people to do online jobs of various sorts.  Where you might be expected to work for a couple of pence an hour, if that.

    Digital exploitation?  You betcha.  There are projects that rely on the good nature of people to get things done – projects where the bottom line is a better, publically and freely available service, rather than profits to corporations who can already dictate terms to much of the online world.

    Some years ago I was involved in film making and there was a very rich culture of ‘No-budget’ filming, where productions were put together with no budget except for the essentials of film stock or tape – everything else was borrowed, begged or blagged.  But part of the contract was that anyone involved would get a copy of the material for their own portfolio and an on-screen credit – ‘Credit and VHS’ – as well as being fed and watered on set.  This model could, of course, be exploited but rarely was, because the world of film making was relatively insular and someone pulling a fast one would immediately find it difficult to crew-up next time around.

    Perhaps we need to start being similarly watchful in the information marketplace?

     

  • Everybody Hurts

    For various reasons, I started really thinking about the REM song ‘Everybody Hurts’ today.  Just in case you’re not au fait with it – here are the lyrics…

    When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
    When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on
    Don’t let yourself go, ’cause everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

    Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along
    When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
    If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
    When you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on

    ‘Cause everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends
    Everybody hurts. Don’t throw your hand. Oh, no. Don’t throw your hand
    If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

    If you’re on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
    When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on

    Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
    Everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes
    And everybody hurts sometimes. So, hold on, hold on
    Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
    Everybody hurts. You are not alone
    “Everybody hurts.  You are not alone.”  So very true, and also so  difficult to remember when you are in any sort of pain.

    (more…)

  • Live together or die alone

    This article in the BBC’s online magazine rather intrigued me; basically, are we heading for a dislocated society in which the relatively wealthy live in walled communities whilst the rest of the population exist in a less secure ‘open world’?

    When I was a kid I remember reading a suggestion that the evolution of community resources, like street lighting, sewers, etc. came about because the rich had to share the world with the rest of us.  A wealthy man might have a well lit private estate and safe water, but if he, or his family, had to go outside the confines of their safe zone they might soon be in dark, dangerous streets and exposed to foul standing water rife with disease. 

    So, philanthropically minded individuals acted from enlightened self interest (and then from the profit motive) to create municipal organisations that provided street lighting, paved roads, sewers, etc. for everyone.

    It’s ironic that a century or so later we’re heading in the other direction by starting to consider retreating from these communities in to walled communities and other protected environments.  The wealthy no longer choose to collectively improve the commmunities that they interact with on a regular basis, but instead choose to isolate themselves from them and rely on defences rather than building a ‘common treasury’ in their communities form which all can benefit.

    I have recently become very interested in Permaculture and ‘Transition Towns’   as means of addressing the pressing problems of Peak Oil and Climate Change.  Both of these philsophies reflect the enlightened self-interest approach to surviving massive cultural shocks.  They assume that the ebst way to make lives in a future totally changed by fuel and energy crises and climate modification is to survive as a community.  Compare this with the alternative approach – wealthier individuals building individual bolt holes for themselves and their families shows admirable foresight and planning but there remains the problem that at some point, after the MREs have run out, the inhabitants of these bunkers are going to have sally forth in to the world they left behind.  At that point they’re going to have to interact with those who didn’t have bunnkers – either by force of arms or by negotiation. 

    I see survival built purely on personal and family group provision as being short sighted and, whilst for some it may be the only way open to them, for the vast majority of us we need to work out how we’re going to mould together the communities in which we live to prepare for changes in the future.

     

  • Dumbing Down 2.0?

    I regularly follow Bill Thompson’s columns on Online Issues at the BBC’s website – see the Blogroll here for a link to Bill’s personal blog – and recently re-read this item  which I found very interesting indeed.

    In it he comments on the idea expressed by Nick Carr – that Google and it’s ilk on the Internet might actually be diminishing our capacity for thinking.  There is also a little backing from neurologist Susan Greenfield for the idea, in that the way we take in information from modern media is different to how we’ve taken in information (by more direct experience) for the last couple of million years.  In other words, there may be a bit of re-wiring going on…

    Now, what really interested me here was that it actually supports a vague suspicion I have that my own mental faculties have changed in recent years.  I’ve also witnessed it in others, and heard people complain about the fact that ‘They can’t settle down to read’, for example.  Just watch people around you – we seem to spend an awful lot of time when we are mentally engaged in ‘information surfing’.  We used to joke about MTV Attention Spans and ‘soundbite politics’ – how long before we start commenting on your ‘Googlespan’ rather than your attention span?

    Experience in administering and contributing to numerous online discussion forums and mailing lists has also exposed me to what I think are changes in the style of discourse.  Ignoring the ‘slanging matches’ I’ve noticed more use of links to things like blogs and wikis without any interpretation of the target link by the poster.  Sometimes this is appropriate, but sometimes the relevance of the link to the ‘guts’ of the issue at hand seems to be tenuous or requires ‘drawing out’ from the material referenced.  In either case, I’d expect the referenced material to be developed in the discussion; without this development it often appears that the poster is simply ‘Google Bombing’ the discussion with a load of references designed more to give the appearance of knowledge than the actual knowledge itself. 

    After all, Googling a topic rarely takes more than a few minutes; understanding the material returned, cross referencing it, checking it’s particular bias or accuracy – these are the parts of the process of Internet research that take the time if done properly.  I guess I’m concerned about laziness or, in some cases, posters exhibiting intellectual intimidation by simply attempting to floor people with their apparent erudition.  How one determines whether soemone is lazy, intimidating or simply assumes people know as much as they do is a good point for discussion!

    Perhaps we should all take a few steps to stop the rot in our own thinking. 

    One starting point is to search for knowledge, not to point score.  Resist the temptation to Google for facts in a topic about we know nothing, purely to win a debating point.  After all, shouldn’t you be engaging in that debate with at least a grasp of the basic issues involved?  Now, don’t get me wrong here; I’m not saying don’t Google; I’m saying Google in the heat of debate to get clarification and detail, not to get ‘first time exposure’ to the issues.  If you see a debate that looks interesting but of which you know nothing, then take soem quality time out to read around the issue from a number of online sources and – dare I say it – the odd book or magazine article?  After all, if it’s worth your time debating it, it’s worth doing well.

    Secondly – know and question your sources.  See what other ersources are referenced.  regard anything without at least a couple of supporting ‘quality’ references as an debate-pieces rather than it necessarily being afctually correct.

    Read deep as well as wide; too often people see something that appears to support their point of view and then stop reading. 

     Let’s see what we can do to stop the ‘fast food’ approach to our acquisition of information.  We should be acquiring information, to improve our knowledge, and from that develop wisdom in the application of that hard earned knowldge.  Read deep and wide and continue the tradition of the centuries.

    Now, stop reading this and grab a book.

     

  • Computer says no – or, `How I stopped worrying and learnt to love the waste…`

    People who know me will be aware of my occasional – and increasingly regular – rants about the lack of joined up thinking that surrounds us in every aspect of life in the UK.  I’m currently attempting to reduce my carbon footprint and general consumption, but every now and again succumb to a desire for take away pizza.

    I know I shouldn’t, but just occasionally noting hits the spot better than watching TV whilst eating something that is baaaaad for you. 

    Tonight, however, ended up with me almost beating my head in frustration against the telephone receiver.  The order was simple – big pizza, two portions of garlic bread and a pot of ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.  The problem started when the assistant tried to be helpful by creating a ‘deal’.  However….ice cream wasn’t included – fine.  And you can have a third side dish.  Not fine.  I didn’t want a third side dish.  Mrs P. and I couldn’t EAT a third side dish.

    I explained this to the assistant and then sat back to listen to her try and get the 1 pizza, 2 sides and ice cream through the computer.  I worked really hard to explain that I didn’t want to waste food by taking a third side order that wouldn’t be eaten…

    And failed.  Said order arrived…with three garlic breads.  Ack…..

    It’s funny in a way but let’s take a serious look at this; Wee Gordon tells us to stop wasting food.  His Government are also concerned about obesity.  Yet major fast food chains in the UK are basically promoting food waste and obesity by attempting to talk people in to taking food they don’t want.  Utterley, utterley bizarre.

    The Government and the Corporates need to get their act together on this sort of issue…if they are genuinely concerned, that is.  Or, as I suspect, are they just mouthing platitudes because they genuinely feel powerless in the path of world events?

  • Just a nudge?

    I recently read the phrase “Some days, it’s just not worth chewing through the straps” on someone’s online signature.  With a wry smile I came to the conclusion that, Yes, some days it’s just too much like hard work out there, and that many of the basic paradigms of civic behaviour and politeness that I was brought up with seem to have become an increasingly rare commodity in modern life.

    Now, before you dismiss this post as the ravings of a fortysomething craving for his lost youth, let me direct you to this Blog entry from the BBC’s Mark Easton – Do We All Need a Nudge?.

    To which I think the answer is yes.

    This article pulled together a few themes that I’m very interested in.  The issues of civic responsibility, duties and rights has always been important to me.  Many people who know me will be sorely tired at my usual rant of ‘Too many people who know all their rights and undertake none of their responsibilities’.  The one aspect of Gordon Brown’s premiership that has encouraged me in any way, shape or form was reflected in a quote from the PM in Easton’s piece – “people themselves adopting the work ethic, the learning ethic and aiming high”.  It may be rare for me to agree with ‘Wee Gordon’, but he’s right on the money here.

    People need to adopt the habit and attitude of learning, working and aiming high; I’m hoping to encourage this in the social and community project field by a new project of mine (still under construction, but feel free to take a look) – CommunityNet – which I’ll be formally launching in the near future.  I have a great belief in communities and individuals helping themselves, and shaking off the ‘nanny state’ and ‘dependency culture’ that seems to have grown up in the UK in recent years.

    A ‘nudge in the right direction’ is perhaps the best thing we can all do to help this happen.

    Catch people doing things right, set a personal example in all that you do, dedicate some time or resources to community projects that matter to you, be a good friend and neighbour, and show genuine respect to those you deal with.  All good things that have become almost platitudes in the last decade or so; perhaps it’s time for us all to be nudged to making small changes that will make the world a more pleasant place to live in.

    Mao Tse Tung said ‘The long march starts with a single step.’; what long march will your small step start off?