Synesthesia

Like Gary Turner, I recently suffered a garage-burglary in which the scumbags helped themselves to a couple of bikes. Luckily though my insurance company works with Wheelies Direct to handle cycle-replacement claims.

The staff at Wheelies have been friendly and helpful all the way from validating the details of the bikes I lost (they know their stuff) through to selecting replacement bikes and dealing swiftly with some transit damage to one of the replacements. It would be worth asking your insurance company who they use to handle such cases.

Going through the saga of reporting the theft and getting the replacements has served as a good wake-up call about actually using them again, and doing something about my appalling fitness level. Unfortunately, also like Gary, I’ve discovered the potential for too long a break from cycling to cause lung-coughing-up symptoms upon resumption of the habit!

Technorati Tags World

There’s been an outpouring of blog entries about this week’s events but strangely I’ve felt no desire to write myself until now.

I was lucky - running late for work I was still waiting at my suburban tube station when the network was shut down. That meant I spent the day at home, watching things slowly unfold on the net and the TV. Like many others I know people who were more closely affected, though so far as I know so far all have had lucky escapes.

The desire not to write (until now) has I think been to do with my own preferred way of dealing with new and disturbing events in the world - in that sense at least I am an introspective person. I’ve discussed things with people close to me, but not felt that there was something I wanted to write.

I’ve used the tube since Thursday, and like others admit to being a little more wary, a little more alert to what was going on around me - but not really any more so than during other times when terrorists were active in this city.

But as the days pass the other emotions come to the surface - anger that this has happened in the city that has been my adopted home for nearly twenty years, a belief that the most one individual can do is be determined to get on with their life and enjoy the freedom that London grants, and a feeling of utter contempt for the perpetrators who think they can drag us down to their level.

The London News Review says it bluntly, Ken Livingstone has risen to a surprisingly good level of oratory and unsurprisingly Tom Coates has said almost exactly what I wanted to say about not writing before I did.

It happened. I feel very sorry for those who have lost loved ones or suffered life-changing injuries, and extend them all the empathy in the world. And now the people who live here are going to just get on with things.

The end.

Technorati Tags bombs, London, terrorism, World

I’m an occasional reader of Whiskey Bar (I don’t often have the time his posts deserve) but this seemed especially thought-provoking for the way it captures the feeling that the country in your heart is no longer the one you live in:

[...]
It’s a strange place to end up: a man without a country, grudgingly supporting the country he no longer has because the alternatives are so much worse. But that’s how it goes, I guess, in this world of empires and religious fanatics.
[...]

Technorati Tags World

Lots of people have raved about Google Earth (Gary for one), but for me one of the coolest features has to be the ability to overlay your own graphics which then become locked in place and move with the earth model…

Technorati Tags World

I’ve just had the opportunity to spend a few days in Brugge (the view of the Bell Tower was from my hotel window). Although the centre of town was thronged with tourists it was only a few minutes’ walk to quieter districts where the architecture is just as impressive. Tourism is clearly the main industry of the town, although there are also lots of residential districts even within the old medieval city so I guess that there must be a range of other businesses in the outer parts. I should imagine that planning controls must be very tight, as there are no aerials or satellite dishes to be seen, and new developments in the centre seemed to be designed to blend in well with the medieval (and 19th century fake-medieval) surroundings.

The Belgians take their beer very seriously, so a tour of the Half Moon Brewery was near the top of the agenda. Straffe Hendrik is a sharp-flavoured blond beer that goes well with food and that I’ve not yet found a source of in the UK!

If you are interested in things mechanical then the short walk to the eastern edge of the old city is well worth it to see the four windmills placed on the site of the old city walls. Three are displaced from elsewhere, but Sint JansHuisMolen has been on its current site for several hundred years and is the only one still working. Inside is a marvellous example of engineering in wood, with very little use of metal. Look out for the simple idea (as all good ones are in retrospect!) to control the speed of rotation of the sails - a traditional rotary governor attached to the arrangement of levers that adjusts the spacing of the mill stones - as the mill speeds up the governor forces the stones closer together, increasing the friction and providing the necessary negative feedback loop to keep the speed constant.

Technorati Tags World

Lots of signs of Spring this weekend:

• Buds on the Birch trees in the local woods
• An invasion of frogs to the small pond in my garden
• The first wafts of barbecue smoke

Technorati Tags World

That’s how long since I posted here.

Some of that has been down to winter solstice ennui.

Some of it down to spending time with loved ones over the Christmas and New Year period.

Some of it because of work stuff (which I don’t write about here)

Some of it because of some painful transitions in a close relationship, and the transformative change that has followed.

And some of it because I am busy on a new project which you can expect to see mentioned here in the next couple of months.

2005 is going to be an interesting year!

Technorati Tags World

A life where TiVo has always existed is a great example of how subsequent generations take for granted technology that was new and strange not long ago. [via The Shifted Librarian]

Technorati Tags Technology, World

I was waiting for email to download this morning when I witnessed two cats and three squirrels playing “cat and tree-rat”.

Watching the activity that spread across the gardens of four or five houses I began to see that although the cats were very good at “seizing” the symbolic and literal high ground such as garage roofs, first-floor window ledges and critical fence junctions their attempts to interdict the insurgent terror-rodents were almost completely ineffectual.

The squirrels were busy with the life-and-death task of collecting and storing food. Occasionally one would stray near enough to one of the feline sentinels for the cat to take notice and switch to stalking mode. Standard squirrel response was “run away”, usually followed by the cat for a couple of yards until the predator gave up - these cats are all well-fed domestic pets and pursuit was at best half-hearted.

There was much more vigorous action when one squirrel strayed into the territory of another - high-speed, high level chases until the intruder was seen off.

All of this time there was no sign of the species that considers itself the “real” owners of these bits of territory!

Technorati Tags World

Another modern parenting milestone - my daughter has her first blog…

Technorati Tags World

Today would have been my father’s 87th birthday. For some reason it seems more important to remember him on this day than on the anniversary of his death - perhaps because the things I remember about him are about life, in particular the things I learnt without knowing - that only now I am learning to recognise in me too.

Technorati Tags World

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in Parliament? Public beta of new site that let’s you access your MP’s voting record, search for what they have said in debates etc.

Technorati Tags World

Clay Shirky: Nomic World: By the players, for the players - drawing parallels between Nomic online games (where the rules can change) and real life societies [via Adina Levin who thinks he's wrong and says why...]

Technorati Tags Systems, World

One of the things that has kept me away from this blog for so long was a week-long business trip to Las Vegas to visit the NAB trade show

Several Americans I know have said “please don’t judge our country on Vegas” - so I won’t. It’s a city based on flesh and money, but so are parts of many others across the world…

Two things that I will comment on though…

First one was at the Apple product launch - although I know people who use (and therefore evangelise about) Apples I had not previously experienced the full Apple acolyte experience in the mass. Imagine the scene - 2000 people in the Venetian Hotel. Apple’s Rob Schoeben came on stage and more or less said “We’ve 5 new products” and that was enough for the room to erupt in vigorous applause. The same theme followed for 90 minutes after every statement. My colleagues and I - techno-sceptics all - felt we had just left normality behind out on the Strip (!) and wandered into a very strange place…

Now I’ve upset all the Apple-philes…

The other thing that struck me was the number of examples of poor customer service that lurked under the surface of tips for everything…

My example is taken from the breakfast buffet of the hotel. As befitted a 3600 bedroom hotel, the buffet area was huge, capable (at a guess) of seating about a thousand people. For much of the time it was only 10-15% full but regardless of the spare capacity there was always a long wait to get in. There were in fact two queues - firstly to pay, which even with 3 cashiers seemed to move very slowly - each transaction seemed to take at least two or three minutes to pay for a single-priced item.

Secondly you had to queue for several minutes for a single waitress to pull people from the queue in the group size that seemed to suit the tables she wanted to fill. All of this at a snail’s pace. Plenty of other waiting staff wandering around delivering coffee and clearing tables (remember this is a buffet so you fetch your own food) but no-one moving very fast.

Looking at this from a process point of view still doesn’t make much sense - the company is happy because everyone has paid before they get in. Having a large “buffer stock” of customers waiting to be seated would make sense if there was a shortage of tables which had to be kept busy, but even at the busiest period I never saw the place at more than 50% utilisation. The constraint seemed to be completely artificial by insisting that everyone was led to a table by one particular member of staff.

I’d love it if someone who is more familiar with US catering operations could explain the logic!

Technorati Tags World

I don’t normally write about work here, but I wanted to note that I was one of the 10,000 people who contributed to this - I’m one of the 6,000 whose name didn’t appear due to lack of space.

Technorati Tags World

The day had to come of course, when the huge interconnectedness of the web comes back to a place that is some way away in the physical world, but right inside me as far as my emotions are concerned…

That’s right, my children have discovered this site!

Luckily, unlike many who write more personal journals on the web - and then go through all sorts of inner twisting when people they know in real life start reading - I have always kept this blog focused on things which appeal to me intellectually - sometimes work related; sometimes not - but always both “work safe” and “family safe”.

Nevertheless it’s a strange feeling!

On balance I’m pleased. These writings and conversations are part of me, and it feels good to know that maybe it will open up new conversations with my children about the world they are growing up in.

Mind you at the moment my daughter thinks it’s “uncool” - which I hope is just a reaction to my photo Perhaps the Christmas project will be showing her how to set up her own site!

Technorati Tags World

Or more exactly, I share world-view and values with a lot of Canadians…

Dave Pollard points to the survey at Fire & Ice: The US, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values and notes that median scores for Americans are in the upper-left quadrant, whilst median scores for Canadians are in the lower-right and the gap is growing.

The author of the survey explains the result chart as follows:

Your personal position can be interpreted along two major explanatory dimensions, or axes of social values. The first axis of explanation of social values, shown here as the vertical or y-axis, describes a general orientation toward the acceptance versus rejection of long-standing social norms in society, that is, an outlook that is either deferential to traditional mores and institutions, labelled “Authority”, or one that is more modern and questioning, labelled “Individuality”. The second axis, shown here as the horizontal or x-axis, describes a general outlook toward, and valuing of, pragmatism and competitiveness, labelled “Survival”, or a world view that is more idealistic and postmodern, here labelled “Fulfillment.”

Taken together, these two axes form four general quadrants of explanation or meaning underlying people’s values. People in the upper left are fundamentally motivated by needs for stability, security and status, and exhibit a strong work ethic. Those in the upper right most value ethics, duty, and responsibility within their families and communities. Meanwhile, those with values that place them in the lower right primarily search for personal control, and are open-minded, flexible and idealistic. And finally, individuals in the lower left pursue, above all else, novelty, excitement and risk.

Having dutifully completed the survey I seem to come out firmly in the “Idealism and Autonomy” quadrant. Apparently the signatures of this quadrant are:

• Key Characteristics
  • Self-reliant and in control of their own destiny
  • Idealistic and open-minded
  • Rejecting out-dated norms and institutions
• Fundamental Motivations and Values
  • Personal Control
  • Question Authority
  • Global Consciousness
  • Adaptability to Complexity
  • Flexible Families

I don’t feel uncomfortable with those values, but I am surprised at the extreme placement of my result - I don’t consider myself an extreme example of any of those views when compared with others I know. It would be interesting to see a similar survey calibrated to include the UK and other European countries…

Technorati Tags World

It’s raining so it must be time to start blogging again…
I’ve been wondering (yet again) about the importance of going with what feels right, the natural flow, and acknowledging your own energy level (or lack of it…)

In the last two weeks I’ve:

* thoroughly enjoyed a long weekend in Paris (photos to follow when I remember to send off the film - you do remember film don’t you?)

* had an activity-filled week at home in London with my children

* two manic days of meetings at work

* helped a colleague celebrate his 50th in the traditional manner

…yet for some reason this morning, as I sat staring at my PC trying to get back into the flow of writing a document I started three weeks ago I couldn’t understand why my thoughts weren’t coming - just how out-of-touch do you have to be to not realise that you’re tired?
Fresh air and walking about required!

Technorati Tags World

As I’ve noted before, my blogging seems to be in inverse proportion to sunlight - the last few weeks have been a fabulous spring here in South East England so I’ve found myself losing interest in scouring the network for things to comment on. That, plus catching up with friends, playing on a new bike, and a couple of events I’ll blog about later…

But now the UK seems to have returned to Winter again, at least for a while, so maybe I’ll catch up on some things!

Technorati Tags World

Been having something of “blogger’s block” for a few days - I blame the time and energy that is being consumed by this. On the bright side it has meant that I can catch up on my current reading…

Technorati Tags World

Over at the American Open Technology Consortium Doc Searls is going deep about the metaphorical aspects of the Eldred case:

Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy,distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

This isn’t just a battle of words. It’s a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain, lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we’re speaking about one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s very much the way our minds work.

But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details.

He also links to Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust, by George Lakoff. This 1995 article examines the different guiding metaphors that underly the conservative and liberal (in the US sense) views of “what is moral”.

I think Doc is onto something here - and the link that is forming in my mind is with the Meta-states / neuro-semantics model. At a recent training Michael Hall was starting to apply those models to aspects of culture - how to understand, how to change… It seems obvious that two of the meta-states at work here are “It is important to protect property” and “It is important to enrich the store of public knowledge and creativity”, but I have a sense that the two sides can be linked… I need to play with this one for a bit…

Technorati Tags NLP, World

I met two very special people earlier this week. Beverley De-Gale and Orin Lewis are the founders of the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust. Driven originally by the necessity of looking after their family, they have gone on to help many, many others. Not pushy, not showy, but very much people who radiate an air of being “on purpose”…

Technorati Tags World

Nayeem Azim is a doctor. He’s also a refugee from Afghanistan. He describes how after re-qualifying to practice in the UK he has set up an online college to train other refugee doctors. After their first year they have helped 46 doctors to re-qualify to work in the UK, at an average cost of 5,000 UKP per head. Training a doctor from scratch costs ~ 250,000 UKP. He says:

Why have we been successful?
Doctors are people who want to work. They are incredibly productive and dedicated to helping society.
When they became refugees, they lost a great part of their identity. For them to be sitting on benefits is utterly demoralising. So when they’re given a chance to work for the good of society, they will do

[ via BBC News]

Technorati Tags World

It’s a few days old, but Tom Bentley wrote in The Guardian You can’t impose democracy from above
(more…)

Technorati Tags World

The Guardian reports that the Internet Service Providers Association has written to David Blunkett:

“[...] refusing to sign up to plans to give law enforcement agencies access to the records of British web and email users [...] the Guardian has learned that internet service providers have told the Home Office that they will not voluntarily stockpile the personal records of their customers for long periods [...] The apparent collapse of the negotiations may leave Mr Blunkett facing a choice between using his reserved powers under the legislation to force internet providers to comply or dropping the measure in response to political and political opposition [...]“

Technorati Tags World

Too thirsty for knowledge - Can you imagine spending every day at work with a hangover? That is the nearest adults will come to the feelings of dehydration experienced by children who have little access to water during the school day. So says a campaigner who argues that learning is being damaged by a simple lack of water in classrooms….
via mad musings of me (uk)

Technorati Tags World

Spent this weekend in the town where I grew up. Catching up with my mother & sister, also spending some time with my kids, who were there wth my ex-wife. I took the kids to the local playground - where I too played at their age. Although some things have changed there is much as it was thirty-five years ago. Buying ice cream for them in the park cafe I had a flashback of my father buying ice cream for me in the same building.
I’ve been reading James Hillman’s “The Soul’s Code” which seeks to build a metaphor for life around the idea of the “acorn” - the essential purpose of each individual that is incarnated, and which, he believes, most often seen early in childhood before the layers of the world are added.

Technorati Tags World

I looked into those big, sad, soulful, hurting eyes and I wanted to give him a hug. People who say the internet is a geeky, meaningless side show to life have no idea. This stuff matters.

Over at The Obvious?

Technorati Tags World

I referred to Gary Turner’s momentary lapses of dilution® a day or two ago in the piece on rageboy’s visit to London… but I’ve only just been introduced to his alter ego Mike Golby at Pagecount. I don’t know what he’s on but it’s very good….

Technorati Tags World

Thought it was time to trawl through some of my compatriots … here are some that caught my eye on the way …
LinkMachineGo, Wherever You Are, Pete Ashton Dot Com, not.so.soft, Interconnected, feeling listless.
And last but not least for its very British (in)sanity A letter from the Olde Countrie by “Group Captain Lionel Mandrake” (aka Steve Bail)

Technorati Tags World

LINKMACHINEGO.COM picks up Texting via wood s lot thus

“I read about Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft’s approval ratings and I wonder about my fellow citizens. I wonder if there isn’t some collective human core drive toward conservatism. I mean conservatism on its most basic level: fear of change. These familiar white men — familiar both because they’re clones of what we’ve been acculturated to perceive as power, and familiar literally, it’s the exact same people, the same handful, the plutocracy — are they somehow reassuring big daddies, distant and tight-lipped, security conscious and faintly disapproving, a little out of touch, a little authoritarian and secretive, deals out of earshot and quiet phone calls, a potential for real anger, but usually genial and a little hokey; they want what’s best for us, they know what’s best, because they’re father? We don’t need to know the details. They’re in charge, and that’s as it should be”

The slightly bizarre coincidence for me is that I met the author of LINKMACHINEGO.COM today at a seminar being given by Christopher Locke of Cluetrain fame. (seminar was organised by the man behind The Obvious? so this was something of a blogflesh or whatever you call bloggers meeting in real life…)

I’ve not heard Chris before, so not I’m not sure if this was his “standard” (??) Gonzo Marketing talk or something he had tailored for the organisation sponsoring the event …anyway… the reason for associating this and the quote from Texting is that a key part of rageboy’s message was about the need for large corporations to let go of that assumed position of authority if they are going to survive in the internet world, to let go of the fear of talking with their consumers.

All of that somehow links in my mind to the quote (allegedly from “A Course in Miracles” but if not I’m sure The Obvious? will correct me!) about all human actions being ultimately based in love or fear. And when someone stands up in front of an audience who are (indirectly) paying for him to be there and demonstrates what he means about the new level of human honesty required in communication and enabled by the internet through simply telling us about his current heart-breaking head-exploding relationship problem then you do rather get the point… (although from the comments I heard at the buffet afterwards not everyone in the audience saw it that clearly - so maybe the fear factor is still too high…)
[post script - here is Gary Turner's account of how he met up with Chris Locke on the very same London trip on Sunday...]

Technorati Tags World

The Shifted Librarian picks up on Weblog Bookwatch and the way Amazon are finding new ways to make the Web work for them and their customers.
The blog at onfocus.com is also worth a look - some interesting stuff going on there with scripts (Paul Bausch is one of the original co-developers of Blogger)

Technorati Tags World

Jon Udell picks up on Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone“

“If he’s right, the flowering of online community that we see all around us may be part of a very large historical pattern. As a culture, we may be sensing a deficiency of social capital, and creating new institutions — appropriate to our time and our technology — to remedy the problem. Putnam’s thesis may be read as a requirements specification for online communities
A corollary to the sharp decline of social capital in our generation, by the way, is a sharp rise in the number of lawyers per capita. Fifty years ago, Americans thought that most people were trustworthy. Today most think the reverse. Lawyering flourishes, says Putnam, because it is the “production and sale of synthetic trust.”
Interesting. For years I have interacted online with people I have never met face-to-face, and may never meet. Yet I trust them..”

“Trust” seems to be a current meme - it’s the theme of this year’s Reith Lectures by Onora O’Neill. In lecture 1 she was asked

“So what happens to trust when you have a technology such as the internet that de-centres institutional validity?” and replied “…But I think it’s going to be very difficult to achieve a culture of accountability of a reasoned sort in different parts of society, and I think the internet, as you rightly say, is going to be one of the hardest of all. At the moment yes, I think it’s like buying snake oil. ”

In the summary of the (not yet broadcast) 4th lecture you can read

“Transparency may destroy secrecy, but there is little reason to think that it destroys the real enemy of trust: deception. Those who set out to deceive the public may even be helped by over-emphasising the value of transparency. There is a downside to technologies that allow us to circulate and recirculate vast quantities of ‘information’ that is harder and harder to sort, let alone to verify.”

So how do we learn to sort what we can trust from what we can’t? Surely this is where increasingly easy-to-use news aggregators and related technologies come to the fore by making it easy to compare many different sources of a story. And is there a need for another tool that will map the sources of those feeds? (after all, how many blogs can you read where an item has actually come from one source via multiple routes?)

Technorati Tags World

Thought provoking piece by Tom O’Reilly on the way forward with web services (via EVHEAD).

Technorati Tags World

Top Ten Reasons To Witness Your Dad’s Demise (via Doc Searls) was written by Halley Suitt 48 hours before her father died - as she says “here’s my attempt to see the good in these bad times”. Reading it reminded me of my own father - he died in Jan 2000 - and just for a moment reflect on how in some ways he has been with me more often in my thoughts since he died. Since then I’ve started to notice the traits I have inherited from him, indeed as I grow into my 40’s I seem to become more like the father I remember. Here’s to fathers and sons everywhere. [updated 2002-04-10] By the way this article “Resolving Grief” by well-known NLP trainer/developer Steve Andreas describes a process that I have found tremendously useful in maintaining a good connection with my father since his death.

Technorati Tags NLP, World

Lots of sources report on the story of Sharon Duchesneau and Candace McCullough, the lesbian couple who selected to have a deaf child. (e.g. Guardian,Washington Post). Commentary varies. There is the expected mainstream and “family values” (e.g. Family Research Council) condemnation. I thought I might find some references in support of the couple’s action, but at time of writing Google hasn’t thrown any up.

An interesting viewpoint that neither condemns nor supports but expresses empathy with the desire of deaf parents to have a deaf child is put by Sharon Ridgeway, herself a deaf woman who with her deaf husband has given birth to a deaf baby. Her perspective is:

I didn’t have any feelings that I wanted a hearing or deaf child - I just wanted my child to be healthy. I say that because, as part of the deaf community, I in no way see deafness as a disability, but rather as a way into a very rich culture. Which is one of the reasons I was delighted to learn when I gave birth that my baby was deaf.

and goes on to liken deafness and the need to use sign language to speaking a specific language that may not be understood when you go abroad.

Where do I sit on this? For me I think Jeanette Winterson (not known for her conservatism!) in How would we feel if blind women claimed the right to a blind baby? sums it up when she says:

I believe that hearing, like sight, is a blessing, and if we are prepared to use technology to breed children we have deliberately disabled, it is not only the language of disability that will have to be radically reworked, but our entire moral perspective. What this case suggests is that we can do what we like to our children, even if the consequences of our actions are irreversible. As lesbians, the two women should know something about choice and personal freedom. They both practise as mental health specialists, so I hope they have a colleague who will be able to talk it through with two kids who turn up in 20 years, explaining that their mothers decided that they had to be deaf.

Technorati Tags World

The engineer who led the team to design the Lunar Module. Born June 14 1929; died March 23 2002. Obituary

Technorati Tags World

It’s the unspoken rule of state education: if you want your kids to do well, you’ve got to pay for private tutors. Which is fine for the well-off middle class, but what about those who can’t afford to?

Jenni Russell writes in today’s Guardian about the hidden system of private tuition that is underpinning the apparent success of many state schools, especially in London.
This sounds like a classic “Tragedy of the Commons” systems archetype - each person acting for their own perceived benefit actually contributes to the shared resource being depleted for all - the common resource is treated as inexhaustible until the whole system fails. I suspect that in this case the scenario is arising from a combination of parents wanting the best education for their children, coupled with a feeling that they cannot influence the quality of the state system, but they can (if they have the resources) directly influence the development of their child through application of private tutoring.
Before we can identify how we could change this we need to look at other systems issues - in fact in this case there appears to another archetype operating - “Success to the Successful”. This one is arising from the UK Government’s own school league table system, where in the name of improved educational standards, the exam results of schools are published in public league tables. Inevitably there is competition to secure places at the best-performing schools, a competition that is biased towards middle-class families that know how to “work the system”. As Russell explains in her article, once the child is at the school then pressure to keep up with peers leads to an increased liklihood of tutoring being used, which in turn boosts the exam results of the school, further fuelling the reinforcing loops of this system archetype. The result is that schools are being polarised between very (apparently) successful and very low-achieving. Inevitably the latter are also becoming “sinks” for economically disadvantaged groups of the population
Russell suggests one way to start to break these loops - make it compulsory for parents to report tutoring and for these figures to be published alongside the school exam results. That will of course be a start, beyond that will require a public debate that once again revisits the private-versus-public divide in our politics.

Technorati Tags World

In “Fourteen Forms of Fun” Pierre-Alexandre Garneau lists the broad categories of entertaining activities, in the context of better computer games design. Co-Working News suggest that these are also fundamental to the design of an effctive co-working experience too. They are:

• Beauty
• Immersion
• Intellectual Problem Solving
• Competition
• Social Interaction
• Comedy
• Thrill of Danger
• Physical Activity
• Love
• Creation
• Power
• Discovery
• Advancement and Completion
• Application of an Ability

Something to think about next time you are trying to fill that job vacancy!

Technorati Tags World

Excellent article in the Observer about the problems divorced and seperated fathers have in getting time with their children, and the way the UK courts seem institutionally biased against fathers.

Technorati Tags World

In The New McCarthyism George Monbiot says:

The charge of “anti-Americanism” is itself profoundly anti-American. If the United States does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as “anti-American” and investigated as potential terrorists. Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational discourse.

(snip)

If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one.

(snip)

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting.

Technorati Tags World

HowGoodInBed.com: is a web front end to a neural network. Every piece of data you add trains the network a little bit more.
So what does it do? It tries to correlate externally observable factors (such as age, height, build, hair, skin colouring, social behaviour, chattiness, happiness, physical activity level and intelligence) with sexual attributes (such as viviaciousness, willingness, location, adventurousness and skill).
You can enter the network either way - by describing someone you know to get an estimate of their bedroom rating, or vice versa - by describing what you want it will tell you the sort of person to look for. And of course there is a section to input your rating of real people you know to train the network a bit more. Try it and see!

Technorati Tags World

“Men Are Back” says Peggy Noonan. If she is right might this be the hidden benefit in all that is happening right now? Many writers have attributed a lot of the current ills in society to a world in which men, especially young under-educated men, have low self-esteem constantly reinforced by the messages they receive. So I join with Ms Noonan in extolling the virtues of the manly men who are putting New York back together. But towards the end of the article she then goes on to imagine John Wayne in Afghanistan swaggering around saying “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”. Shades here I think of the Roman matrons who told their sons to come back with their shield or on it - let’s not let this newly rediscovered manhood be distorted by the proxy war-hunger of yet another female in power….
(with thanks to Dave Winer)

Technorati Tags World

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) describe themselves as “a political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women’s rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan.”. Certainly they have some shocking photos of the reality of life in the land ruled by the Taliban.

Technorati Tags World

Oliver James writes in the Guardian to argue the case for adults to be playful. He reports on a study by the Gestalt Institute in Italy that studied flirtation and sex among 1,000 employees, and which concludes that office flirtation is good for relieving workplace anxiety and stress and improves relationships with your partner. Apparently the benefits to productivity and relationships are gained in proportion to the way in which flirting behaviour mimics the play of children in being goal-less fun. Where it goes horribly wrong is not through the intervention of “Big Brother” but when people get stuck into power-seeking and use flirtation and the manipulation of desire to reach work goals…
He concludes

“And now it’s official: playful flirtation is good for you. Po-faced anti-flirts must learn to have more fun - but nobody should forget that it is only a game.”

Technorati Tags World

George Monbiot is nudging our consciences again. In his article “Genocide or Peace” he notes

“the Afghan winter, like the Russian one, is absolute. Aid workers with long experience of Afghanistan report that after the first week of November, there is nothing you can do”

and…

One person requires 18kg of food per month to survive. If the UN’s projections are correct, and some 1.5 million manage to leave the country, around 6.1m starving people will be left behind. In five weeks, in other words, Afghanistan requires 580,000 tonnes of food to see its people through the winter, as well as tarpaulins, warm clothes, medicines and water supply and sanitation equipment. The food alone would fill 21,000 trucks or 19,000 Hercules transport planes. The convoy which reached Kabul to such acclaim yesterday has met barely a three thousandth of the country’s needs.

Technorati Tags World

Today I keep finding links that take me to this satirical site. Star piece for today (and surprisingly moving too) is “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule”. Read it.

Technorati Tags World

Tom Cunliffe at Time for tea pointed me to Annie Mole’s site called London Underground. No, not a trainspotter’s site, but a complete “microculture” - stuff that those of us who use the Tube every day take completely for granted. Or maybe it’s irony?

Technorati Tags World

Doc Searls refers to a list of former WTC tenants, and their corporate websites that in some cases seem untouched by events of the 11th, frozen where they were left in cyberspace. Hmmm.

Technorati Tags World

…is the title of a thought provoking article by George Monbiot (who characterises himself as an “objector”) For him objecting to war is not about appeasing terrorists, nor does he view the events of 11th September as anything other than “a crime against humanity”, but he does argue strongly that if we forgo justice then the terrorists have already won.

His approach to resolving this situation, if evidence can be assembled that points to Bin Laden is to “cut out the world war and go straight to Nuremburg”. To encourage the Afghani people to drive out the Taliban and Bin Laden so that they can be brought before the courts he advocates massive humanitarian aid to these starving millions to “show the people that, unlike the Taliban, the West is on their side”.

What I found particularly interesting about this article was that far from being the sort of simplistic “all war is wrong” stance that most of the Western governments have accused the “pacifists” of adopting it does not duck the issue of bringing the perpetrators to justice, and it does offer a route that may stabilise the region rather than ferment further strife.

The underlying assumption on which it rests is that the Afghan people resent the Taliban but are both too weak to oppose them and too scared of the West. That is the presumption that needs to be tested over the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags World

John Pilger wrote in the Guardian last week

In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.

…and further urged us in the UK to “behave responsibly” and turn away from the imperialistic response to focus instead on peace and justice for all people. He compares the religious fundamentalism of Bin Laden and the Taleban with the foreign policy fundamentalism of the West - both result in the death of innocent people.

His article has attracted considerable comment both for and against, including a response from Ken Barnes in Sacramento who states

“It’ s quite obvious that John Pilger just doesn’t understand your situation …a continued lack of action will just worsen an already grave condition. “

So who should we believe? John Pilger is a widely-respected journalist. I don’t know who Mr Barnes is, but I get a sense of honest belief from his argument that I suspect many Americans share.

Surely it must be simple - one of these commentators must be right and the other wrong? Or can we look beyond that and understand a world where they are both right? And if we do that, then what action should we advocate?

What do these commentators believe in order to say what they do?

What is the intention of that belief?

Can we find anything in common between those intentions?

And how can we incorporate those perspectives into our own beliefs in a useful way?

If we are going to keep our way of life, regardless of the actions of those who would destroy it, then I suggest we all need our own answers to these questions…

Technorati Tags World