Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

As you may have noticed, we recently experienced some riots in the UK.

Everything was fine here in Leeds. Someone got shot in Chapeltown, but that is just a normal evening in Chapeltown. In fact, rather than a riot, we had a march of peace while other cities were kicking off. Good old Yorkshire values present such destruction, as we just stick kettle on instead (and it’s important to note I didn’t say stick the kettle on.

Two things I found interesting though.

Firstly, the amount of people who turn out to be rather right wing when it affects their lives. We should lock them up, evict them, beat school children with a cane and possibly bring back the death penalty should Facebook comments and tweets be believed.

Obviously we shouldn’t do this, we want to live in a fear-free progressive society, not a police state.

The second is that, the remaining people, though relatively few in number, seemed to think that those who were behind the riots, shouldn’t take much responsibility at all. It’s due to underlying social issues and the forgotten generation, so it isn’t their fault.

Of course this is equally nonsense. Even if there are underlying social causes, which there are, but rather contributing factors than absolute causes, people need to take some responsibility for their actions and nothing that took place in the past week is justified – stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family is justified, looting a shop isn’t.

So basically, if you expressed an opinion on the riots, you were probably wrong about it ;). But I look forward to blog posts from other people explaining to me why my middle of the road approach is nonsense as well… :D.

It’s everyone’s favourite time of year again – the debate as to whether exams are getting easier.

Yet again of course, exam results have gone up and everyone is asking “have exams gotten easier?” The answer, of course, is yes. Clearly if such a large sample size as the whole of the United Kingdom, probably going on a million children, have consistently achieved higher grades than last year, the exams are getting easier.

The educational community will quickly argue that it is in fact teaching methods getting better, but this to me, seems irrelevant. Even if it is teaching methods getting better, which I’m not disputing – I’m sure they are, if the exams stay the same and don’t get more challenging in proportion to teaching methods getting better, then from the perspective of the child, the exam has got easier – with the same amount of effort and intelligent on their part, they are able to achieve a higher grade.

You can then argue that, given they have done better in the exam, they deserve that higher grade, but I disagree. Firstly, just because teaching methods have improved to allow them to do better, doesn’t mean that they have actually learnt more – maybe teaching methods have just improved in terms of teaching kids to pass exams and not actually learn more, which seems a very plausible scenario.

Secondly, even if they are more knowledgeable about a specific subject, doesn’t mean they necessarily deserve a higher grade. That sounds counter-intuitive at first, but in reality the main purpose of exams is to test how intelligent someone is and just because schools have found a way to better put knowledge into their head in order to pass an exam doesn’t really help that purpose. On that basis, the only reason that exam results should go up is if children are genuinely getting more intelligent – this could be the case but I haven’t seen any evidence to show it’s happening, at least at the same rate as exam results are improving.

Therefore, I would argue that the constant year on year improvement in exam performance, is a problem.

The solution, I would put forward is percentile banding of exam results. Rather than setting specific levels which a candidate has to reach, you put all the results together and give a certain percentile each grade – for example the top ten percent get A*, the next ten percent get an A, the next ten percent get a B and so on.

I’m not arguing this is a perfect system, and you probably need to have something in place where there isn’t a “fail” percentile, if possible, but below I will outline why I think it would arguably be a fairer system than the current one.

Primarily, it ends the debate on whether exams are getting easier. Every year exam results would stay the same, because the same percentage of people will get each grade, and it doesn’t matter if exams get easier or harder because the system sorts itself out. It is impossible to make exams the exact same difficulty every year because you have to change them and under the current system, children are unfairly punished if they happen to get a slightly harder exam and unfairly rewarded if they happen to get a slightly easier exam. This eliminates that.

Secondly, it stops the grade creep which leads to everyone getting grades closer and closer to the top and therefore makes it harder for universities and employers to distinguish between the top candidates.

There are criticisms of such a system, and I will deal with these now.

Firstly, it means that a child could lose a grade just because they end up in a year where everyone does well. This doesn’t really stand up because, because of the sample size involved, if everyone else does well it is more likely to be because the exam is slightly easier this year and therefore they haven’t lost a grade, they simply weren’t good enough to achieve it.

Indeed, sample size is important. When dealing with an entire year group, which as I previously stated I would imagine is heading towards a million children, the probability that an entire generation happened to suddenly be more intelligent than the year before, is far less likely than this year’s exams simply being a little easier.

You could also argue that everyone deserves the change to get an A* if they achieve the required level. There are two parts to this answer, first of all, they have target just like the current system – except, instead of a specific number of marks, their target is to reach the top ten percentile, but either way they have a set, fixed target to reach. Secondly, you could argue that if everyone in the country all worked really, really hard, they should all deserve to get A*.

This is true, but this has never, ever happened. Indeed, what is the probability that this would ever happen? The answer of course is negligable, when you are dealing with such a big sample size, it evens out and you don’t get disadvantaged by statistical anomlies as you do under the current system.

So…

You could replace the current system with a banded percentile system and ensure that the grades accurately reflect a candidates performance, irrelevant of how accurate the difficulty level of the exam was and without worry that they were disadvantaged due to circumstance because of the sample sizes involved. This will then allow employers and universities to accurately select the best candidates, which is the whole point of standardised testing after all. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s arguably fairer than the current one.

Unfortunately, there would be very little incentive to change because the current system plays into the favour of schools and governments, because it makes them look like they have done better every year. This is probably true, but at the disadvantage that it makes the achievement far less meaningful.

As we know from the whole religion business a lot of us have been involved in over the past few years, it is very difficult for someone to change their mind. It really takes a lot, especially when you’re emotionally invested in something.

I’ve been a champion of the Firefox cause for many years now and I think the Mozilla Foundation have done some great work.

But I can’t champion its name anymore.

Let’s face it, it’s just rubbish these days. Their rapid release cycles have brought around faster versions, but this has just made them increasingly unstable and still trailing the competition.

Firefox uses up more memory than anything else on my computer. Anything else! I run Zend Studio. That is based on the massively bloated Eclipse Studio, and then Zend came along and added a lot more bloat, and it still uses less memory than Firefox!

So, unfortunately, I’m cutting my ties.

I’ve already replaced my Firefox/Opera combination at work with a Chrome/Opera combination, and plan to do the same on my laptop as well. The only thing I have held out with on Firefox for this long was Firebug, and Chrome’s Developer Tools and Opera’s Dragonfly do just as good a job, once you get into them.

Farewell, Firefox, you broke my heart :(.

Last week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth from it’s final mission. The Space Shuttle programme was over.

Arguably this is another step backwards in the exploration of space. We haven’t put a man on the Moon since 1972 (39 years ago now), and now we’re not evening flying Space Shuttles. Did we just get really lucky in 1969, when we first walked on the Moon, and now we can’t replicate that success?

Actually, according to Dr Jim Wild, it was a good job that they missed some of the solar activity around at the time, which between some of the Apollo missions, reached fatal radiation levels. But that isn’t really a problem for quote unquote simple Earth orbiting.

The problem with the Space Shuttle programme was it was just too big, complex and expensive to run. Each mission cost around half a billion dollars and required an army of over 6,000 people to prepare for it. They also weren’t the safest of things – of the 135 missions flown, two of them didn’t come back – Challenger and Columbia.

I would probably argue that such a record isn’t too bad – we are still pushing back the boundaries of scientific exploration when it comes to space travel and the unfortunate fact is people die in accidents in the common workplace from time to time, let alone when exploring new frontiers.

However, despite its huge cost and army of safety engineers, the Space Shuttle can’t live up to the standards of its rival – the Soyuz. Russia’s Soyoz spacecraft has been in service since 1966 and in the entire time has only suffered four fatalities in a combination of two accidents.

Indeed, the Soyuz is now the sole manned space shuttle which will continue to send people into space to allow crew rotation of the International Space Station. So it’s not hard to see why the Space Shuttle programme is being brought to an end so a cheaper, easier craft for putting man into space can be developed.

But the one thing that the Soyuz has failed to do (this could be entirely inaccurate, I’m writing from a Western perspective and maybe millions of people elsewhere have been inspired by Soyuz) in the same way is to become an icon of space travel that has inspired a generation during its 30 year service.

I remember watching a Space Shuttle take off from Kennedy Space Centre in 1998 and remember thinking it’s magical. Actually, I thought, “wow, we sat in the boiling heat all day to see a little spec in the distance,” but I’m sure you can appreciate that would be a far less dramatic ending to this blog post.

We had a very interesting discussion at work today, when I brought up the idea that you should do away with separate competitions for men and women, and just have one unisex league.

Football is a great example of this. Women’s football is not a popular sport by pretty much any measure. Faye White, captain of the England team reportedly earns £16,000 a year. That is just above minimum wage and for the most part, even women in the top flight of their profession cannot earn anything other than what would be considered a semi-professional wage, having to have another job as well.

Women’s football is barely televised, if at all. Not to mention garnering little respect from people like FIFA president Sepp Blatter who suggested that women should “wear tighter shorts and low cut shirts… to create a more female aesthetic” (and you didn’t think it was possible to lose any more respect for Sepp Blatter 😉 ).

There is a simple solution to this problem.

Just combine men’s and women’s football into one unified league structure.

This is much more inline with equal opportunities. At the moment, women are absolutely and unreservedly banned from competing in the top flight of football of earning a professional football’s wage, entirely because of their gender. Even if a woman was the best player in the world, she would be limited to playing in a league which earns less than half what I do and receiving very little exposure.

Allowing both genders to complete in the same league means that everyone gets the chance to complete on a level playing field, based on their ability.

Now, to address some of the concerns.

Firstly, the idea that women aren’t as strong as men. This is somewhat of an issue in football, but far more clear in other sports (boxing or hammer throw for example). But this doesn’t matter. When it comes to equal opportunities, you need to give everyone the same chance, and some people are always going to be better than overs.

You could argue it is better for a woman to compete on the top flight of women’s football than a lower tier of a mixed gender league system, but I disagree. Separating the leagues presents a ceiling to which they cannot rise above, no matter how prestigious people might try to suggest it is.

Secondly, the idea that women aren’t as good as men. It is true that the top flight of women’s football isn’t the same standard as men’s, but that could be down to a number of factors. Women are unable to complete in professional men’s football, so don’t have the opportunity to play week in week out against top competition. Society generally has a bias towards men playing football (not helped by the fact that only men are allowed to play in the top leagues). Statistically, more men play football than women, so statistically you’re also going to get a better standard.

But none of these reasons say that women can’t play football as well as men, it just says that in the current setup in society, they generally don’t. But again, it presents a level playing field it you give everyone the same chance.

I think it is also worth considering that a lot of people simply aren’t going to make it, female or male. You can make the argument that women would never make it into the World Cup squad in a combined league, but then neither would I. I’m not that good at football. I used to play for my school team, I trained, but I was never that good, let alone world standard.

Yet nobody says, “well we should have a separate world cup for geeks, because they can never compete with real men.” Why? Because we’re given the same opportunity. If I had the skill we could be up there. Whereas a woman who did have the skill, couldn’t.

Finally however, you don’t have to have to accept it as a perfect solution. It isn’t. Women would really, really struggle to make it into the top flight of football (though we can’t say for sure because women don’t have the same opportunities to train up through the professional system as men do).

But, all it has to do is be better than the current system.

Even if women only made it into league one or two, they would still earn more than they can at the moment. They would be able to compete in games which were televised more and gain far more exposure, encouraging more girls to participate in sport. Finally, it would make things more equitable because everyone would have the chance to compete, based on ability, in the same competition.

I’ve recently re-read Ray Kurzweil “The Singularity is Near”, which is nothing else, really enlivens your passion in AI. One of the many interesting points made in the book was the idea that we will eventually be able to grow new body parts in a lab.

This has one great advantage for animal welfare – the idea that we could grow lumps of meat in a lab.

This would essentially end the need for vegetarianism.

For vegetarians like myself, who really, really love meat, this really would be a utopian future. Vegetarianism is based on the idea that it is wrong to kill conscious animals for food (some so called vegetarians say it is because of the taste, but these people aren’t real vegetarians), and this would entirely get round that.

We could eat our lab grown meat, without having the ethical implications that you where causing the death of an animal by doing so.

Of course, people would object that they didn’t want to eat meat grown in a test tube. But then, the fact that people can stomach meat now is mainly thanks to the lack of thought put into the factory farming and slaughter methods already in use.

Other advantages of doing this include:

* It will, at least after the initial development, be much more cost effective that having to rear an entire animal for an extended period of time and use less resources to satisfy our meat needs. Meat is incredibly inefficient, the amount of vegetarian food it takes to feed one animal to produce some meat is huge.

* Given the reduced cost and increased efficiently, there would be more food available for the third world, both vegetarian and meat.

* While we’re doing this, it’s a lot easier to generically engineer (or even using traditional refinement methods) to make the meat higher quality.

This post is aimed primarily at my vegetarian friends.

I’m going to put this forward as a supposition: you believe that for a number of possible reasons including the good feeling from being ethical, the health benefits associated with avoiding meat, the fact that meat can be expensive (though some vegetarian alternatives are also) it is better to be a vegetarian.

Surely it follows then that if only more people tried it, more people would become vegetarian and this would be good because you think vegetarianism is the best, most ethical position.

So how about this idea: Try Vegetarianism Week. It is a week (or a fortnight, or a month, it might not work over such a short time period) in which one of your friends gives up meat and tries vegetarianism, and in exchange, for period of time, you eat meat.

This would mean that many more people try vegetarianism and hopefully some of them like it and stick with it and as a result, we’ve won a fresh convert.

Of course the next likely question is “why do I have to eat meat instead of them?” The reason is that most meat eaters are arrogant bastards about it, using quips like “we’re naturally meat eaters” and “I’m a real man” and “why don’t you eat eat, you giraffe, you!”

Indeed, there is nothing most of them would enjoy more than a vegetarian eating meat. That’s the hook, that is what sells them. Most of them would never try vegetarianism (otherwise they would probably be vegetarians), but breaking a deal with them such as this could finally get them to give it a go.

Secondly, it doesn’t increase the number of animals being killed for food by you eating meat for that period because they will have stopped eating meat, so it balances out (and hopefully in the long term reduces the number of animals breed and killed for food because they will hopefully like being a vegetarian and convert).

Thoughts?

Btw, to my non-vegetarian friends, just as a quick gauge of its popularity, who would be interested in this?

I finally got round to watching the first episode of Secrets of the Superbrands which looks at technology.

I’ll be honest, the presenter, Alex Riley, really failed to endear himself to me with his surely attitude. I’m sure he’s an intelligent guy who on purposely plays the fool with comments like “iPhones, and iPads and 3gs and stuff like that.”

In fact, these go on and on with comments like “that’s a massive electromagnet, so if I brought in anything that was metal it would fly over there and rip Adam’s face off” or “is there any time when you think eww, it’s a brain, it’s horrible” to which the woman succinctly answers “no.”

Anyway, as we are all aware, marketing these days is brilliant. It’s amazing. Remember the last time you went round Tesco – did you buy something that wasn’t on your list? Buy an extra one because it was two for one? That isn’t an accident. You didn’t go out to buy that stuff, but you did, and it might sound like a simple thing, but millions of pounds of Tesco’s money goes into making sure it happens, every time you walk in that door.

Apple especially have some amazing marketing too. People hang off Steve’s every word.

But I really felt the show suggested that Apple were somehow tricking us into buying their products. Missing the point – that Apple produce really, really good products. So they should be – they are really expensive. But isn’t that just how the world works normally? You pay more, you get a better product? I don’t buy Apple products because it’s a cult, I buy them because I have enough disposable income to buy better products.

As for his treatment of Microsoft, there seemed to be disdain in his voice when he said they spend $5.5 billion on research and development. Of course R&D helps their profits in the long term, but it’s also giving back to the community (OpenOffice is great for example, because they just copied Microsoft Office which is great is because of all the money Microsoft spent making it great).

Also some of it was just factually incorrect. Microsoft’s income isn’t dwindling, they’re setting new quarterly records.

There is nothing wrong with his Nokia 6330 Classic but it’s just silly to take an attitude of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” when new phones are adding some amazing new features bringing you better communication to those you care about and access to the sum of all human knowledge.

As for, us getting better software because they get our details to target ad at, surely that is actually a good thing? How many boring ads do you sit through on TV ad breaks? Most of them don’t target you, so there is no point you looking at them. What if you could just watch the one advert and then get back to your programme? That is what targeted ads offer.

And seriously the presenter was very, very annoying. No surprise he labels himself as an agnostic. And who asks the man behind Kinect if he was abused as a child? He’s like annoying, offensive, shit version of Louis Theroux.

Anyway, rant over lol.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near and having read the section about how the brain rewrites itself as you learn got me thinking. This is nothing new of course, it’s basic brain biology, but chancing on the subject again made me wonder.

If you can reinforce a pattern in your brain simply be repeating the activity over and over again, and this doesn’t even including physical actions but can also be done by thinking a certain idea, can you by mere repetition, implant a false idea in your head?

If you can, the consequences are obvious.

But this seems to be a hypothesis that is quite testable. What would happen for example, if we all collectively decided to believe a lie. If say, all the members of the A-Soc circle, picked a false statement to collectively believe, spent all their time thinking it was true and telling each other it was true for social reinforcement.

Of course, it could well fall flat on it’s face. Because you would know it wasn’t true, you could well spend all your time thinking “I’m pretending to believe this, even though I know it isn’t true” and therefore strongly reinforce the pattern that you know it secretly isn’t true.

Still, it might be an interesting project for someone to undertake.

After the HSoWY meeting last Thursday, we headed towards The George for a few drinks. Unfortunately (or should I saw fortunately) The George was closed. So we headed on to Millenium Square, to hit the Cuthbert Brodrick.

While I will admit that it was a little nosier than I was expecting, we soon found a nice quite place to sit down outside. And the advantage of going to Cuthbert was the drinks were both cheap and varied.

Not to mention that when I ordered my ham, egg and chips, it cost £2.10. £2.10! You probably couldn’t make it that cheap just based on buying the raw ingredients, let alone the labour costs which could come to 20 times that once I had gone to the shops, cooked it and cleaned up.

There really is no justification for disliking ‘Spoons.