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The Washington Post has an article about handwriting, apparently for some university entrance exams in the US 85% of students write their essays in block letters. The article claims that students who have poor writing skills demonstrate lesser ability to construct sentences – and claims that this indicates that there is a link between hand-writing and mental processes.
While the article didn’t cover the evidence in much detail I was left wondering whether there were any tests of teaching students to touch type and then assessing them on the same tests. I suspect that increasing the ability to record text in any way would increase the sentence length and the use of long words. While students who can only write slowly will have an incentive to write more briefly.
My handwriting is quite poor, I was never able to write quickly or particularly legibly and since completing university I have had little incentive to improve my writing skills. When laptops became cheap enough for me to own one (in 1998) my hand-writing skills decreased and when I started seriously using a PDA about a year ago they decreased again.
I don’t believe that my writing skills (in terms of conveying ideas and instruction to other people) have declined during this time. In fact the steadily increasing amount of writing that I have done has improved my skills a lot.
I think that children should be taught cursive writing, but it shouldn’t be regarded as especially important – or more important than touch typing! Then there’s the issue of the Dvorak keyboard. If the government wanted to improve the efficiency of the nation (which is what they claim to be doing) then maybe teaching all students touch-typing on a Dvorak keyboard and subsidising the purchase of such keyboards for everyone would be better than some of the current ideas in education. Dvorak keyboards would certainly be better than flag-poles!
News reports indicate that hand-writing skills are decreasing dramatically in Japan due to word-processors – and a significant number of students are never learning how to write any significant portion of the Japanese letters. But the sky doesn’t seem to be falling on them either.
Mark Greenaway writes about having bad hand-writing and is apparently considering some sort of remedial course. I have to wonder how good Mark’s touch-typing skills are and whether he would benefit more from improvement in that area.
One thing that I don’t like is blogs that provide no method of feedback. When I want to read something with little or no possibility of feedback I’ll read one of the many newspapers that are available.
Craige McWhirter’s blog is one of them. The CAPTCHA system doesn’t work (I must have tried at least 20 times with both Konqueror and Iceweasel) and he doesn’t provide an email address. He does provide a mobile phone number which is handy for people in the same country.
AKISMET works fairly well on my blog and makes the spam quite managable. As the number of legit comments are not that great I manually approve them thus avoiding having a spam ever appear on my blog – showing a spam encourages more of the same.
The comment I wanted to make on his post was to reference my previous blog post on this topic and suggest that one thing that can be done is to improve public transport which will increase the area of land available to people who work in central city areas. This means that the land prices can decrease and housing prices will follow.
Another issue is that he suggests assisting people in paying rent. While this may sound like a good thing the current system of Negative Gearing is designed to decrease rent, but instead merely increases the price of owning a house.
news.com.au reports that MS has hired former Miss Australia Erin McNaught to sex up the computer industry’s geeky image and describes her as a “University Drop-Out” (later in the article it’s revealed that she deferred her course so she might end up completing it). Hiring her is supposed to demonstrate that IT careers have “gone from geek to chic”.
There are lots of more professional ways of demonstrating that idea. One way is to compare the median income of IT people ($54,422 according to payscale.com) to the median for the Australian population ($13,200 to $20,000 for females and $31,200 to $41,600 for males in 2006 according to the ABS) which clearly indicates that IT people get paid more than most Australians.
Another way is to use adverts such as the Apple adverts for Mac vs PC, and Novell adverts for Linux vs Mac vs PC. Note how the female Linux character in the Novell adverts is cool and cute while still keeping all her clothes on.
Yet another possibility would be to find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion. MS is one of the largest IT companies in the world and has a large presence in Australia, surely they have enough female employees that they can find someone to do this promotion who isn’t famous for wearing a bikini!
Hiring a model who is famous for swim-suit work to promote the computer industry isn’t going to affect the career choices of any but the least talented male students and if anything will scare off female students (who are already under-represented in the computer industry). The fact that the news.com.au story included a set of pictures of her in swim-suits and lingerie with the title Erin McNaughty really says it all.
It seems to me that Danni Ashe (wikipedia link) is better qualified for the MS job – after all she has even been recognised by the Guinness book of records for her work in sexing up the computer industry. Unlike Erin she has created web sites herself and started a very successful online business. Surely if being famous for wearing bikinis makes Erin suitable then being famous for wearing no clothes at all makes Danni even more suitable! :-#
But seriously, has anyone ever hired the Chippendales (wikipedia) to advertise in the computer industry? There is a reason why that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and the same reason would apply to hiring an ex miss-Australia.
Updated to fix a bad link.
- We always underestimate the number of stupid people
- The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person
- A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself) — or even with some resultant self-damage
- Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people invariably constitutes an expensive mistake.
- A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence
- Stupid people don’t know they are stupid
The above has been floating around the net for a while. While it makes an interesting read I think that having a boolean criteria of labelling someone as stupid is not necessarily accurate. While there are a small number of people who are stupid, there are many more people who are good at some things and stupid when they act outside their area of expertise. There is a saying “never take investment advice from your dentist” which is apparently due to the incidence of con-artists targetting wealthy people (such as dentists) who sometimes then pass on the bad advice to their customers.
One stupid thing that I did a few years ago was to spend more effort in choosing a mobile phone than on choosing a car. I was totally happy with my mobile phone but not totally happy with my car – and the car cost a lot more… Of course the difference between pure stupidity and tactical stupidity (for want of a better term) is that a smart person who is about to do something stupid can generally be persuaded not to do it with a logical argument. If someone had pointed out to me the fact that the amount of time spent on background research for a decision should be in some way proportional to the amount of money involved (maybe proportional to the log of the value) then I would have been convinced.
So for rule 4 maybe it would be best to say taking advice from someone in an area where they are stupid is a mistake. For rules 5 and 6, if someone is known to be smart in other areas then tactical stupidity may be overlooked (until it’s too late).
Update: Don Marti commented with this link http://www.math.wisc.edu/~miller/old/incomp.txt about incompetent people being unable to judge their own level of incompetence as further evidence for point 6.
I have created a new blog page for suggestions for future posts. If you want to suggest future topics that you would like me to write about (or vote for topics that are already on my list) then please make a comment on that page.
Also I now have enough post pages that they don’t all display at less than a 1080 pixel window width (with the fonts used on my system at least). I guess I need to use a theme that supports multiple rows of pages or hack my CSS to increase the minimum window size. Any advice on WordPress themes in this regard would be appreciated.
In response to a blog conversation on Planet Debian, Wouter Verhelst writes about voting tactics in which he claims that Instant-Runoff (wikipedia) (the method used in Australia to elect members of the house of representatives) is broken.
I have read the Wikipedia review and neither it nor my previous understanding of Instant-Runoff leads me to believe that it is broken or prone to tactical voting problems.
The main tactical voting issue in Australian elections is to give first preference to a small party (such as The Greens) in a seat where there is almost no chance of the small party winning. The idea is to have the vote effectively be a vote for whichever of the two major parties the voter prefers while also sending a message (by the first-preference votes which are widely publicised) as to their desires. If a major party wins a seat while 20% of the first preferences went to the Greens then they might find it an incentive to try and get some Green policies adopted if they want to win the next election (whether this actually works is debatable but it is a fact that people try it).
There are many people who don’t understand how the Australian voting system works and believe that they have to vote for one of the major parties to avoid a “wasted vote”. This is not due to the voting system but due to American media – and ill-educated Australians who can’t work out which parts of the news apply to them. Wouter has an advantage in living in a country where English is not the primary language – English news does not directly concern him and his country-men can probably work out that English-language voting instructions should not be followed!
The condorcet.org site has a useful analysis which demonstrates one theoretical flaw in IR, but realistically getting the average voter to use Condorcet would essentially be an IQ test as a pre-requisite to voting (numbering all the candidates in order for IR is difficult enough).
The fact that an election system is not theoretically fair is not a valid criticism unless there is a viable alternative which is better. If the lower house is to actually represent the people of each electorate (which is rarely the case nowadays) then IR seems to be the best option. If members of the lower house are not expected to represent geographic regions then Wouter’s advocacy of proportional representation makes sense.
As for the Australian Senate, the voting system for that is far too complex and I think that as a matter of principle any voting system which can not be understood by the majority of voters is wrong. A good case could be made for proportional representation in the senate.
Update: In response to Wouter’s post – tactical voting that doesn’t change the outcome of the election and merely sends a message to a political party is OK IMHO. But if you convince enough people that tactical voting is the only option in the US then the result may change.
What do you think is the most important single-sentence of advice that you can offer to someone who wants to contribute to the free software community? I intentionally didn’t mention what area or type of advice or what “contribute” means, interpret it how you wish and give multiple answers for different interpretations if that seems appropriate to you.
If you had the opportunity to say one sentence to someone who knows about computers and free software (EG they have used both Linux and Windows and done a small amount of programming) to convince them that they should join the free software team, what would it be?
Writing an essay about your thoughts is fine (and I’m sure that many readers of my blog could easily write an interesting essay on each of those topics). But please preface it with what you consider to be the most important sentence.
Please either track-back to this blog post or post a comment with a URL of your post (comments are moderated but I usually approve them in less than 12 hours and often much faster – I approve all sensible non-spam comments). If you only offer two sentences (and decide not to write an essay) then the comment section can contain your entire answer.
Note that by Serious Free Software Contributors I am referring to people who feel that they are serious about it. If free software matters to you and you go out of your way to help the cause in the way that best suits your abilities then it means you.
I will write another post with a summary of what I consider to be the most interesting responses (including links to any blog posts with long answers).
PS This post is not what I consider to be a “meme”.
A common pattern in blog communication is referred to as a Meme. Here is one example of the commonly used definition of the term as applied to blogs. One common factor that doesn’t seem to get directly mentioned much when people define the term (but which always seems to be mentioned in passing) is the idea of tagging people. So the definition of a meme as applied to blogs seems to be a silly question that you answer in a blog post and then request that some other bloggers (usually 5) answer as well.
At the end of this post I have included the dictionary definition of the term (here is the Wikipedia definition).
I believe that it is incorrect to call a question such as “which superhero do you most identify with” a meme. Instead I think that there is a Memeplex associated with such posts. One meme is that when someone “tags” you (requests that you answer a question) it should be considered an honour (someone in the blog-sphere likes you enough to ask you random questions in a public forum). Another meme is that such discussion is a good thing (although an increasing number of people in the more serious part of the blog-sphere oppose this). A final one that is apparent to me (I’m sure that there are others) is that so-called memes and lazyweb posts are the same thing (I believe this to be wrong).
I believe that lazyweb posts if written about interesting topics can contribute significantly to the community knowledge base. I also believe that chain lazyweb posts (here is a link to the only such post I’ve made so far) can also contribute if created in a sensible manner. Chain posts that don’t require any thought or input from the person re-posting them (EG “please post this message to all your friends so that they can know of the terrible war/famine/earthquake/whatever in some foreign part of the world”) are of course quite useless (you can make a post of links once a month if you want to spread the news about such things).
Now I agree that some amount of conversation among bloggers in a community that is personal and not directly related to the main topics of discussion is good for building the community.
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:
meme
/meem/, n.
[coined by analogy with `gene’, by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
PS This evening I had planned to go to a LUV meeting and see my friend Andy Fitzsimon (blog) give a talk about Inkscape (for which he is famous). I also had a day off work, so it was going to be a day of non-stop fun. But instead I got some sort of cold/flu, stayed in bed for much of the day, missed the meeting, and was late in my blog post. This sucks.
I’ve created a page about translating my blog. Currently it has the following text:
If you would like to translate any posts from my blog to a language other than English then please feel free to do so. I demand that any translations correctly cite me as the author of the original English version and give a permanent link to the original post, but I don’t expect that this will cause any inconvenience.
I also request that anyone who translates one of my posts gives me permission to do whatever I wish with the translated text (I want to mirror all translations of my work on my own site). I am unsure of what legal rights I have to demand this and have not yet considered whether I have a moral right to demand it. But I believe that it is the nice thing for a translator to do and hope that everyone who translates one of my posts will do so.
Also I may grant permission for translations of my posts to appear on sites with Google advertising or other commercial use. I won’t rule out the possibility of assigning monopoly rights on commercial use of the translations of my posts to specific individuals or organisations.
Does anyone have suggestions for improvements?
One of my multi-lingual friends suggested that I should be concerned about the risk of bad translations. But I desire to have people read my posts and I believe that this is a risk I just have to accept – I’m sure that there are enough multi-lingual people in the blog space to find such errors and help the translator correct them.
Also I have to consider the best way to mirror the translations. I could add them to the same permalink page (producing long pages with multiple translations of my best posts), I could create a new post (resulting in English-language Planet installations getting posts that most people can’t read), or I could use a separate blog installation for the translations.
Please comment if you have any suggestions. I’ll write another post in future with the solutions that I select and some analysis of the issues.
Update: Thanks for the nice post Victor. It was seeing my blog in the list of “Enlaces Interesantes” on Victor’s blog that inspired my post about translation.
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about pre-fabricated houses from Ikea and suggests that they could solve the housing price problems. The article states that in the UK the pre-fab houses would be more than 25% cheaper than regular houses in the UK.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the introduction of Ikea pre-fabricated houses in the Australian market (which they currently don’t plan to do) will reduce house prices by 25%. This won’t solve the problem. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 the median income for males was $600-799 and for females was $250-399. A couple who are both at the high-end of that scale would gross $1200 per week, this would possibly allow them to pay $1600 per month towards a mortgage, if they were in the middle of that scale then they would gross $1000 per week which might allow paying $1000 per month towards a mortgage. With current interest rates that would make any mortgage greater than $200K unreasonably difficult for a couple at the high end of the median income range to repay and a mortgage greater than $120K would be unreasonably difficult for a couple in the middle of the range.
The ABS median house prices show that the cheapest places to buy houses in 2005 were Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin with median prices of $208K, $209K, and $216K respectively. So a couple who are both at the high end of the median income range can only afford to buy a house in the three cheapest cities in Australia (which are also not densly populated). The two largest cities are Sydney and Melbourne which had median house prices of $363K and $300K respectively, they would not be affordable to a couple who are anywhere near the median income – not even with a 25% reduction in price!
I believe that people on a median income should be able to afford a median prices house – the majority of Australian families should be able to afford the majority of houses!
The above analysis only covers families wanting to purchase a house with two incomes. The “traditional” Australian idea of having the man earn the majority of all the money that is required while his wife looks after the children (which is a bad thing for other reasons) is obviously dead. A man who earns 50% more than the median income will have trouble paying for a house while supporting children if his wife doesn’t also work. It is generally accepted that anyone who doesn’t purchase a house before having children will never own a house. It seems strange that the major political parties talk about wanting to support families and to support “the Aussie battler”, but won’t do anything serious about house prices (which is the most significant issue for such people). Giving a first home owners grant of $7000 (which is less than 3% of the required money).
One possible way of alleviating this problem would be to remove Negative Gearing (or at least modifying it to encourage construction rather than buying existing properties). Then the price of properties that are rented out would reflect the rent value instead of being significantly over-priced.
Another possibility would be to make public transport more efficient and with a wider scope. The desirability of a location is to a large extent determined by how much time/money/effort is required to get to the centre of the nearest city for work. Making the mass public transport support larger numbers of people (by larger and more frequent trains, trams, and buses), have shorter journeys (by a more frequent service to reduce waiting and express and connecting services where possible), and more routes (by building new train or tram lines every time a new major road is built) would significantly increase the desirability of properties that are further from the centre of cities. That would decrease the market pressure on prices of properties that are a currently 30 minutes or one hour travel from the centre. It would also be a significant benefit if people who currently spend 30 minutes commuting could spend only 20.
If public transport was improved and negative gearing was abolished then I expect that there would be increased demand for new houses that are further away from city centres, and that pre-fabricated houses would make a significant difference in the price. But while the majority of the value of a house is contained in the land that it rests on I can’t see that making a difference.
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