More rich kids going to university

So they have noticed that the average income of the parents of graduating lawyers, medics, etc has risen sharply over the last 25 years. And they (BBC) interview two parents who say it is too expensive, the second of which says he sent his first daughter but can’t afford to send his second.

So what is the initiative to address the imbalance?

Let’s have lots of career advisors, outreach from universities, role models, etc. to change the expectations that kids from poorer homes have.

Excuse me, what is the main thing that has happened in the last 15 years? Tuition fees. What were the parents saying? The problem is money.

Were tuition fees or financial issues even mentioned in the subsequent discussion? No.

So lets have an army of people changing the expectations of kids from poor families that their parents can’t possibly match financially – that’s a nice recipe for familial harmony.

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OKCON 2009

Where do I start?

Having done rather a lot of traveling this month, I was very reluctant to spend 12 hours or more on a Saturday going to London for this event. But as my name was listed as a speaker, and I knew that other Linked Data people were likely to cry off (for similar reasons), I felt it would be rude not to attend.

So what happened?

Well, I got there nicely (less than 90 mins drive), which was good.

But after that things weren’t so good. The talks on development (that is, development as in Aid and Development, it turned out), were OK to start with – sort of how Open Knowledge being made available to poor people about all sorts of things might help them. But it soon got quite bizarre.

A presentation, complete with baby crawling around a game that a Serbian group had made, was an example of how Open Knowledge might empower “Independent Thinkers” in some way. Well yes, but it didn’t need that long to get the idea – where was the chair? And where was the chair when the same guy later came back to tell us a bunch of similar stuff again? “Haven’t you spoken before?” – well, yes, he had.

And then we were treated to a discussion on how a Buddhist (I think) financial system based on coupons and things would be much better for the world, by turning our economies back to the middle ages (his words). Perhaps good fun, but excuse me if I find it hard to see the link to Open Knowledge.

Quite a lot of these presentations were quite interesting from the point of view of ideas, but often lacked much idea of the technology which might help them deliver it. Typical of the delivery platform was “We will use a wiki”, or “We think Flickr might be good to spread this”. Well, Flickr may be effective, but is hardly an open system, and there were a bunch of people in the room who actually might have some useful input on this. These Linked Data and Semantic Web people were wondering whether there would ever be time to discuss the topic for which they had come.

As it approached 4pm, I guess, we were told that we would be strictly limited to 5 mins – great to have some chairing, but would have been even better to have it for the previous 4 hours. I pointed out to the organiser (Rufus Pollock) that, as I was first up, I would need to introduce the idea of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, and perhaps needed a bit of extra time. The response that there would be such an introduction in the session at 5pm beggared belief – I could give my presentation before the topic was introduced? When I pointed this out (twice), the response was that “it should only take a minute to introduce the idea of Linked Data and the Semantic Web”. No suggestion of, for example, Mark doing his introduction from the 5pm panel session first.

So Rufus Pollock seemed to think that a sensible presentation that made my trip worthwhile could consist of:

1. 1 min complete introduction to Linked Data and the Semantic Web to a largely non-technical audience;

2. 2 mins on the use of RKBExplorer system to Open Knowledge

3. 2 mins on the problem of coreference in the Web, and an infrastructure to solve it to facilitate Open Knowledge.

I hadn’t expected much time, as I knew it would be “5-10 mins” per talk, and I might in the end have only been given one talk, but 5 mins without any time for discussion or questions was just insulting.

And not just me – I was followed by Sebastian Hellman on Dbpedia, who had flown in from Leipzig specially; he got the same treatment.

Paola Di Maio is probably glad she didn’t make the trip from Strathclyde, although she put in a lot of work constructing and sending slides, with voice annotation, in the expectation that someone would be able to show them for her (no-one did).

I confess I left before the end, about 5:30pm, as I thought that if I felt I had reclaimed some of my Saturday evening I may not feel as pissed off the next day – it was a shame, as I’m sure the panel presentations were good, and I might not see them elsewhere. Also, by this time I had a £40 parking ticket (the first real one I have ever had) for being 3 mins late back to my car during the afternoon, so my equilibrium was crumbling.

Of course, on the way out I passed a whole load of the Development people who had been speaking all day, chatting on the stairs, and not bothering to listen to Tom and Jeni, etc..

So what do I think? I’m sure lots of people enjoyed themselves, doing the stuff they do for their personal interest or hobbies. However, I and some others were simply doing this as part of our jobs – if the Open Knowledge Foundation wanted people like me to get involved, then this was not the way to do it. I am happy to apply my technology (and even expertise) to any area; but I choose carefully who the people are.

On this evidence, the Open Knowledge Foundation are the last people I would get involved with – not a clue how to get people who don’t actually care (like me) to further their cause; or perhaps they want to prove me wrong?

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The usual lie about privatisation

“It will give the Royal Mail greater commercial freedom and enable it to open talks with continental rivals” (Mandelson in Sunday Times, 2008-12-14)

Er, excuse me, this is not the only way. Simply changing the treasury rules, etc would allow this to happen. Any lack of commercial freedom is simply because the government imposed rules say that state-owned companies should not have commercial freedom.

Exactly the same could be achieved by running an organisation such that the government is the sole shareholder. In fact, I think the newly-nationalised banks are being run like this, and apart from the tendency of the government/shareholder to interfere, are not losing out on commercial freedom.

The usual canard.

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Beds I have to make

You arrive in a poshish hotel like the one I am in now, and the bed looks all nice, with a cover on.

But then you lift the cover off, or rather drag it off because it seems like it is nailed down all the way round, and find no such thing.

There is a bolster, or whatever it is, which stretches half way down the bed. But worse, below that is a duvet; now this duvet is a very nice duvet, but for some reason I completely fail to understand, it is folded in half and placed sideways. I am not 1.17 meters tall, and I do not need to sleep under a doubled up duvet.

Just put the bed in a state so that I can sleep in it – I really don’t want to have to make my bed before I can sleep in it.

And tomorrow night I bet I will have to go through the same palaver.

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Headlines like “Third of Muslim Students Back Killing”

“Third of Muslim Students Back Killing”

Doesn’t this headline (and maybe the accompanying article) from the newspaper* make your blood boil? It does mine, but only when I compare it with the full report on which it is based+.

Let us look at the first paragraph of the Conclusion of the report upon which the article is based:

“This report shows that British Muslim students hold a diverse and broad range of opinions. The majority of Muslim students have tolerant ideas towards other minorities, reject violence in the name of their faith and support Britain’s secular and democratic society as well as its system of governance.”

The Introduction also says:
“The results show that Muslim students hold opinions and attitudes which are broad and varied, giving cause both for hope and concern.”

Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?

Continue reading “Headlines like “Third of Muslim Students Back Killing””

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MacBook Pro neon light

My MacBook Pro has a neon light on the catch. It’s off when the machine is awake with the lid open, and on when the machine is awake with the lid closed (I think!). Some tosser in Apple obviously thought it was a good idea, and probably got a prize for it. But it goes against one of the simplest and perhaps fundamental engineering design principles. If you want to indicate the state of a machine to a user, you do not use something that has a temporal element.

This is why the traffic lights in the US are badly designed, while the UK ones are not. If you are approaching the lights in the US, and you see an amber light, you don’t know whether it is about to turn green or red; in the UK it will be about to turn red. Simple innit? (If it was red and amber it would be about to turn green.)

So if I glance at my little neon light, can I tell if the machine is asleep? No. I need to stand and stare at it for a while, and probably wait for it to go through a couple of pulsing cycles before I am sure (and I needed to do this because Apple screwed up the firmware so the machine didn’t always sleep).

And apart from that, why do I need a bright pulsing light in my hotel room? If I wanted to stay awake I wouldn’t go to bed.

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File types needing extensions.

I’m asked for a document to be Text, PDF or PS. So I fire up vi to make sure I’m not getting any extra formatting stuff in my text file and submit it. I get back a message saying the type is not permitted, as only: “plain text (.txt), Adobe (.pdf), or postscript (.ps)” are allowed. I gave you plain text, you dolt. In fact, I guess I could have given you a tiff image file , as long as it had a txt extension.

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