We’re all a bit religious

Ever said “Touch wood”; crossed your fingers; avoided the crack in a paving stone; read a horoscope; not put up an umbrella indoors; avoided walking under a ladder? (Well possibly not the last if there was someone up there, but why did you do it?)

Most people find they have some of these comfortable little routines, and in fact they are largely harmless, perhaps helping us through some of the bits of the world we find painful or don’t understand.

Mind you, I am pleased to say people are sufficiently self-aware about them to keep them to themselves, as they realise they are groundless, and they would be rather embarrassed to let others think they used them to organise their lives. Well, possibly with the exception of astrology.

Such things are generally referred to as superstitions, although religions is used for the more complex.

Some people are more superstitious than others, but I like to try understand them by putting them all on the same spectrum. To do that we need to use the same term, and I prefer to use the superstitious scale, as religion comes with a lot more baggage, especially at the less complex end of the scale.

So why don’t you try this?

Whenever anyone uses the word religious, simply rerun the words substituting superstitious. If you find the word god, make it a favourite planet (I tend to use dog myself, as it is easiest).

“He is very religious and prays to God every day” becomes “He is very superstitious and prays to Saturn every day”.

“Tony Blair called in superstitious leaders for consultation this morning.”

Sounds to me that is what he did?

So now I can talk about how superstitious people are, and can seek to understand the comparison between religion, astrology, homeopathy, crossed-fingers, etc. within a nice consistent framework.

This is good, because it helps me to understand the people I am interacting with, and that is always good for human relations.

Flattr this!

Consume within 3 days

What a waste.

I buy a mature cheese: “After opening consume within 3 days”. How could a cheese possibly go bad after 3 days? I might put it in the oven or under my armpit to make it rot, but even then I would only have to cut off the bit that had gone a bit rotten. Did nobody tell the people who wrote this that cheese was invented to preserve the goodness from bad times to good?

A month later, and I’m still happily hacking off a bit now and then.

But lots of (quite rightly careful) people would have thrown it away weeks ago because they have never had the opportunity to discover anything different – and that indeed I am waiting for the cheese to actually improve with time!

Flattr this!

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.

Flattr this!

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?

Flattr this!

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.

Flattr this!