It only struck me a few months ago that there is a decent minority of the political/business establishment who seem to believe that a large proportion of the population can live at a basic level without the need for any income, i.e. from some nebulous kind of family wealth. That’s not “to live well”, but the idea that the basics of housing, food, transport and basic personal care are just somehow “taken care of” in some vague way. You see this on Dragon’s Den, where entrepreneurs are urged to quit their job and show “real commitment” to their business idea. I’d always been rather bemused by statements such as this, but in light of the idea that the basics are “covered”, it makes sense—they are asking people to give up, as they see it, luxuries, not just the basics of living.
Archive for the ‘Changes of Perspective’ Category
Basic Income (1)
Saturday, November 28th, 2015A Wild Idea for Treating Infectious Diseases
Monday, July 13th, 2015Engineer a variant on a disease which spreads quicker within the organism, so that it drives out the standard variant in its niche. Engineer this variant with a genetic “self-destruct” switch which can be triggered by a standard drug. Then superinfect the patient with the new variant, wait until the new variant has taken over, then apply the drug to remove the infection from the system.
Seeming more Specialised than you Actually Are
Monday, June 29th, 2015Sometimes it is important to present yourself as more specialised than you actually are. This can be true for individuals and for businesses. Take, for example, the following apparently successful businesses:
- www.mysurgerywebsite.co.uk—this is a business that builds websites for doctor’s surgeries.
- www.parentpay.com—this is a business that describes itself as the “market leader in online payment for schools”
Woaah there! What’s happening here? Surely any decent web design company can provide a website for a doctor’s surgery? The specific company might provide a tiny little bit more knowledge, but surely the knowledge required to write a decent website is around 99 percent of the knowledge required to write a doctor’s surgery website. Surely, handling payments from parents for school activities is just the same as, well, umm, handling payments, and there are plenty of companies that do that perfectly well.
This, of course, misses the point. The potential customers don’t know that. To them, they are likely to trust the over-specialised presentation rather than the generic one. Indeed, the generic one might sound a little bit shady, evasive or amateurish: “What kind of web sites do you make?”, “Well, all kinds really.”, “Yes, but what are you really good at.”, “Well, it doesn’t really matter, websites are all basically the same once you get into the code.”. Contrast that with “we make websites for doctors.” Simples, innit.
So that’s my business startup advice. Find an area that uses your skills, find some specialised application of those skills, then market the hell out of your skills in that specific area. You will know that your skills are transferrable—but, your potential customers won’t, and they will trust you more as a result.
I’ve noticed the same with trying to build academic collaborations. Saying “we do optimisation and data science and visualisation and all that stuff” doesn’t really cut it. I’ve had much more success starting with a specific observation—we can provide a way of grouping your data into similar clusters, for example—than trying to describe the full range of what contemporary data science techniques can do.
Similarly with courses. Universities have done well out of providing “MBA in Marketing for XX” or whatever, when the vast majority of the course might be generic marketing skills. Again, the point here is more one of trust than one of content.
“Who Bought you That?”
Monday, December 16th, 2013I’ve noticed a communication difference between people like me, who grew up in small families without much of a tradition of present-giving, to people who grew up in big, richly-connected families where dozens of people exchange presents for Christmas and birthdays.
People in the latter group often ask the question “Who bought you that?” when enquiring about some day-to-day object—a scarf, a watch, a pen that I have. I always thought that this was a weird question—why on earth would you imagine that someone bought it for me? But, of course, to people from such a background, the idea that you would ever need to buy such day-to-day tchotchkes is weird. For their whole lives they’ve never had any need to buy all these little bits and pieces, every since childhood they’ve had an endless supply of little day-to-day objects in the form of presents from cousins and great-aunts. Of course, they are in an economically neutral position, as they have had to keep up their part of the exchange.
For Real (1)
Wednesday, June 19th, 2013Its odd when something turns out to be real. In the back of my head I have a vague idea that brand names like “Dolce and Gabbana” are the invention of a chap called Toby working in a Soho ad agency in the ’70s. It is weird to see that they are actually a couple of real blokes in their 50s:
We Don’t Take Comedy Seriously Enough
Monday, April 8th, 2013Despite the rise and rise of complex, richly engaged comedy, people in other artforms still don’t have any respect for it. For the last few years I’ve been interested—in a rather inchoate way—in how comedy and contemporary classical music might interact, in particular whether the forms and structures of comedy provide an interesting and novel analogy for the structuring of a piece of music, or whether music-theatre can learn from comedy performance practices. I’d be interested, for example, if the tension inherent in a Stewart Lee performance, and the sophisticated use of reference and callbacks, could provide an emotional flavour that could be delivered in a musical way, or whether the emotional trajectory of Daniel Kitson’s storytelling performances could give us an idea of how to hold an audience for an extended period of time.
Very few people take this seriously. When someone raised a point like this with Larry Goves at a tutorial last summer, the response was incomprehending. What could the mere stimulus-response of joke-laugh have to do with a sophisticated artform such as composing a string quartet? Similarly, at a meeting the other day, the idea that a contemporary music group might put on a joint event with a comedy group was treated rather distastefully—”I don’t know if we want to be associated with that sort of thing”, whereas collaborations with poetry and art groups were greeted with enthusiasm.
I don’t want to suggest that all comedy is deep and profound—there is a big place for “summat as meks yer ears laff”. But, when some people in contemporary comedy are making a rich and distinctive contribution to new ways of taking an audience on an emotional trajectory, it is a pity that this is ignored by other artforms.
“You turn if you want to…”
Thursday, March 21st, 2013Interesting attempt by Labour to shift the use of the phrase “U-turn” in politics:
I’ve never really liked the aversion to “U-turns” in politics. I can see that we don’t want people flip-flopping between decisions, but too strong an aversion to changing your mind in light of changing situations and new evidence can leave politics very unagile and leaden. It would be great if politicians could say “in response to overwhelming public pressure / new evidence … / the shift towards … /etc. we have decided to …” without opening themselves to accusations of U-turning.
The Revolution will be Computerised (1)
Tuesday, December 11th, 2012I wonder how long things like “competence in IT and familiarity with a computerised environment” are going to continue to be listed as job requirements (and this for a lectureship post in Computer Science, natch). Surely, “computerised” is the default now and the odd, specific skill that you might be looking for on odd occasions is familiarity with the opposite? And, for that matter, how long information systems type courses are going to use the case study of a paper-based system being “computerised”.
Zeitgeist (3)
Friday, May 4th, 2012An interesting shift in perspective (from the middle of a recent discussion on Ask Metafilter):
Zeitgeist (3)
Saturday, December 31st, 2011Interesting perspective from a forum post that I read somewhere t’other day: someone (presumably someone growing up since the ubiquity of mobile phones) who saw landlines as a premium service (because the company had to “put all the wires in” to the house) and mobile service as the basic service (because you just issue someone with a handset and then you are done with it), and didn’t understand why the mobile service was the more expensive one. I wonder how much this is true: is mobile only a premium-price service because historically it was, or is it still more expensive to maintain and run the mobile infrastructure?
Personal Progress
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011In today’s Guardian there is an article about a dispute between Julian Assange and publisher Canongate about whether the publisher is right to publish the early draft of an autobiography that they had commissioned and paid for, but where no final version has been received nor the advance returned to the publisher.
There are lots of complex legal and moral issues here, but I want to use this to raise an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while. We always assume that the current state of a person is the one that is allowed to make decisions that override the wishes of the person at other times. Let’s just introduce some informal notation: let persontime represent the mental state of person at time, persontime1-time2 represent the generalisation to a range of times (to do this properly requires a lot more complexity which will detract from the argument).
So, we can phrase our argument thus: why should AssangeSept 2011 be able to unmake a decision that AssangeDec 2010 made? That this is a meaningful question seems at first doubtful—he has changed his mind, and the current state of mind is the one that we universally accept as completely dominant overall all other previous states of mind (except, perhaps, in cases of temporary “out of mindness” such as mania or drunkenness).
And yet, and yet…this seems to throw up some bizarre consequences. Consider for example the case of Alice, who from 1980 to 2010 wanted to will her money to her children. At the beginning of 2011 she converts to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and changes her will to leave her money to the church. A few months later, in a tragic incident involving a pasta strainer, Alice dies and all of her money gets left to the Church, in accordance with the will of Alice2011. The much longer lasting will of Alice1980-2010 is completely ignored. Why should Alice1980-2010 not have some—indeed, most—of the rights over what happens at the end?
Note that we are not talking about the state where Alice2011 discovers that the beliefs that Alice1980-2010 were false—e.g. that the children that she was to give her money to were acting in some way that she disapproved of; we are just talking about the case where she “merely” changed her mind.
This gets even more complex when we think about future states too. Imagine depressive Bob, who has had quite a good time of it from 2005-2010, but in 2011 decides that it is too much and that Bob2011 wants to commit suicide, against the will of Bob2005-2010. Perhaps this doesn’t matter—but, what about the will of Bob2020, who has successfully gone though therapy and is now basically happy with his life? Should Bob2020 not get some consideration, even some legal protection, from the murderous intentions of Bob2011?
A somewhat lighter example concerns phrases like “their marriage failed”. If Charlie1990-2005 and David1990-2005 are both in a happy marriage, which falls apart between 2006-07 ending in divorce during 2008, why should the opinions of Charlie2008 and David2008 be the definitive opinion on the marriage as a whole? If, in a counterfactual world, David had had a sudden heart attack in 2004, the eulogy would have talked about his “happy marriage”; why is it suddenly rendered unhappy by the events of 2006-08?
Underpinning all of this seems to be some notion of “progress” throughout life. We have worked hard to be critical of naive notions of progress in other domains; we are, on the whole, critical of accounts of, say, politics or technology as being a universal progress towards better states. Yet in terms of an individual’s personal life, we are uncritical about this. There is the occasional exception—the temporary loss of mind discussed earlier, the person who loses decision-making capability due to mental illness, or the individual who is painted as “throwing away” their previous rationality for short-term gain (as in the Anna Nicole Smith case). But, on the whole, the idea that the current person has valid domain over that person at other points in their life, particularly the past person, seems to dominate and support the notion that a person just makes “progress” throughout their life.
“Like an express train, with me standing at the platform…”
Thursday, September 15th, 2011In universities we teach programming at a breakneck speed, even if we think that we are doing it fairly gently. Contrast the teaching of programming with the teaching of mathematics. If we taught programming the way that we taught basic mathematics, then we would spend a few hours a week for several years doing basic drill-and-practice on programming constructs: a few hundred for loops, a few thousand if statements, and so on, all in isolation before we even think of bringing it together. Why on earth should we believe that we can teach something of comparable complexity in a couple of terms of a-few-hours-a-week courses.
Why do we have this irrational exuberance in our ability to teach programming so quickly? Do we believe that it builds on transferrable skills that have been learned by that point? That students at that age (and, who have elected and been selected to do computer science or a similar subject) are capable of coping with the pace? That programming is vastly easier than these mathematical skills? That we try to teach the mathematical skills at a much too early age?
I wonder if this is why we occasionally get student feedback comments that are like the one we got many years ago: “the course is like an express train, with me still standing at the platform”.
The Unbelievable Effectiveness of Public Services (1)
Thursday, October 21st, 2010Imagine first-class mail being pitched as a new idea on Dragon’s Den.
You pick up letters locally for delivery across the country; sensible, something a lot of customers need. And you deliver them the next day; a good, if potentially expensive, service. How does collection get arranged: do you book a slot online for it to be collected, or take it to a central location in your local city or market town? No, you just put it in a box, and we will make one of these available in every settlement of significant size in the country. Okay…but what about the staff needed to collect and charge for the letters? How do you pay for them to be near to the boxes? Or perhaps people need to pay online and then they print-out an e-ticket that they attach to the letter? No, what, you just sell stamps in small shops around the country. Good idea, but getting but-in from lots of small businesses could be challenging.
Sounds like a good idea, well thought through. What is your price point? Ten pounds per letter? Five pounds? Two pounds; but what about the infrastructure costs? What…41p…? That’s ludicrous. I’m out.
What you see is what you get
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010Something that I talked to many people about over the years is their sense of how “dense” (in terms of urban buildup) the country is. This is a subject that can readily spill out into hard political argument—for example, a favoured tactic of those who oppose immigration is to argue that the country is “full” and that there is physically no room for more building. This doesn’t seem to me to be the case at all.
One idea that seems to have promise in explaining this is considering the effect of different forms of transport on people’s perception of their environment. I usually travel by train, and this gives me a certain perspective on the density of the environment. For example, leaving from an inner London train station on an inter-city train I am out of the built up area in around 15 minutes. For most other cities, this time period is around 5 minutes. Furthermore, mainline trains rarely go close to smaller villages. As a result, a journey like London to Edinburgh is 4½ hours of essential rurality; 15 minutes to leave London, then a few periods of 5-10 minutes in the outskirts of a city. Overall, the majority of the journey is spent in open country.
Contrast this with a car or coach journey. It can easily take a road vehicle an hour to get out of London, and many other cities take 20-30 minutes to get in or out of. This makes a huge difference to the perception of people as to how much land those cities occupy. If have your journey is taken up with getting into and out of cities, then you could easily imagine that the country is very dense and urban.
I would argue that my country-centric view from the train is more accurate, as can be seen by studying a map. Despite the UK being a very built-up country, the only map page that looks predominantly urban is that displaying London. Most of the rest show towns and cities sitting in a predominantly green, rural context.
There is an interesting study to be done to see if this is borne out across a large sample; could we correlate people’s estimates of the density of the country against their predominant modes of transport?
Location, Location, Location
Monday, September 13th, 2010There is an ad for a hyper-expensive watch brand that runs something like “You never actually own a Patek Phillipe watch—you merely look after it for the next generation”.
Increasingly, even though we buy our houses at a greater rate than previous generations, we increasingly have less sense of ownership. It used to be argued that one advantage of owning your own house was that you could “do what you like with it”. However, all of the weirdo TV house programmes that my mother watches incessantly convey the impression that, despite living in a house for years, you are really just looking after it until the “real owner”—the next buyer—comes along. They, of course, will take the same attitude towards the following owner, …
This has strange consequences. My flat has an odd cod-wrought iron fire surround with images of happy workers toiling in the field embossed into it. It is as horrible as it sounds (now, had it been done in a soviet futurist style, that might be different…). My mother agrees with me that it is horrible—but when I proposed getting it replaced with something more tasteful and understated, her response was “I don’t know if you should do that, perhaps the people you want to sell it to next might like it.”.
Shoddy Video
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010A thought—one of the positive effects of YouTube and similar services is that they have accustomed the general public to low production quality video. This is a good thing because it means that video can be more widely used across the web et cetera.
Ages ago amateur video used to be just that – very amateurish by comparison with even the low end of professional video. Contrast, say, local TV news with the productions of a student TV station, even one that is trying hard. The contrast is vast in terms of production quality – camera work, lighting, editing, …
Consider an organisation that wants to use video for publicity or training. A number of years ago most organisations would have shied away from this—either it could be done on a shoestring, causing negative associations by contrast with professional video work, or it could be done at great expense resulting in lumbering productions that were used for many years afterwards to justify their production costs (a good example of the sunk costs fallacy).
Now video has been democratised—not just in the usual sense that the means of production of video is available to many more people and organisations, but that the expectations of audiences concerning video have been calibrated appropriately to the day-to-day use of video by low-budget and low-skill organisations and individuals. This means that finally the power of video as a communication medium can be used more fully.
We’re All Middle Class Now (1)
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Overheard in Tesco this evening, from someone dressed like the canonical chav to one of the shop assistants:
“Oi, you! ‘got any tzatziki, mate?”
Change Change
Monday, October 5th, 2009One advantage of working in the university is seeing trends emerging out from the Young People. Something I’ve noticed a couple of times in the last few weeks is students in the campus shop ignoring the attempt by the cashier to give back the 1p change when they have e.g. paid for a 99p purchase using a pound coin. That is, to start walking once they have handed over the coin, and make no attempt to indicate to the cashier what to do with the change. The staff put it in the charity box.
A neat alternative to this is spreading in the US by I haven’t seen it here: a little tray of low-value coins kept on the shop counter, to which customers can add small change or remove a small number of coins to make up the fiddily last bit of a transaction.
I’m slightly surprised that when the major British coin redesign happened a year or two ago that an opportunity wasn’t taken to eliminate the 1p and 2p. It is 25 years since the decimal half-penny coin was removed from the currency system. That said, I can see that a government would be very wary of this; whilst it would probably be generally accepted, the risk of the public/media taking it as “the government doesn’t care about small amounts of money” (by contrast with “ordinary people” who do).
I have been trying to persuade myself for years that one pound is not a large amount of money; when I was a kid, not all that long ago in the greater scheme of things, it seemed like a large amount. I am determined not to gradually become paralysed into thinking that everything is overpriced, as has happened to an older generation. I think my epiphany on this occurred earlier today in the campus shop where I witnessed the aforementioned incident. I noticed that the price of an ordinary daily newspaper has reached a pound; the newspaper has always struck me as the canonical “throwaway purchase”. At last I feel a shift in intuition to match what I have felt rationally for a few years. Of course, another advantage of working in the university is getting the student discount is applied automatically, so the paper actually only cost 40p!
Zeitgeist (2)
Monday, July 27th, 2009Altered Priorities Ahead: “I won’t have access to a phone for the next couple of weeks, and not even to the internet” (paraphrase of an email from a student).