Category Archives: Asides

Only the paranoid…

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… survive, as Bill Gates knows. This week’s Economist reports that:

On May 18th America’s State Department said it would not use 16,000 computers it recently bought from Lenovo, a Chinese firm, for sensitive “classified” work. Instead the PCs will be used for more prosaic matters… Moreover, the department said it was “initiating changes in its procurement processes in light of the changing ownership of IT equipment providers”.

Interesting. Lenovo, you will remember, is the firm to which IBM sold its comjputer manufacturing business. So when you buy an IBM Thinkpad today, you’re really buying a Lenovo machine.

Why the State Department’s paranoia? Well, as the Economist tactlessly points out, the US has long experience of convert surveillance. For example, in 2001 there was a minor diplomatic scuffle when the Chinese discovered that a Boeing plane built for the then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, was stuffed with bugging devices.

AdSense nonsense

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Just noticed (Sunday 21 May, 10:30am) that Google has started placing occasional Flash ads on this page, rather than the text ads I signed up for when I embarked on the experiment. That’s naughty, because I detest Flash ads, and I wouldn’t knowingly inflict them on my readers.

The whole experiment has been instructive. First of all, it’s clear that the contents of this Blog poses real difficulty for the Google AdSense system, because it has always struggled to find ads that are even vaguely relevant to the content. Every time I wrote about the iniquities of the copyright thugs, for example, or my support for Open Source, the system would place ads for law firms offering to “help protect your intellectual property”!

And as for my ‘earnings’, that’s been interesting too. As of today, my total take (which I haven’t claimed yet) is $24.59!

Clearly, I’m not cut out for business.

Targeting insanity

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Wonderful column by Simon Caulkin on why the New Labour regime’s obsession with ‘targets’ is nuts. Excerpt:

Because they are products of one world view applied to another – reductive mechanical measures applied to non-mechanical systems – targets have unpredictable and quickly ramifying consequences. To cut waiting lists hospitals do easier, rather than more urgent, operations; to meet exam pass rates schools exclude difficult students or encourage them into easier subjects; and to hit City earnings targets companies overstate profits or cut advertising or R&D budgets. Enron was the most target-driven company on earth, and to meet its targets it tore itself apart. The reply to ministers’ repeated refrain that ‘the private sector has targets’ is: look at Enron…

Amazonian tricks?

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According to John Sutherland,

The American economist R Preston McAfee, for example, suggests that hip book buyers should “try logging into Amazon with your own identity and asking for a price on something. Then clear your cookies (so Amazon cannot access your personal information and purchasing history) and search again anonymously for the same item. Sometimes you will be quoted a different price, because when Amazon looks at your past spending pattern, and sees that you have not always gone for the lowest price, they will treat you as a poor searcher – a more inelastic customer – and make you a less attractive price offer.”

Hmmm…. Wonder if this is true or just another urban legend. At least it’s an empirical question. Must have a go…

The prolific Professor Sutherland, incidentally, resembles the Chicago meat-processing industry — which, famously, “used every part of the hog except the grunt” — in that he allows nothing to go to waste and extracts maximum value from every snippet he finds. Thus, the McAfee quotation is used again in Sutherland’s entertaining ‘Diary’ piece in the current issue of the London Review of Books.

The real story of the Fisher Space Pen

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The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe.

That’s the gist. For detail, see here. Another urban legend bites the dust. Sigh.

One of my boys had a Space Pen for school work. Once he wrote a poem about it for an English assignment. It went like this:

This is the pen
That I did my homework with.
This is the pen
That earned me merits.
This is the pen
That got me through tests
And classwork,
Took me through my education,
Always at the bottom of my pencil case,
Waiting…
This is the pen.

Books are better

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Some years ago, at a Parents’ Evening at my children’s (lavishly funded) secondary school, I listened as the Head boasted about the expansion of their ICT facilities. When he’d finished, I asked if anyone had considered the possibility that the money would be better spent on teachers and books. He looked at me uncomprehendingly — as indeed did most of the audience, who expected better from someone who specialises in ICT.

But my question was — and remains — a valid one. Now comes news of research conducted by one of my academic colleagues at the Open University.

Books are more than twice as effective as computers in raising standards among pupils, says a senior academic who spent 30 years training teachers to use computers. Spending £100 a year on books for each primary school pupil raised test scores by 1.5 per cent while the same amount invested in computer technology was less than half as effective, according to the study by Steve Hurd, a former teacher trainer specialising in computer assisted learning.

Mr Hurd, who now lectures at the Open University, said the results were “significant”. “It is surprising that books matter. Things have gone overboard on ICT (information and communication technology). It is out of kilter. Schools pick up the message that they will be clobbered if their technology is not up to scratch, but no one looks at books.” School inspectors collect data on the provision of computers but have not asked for figures on spending on books since 2003, he said.

Mr Hurd’s research team concluded that the average test scores for English, maths and science would rise by 1.5 per cent in schools spending £100 per pupil on books, a higher than average figure…

Tim O’Shea, a former colleague who has gone on to greater things (he’s now Principal of Edinburgh University) and is a leading expert on computer-assisted learning, used to infuriate conference audiences in the 1980s by saying that “the only piece of educational technology known for sure to work is the school bus”!