George Orwell likened advertising to “the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket”. Perhaps that was because the advertising is his day was so crass — like this ad which probably dates from late Victorian times. But here’s a terrible thought: maybe this looked cool and clever to those at whom it was aimed. And maybe our own oh-so-cool-and-clever advertising will look just as pathetic and dated to our great grandchildren.
Category Archives: Asides
Shopaholicism
I hate shopping (one reason why I am ambivalent about Christmas), and am constantly amazed by people who apparently love doing it. Here are some examples: the people queueing for our local park-and-ride bus heading into the post-Xmas ‘sales’. Weird.
Santa’s Landing Lights
It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve finally come to rest. What shopping isn’t done now will have to remain undone. In a few minutes I will light a fire and settle down to read through a pile of New Yorkers that have been piling up through December. But the radio’s on and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College down the road has just begun and, without warning, it plunges me into reflective mood.
I remember, for example, the first Christmas Carol and I spent in Cambridge — in 1968. We’d come as graduate students and had heard of the King’s Service, of course, so we resolved to attend. But something like two hundred other souls had had the same idea before us, so after an hour queuing in the freezing East Anglian wind we thought better of it and repaired to the warmth of the Copper Kettle cafe on the other side of King’s Parade. To the end of her life, Carol remained fascinated by the service, sometimes managing to get a ticket through a friend who was a Fellow of King’s but more often settling down to listen to the radio broadcast at this time every Christmas Eve. And, of course, this is when I always think of her, and wish she had lived to see our first grandson, who is blissfully oblivious to all this adult angst.
Another memory: of a Christmas Eve in the 1950s. We’re living in Donegal, in a small but cosy house that was then in the country and now is on the outskirts of the town. The house is decorated, fairly sparsely. The fairy lights on the tree were being temperamental — as they always were. My mother is in the kitchen, baking. Then suddenly a crash and an anguished cry. We rush into the kitchen and there is the christmas cake in bits on the tiled floor. And Ma in tears.
My father worked in the Post Office, and this was the busiest time of his year. On Christmas Eve after the sorting office closed he would take some of his colleagues to the pub and then come home for tea — served in the dining room rather than in the kitchen, with a proper tablecloth and stuff. This year, he’s later than usual, and when he arrives he’s holding a large hinged case made of polished wood. Upon opening it we find that it’s a gramophone. Well, almost: it’s actually a turntable. It needs an amplifier and speakers, but Da didn’t know that when he bought it. But we discover by experimentation that we can connect it up to our Bush radio — which enables us to hear what’s on the vinyl discs — provided nobody breathes too loudly.
I still remember the first vinyl discs we owned: recordings of This Old House, How Much Is That Doggy in the Window and Bing Crosby singing A White Christmas. (Ours was not an intellectual household.) But the frustrations engendered by that first turntable had an unexpected outcome: they kindled an interest in electronics which eventually saw me becoming an electrical engineer. And to building my own stereo rig when I was a student.
I’ve often thought that the reason I dislike Christmas go back to childhood. I associate the season with feelings of disappointment, of hopes and dreams unfulfilled, of our mundane domestic reality not conforming to some media-borne ideal (the most dramatic realisation of which was in the fantastic opening scenes of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander). It may also have had something to do with the fact that, even as children, an alternative version existed. My maternal grandparents were prosperous, lived in an expansive style with a large family and generally seemed unconcerned by the things that worried my parents (who had to live on my father’s modest salary). Some years we spent Christmas with them, which meant travelling to Mayo, where they lived.
Because of Da’s work commitments, that meant that we always travelled late on Christmas Eve. So one of my abiding memories of this day is of snuggling down under a rug in the back of the car with my siblings (and the family dog), speeding through a dark, silent, deserted countryside and looking out for farmhouses as we went. Why? Because in the window of every house there would be a single lighted candle. My mother (a devout Catholic) explained the custom in terms of ‘the star of Bethlehem’: our fellow-countrymen were signifying the impending birth of Christ. But to us the candles seemed to serve a far more useful purpose: as landing lights for Santa.
Photograph by Irish Typepad
If Car Companies Were Run Like Tech Companies
Lovely spoof by David Pogue.
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9 — Here at the annual Consumer Electronic Automotive Show, the largest trade show in the world, the carheads have again made their annual pilgrimage to see what new breakthrough vehicles will be finding their way into American garages in the new year.
Axxle, the Cupertino, Calif., automaker, is again notable by its absence. But even though its perfectionist founder, Steve Hubs, recently died, the company’s impact was everywhere at the show.
When Axxle announced its sleek, simple-to-drive iCar last year, automotive blogs like Gizmoto and Engearjet savaged it for its lack of a windshield, doors, roof and body. “Only the fanboys would want to drive a flat glass surfboard,” went a typical remark.
Once the iCar went on sale, however, it rapidly became the fastest-selling new vehicle in history. And at this year’s show, imitators are everywhere. Many are based on Andrive, a design offered by the mobile billboard giant Gogle (whose unofficial motto is, “Don’t be civil”). Andrive is regarded as a less polished but free chassis that closely resembles the iCar.
A workflow for remote collaboration
I use Dropbox a lot, but so far haven’t really exploited its potential for remote collaboration. So I was intrigued to find this illustration on Quentin’s blog outlining a workflow designed by Rick Lecoat at Shark Attack Design. Once you’ve seen it, it looks obvious. But then that’s the defining characteristic of most great ideas.
Havel’s heart
Vaclav Havel has died, at the age of 75. David Remnick has a very nice tribute to him in the New Yorker.
In a parallel universe, in a luckier realm, Havel would have lived out his life as a Czech epigone of Ionesco and Beckett, a carefree son of privilege, free to write, to pursue his pleasures, to listen to the rock ‘n roll he loved. Instead, like a living figure from Kafka, he was born to a system where absurdity, not law, ruled; calmly, resolutely, he pursued a life of dissidence, led a revolution, and then assumed a home in the Castle, the seat of power in liberated Prague.
In 2003 Remnick wrote a good profile of Havel as he prepared to leave the Presidency of the Czech Republic. Remembering the interview he had with the great man, Remnick writes that
“He gave me as a gift a marvelous book of photographs portraying his life as an artist and politician. He signed it to my wife, who had covered the 1989 revolution in Prague with me, in lime-green marker and then drew a little heart, in red, next to his signature. I have a hard time imagining any other president goofing around like that.”
That rang a bell for me. I met Havel once, just after he was elected President. He was on a State Visit to Britain and the Royal Shakespeare Company, prodded by Harold Pinter and others, gave a party for him in the Barbican to which I was invited. (I wrote a piece about it for the Observer but since this was long before the Web I cannot find my copy of it.) The place was thronged with luvvies (I remember Jeremy Irons squiring Edna O’Brien around, for example; Pinter with Lady Antonia Fraser; etc., etc.) Two things stand out in my memory.
The first was a conversation I had with one of the President’s bodyguards in which I discovered that before he took up his present line of work he had been an actor. So, I asked, how had he qualified for his current duties? He replied that he had always been keen on karate.
My other memory is of someone asking Havel to autograph a copy of his book, Living in Truth. He did so — and drew a picture of a heart alongside his signature. Like Remnick many years later I came away wondering how many Heads of State would do such a thing.
G2Z est arrive!
have arrived. It’s funny to confront it in the flesh, as it were.10 predictions for 2012 in technology
From a Seattle-based VC fund. Usual health warnings apply.
Classic(al) Alert
Spotted in Cambridge yesterday on railings outside a house in the city centre.
Rough translation: “Two wheels left here will be destroyed”.
I should have known that Quentin would have spotted this before me. His translation (‘Two wheels, that have been left here, will be destroyed’) is slightly more, er, classical than mine.
Universities under Attack
The historian Keith Thomas has a terrific piece in the current edition of the London Review of Books about the government’s current onslaught on UK universities. It’s full of good stuff, as you’d expect from such a distinguished scholar.
He has three specific proposals which make a lot of sense.
1. Firstly, he thinks (rightly) that the Coalition has made a terrible job of ‘explaining’ its policy on tuition fees. What it’s created is a graduate tax — which doesn’t seem unreasonable given the lifetime benefits that a degree confers (or at any rate use to confer) upon a student. But ministers haven’t explained that to the public.
Instead, potential students have the mistaken impression that they will be crushed by a lifelong burden of intolerable debt. The other day I heard a mother on the radio lamenting that, if her son went to university, he might never get a job and would therefore be unable to repay his colossal debts. Universities should do all they can to help poor students by fee waivers, scholarships and maintenance grants, but above all they should try to dispel the fog of misunderstanding which the government’s ineptitude has created.
2. Secondly, Thomas thinks universities should press for changes to the REF (Research Excellence Framework — the bean-counting scheme proposed to assess the quality of university research). Writing about the REF’s predecessor, the Research Assessment Exercise, he says that
In my experience, this operation, though initially a stimulus, has in the longer run had appalling effects. It has generated a vast amount of premature publication and an even larger amount of unnecessary publication by those who have nothing new to say at that particular moment, but are forced to lay eggs, however addled. In the social sciences, it has discouraged the writing of books, as opposed to specialist articles, and by making peer review the ultimate arbiter it has very probably enshrined orthodoxies and acted as a curb on intellectual risk-taking and innovation. Everywhere, it has led to an unwelcome shift in academic priorities, for younger faculty have been encouraged to do all they can to secure outside research grants which will allow them to escape from teaching, which they now regard as a vastly inferior activity; and it has induced vice-chancellors to emulate football clubs by buying in outside ‘stars’ on special terms and conditions. The RAE has also been absurdly rigid in its requirements. A few years ago, a colleague in another university published a huge book, based on a vast amount of archival research, meticulously documented, beautifully written and offering a new and formidably argued reinterpretation of a major historical event. I remarked to a friend in that university that this great work would certainly help their prospects in the RAE. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We can’t enter him. He needs four items and that book is all he’s got.’
Thomas would like to see the abolition of the REF altogether, but that’s unlikely to happen. Universities, he thinks, should press for a longer interval between each round of assessment, say, ten years rather than six, a much greater emphasis on the quality of publications rather than their quantity, and the relegation of ‘impact’ to an optional extra rather than an essential requirement.
Since the REF is a scheme which is workable only if academics co-operate with it, the universities could easily achieve some reform here, but only if they maintain a united front. Unfortunately, those institutions which are currently most successful in the competition have no incentive to change the system, its undesirable intellectual consequences notwithstanding.
The chances of British universities maintaining a “united front” are close to zero, given the way in which the Browne Review and the Government White Paper reconfigured the system to make them “competitors” for “customers” (i.e. the people formerly known as students).
The lack of solidarity — or even collegiality — among academics is one of the most depressing aspects of the current crisis. One sees this acutely in the way it renders universities unable to combat the racketeering of journal publishers, for example. If all the serious universities in Britain and the US collectively decided that they would cancel journal subscriptions rather than submit to the price gouging currently practiced by publishers, then the entire cartel would collapse in a year. But the moment a university librarian so much as hints that s/he is minded to call the publishers’ bluff there will be angry calls from academics each concerned not about the importance of the issue for the community, but about their individual interests — citations, access to papers, etc.
3. Thomas’s final recommendation is, in a way, the most radical. It is that
universities should collectively and publicly refute the repugnant philosophy underlying the Browne Report and the White Paper by reaffirming what they stand for and what they believe is their correct relationship to students on the one hand and to the government on the other. The original purpose of universities in the Middle Ages was to train students for service in Church and State, but the undergraduate curriculum was in the liberal arts (which, of course, included science and mathematics), and only after graduating did students take up vocational courses in law, medicine and theology. Today, universities aim to enable students to develop their capacities to the full; in the process, they acquire the mental skills and intellectual flexibility necessary to meet the demands of a rapidly changing economy. But a university should not provide vocational training, in the narrow sense of uncritical indoctrination in the rules and techniques of a particular trade. Institutions which do that are an indispensable part of the higher education system. But if their courses are vocational and their staff do not engage in research, it does not help to call them ‘universities’: that way they end up being regarded as inferior versions of the real thing. We need a diverse system of higher education, but only some of its components should be universities and much confusion is created by the indiscriminate application of that name.
The most upsetting thing about what’s happening to UK universities is the way it’s undermining what was a rather good system. University education was one of the areas where Britain punched way above its weight. But the implementation of the philistinism of a clueless engineer is now eviscerating the system as Humanities departments, for example, face extinction. That’s not to say that there weren’t things that needed to be fixed in the old system, but UK universities in the latter half of the twentieth century were pretty good. Thomas — who is one of the greatest scholars of his generation — has some mordant reflections on his own experience:
The [Oxford] college where I became a tutor in 1957 had only 19 academic fellows. Of these, two did no research at all and their teaching was languid in the extreme. That was the price the rest of us paid for our freedom and in my view it was a price worth paying. For the other fellows were exceptionally active, impelled, not by external bribes and threats, but by their own intellectual ambition and love of their subject. In due course three became fellows of the Royal Society and seven of the British Academy. They worked at their own pace and some of them would have fared badly in the RAE, for they conformed to no deadlines and released their work only when it was ready. I became a tutor at the age of 24, but I did not publish a book until I was 38. These days, I would have been compelled to drop my larger project and concentrate on an unambitious monograph, or else face ostracism and even expulsion.
Just ponder that. Of 17 active academics, three FRSs and seven FBAs.