Daily Archives: May 20, 2006

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.

Amazon goes into the online data storage business

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Yep. See here for details.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Costs? You pay only for what you use. $0.15 per GB-month of storage used; $.20 per GB of data transferred.

Oh, and here’s a handy front end.

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Who falls for 419 scams?

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I cannot believe that people fall for these Nigerian email scams. But here’s a true story from the New Yorker which suggests that they do.

James Miller collects all the 419 emails he receives and keeps them in a special folder (no doubt labelled “Greed, Folly and Stupidity”). He also pointed me to Scamorama, a site which realises the comic potential of the 419 racket.

Human rights, political absurdities

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Splendid rant by Charles Moore arguing that Blair’s discovery of the absurdities wrought by his Human Rights Act is analogous to the Black Wednesday when the Major government had to scuttle from the ERM in September 1992.

In popular conversation now, “human rights” in this country is the subject of mockery. It is understood, essentially correctly, to be a system by which judges defend bad people from the consequences of their actions and impose duties upon good people which are unreasonable. Every nasty school pupil knows that his human rights can be invoked if the teacher gets too angry with him; every conscientious teacher knows that 20 years of unblemished conduct will count for nothing in his favour if he can be shown to have breached a child’s human rights.

Every grumpy prisoner, second-rate employee, suspected terrorist, mixed-up trans-sexual, Muslim schoolgirl who wants to wear the most extreme forms of religious outfit – these, and countless others, know that they can get lawyers, attention, legal aid and often, money, out of “human rights”.

Human rights are also understood, also correctly, to be an arrangement by which British citizens derive no advantage from their citizenship and foreigners can ride on their backs. Because the laws of human rights regard most of those rights as being universal, you do not have to qualify for them by becoming a citizen of our country.

All you have to do is get inside the perimeter fence. Then your rights to religious freedom and social security and privacy and founding a family and paid holidays and free health treatment are all there. And so is the delay that so much law involves, the public expense of keeping claimants and their dependants, the fees for people like Mrs Blair, and the virtual breakdown of all administrative systems – policing, immigration, criminal justice, prisons, deportation, extradition – which relate to the problems involved…

He’s right about one thing — the desire to incorporate Human Rights into British law was one of the ruling passions of the incoming New Labour regime in 1997. It’s funny now to see Blair railing against its counter-intuitive absurdities.

Absurdities? Well, it turns out that even companies can have ‘human rights’.

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”!