"Inside out" trailer - referenced in MindHacks blog. "The new trailer for upcoming Pixar movie Inside Out is very funny and has a remarkably accurate depiction of brain function."
Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman, and Juvenescence by Robert Pogue Harrison – review
by Josh Cohen in The Guardian. "Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? is a spirited philosophical defence of the aspiration to maturity. As she sagely observes, by clinging impotently to youth, we impoverish youth and maturity alike. The vindictive subtext of the message that youth is the pinnacle of life, after all, is that things will only get worse. What better recipe for splitting our lives between an infantilised first act and its increasingly embittered aftermath? In Juvenescence, a penetrating and impressively omnivorous 'cultural history of our age', Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the same malign ambivalence in the collective drive to make ourselves younger in 'looks, behaviour, mentality, lifestyles and, above all, desires'. Our age’s self-defeating ruse is to give the younger generations sovereignty over culture, all the while depriving them of the 'idleness, shelter and solitude' needed to cultivate an authentically creative life.... Both books address our era’s tendency to set youth and age in facile opposition to one another, a tendency that gives rise, Neiman argues, to the most pernicious distortions of political life. In a consumer society, adulthood is confused with the capacity to accumulate overpriced toys, while 'ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams'."
Life after a viral nightmare: from Ecce Homo to revenge porn - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "You don’t have to have done anything for the internet to claim your name. At 16, Alex Lee became a global heartthrob and, to some, a hate figure, when someone snapped a picture of him simply doing his job: filling bags at Target. Even where some criticism might be fair, the error rarely warrants the punishment. When [Justine] Sacco tweeted 'Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!' she was very obviously joking about racism rather than advocating it, but still, not obviously enough. And you’d expect a 'global head of communications' to know better. [Breanna] Mitchell, who was, let’s remember, a schoolgirl, might have considered the sensitivity of a selfie in Auschwitz more carefully, but her picture was nothing like as crass as it seemed. She had talked for years about visiting with her father and, after he died, she had finally managed it. She took her phone out to record the moment and – perhaps out of habit – happened to smile. The picture was online for a month before anyone noticed. 'I literally woke up one morning and had literally a thousand things on my phone, notifications,' Mitchell said at the time. 'I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people telling me I need to kill myself.' When the race to denounce a bigot begins, people forget about details like whether or not they were guilty. We don’t need to ask where these torrents of scorn come from because we create them ourselves with our clicks and shares. If we had the proper context we might not laugh, so we don’t want context, and don’t get it. Nor is it likely to ever stop."
Vinyl's difficult comeback - article by John Harris in The Guardian. "In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment. A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company."
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerald Russell - review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "In the spring of 2006, Gerard Russell was a bored British diplomat stewing in the heat of the Green Zone in Baghdad.... Then he received a call from the high priest of the Mandeans. The Mandeans, he knew, claimed descent from Seth, son of Adam, and believed themselves to be the last followers of John the Baptist. They were also said to be the last surviving remnant of the Gnostic sects that once proliferated across the Middle East in late antiquity. In addition, Arab scholars had long recognised them as 'the last Babylonians'. It was, writes Russell, 'rather like being summoned to meet one of the knights of the Round Table'. He arranged to meet the high priest and his entourage in Al-Rasheed hotel on the edge of the Green Zone. The encounter had, however, a sad conclusion. The high priest told Russell how the American invasion of Iraq had unleashed a firestorm on his people. The Mandeans had been protected by Saddam Hussein, ...but during the anarchy after his fall, and the US occupation that followed, life had become impossible. The high priest spoke of the long series of forced conversions, bombings, killings and kidnappings for ransom that had affected his flock since 2002. Now he wanted to transport the entire community to the west: 'There are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq,' said the high priest. 'And we want to leave. We want your country to give us asylum.'"
Testament of Youth: Vera Brittain and her remarkable life - article in The Guardian by Alexandra Harris, on the occasion of the release of the film of Testament of Youth. "There wasn’t much encouragement in Buxton for a girl who wanted to go to Oxford, but Vera Brittain ignored the disapproving looks, went to Extension lectures, studied and struggled, almost walked out of her entrance exams, and got herself a place at Somerville in 1914. That’s a 20th-century story in itself, but it turned out not to be the central story of Brittain’s life. By the start of term, there was a war on. Her brother, Edward, and Roland Leighton, the man she loved, were going into the army rather than to New College and Merton respectively.... Brittain could not join Roland at the front, but she could put herself at the service of men like him by joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse. For the next four years, during which she lost, one by one, the people she had ever cared about, she worked with astonishing toughness and skill at hospitals in London, Malta and at the purgatorial clearing station in Étaples in northern France. She had been brought up in a society that insisted on a chaperone being present for a tea date with a man; now she had responsibility for mutilated male bodies. Back in Buxton the Germans were hated, but, under corrugated iron in France, the hand of a dying German soldier felt very much like Roland’s hand. Passionately and clear-sightedly, Brittain tried to make sense of these extraordinary situations."
Magna Carta 800 years on - article by David Carpenter in The Guardian. "In 1215, John was ... placed beneath the law, but the Magna Carta of 1215 was very far from giving equal treatment to all the king’s subjects. Socially it was a divided and divisive document, often reflecting the interests of a baronial elite a few hundred strong in a population of several millions. Having asserted that taxation required the common consent of the kingdom, the assembly giving that consent was to be attended primarily by earls, barons, bishops and abbots.... In 1215 itself both John and his enemies would have been astonished had they known that the Charter would live on and be celebrated 800 years hence. Especially as within a few months of its promulgation, Magna Carta seemed a dead letter. John had got the pope to quash it.... The barons, likewise abandoning the Charter, deposed John and elected another king in his place, none other than Prince Louis, the eldest son of the king of France. The Charter only survived because, after John’s death in October 1216, the minority government of his son, the nine-year-old Henry III, accepted what John had rejected. In order to win the war against Louis, and, having won the war, consolidate the peace, they issued new versions of the Charter. Then, in 1225, in order to secure a great tax, they issued what became the final and definitive Magna Carta. It is chapters of Henry III’s Charter of 1225, not John’s of 1215, which remain on the Statute Book."
The People's Platform by Astra Taylor - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. 'From a certain angle,' writes Taylor, 'the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.' In fact, she concludes, 'Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.' "
Can these 36 questions make you fall in love with anyone? - short note in The Guardian. "A 36-point questionnaire, which promises to help you and a partner kickstart a relationship, is being shared widely on the web. Could our singleton guinea-pigs find love among the probing questions?"
Seeing the sort: quick-sort with Hungarian folk dance - video and article in Journal of the New Media Caucus, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Algo-Rythmics project pairs basic sorting algorithms from an introductory computer science course with folk dances in Romania (Transylvania).... In the video, each dancer embodies a number (which they are wearing) in an array (depicted via a projection on the curtain behind them).... A comparison between two values is indicated in the dance by downstage movement. The operands wear hats, and the first operand (in a quicksort, known as the pivot) wears a hat with a flower. If the comparison operator evaluates as false (the first operand is greater than the second one), one of the dancers executes a retrograde (reverse) phrase. However, a comparison that evaluates as true (the first operand is less than the second) produces an extensive round of boot slapping. Successfully sorted dancers turn to face the upstage curtain and mostly stop moving."
TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on - article by Robert Crawford in The Guardian. "Because Eliot was a trained philosopher – he wrote a Harvard PhD on philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the subject – he knew that the 'self' in self-consciousness was unstable. 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' maps an unstable self.... Prufrock, inhibitingly aware that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome, alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a sense of vulnerability and pain.... As it develops, up until 'The Waste Land' and beyond, Eliot’s poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on its earlier performances. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it."
Flicker: Your Brain on Movies by Jeffrey Zacks – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "First, Zacks sets out the wealth of experimental evidence which shows that a filmed version of events will likely override our knowledge of the facts. Not only because superstimuli are so compelling, but because we’re not very good at remembering the sources of information that inform our opinions. Was that in the local paper or did my friend tell me about it? Did I learn that from a history book or from watching Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth? Was I watching Osama bin Laden in the film Zero Dark Thirty or in a documentary? The political implications are huge, if not entirely unexpected: Hollywood can win hearts and minds at the expense of the truth. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Zacks argues that there need be no further controversy about whether violence on TV, in games, or on film makes those exposed to it more aggressive: it does.... The mechanisms? Observational learning, being primed to interpret ambiguous stimuli as aggressive, and desensitisation. A strong cocktail."
How economic theory can help stop sexual assault [or: Changing beliefs about what other people believe] - article by Michael Chwe on PBS Newshour website, referenced in Mindhacks blog. "A great deal of social behavior, even violent behavior, is socially regulated in the sense that whether a person does it depends on whether other people do it and condone it.... For example, regardless of how individual members of a college fraternity feel about sexual assault, a fraternity, as a collective, can be a physical and social environment in which a perpetrator has greater confidence, because of fraternal loyalties, that surrounding people will not report him.... Project Callisto, is a web-based system for sexual assault reporting....A survivor can upload and time-stamp evidence, including images, audio and testimony, without having to decide at the time whether to forward it to authorities. This way, evidence is preserved soon after the assault, even if action is not immediate.... Callisto allows a survivor to choose to have his or her evidence forwarded to authorities automatically once another person uploads evidence about the same assailant.... By combining information, Callisto serves as an 'information escrow'.... If people are reluctant to be the only accuser, or are reluctant to report inconclusive information, then we should design a system that ensures that a person will not be the sole accuser and that his or her information will be aggregated with the information of others."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth, jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
The difference between plan and reality - cartoon by Anne-Marie Gainsford, on "the difference between what you think doing a degree will be and the reality of doing it".
The £8.8m typo: how one mistake killed a family business - Pass Notes in The Guardian. "[The] government agency that acts as the registrar for all companies in the UK... recorded information stating that Taylor & Sons Ltd – a 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm employing more than 250 people – had been wound up....The problem was Companies House hadn’t meant to report that Taylor & Sons Ltd had gone into liquidation. They had meant to say Taylor & Son Ltd....Companies House corrected their error three days later, but by then the damage was done: the information had cascaded uncontrollably across the internet.... A judge ruled that Companies House was legally responsible for the firm’s unhappy fate. Damages have yet to be awarded, but lawyers acting for Davison-Sebry have valued the company’s claim at £8.8m. Nine million quid for an ’S’? That’s like the most high-stakes game of Scrabble ever."
'A golden shining moment': the true story behind Atari's ET, the worst video game ever - article by Alex Godfrey in The Guardian. "On 22 September1983, in the dead of night, 13 trucks were driven to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and their contents emptied. Everything was buried and concreted. And that should have been that. But it wasn’t. A few days later, scavengers arrived and found some Atari ET video games. Word got out. The tie-in product had been released to much fanfare the previous December, but had gained a reputation as a stinker. Now, here in New Mexico, as legend began to have it, were millions of them, unloved, unsold, underground. The game, many believed, was responsible for Atari’s sudden downfall, and the company had physically buried its shame. Years later, the internet decreed ET to be the worst video game of all time. Over and over again. In April 2014, a documentary crew turned up to excavate the site and dig up the truth.... 'Why do people want to believe this specific version of this story?' [says Zak Pen, director of the documentary] Why did it need to be that the game was buried? Is it that we naturally are storytellers, and it sounds better that it was because it destroyed the video game industry?”'
Monday, 2 February 2015
Seen and heard: January 2015
New Year’s Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein, live on BBC – this year, with a technology theme. Extraordinary: I never realised before that you could use the titles of Strauss dances to map the conversational topics of the smart people in Vienna, like trends in social media: for example, the Explosions-Polka of 1847, following the discovery of guncotton.
Last Tango in Halifax - third series on BBC TV. Another dense dose of family conflict and personal trategy, but the critics (such as Rebecca Nicholson) are right in pointing to the quality of Sally Wainwright's writing and the superb cast's acting in carrying us along, so that it somehow never seems unrealistic. I'm inclined to agree with the Guardian TV critic who said of Derek Jacobi's character: "I hope I'm like that at his age."
Boxers and Saints - linked pair of graphic novels by Chinese American Gene Luen Yang, set in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion. In one, a village boy whose region is being oppressed and humiliated by European foreigners and their Christian priests, learns martial arts and joins the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists; in the other, a village girl, whose personality and birth order (fourth) means she's seen as unlucky, joins a Christian community to escape her oppressive family life. Their stories intertwine, of course, and follow a tragic trajectory as the Boxers come to take on not only the foreign devils but the secondary devils of Chinese christians. Expertly and movingly executed.
Scheherezade, by Rimsky-Korsakov - recording by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. I first heard a track from this on ClassicFM, played by John Suchet at the special request of his (Turkish) dry cleaner, who had enjoyed it on a previous playing. It's a wonderful piece of music anyway, but I think this must be the definitive recording of it: this orchestra, under conductor Sascha Goetzel, is specialising in European-oriental crossover music, and so they're perfectly placed to bring out the orientalisms of the score. They do some instrument substitutions too, so for example the violin theme as Scheherezade begins each story is accompanied by a kanun, which gives it a magical other-worldly quality.
Broken Age - fabulous adventure game (or rather, the first half of one) from Tim Schafer (ex-LucasArts, Grim Fandango etc), beautifully realised for iPad. There are two parallel stories: in one, a boy lives alone on a spaceship in a kiddy environment maintained by an overprotective maternal computer and is striving to break out of the system's limitations and escape childhood; in the other, a girl is chosen to be one of the village maidens sacrificed to a monster (it's considered an honour, and the maidens dress up as cup-cakes to boost their monster-attractiveness) but she breaks with tradition by asking "why don't we kill the monster instead?" Obviously the two of them have to meet - but for what happens after they do so we'll have to wait for the second act, due out this year. Beautiful graphics, great writing (every dialogue choice delivers something worth hearing), top quality voice acting (including Elijah Wood as the boy), and excellent music; definitely one of my all-time favourites.
Last Tango in Halifax - third series on BBC TV. Another dense dose of family conflict and personal trategy, but the critics (such as Rebecca Nicholson) are right in pointing to the quality of Sally Wainwright's writing and the superb cast's acting in carrying us along, so that it somehow never seems unrealistic. I'm inclined to agree with the Guardian TV critic who said of Derek Jacobi's character: "I hope I'm like that at his age."
Boxers and Saints - linked pair of graphic novels by Chinese American Gene Luen Yang, set in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion. In one, a village boy whose region is being oppressed and humiliated by European foreigners and their Christian priests, learns martial arts and joins the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists; in the other, a village girl, whose personality and birth order (fourth) means she's seen as unlucky, joins a Christian community to escape her oppressive family life. Their stories intertwine, of course, and follow a tragic trajectory as the Boxers come to take on not only the foreign devils but the secondary devils of Chinese christians. Expertly and movingly executed.
Scheherezade, by Rimsky-Korsakov - recording by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. I first heard a track from this on ClassicFM, played by John Suchet at the special request of his (Turkish) dry cleaner, who had enjoyed it on a previous playing. It's a wonderful piece of music anyway, but I think this must be the definitive recording of it: this orchestra, under conductor Sascha Goetzel, is specialising in European-oriental crossover music, and so they're perfectly placed to bring out the orientalisms of the score. They do some instrument substitutions too, so for example the violin theme as Scheherezade begins each story is accompanied by a kanun, which gives it a magical other-worldly quality.
Broken Age - fabulous adventure game (or rather, the first half of one) from Tim Schafer (ex-LucasArts, Grim Fandango etc), beautifully realised for iPad. There are two parallel stories: in one, a boy lives alone on a spaceship in a kiddy environment maintained by an overprotective maternal computer and is striving to break out of the system's limitations and escape childhood; in the other, a girl is chosen to be one of the village maidens sacrificed to a monster (it's considered an honour, and the maidens dress up as cup-cakes to boost their monster-attractiveness) but she breaks with tradition by asking "why don't we kill the monster instead?" Obviously the two of them have to meet - but for what happens after they do so we'll have to wait for the second act, due out this year. Beautiful graphics, great writing (every dialogue choice delivers something worth hearing), top quality voice acting (including Elijah Wood as the boy), and excellent music; definitely one of my all-time favourites.
Thursday, 8 January 2015
Seen and heard: December 2014
Peter Pan – pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Definitely the best panto in our grand-daughter’s four years of panto-going. At her first panto it was clear that most of the budget had been spent on a 3D film insert (that was back when 3D was all the rage), leaving not so much for costumes and sets, or even a decent script. This year they’d spent the budget much more wisely: on music rights (so every song was a hit), and on a good cast, including streetdance company Flawless (who did an astonishing dance-in-the-dark, only their body outlines visible picked out with flashing LED lights, worth the price of admission on its own) and a tremendous sulky Tinkerbell (the dwarf Francesca Mills, working on roller skates as well as wires).
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
Saturday, 3 January 2015
Cuttings December 2014
What should we do with private schools? - article by David Kynaston in The Guardian. "Are we sure that the systematic pursuit of social mobility is necessarily such a good idea? ... There is the argument that to bang on about social mobility is, whether out of naivety or pragmatic calculation, to be choosing the soft option. Or put another way, that it may in its own terms be justified to pursue greater equality of opportunity, but that what matters far more to the welfare of most people is greater equality of outcome – a far tougher policy objective, but one almost entirely written out of the script during the New Labour years and now only falteringly returned to."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
Where e-learning went wrong
You know those insights which come out of the blue, so that suddenly you understand something clearly, and it seems so obvious that you can't think why you never saw it before? I had one of those the other day, when I knew, clearly and distinctly, where it was that e-learning has been going wrong all these years.
The background to this was that I'd been listening to an interview with John Hattie, part of the Radio 4 series (and OU co-production) The Educators. Hattie has made a massive survey of the research literature on teaching and come to the conclusion that which pedagogic approach a teacher uses is pretty much irrelevant to how well their students do. What is much more significant is how much experience the teacher has had - which is not necessarily a popular message for educational theorists or politicians, or even for teachers.
I'd found myself saying something similar a little while ago, when some colleagues were talking about how to get themselves to a certain level of expertise in learning design. Those of them from a project management background were rather hoping that learning design was a determinate procedure which you could follow and get good results, as long as you understood it and followed it correctly; maybe there was a book or an online tool somewhere which set it out? I had to disillusion them. Theories and books and online tools can all help, but basically to become good at learning design you need to put in what I called the "flying hours". If you want to qualify as a pilot, you need to know the science and the theory and be able to pass some practical tests; but in addition to all of that you need to have logged a certain number of hours at the controls. You just need to have done a lot, and seen a lot of things. (This is of course the message of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, that the expertise of acknowledged greats such as The Beatles required an estimated 10,000 hours of practice - in the case of The Beatles, acquired during their time in Hamburg.)
And then I remembered that back in the 1980s, when computers became small and cheap enough for individual people to afford, and we first started wondering about their use in education, it was practice that we were thinking of. The great hope we had was that computers would be a way to give learners a huge amount of practice; they could try problem after problem after problem, in whatever domain of skills they were trying to perfect - especially numeracy, literacy and all the key skills - and the computer would never get tired or bored or irritable, but give them all the practice they needed or could cope with.
What went wrong? How did we get side-tracked? I blame the baleful influence of the IT industry, which as I've argued elsewhere has led us to think of the use of computers in terms of the transmission of information. And when the term e-learning was coined in 1999 - as, confusingly but revealingly, a new approach to teaching - the damage was done. Instead of practice, practice, practice, we've ended up with presentation, presentation, presentation.
The 1980s is back in fashion now; my granddaughter's been learning about it in primary school and is the proud owner of a home-made "I [heart] the 1980s" T-shirt. Perhaps it's time for us all to imitate Back to the Future and return to recover what we lost back then, before e-learning went wrong.
Reference
The term "e-learning" was coined or at least popularised by the American technologist Jay Cross in 1999, as "a model for what corporate training [using the internet] can become". 'Elearning: Winning Approaches to Corporate Learning on Internet Time', Internet Time Group, p. 1. Available from http://www.internettime.com/Learning/articles/eLearning.pdf [Accessed 30 November 2014.
The background to this was that I'd been listening to an interview with John Hattie, part of the Radio 4 series (and OU co-production) The Educators. Hattie has made a massive survey of the research literature on teaching and come to the conclusion that which pedagogic approach a teacher uses is pretty much irrelevant to how well their students do. What is much more significant is how much experience the teacher has had - which is not necessarily a popular message for educational theorists or politicians, or even for teachers.
I'd found myself saying something similar a little while ago, when some colleagues were talking about how to get themselves to a certain level of expertise in learning design. Those of them from a project management background were rather hoping that learning design was a determinate procedure which you could follow and get good results, as long as you understood it and followed it correctly; maybe there was a book or an online tool somewhere which set it out? I had to disillusion them. Theories and books and online tools can all help, but basically to become good at learning design you need to put in what I called the "flying hours". If you want to qualify as a pilot, you need to know the science and the theory and be able to pass some practical tests; but in addition to all of that you need to have logged a certain number of hours at the controls. You just need to have done a lot, and seen a lot of things. (This is of course the message of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, that the expertise of acknowledged greats such as The Beatles required an estimated 10,000 hours of practice - in the case of The Beatles, acquired during their time in Hamburg.)
And then I remembered that back in the 1980s, when computers became small and cheap enough for individual people to afford, and we first started wondering about their use in education, it was practice that we were thinking of. The great hope we had was that computers would be a way to give learners a huge amount of practice; they could try problem after problem after problem, in whatever domain of skills they were trying to perfect - especially numeracy, literacy and all the key skills - and the computer would never get tired or bored or irritable, but give them all the practice they needed or could cope with.
What went wrong? How did we get side-tracked? I blame the baleful influence of the IT industry, which as I've argued elsewhere has led us to think of the use of computers in terms of the transmission of information. And when the term e-learning was coined in 1999 - as, confusingly but revealingly, a new approach to teaching - the damage was done. Instead of practice, practice, practice, we've ended up with presentation, presentation, presentation.
The 1980s is back in fashion now; my granddaughter's been learning about it in primary school and is the proud owner of a home-made "I
Reference
Seen and heard: November 2014
Poetry in Music - concert by Polymnia (the choir in which I sing) in Milton Keynes city church. Memorable discoveries for me in our programme: (1) Morton Lauridsen's beautiful song cycle 'Les Chansons des Roses', setting poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (unusually in French; sample: "contre qui, rose, avez-vous adopté ces épines?"); (2) Seamus Heaney's poem 'Postscript', graphically set by our conductor John Byron to convey the raw power of the sea and wind off the West coast of Ireland (massive swell in the music up to the word "ocean") and the force of the final lines ("Useless to think you'll park or capture it more thoroughly... as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open" - corresponding swell up to the word "open").
Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 - performed by the wonderful Sixteen in the equally wonderful Saffron Hall. Top quality singing, of course, with a small but perfectly constituted orchestra: organ and harp at the core, with the addition of strings for richness, and trios of cornets and sackbuts when the music called for a bit more welly. Only problem, with this as with any performance: how do you follow the Ave Maris Stella?
Sorcery - ingenious and smooth touch-screen realisation of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' gamebooks (of the variety often called choose-your-own-adventure, though that was actually the brand name of a different series). The core gamebook engine, developed by two Cambridge software engineers with a solid track record in interactive fiction, is also publicly available in a cut-down form as Inklewriter; I can see a lot of applications for that, as a nicer and easier alternative to, say, the Quest engine.
Dreamfall Chapters - long-awaited sequel to classic adventure games The Longest Journey (1999) and Dreamfall (2006), from the keyboard of Ragnar Tørnquist. As before, top quality scripting and voice acting, and as in 'Dreamfall' vividly realised 3D environments - in this case, the dystopian futuristic city of Europolis. For fans of the original ('The Longest Journey' inspires particular affection, regularly featuring in charts as the best adventure game ever, and recently remastered for iOS), this is essential playing, because 'Dreamfall' ended with Zoe Castillo in a coma, Kian Alvane due to be executed, and April Ryan stabbed and presumed dead ('Chapters' opens with her funeral, which would seem to confirm that - except that 'Journey' shows her as an old woman, Lady Alvane, so that can't really be the end of her story).
Information Age – new gallery at the Science Museum. Exhibitions of new technology are prone to dating very quickly, but cleverly the curators have given this gallery a better visitor-life by arranging it around six technologies, each treated historically: Cable (telegraph), Exchange (telephone), Broadcast (radio and television), Constellation (satellite networks), Web (computer networks), Cell (mobile phones). Of special interest to me were the exhibits showing the instructions to users which were needed when the technologies were new: the demo telephones on which to practice dialling, the notice of penalties for telegraph operators who altered or allowed a non-recipient to see a message, the guidance to BBC scriptwriters on the narrative devices and effects possible with radio broadcasting.
Clare Teal singing Doris Day - live at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Not only great singing (of course), and great backing from a (little) big band, but lovely dialogue with the audience; I think she's specially careful to give her live performances something you can't get from a recording. Big enough also to ask the audience whether, after leaving the show, they'd buy a CD of her tribute act (if she were to make one) or instead look out a recording of Doris Day. Interesting question, and respondents were divided about 50:50. Respect also to Doris Day herself: still alive, and just turned 90.
Befriending Chaos – psychotherapy / spirituality workshop at Turvey, Monastery of Christ our Savour, with key talks by Pat McGrath and Tony Ang. A lot of emphasis on the positive aspect of chaos (sample quote from Nietzsche: “One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”), so I was glad that at the end of the day we came back to chaos's destructive aspect. I remembered Seamus Heaney's 'Postscript' when Pat talked about the sea off the West coast of Ireland, where he comes from, which is apparently one of those places where the fishermen don't learn to swim, because there's no point; if you go overboard you're done for. You're dependent on your boat in order to survive. Which is not to say that some people can't survive in the water very well, as in this video of a French freediver already noted.
Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 - performed by the wonderful Sixteen in the equally wonderful Saffron Hall. Top quality singing, of course, with a small but perfectly constituted orchestra: organ and harp at the core, with the addition of strings for richness, and trios of cornets and sackbuts when the music called for a bit more welly. Only problem, with this as with any performance: how do you follow the Ave Maris Stella?
Sorcery - ingenious and smooth touch-screen realisation of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' gamebooks (of the variety often called choose-your-own-adventure, though that was actually the brand name of a different series). The core gamebook engine, developed by two Cambridge software engineers with a solid track record in interactive fiction, is also publicly available in a cut-down form as Inklewriter; I can see a lot of applications for that, as a nicer and easier alternative to, say, the Quest engine.
Dreamfall Chapters - long-awaited sequel to classic adventure games The Longest Journey (1999) and Dreamfall (2006), from the keyboard of Ragnar Tørnquist. As before, top quality scripting and voice acting, and as in 'Dreamfall' vividly realised 3D environments - in this case, the dystopian futuristic city of Europolis. For fans of the original ('The Longest Journey' inspires particular affection, regularly featuring in charts as the best adventure game ever, and recently remastered for iOS), this is essential playing, because 'Dreamfall' ended with Zoe Castillo in a coma, Kian Alvane due to be executed, and April Ryan stabbed and presumed dead ('Chapters' opens with her funeral, which would seem to confirm that - except that 'Journey' shows her as an old woman, Lady Alvane, so that can't really be the end of her story).
Information Age – new gallery at the Science Museum. Exhibitions of new technology are prone to dating very quickly, but cleverly the curators have given this gallery a better visitor-life by arranging it around six technologies, each treated historically: Cable (telegraph), Exchange (telephone), Broadcast (radio and television), Constellation (satellite networks), Web (computer networks), Cell (mobile phones). Of special interest to me were the exhibits showing the instructions to users which were needed when the technologies were new: the demo telephones on which to practice dialling, the notice of penalties for telegraph operators who altered or allowed a non-recipient to see a message, the guidance to BBC scriptwriters on the narrative devices and effects possible with radio broadcasting.
Clare Teal singing Doris Day - live at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Not only great singing (of course), and great backing from a (little) big band, but lovely dialogue with the audience; I think she's specially careful to give her live performances something you can't get from a recording. Big enough also to ask the audience whether, after leaving the show, they'd buy a CD of her tribute act (if she were to make one) or instead look out a recording of Doris Day. Interesting question, and respondents were divided about 50:50. Respect also to Doris Day herself: still alive, and just turned 90.
Befriending Chaos – psychotherapy / spirituality workshop at Turvey, Monastery of Christ our Savour, with key talks by Pat McGrath and Tony Ang. A lot of emphasis on the positive aspect of chaos (sample quote from Nietzsche: “One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”), so I was glad that at the end of the day we came back to chaos's destructive aspect. I remembered Seamus Heaney's 'Postscript' when Pat talked about the sea off the West coast of Ireland, where he comes from, which is apparently one of those places where the fishermen don't learn to swim, because there's no point; if you go overboard you're done for. You're dependent on your boat in order to survive. Which is not to say that some people can't survive in the water very well, as in this video of a French freediver already noted.
Cuttings November 2014
Couch potatoes have killed the internet dream - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "Earlier this year engineer Dr Craig Labovitz testified:....'Whereas internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies,... we found that by 2009 half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.' To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock....What we failed to appreciate was the passivity of most of humanity and its inexhaustible appetite for consumption, entertainment and 'infotainment'. The spread of high-speed broadband connections did not liberate human creativity but instead created Couch Potato 2.0, a creature that sees the internet mostly as zillion-channel TV. In that sense, it’s no accident that the corporations which now dominate network traffic are outfits like Google and Netflix, beaming YouTube and movies to you in the comfort of your own settee."
How Made in Chelsea and Gogglebox make sure they don’t miss a beat - article by Stuart Kemp in The Guardian. "A beat is ... a scriptwriting technique originally developed in feature films: the use of dramatic pauses, or the timing of key events, decisions, discoveries. Constructed reality series on American TV mimicked the movies by adopting them, and now beats are being used by the makers of similar UK shows such as The Only Way Is Essex (Towie), Geordie Shore and Made in Chelsea. British producers are increasingly familiar with the US term 'beat sheet', outlining what they want to achieve from each scene. 'You’ve got four or five key points to get to in the episode, then in the edit you beat out each scene again,' says Derek McLean, head of non-scripted programming at Lime Pictures and executive producer of Towie and Geordie Shore, of the US practice. At the moment in the UK, he says, it’s more about beats in the edit. 'You say "give that a beat". It’s about pausing to highlight the key points,' he explains. 'With Towie, if you’re filming and there’s a breakup, we know we have to follow that story over three parts of a show. So what we do is make sure the highlight or conclusion happens in part three rather than at the beginning.'"
Want to succeed? You need systems not goals - Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "As anyone whose employer foists 'performance targets' upon them already knows, a fixation with goal-setting has many downsides. But Adams [Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonst] adds one more: when you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure”. Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose – so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again. A system, by contrast, is 'something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run', regardless of immediate outcome. Drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily – rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours. One system that’s currently popular online goes by the name 'No Zero Days': the idea is simply not to let a single day pass without doing something, however tiny, towards some important project."
We're Sexist Toward Robots - article on Motherboard website, cited in MindHacks blog. "What’s weirder than our insistence on assigning gender to non-sentient machines is that we then sometimes treat them differently as a result. We’re sexist to robots. It would be funny in its absurdity, if it didn’t so harshly reflect the prejudices already ingrained in human society, and risk entrenching them even further. Take for instance a study published last year that asked participants to interact with a robot security guard, a stereotypically male occupation in the human world. Half of the participants met a robot that was given the typically male name 'John,' and the other half met a robot with the typically female name 'Joan.' John had a male text-to-speech voice, and Joan a female voice, but otherwise the robot remained identical. After doing some security tasks, like detecting an intruder on CCTV, the participants rated the robots. They rated John higher than Joan. He was considered more useful and more acceptable as a security bot than his female twin. It’s a curious experiment, and the results are rage-inducingly reminiscent of past findings that have shown a similar gender bias when we judge male and female humans."
There are two ways to read this novel - interview with Ali Smith about her new novel in The Guardian. "How to Be Both consists of two parts, one set in the present day, concerning George, a teenage girl whose mother has died suddenly, the other imagining a life for the 15th-century Italian fresco painter Francesco del Cossa, of whose actual biography little is known. But here's the twist: the novel exists in two editions, one with George's story first, the other with Del Cossa's. Each narrative contains references to the other, but they can be read separately, and in either order. Whether you are in the bookshop or ordering an ebook (in which case, both versions will be delivered to your device), you get to choose, or to abandon yourself to chance." See also Ali Smith on the story behind How to be Both: "[It] started with the structure of painting and the notion of time and the notion, too, of the time we take (or don't take) to use our eyes."
Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Žižek - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "[Žižek] ... sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, 'they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave'. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy."
Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars - Paul Mason column in The Guardian. "The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since [Ernst] Friedrich’s book [War Against War] came out [full of horrific war images], we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.... [Martin] Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury."
Superheroes and Star Wars get a 16th-century makeover - picture sequence in The Guardian. "Photographer Sacha Goldberger has reimagined comic-book heroes and Star Wars characters in the style of old masters, in his photo series ‘Super Flamands’."
Wizardry is artistry - interview with Ursula Le Guin by Hari Kunzru. "I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. People want to thank Le Guin. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy.... One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open heart surgery. 'Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,' he wrote to me. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, 'escapism' the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat."
The Peripheral by William Gibson – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered.... The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. The only real money in the economy comes from 'building' (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. 'Homes' (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get 'fabbed' at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as 'the Jackpot' has wiped out 80% of the population. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or 'klepts', while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because 'terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state'.... The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called 'continua enthusiasts', that allows people to reach into the past.... The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. She wasn’t, as it turns out, playing a drone-piloting simulation game: she was piloting a real drone in this divergent future."
William Gibson webchat – on The Guardian website.
[On the technology he didn't predict.] "Cellphones. If I were a smart 12-year-old reading Neuromancer for the first time, I would decide that the mystery must hinge on where all the cellphones have gone. Why are there payphones in the background?"
[On immersive Virtual Reality.] "I've tried Oculus Rift, the latest developers' version, and I found it very impressive....it did what the 90s Sunday supplements advertised VR as doing. But I'm still in doubt as to whether very many people will want to do it. We already attain full immersion with flat screens, simply by being very interested in the content."
[On new technologies.] "Whenever I'm shown something, like Google Glass... [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a thrift [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do."
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In an extended opening image, as beautiful as it is useful, Marina Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairytale as a world map. The two beacons – and the term is used properly here, rather than as a hyperbolic adjective – are Charles Perrault in Paris and the Grimms in Saxony.... Perrault may have picked up the kernel of his stories from various Mother Gooses gabbling away in cottage kitchens, but the tales’ polished delivery, complete with references to contemporary events and places, was entirely down to him. Something similar happened but in reverse with the Grimms more than 100 years later. Setting out to record the true voice of the people, the scholar brothers found themselves sifting through stories that sounded suspiciously as though they had started life in a French salon or even a Persian souk. The young researchers’ first solution was to purge their tales of anything that might fix them in a particular place or moment – a named battle, city or king. The second was to create a narrative voice that sounded as if it had bubbled up from a collective unconscious as old as the hills of Westphalia. Shorn of anything like modern psychology or social logic, the tales as told by the Grimms now took on their characteristically creepy power...."
Evidence-based debunking - post on MindHacks blog. "We all resist changing our beliefs about the world, but what happens when some of those beliefs are based on misinformation? Is there a right way to correct someone when they believe something that’s wrong? Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook set out to review the science on this topic, and even carried out a few experiments of their own. This effort led to their “Debunker’s Handbook“, which gives practical, evidence-based techniques for correcting misinformation about, say, climate change or evolution. The first thing their review turned up is the importance of “backfire effects” – when telling people that they are wrong only strengthens their belief.... What you must do, they argue, is to start with the plausible alternative (that obviously you believe is correct). If you must mention a myth, you should mention this second, and only after clearly warning people that you’re about to discuss something that isn’t true."
How Made in Chelsea and Gogglebox make sure they don’t miss a beat - article by Stuart Kemp in The Guardian. "A beat is ... a scriptwriting technique originally developed in feature films: the use of dramatic pauses, or the timing of key events, decisions, discoveries. Constructed reality series on American TV mimicked the movies by adopting them, and now beats are being used by the makers of similar UK shows such as The Only Way Is Essex (Towie), Geordie Shore and Made in Chelsea. British producers are increasingly familiar with the US term 'beat sheet', outlining what they want to achieve from each scene. 'You’ve got four or five key points to get to in the episode, then in the edit you beat out each scene again,' says Derek McLean, head of non-scripted programming at Lime Pictures and executive producer of Towie and Geordie Shore, of the US practice. At the moment in the UK, he says, it’s more about beats in the edit. 'You say "give that a beat". It’s about pausing to highlight the key points,' he explains. 'With Towie, if you’re filming and there’s a breakup, we know we have to follow that story over three parts of a show. So what we do is make sure the highlight or conclusion happens in part three rather than at the beginning.'"
Want to succeed? You need systems not goals - Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "As anyone whose employer foists 'performance targets' upon them already knows, a fixation with goal-setting has many downsides. But Adams [Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonst] adds one more: when you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure”. Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose – so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again. A system, by contrast, is 'something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run', regardless of immediate outcome. Drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily – rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours. One system that’s currently popular online goes by the name 'No Zero Days': the idea is simply not to let a single day pass without doing something, however tiny, towards some important project."
We're Sexist Toward Robots - article on Motherboard website, cited in MindHacks blog. "What’s weirder than our insistence on assigning gender to non-sentient machines is that we then sometimes treat them differently as a result. We’re sexist to robots. It would be funny in its absurdity, if it didn’t so harshly reflect the prejudices already ingrained in human society, and risk entrenching them even further. Take for instance a study published last year that asked participants to interact with a robot security guard, a stereotypically male occupation in the human world. Half of the participants met a robot that was given the typically male name 'John,' and the other half met a robot with the typically female name 'Joan.' John had a male text-to-speech voice, and Joan a female voice, but otherwise the robot remained identical. After doing some security tasks, like detecting an intruder on CCTV, the participants rated the robots. They rated John higher than Joan. He was considered more useful and more acceptable as a security bot than his female twin. It’s a curious experiment, and the results are rage-inducingly reminiscent of past findings that have shown a similar gender bias when we judge male and female humans."
There are two ways to read this novel - interview with Ali Smith about her new novel in The Guardian. "How to Be Both consists of two parts, one set in the present day, concerning George, a teenage girl whose mother has died suddenly, the other imagining a life for the 15th-century Italian fresco painter Francesco del Cossa, of whose actual biography little is known. But here's the twist: the novel exists in two editions, one with George's story first, the other with Del Cossa's. Each narrative contains references to the other, but they can be read separately, and in either order. Whether you are in the bookshop or ordering an ebook (in which case, both versions will be delivered to your device), you get to choose, or to abandon yourself to chance." See also Ali Smith on the story behind How to be Both: "[It] started with the structure of painting and the notion of time and the notion, too, of the time we take (or don't take) to use our eyes."
Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Žižek - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "[Žižek] ... sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, 'they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave'. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy."
Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars - Paul Mason column in The Guardian. "The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since [Ernst] Friedrich’s book [War Against War] came out [full of horrific war images], we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.... [Martin] Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury."
Superheroes and Star Wars get a 16th-century makeover - picture sequence in The Guardian. "Photographer Sacha Goldberger has reimagined comic-book heroes and Star Wars characters in the style of old masters, in his photo series ‘Super Flamands’."
Wizardry is artistry - interview with Ursula Le Guin by Hari Kunzru. "I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. People want to thank Le Guin. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy.... One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open heart surgery. 'Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,' he wrote to me. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, 'escapism' the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat."
The Peripheral by William Gibson – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered.... The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. The only real money in the economy comes from 'building' (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. 'Homes' (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get 'fabbed' at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as 'the Jackpot' has wiped out 80% of the population. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or 'klepts', while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because 'terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state'.... The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called 'continua enthusiasts', that allows people to reach into the past.... The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. She wasn’t, as it turns out, playing a drone-piloting simulation game: she was piloting a real drone in this divergent future."
William Gibson webchat – on The Guardian website.
[On the technology he didn't predict.] "Cellphones. If I were a smart 12-year-old reading Neuromancer for the first time, I would decide that the mystery must hinge on where all the cellphones have gone. Why are there payphones in the background?"
[On immersive Virtual Reality.] "I've tried Oculus Rift, the latest developers' version, and I found it very impressive....it did what the 90s Sunday supplements advertised VR as doing. But I'm still in doubt as to whether very many people will want to do it. We already attain full immersion with flat screens, simply by being very interested in the content."
[On new technologies.] "Whenever I'm shown something, like Google Glass... [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a thrift [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do."
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In an extended opening image, as beautiful as it is useful, Marina Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairytale as a world map. The two beacons – and the term is used properly here, rather than as a hyperbolic adjective – are Charles Perrault in Paris and the Grimms in Saxony.... Perrault may have picked up the kernel of his stories from various Mother Gooses gabbling away in cottage kitchens, but the tales’ polished delivery, complete with references to contemporary events and places, was entirely down to him. Something similar happened but in reverse with the Grimms more than 100 years later. Setting out to record the true voice of the people, the scholar brothers found themselves sifting through stories that sounded suspiciously as though they had started life in a French salon or even a Persian souk. The young researchers’ first solution was to purge their tales of anything that might fix them in a particular place or moment – a named battle, city or king. The second was to create a narrative voice that sounded as if it had bubbled up from a collective unconscious as old as the hills of Westphalia. Shorn of anything like modern psychology or social logic, the tales as told by the Grimms now took on their characteristically creepy power...."
Evidence-based debunking - post on MindHacks blog. "We all resist changing our beliefs about the world, but what happens when some of those beliefs are based on misinformation? Is there a right way to correct someone when they believe something that’s wrong? Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook set out to review the science on this topic, and even carried out a few experiments of their own. This effort led to their “Debunker’s Handbook“, which gives practical, evidence-based techniques for correcting misinformation about, say, climate change or evolution. The first thing their review turned up is the importance of “backfire effects” – when telling people that they are wrong only strengthens their belief.... What you must do, they argue, is to start with the plausible alternative (that obviously you believe is correct). If you must mention a myth, you should mention this second, and only after clearly warning people that you’re about to discuss something that isn’t true."
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