Tom Morris

Calladus, over at PZ's place, said this:

In physics class a few years ago we were exploring friction and used Britney as a model. We learned that Britney couldn't generate enough force to actually push a soda machine across the floor, but that she certainly could generate the necessary force to tip the machine over on top of herself.

When ever I see Britney in the news now, I see the blackboard equations, and graphic of a squashed Britney.

That's so beautiful.

Frank Furedi has an article on plagiarism and cheating in universities and schools.

His basic thesis is that parents have 'institutionalised' plagiarism and cheating. It's a nice idea but I'm unconvinced.

The problem is that plagiarism comes about, in my experience, from a lack of skills. I've actually had difficulty finding source material to read for essays. I can't find essays to plagiarise because the material isn't there! That's after Googling, checking both the academic libraries I use, and often the British Library also.

Would I plagiarise if I could? No. It's wrong to do so. Could I plagiarise if I wanted to? Occasionally, but it wouldn't actually answer the question set.

Schools do not teach critical reading skills, academic essay writing, footnoting and bibliography writing. All of these are necessary for university - and all are skills (not particularly difficult) I have taught myself because nobody else wanted to.

The government currently uses the Key Skills Qualification as remedial education for 16-18 year olds to make up for the failures of their GCSE educations. The government are playing a game where they say that vocational qualifications are equivalent to academic qualifications.

The point that Furedi makes about parents being outsourced teachers is interesting. "Outsourcing" is the word I would use, but I would switch the direction. We've been teaching our own for a long time, and often parents can do it a lot better than qualified teachers. And there are benefits (downsides also: raising them to be ideological and philosophical clones is hardly an advantage). We've outsourced our teaching to the government, and they've done a poor job handling the responsibility.

Every few years, the government change everything. I'm a year younger than the folks who got the full brunt of reform. My friend Dan got everything - the introduction of Sats, Key Stages (later Assessment Stages or some other newspeak), CATs (which are a bit like an IQ test merged with American style SAT exams), the introduction of National Records of Achievements (quickly rescinded in our area, then brought back in, causing numerous headaches as the students moved from primary to secondary school), fiddled with GNVQ's and, finally, got the full meddlesome reform-for-the-sake-of-reform that was "Curriculum 2000" (turning A-levels in to AS/A2 levels, quadrupling the number of exams taken in the Sixth Form, introducing the ridiculously ill thought out Key Skills Qualification).

So, not only are today's twenty-two years olds educational refugees in a land of constantly rebranded and relaunched acronyms, now they are finishing university only for their parents to find out their younger sibling is starting university with three times the financial burden.

What the government could do to fix the education system is to leave it alone for awhile. They've spent so long playing with it, rejigging it and pulling letters out of the Scrabble bag to name new qualifications, might it actually be time just to sit back and see whether or not it actually works?

All of these issues come from a government more interested in shouting out big new ideas than thinking of actual good ideas. How exactly does teaching mathematics suited to twelve year olds to seventeen year olds who've already passed their maths GCSEs benefit them?

Similarly, look at school libraries. They are chronically resource-less. Between 1996 and 2003, my old school library halved the number of books they had, and halved the quality (they had a whole shelf of celebrity picture books prominently displayed on my departure - hardly a "independent learning resources centre").

On the bright side, all of this will be irrelevant in a few years. Academic overachievers will be shipped off to either America or some "fag" country like France where they care about poetry and philosophy. The rest will sit back and enjoy the vomit running through the streets. I'm saving up for my plane ticket...

I've just been listening to Start the Week from Monday the 20th of March. I particularly enjoyed Hilary Spurling's discussion of the Royal Literary Fund's survey of undergraduate literacy (or lack thereof). This discussion has been covered pretty well by an argument in the Sunday Telegraph a little while back, as well as a writeup in The Hindu.

All very interesting. While listening to Ms Spurling, I heard this little remark from Andrew Marr:

"I should announce - or - admit, I suppose, by the way, erm, that, Start the Week is now available as a podcast since we're talking about the, the non-literary culture. You can download it, I'm told, in seconds to an MP3 player should you wish to do so. Erm, Hilary Spurling, we're not going to download you in to an MP3 player..."

'Admit' is exactly the right word to use, since it is done, according to the Oxford American dictionary, "typically with reluctance". The BBC should be singing from the hills that they are podcasting. It is perhaps the best thing the BBC have done, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Jonathan Miller's Atheism programmes and a few of the Horizon shows.

Marr is not the exception. I've heard numerous programmes on Radio 4 plead guilty to the sin of podcasting. I mean, who would think that putting an MP3 file online and distributing it using RSS enclosure tags is such a crime! Such remarks seem to have, at their core, a lack of knowledge of the technology which actually underpins podcasting, a lack of understanding of the value of podcast shows and a rather nasty surprise that someone may be out there who uses said technology.

The idea that podcasting is "non-literary culture" is a bit like the statement thrown around - wrongly - by early opponents of radio, and statements made - rightly - by opponents of television. If podcasting is non-literary, so is radio.

First of all, authors are rethinking storytelling for podcasting. One only needs to look to someone such as Scott Sigler, who delivers "sci-fi horror at its most personal and graphic" (or so says one of his reviewers). Not exactly to my taste, but he's putting his work out there, and people are really enjoying it.

Cory Doctorow produces audio versions of his short stories over at Craphound. These are delivered by podcast. I just finihsed listening to "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" the other day, and it's a fantastic story. Definitely "non-literary culture". In fact, Podiobooks offers a whole number of stories that cover all different types of fiction, and LibriVox are giving podcast treatment to many books, stories and poetry. When I've got a bit more time, I'm planning to do a Nietzsche reading for LibriVox. Nietzsche is very much "non-literary culture".

On the non-fiction side, I'm just looking through my iTunes subscriptions, and I've got programmes on terrorism, evolutionary biology, religion, ethics, the Qu'ran, homosexuality and the Catholic church, the Prime Minister's Questions on the New Labour education reforms, Don Quixote, the Macintosh computer, psychology, Israel, Internet advertising, Perl, open source software development, citizen journalism, global warming, Iraq, neoconservatism, drug policy, bird flu, NASA, patent law, Peter Singer, Immanuel kant, the US Supreme Court and Samuel Alito, Bruce Sterling's stunning speech at SXSW, Christian fundamentalism, Shabina Begum's blasted jilbab, chiropractic stupidity and Cheryl Merkowski's stinky whorehole.

In fact, compared to the cursory glances given to a number of these topics in BBC coverage of them (quick, quick... summarise the last two thousand years of philosophy in the next five minutes!), podcasts often cover them in greater depth and the producers of independent podcasts are often more tolerant of differing opinions.

Perhaps the reason why the BBC are reluctant to "admit" the existence of podcasts is because to do so might expose the shockingly thin coverage given to important topics, and the reliance on "media-friendly" thinkers whose actual grasp of the subject is often rather questionable.

Podcasting has done for radio what the VCR has done for television - freed us from scheduling, and given us a fast-forward button when someone's talking nonsense. I guess someone at the BBC doesn't like that, and so considers it an easier target to brush podcast listeners off as beat-obsessed hyperactives who are unable to think. They see the white earbuds poking out, forgetting that there's a brain inside.

All the while, they kick their heels, failing to put more and more podcasts online. Could there be a connection between this dismissiveness of the "non-literary" podcast audience and the BBC's sluggish pace on embracing podcasting.

Browsing through my referral stats today, I found that somebody had found my review of Richard Dawkins' Root of All Evil? by searching for peter singer nambla on Google. I redid the search (the FBI are gonna be after me now!) and found that my review is number two.

But it brings up a couple of nutjob websites. Before we go in to those, refamiliarise yourself with Singer's meta-ethical statement that I put in the previous post. Here it is:

"I approach each issue by seeking the solution that has the best consequences for all affected. By 'best consequences', I understand that which satisfies the most preferences, weighted in accordance with the strength of the preferences. Thus my ethical position is a form of preference-utilitarianism"

And, while we're at it, here's some more of Singer's meta-ethics:

"I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise."

"an action contrary to the preference of any being is, unless this preference is outweighed by contrary preferences, wrong. Killing a person who prefers to continue living is therefore wrong, other things being equal... For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person would normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, since persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one, but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have."

Google points us to an article by Dorothy Anne Seese called Get the Real Criminals: we haven't begun to gittem (that's Sun City, Arizona for those of you who haven't honed their American dialect radar). Ms Seese "is a Christian conservative, a part of "the greatest generation" and proud to be an American. She is striving through her writing to help this nation go back to the constitutional and moral foundations she knew in her youth".

In this article, Ms Seese draws an analogy between the death of a neglected child at the hands of their evil, perverted parents, and the "real criminals who have perpetrated this and other crimes of violence, lust and perversion on our society, because if they are allowed to continue unhindered, no child in America will be safe and no adult will dare go out without a gun in the coming years". Those criminals are, of course, liberal profesors like the aforementioned Princeton ethicist Peter Singer.

Why Singer? Because he "strongly advocates bestiality, sex with animals (as well as lifting all taboos off all sexual relations as long as no one harms the animals)". We'll ignore the logical discontinuity in the latter bracketed clause. We all make mistakes, right?

Does Singer "strongly advocate" bestiality? Well, he's written a review of a book about human-animal sexuality entitled Heavy Petting. He doesn't so much advocate it, in the sense of being a spokesman or flag-bearer of it. He describes the history of it, and then really dismisses the issue. If you accept Singer's meta-ethics (I don't accept them, but I do think a fairly convincing case can be made for them), then voluntary bestiality logically follows as a non-issue.

Voluntary sex with animals satisfies the preferences of both the animal and the human, and so there is, under Singer's meta-ethics, no case to answer for. He is not advocating it, he is dismissing it from his ethical courtroom. Seese then links to an article by one Jackie Patru. This website is a lovely feast of camp. I particularly like the statement at the top imploring God to "Bless All The Little Children", presumably because when they grow a bit older they get acne and God could never bless acne.

Patru's article, It's official: Diversity Includes Sex with Children and Sex With Animals, seems to go back to that little search query that hit my site, drawing an analogy between Peter Singer's statements about bestiality with those of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. You can judge that one for yourself, and you'll find it to be pretty ridiculous.

What you don't find with either Seese's or Patru's articles is actual reasons why Singer is incorrect - no argument is given against his meta-ethics. They doubt the statistics he use, but these are not in any way essential to his argument, even though they are used in his article.

Instead, we get rhetorical fluff about how "so-called intellectuals and liberal progressives [...] are not only attacking Christianity but dragging our nation into the mire and muck and sewage of moral filth and depravity" followed by statements about how we should look forward to "God's great Judgment Day". You know, where God, who, if his historians are accurate, has killed and savaged thousands of people, creating the category of sin, then providing the only medicine.

As a brief interlude, not everything said is bonkers. She does at least acknowledge (and posthumously tries to curry the support of) the existence of Thomas Paine, although ascribing atheism to him rather than deism.

Then back to NAMBLA and a condemnation of human sacrifice. Good, so she doesn't support the usual Republican line on capital punishment, then. "Thou shalt not kill" and all. Oh wait...

I also managed to find this amusing list of the 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Roy Moore is screwing up America only slightly more than Michael Newdow. Both are screwing them up more than James Kopp, the guy who murdered an abortion doctor. Good old hypocrisy.

What this equation of evil people with (broadly) left-wing thinkers (and I say that as an ex-socialist, now left-wing libertarian) all comes down to is that these people don't do convention. They think the unthinkable. In Seese's statements, she seems to be saying that we ought to use this new technology in order to push old opinions around forcefully. Great. I say we ought to use the technology, and our abilities, to push the discourse in to places we would be afraid to plumb.

Love him or hate him, Peter Singer is saying things which people find unpalatable. His critics provide a knee-jerk reaction, without looking at his reasons why. As someone who sits on the fence on a lot of the things Singer writes about, here's a tip to his critics: stop waffling about America's "moral foundations" and actually look at moral foundations for proper.

Singer left a trapdoor open for his critics when he said: "I don't think there's much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there's some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don't bother writing a book; go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun."

Cut the crap about how repulsive Singer's ethic is. By making this type of argument against Singer's ethic, you don't answer the question set. Point out the flaws in Singer's arguments. This is exactly the point about Dawkins. Spend some time with religious folk and you get a lot of words, but no actual points. I saw this after the broadcast of Dawkins' first "Root of All Evil" programme. Religious people condemned it for reasons none of them wanted to actually elucidate, thus proving Dawkins right. Religious folk are condeming Singer for no reason at all, proving Singer's unwritten thesis - that Judeo-Christian morality is based on hysteria and taboo - to have some merit.

Is it because it's easier to get het up about liberal professors advocating bestiality and call people to action, than to actually look at the reasons behind them? It's far easier to say of people like Singer (or Dawkins) that they are moral monsters, luring children away to have their values aborted in a fit of atheism, utilitarianism or, worst of all, Darwinism. It's far harder to read them with an open mind.

When reading, writing and thinking about morals, one can be brought to tears because of the importance of the task. That's why we have defence mechanisms like humour and insults. If we are going to take part in this task, we need to do it properly. Singer, however repulsive some of you may find his views, does this properly. His critics don't.

On that note, now go and read Mark Oppenheimer's article Who Lives? Who Dies? The Utility of Peter Singer. It's a religious author reading Singer and actually thinking about it rather than just objecting mindlessly.

A 'think tank' at my college produces an interesting weekly newsletter called "Rapid Response" which is all about topics of religion, public policy and ethics. I don't agree with quite a number of the things it says each week, but it's well worth reading. It's also written by one of my current lecturers and two lecturers who I have had in the past. It only seems to be distributed via their website, and there doesn't seem to be any way of syndicating what is basically an institutional blog.

I'm trying to find an online service that generates an RSS feed of the site. The first service I've tried is called FeedFire. It requires a slightly intrusive registration (phone number, for instance) and doesn't let you change the feed title which is based solely on the TITLE tag in the HEAD of the HTML. Which in the case of the site is "Main Page" - hardly useful.

But it just about works. You get notified when the page is updated, though if they change the formatting too much, it'll probably break the feed. It doesn't contain any description, so you don't know what you're going to get unless you click the article.

But that page title thing gnawed at me. So I checked out FeedBlendr (blendr ought to have an extra 'e', but I'm just being fussy!). You just put the FeedFire RSS url in, give it a new title, and it turns out an RSS and Atom feed.

If anyone knows of a better way to do this without having to install software or pay money, please do tell. Perhaps we could also work out an OPML index of academic departmental and institutional blogs and publications (like this one).

I saw a "Web 2.0"-ish version of FeedFire recently, but I can't remember the URL.

We've got the following then: RSS, Atom all being sourced from here. There seems to be a decent list of online services here if you want to play.

Update: (5/5/06) I've set up another feed using Ponyfish, here.

Funny news from the front: a colleague told me today of how faded teen pop band, Take That, were recently found rehearsing at the hall of my college, right next to the office where I spend my days.

The now significantly older, balder and distinctly less heart-throbbish attracted a small following of female university students sadly reminiscing over their pre-teen years. It's funny how Plato and Jason Orange can mix.

If you really need your memory jogged, Take That had eight number one hits in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 1996, Wikipedia describes their 1996 breakup as "cataclysmic" (Oxford American Dictionary: "relating to or denoting a violent natural event [or] something unpleasant or unsuccessful on an enormous scale"; hardly NPOV, if you ask me). They've only had one hit in the United States.

After Take That broke up, according to Wikipedia, hotlines were set up in Britain to "cope with fan's grief". Oh, for crying out loud. Shed a tear for talent, but shed nothing for these guys.

Take That was the signal to the music industry to spoil the nineties with manufactured boy band acts, though they obviously didn't start it. They just reactivated the clean cut, happy clappy boy-band act that's pissed off anyone who likes music for decades now.

How do I feel working in the room next door to where Take That are rehearsing for their UK tour? Pretty apathetic. I'm testing out and evangelising technology that will hopefully replace the industry which makes Take That popular, and that's really exciting.

It's a technology that doesn't care about your age, or your "image", or your sexuality or any of that jazz. It only cares about ideas.

I like this comment over at Hellbound Alleee's blog:

With respect to hell, I just loved what Richard Carrier said during the movie The God Who Wasn't There. Brian Flemming asked Carrier if he would be regretful if, when he died, he ended up in the Christian hell. Carrier said not at all; indeed, the Christian heaven would be a true hell for him. He pointed out that, if he knew billions of people were suffering agonizing torture for all eternity, and he couldn't do a thing about it while sitting up in heaven, that would be the worst afterlife he could imagine.

The very concept of hell demonstrates the inherent immorality of Christianity. No virtuous religion would envision a place filled with agonizing tortures and horrendous suffering. Envisioning such a place seems downright psychopathic.

I post this while I listen to very happy-clappy gospel music. Am I a hypocrite, or do I just know which bits of religion are worth bothering with?

Now, to free the rather interesting concept of 'conscience' from it's theological dogma for an essay on the ethics of religious 'hatred'.

The discussion of Luke 16:23 in P. Z. Myers' comment thread certainly is interesting. If Abraham is really the father of faith, then torment awaits. Real good endorsement of the Religious Life isn't it, Mr Kierkegaard? You can start the whole idea of faith off, but if you don't accept the salvation of a man born after your death, you're gonna burn. What a sexy religion.

I had a brief chat with Yoz Grahame after the Technology 2.0 event today, on the topic of Ning. Here's what's really cool. A few days ago, I wrote a piece called Ruminations on Message Boards, where I described how virtually nobody had done anything new or interesting with message boards and forum technology. Basically, the whole idea of message boards has been stuck virtually in a vacuum since 1996, with many, many recreations of the same, tired old ideas.

During Yoz's talk, I found a discussion board system on Ning at discussion.ning.com. It offers much of the functionality which I want, and because it's 'cloneable' for anyone with a Ning account, anyone can launch a pretty, Web 2.0 message board which uses a tag-based folksonomy rather than an artificial hierarchy.

I explained the point about letting organic organisation flow using tag-based hierarchy structures. There is something very Ning-like in the idea - basically, you are taking an aggregate of user ideas, and letting people 'clone' and customise them.

Talk turned to OPML, Dave's OPML Editor and the suchlike. Yoz has actually installed Les Orchard's PHP server on to Ning. You can find it at opmlserver.ning.com. Neither Les Orchard's server, nor Yoz's Ning implementation support the blogging functionality, which needs to be ported over from the Frontier code.

To be honest, when I first saw Ning, I said "meh". But looking at it again tonight, during Yoz's talk, is all rather exciting.

Evening all, I'm at 01ZeroOne, to liveblog Technology 2.0, the evening technology conference where they take stuff that people have seen at American tech conferences.

Promise TV

First up, Promise TV (the Ludlam family). These guys presented back at OpenTech 2005 in London.

Video recorders were one of the main changes in televisual technology, that let consumers exert control over our entertainment. Time-shifting and alternative content sources (eg. video rental).

DVR & PVR has made things easier, but it's just an extension of taping content. We are still programming a device for a particular event.

Freeview was born from On Digital (later ITV Digital) services in 1998, an exciting change in UK TV. One of Greg Dyke's most stunning achievement.

5 channels in the last month, 3 more due this year, Channel 4 trebled revenue their revenue by moving away from subscription.

Moved from five analogue channels to over 30 digital cahnnels.

There are still problems: in one evening, 81 separate programmes, with scheduling conflicts inevitable.

Demonstration: Watch Live TV, Programme List, Recorder Status. Four viewing boxes hooked up to one recorder.

Four minutes rewind and fast-foreword. "You're in a time machine with video". Two thousand programmes recorded, which you can browse through.

This is very cool. Thin clients, radio, Zeroconf (aka Bonjour, Rendezvous) support!!!!, automatic tuning, faster interaction response time. This isn't a Personal Video Recorder, this is "an Impersonal Video Recorder".

Impacts on viewing habits: you watch less TV, not watching live, quality goes up, the "Last Night's TV" column in the papers is actually useful, you watch less live TV, 'news' comes mainly from radio. Still buy the Radio Times, need an 'editorial' review of TV, because the EPG is impartial.

Producing a limited production run for a beta test, next-gen EPG development, levering social software concepts, freesat and HD tests.

Promise TV is so unbelievably cool.

Tom Armitage: From Paddles to Pads: Is controller design killing creativity in videogames?

Summary of Etech talk - see we make money not art for previous talk and comments.

Google for the Revolution Remote image. What's wrong with gaming now? Gaming is "bigger than Hollywood". A sea of genres, sameyness of games - adding a few new buttons each time.