Craig in feed form

I recently visited the United States of America. For as long as I’ve held opinions on anything, I’ve said that US was somewhere I would be quite happy if I never visit. I now have to amend that statement. The US is somewhere I would be happiest if I never visited again.

I’m not really feeling very literate today, so I’m just going to make an ad-hoc list of points which come into my head:

• As soon as you make land-fall in the country the state assails you
• Conspicuous consumption at a scale I’ve never seen before
• A tendency for large products, made from expensive materials, but made poorly
• Service staff skitter around like frightened bunnies, keen to help, but completely incapable of doing so
• For an Englishman, the culture of tipping felt so awkward as to make me reticent
• The programmes on their TV had me chuckling for hours
• Their cars aren’t just big, they are designed to look big
• The stereotypes of the average American have not been washed away
• Despite being in ‘hippy’ California, and despite assurances from various Americans, it was not easy to find vegetarian food
• Perhaps related to the last point, at no point did I find good food

I might add to this list as the visit comes back to me.

I should add the caveat that I did meet some wonderful and lovely people. People who were interesting, intelligent, witty and worthy of my admiration and respect. However, the ‘nature’ of these people did not seem to be represented in the media, the culture, the shops or the infrastructure.

Steve Culley asked (by email) for my views on an article in the Guardian titled, I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think. A related article, Hits and misses, was contributed by Mansur Darlington.

Personally, my memory for simple facts has been degrading and that has been noted by my friends and family… I don’t think I’m yet at a point where I can put that down to my age. I can, however, still enjoy losing myself in a book, or following an article or report through its arguments. I don’t agree that the consequences of Google include the degradation of our ability to think or really pose some fundamental threat to our intelligence.

I’ve always thought one of the most fundamental tools humans possess is extelligence. Is the WWW as an information carrier fundamentally different to the older methods: books, scrolls, tablets, stele and cave walls? I would say it has just become easier to rely on - more accessible.

The ability to assess the validity and bias of sources, interpret arguments and construct concepts is separate to that. The WWW (and current search technology) make it harder by increasing the potential sources by several magnitudes. I think that just argues for better teaching of soft skills. At no point in my education have I been instructed on how to search any form of information, I have never been taught how to classify, I have never been taught the importance of providing a chain of references. I think it is usually assumed that the individual should pick this up in the course of their education… I think most people do, but many do not. The greater the field of information to draw on the more crucial these skills become.

Why do people insist on naming everything? We seem to have an underlying need to give things unique names. We do this even for things which are not being explicitly marketed, are only used within one context and do not have to compete with other things providing the same function (Although I have just stated quite a few constraints on what I am talking about there are still quite a lot of things covered by it). Let me clarify what I am complaining about with an example:

I just ran a cropper of this problem when trying to request some changes be made to my university’s central address book. The maintainer seemed quite confused by my referring to it as “the university address book”… apparently I should have known to call it Person Finder. Silly me! One email simply reads:

It’s called Person Finder.

What is wrong with “Address book”, that is surely what it is to most people? Perhaps I am different, do most people think in terms of names or what something actually does or is? Other than being memorable, what is the point, and if that is the only point does it really help us remember or communicate about a particular thing?

The two extremes of this might results in my being called “vegetarian engineer from Guisborough” or, on the other hand, Person 728692. Although many of our names did once reflect key identifying traits, we just got lazy or sentimental when it came to changing them… I should really be living in a loft-house below a cliff face. A person is something which must clearly be named in a global context which lends more weight to a numbering system…and I do not think I am something which already has a widely accepted name nor can I be easily and intuitive described! We are all different things to different people after all. There are clearly circumstances where naming is the most desirable solution but I feel we take it too far!

This post started off which a clear intention to rant about something very specific… it turned into just a amble with a particularly aggressive tone.

In the papers and articles I read in the information management realm there seems to be a great love of stating the obvious. I would like to share some examples which have had me giggling at my desk this morning:

[The] importance [of plan implementation] cannot be overstated, as without plan implementation the planning exercise may be thrown into question.

Planning outcomes have typically been operationalised as the extent to which key planning objectives have been fulfilled.

The last quote had three references! Perhaps I do not yet understand the principles of writing quality papers but I really do not understand the need for such trivial statements? In some ways I actually admire the author’s ability to express fundamental truths so carefully - and so seriously.

I have finally moved away from my previous website host, Servelocity. For too long I have been putting up with a very old and peculiar setup which has curtailed my fun to a great extent. Servelocity (and many others) seem positively backwards in their insistence on hanging on to legacy stable software.

I’ve been developing another section for my website, but I’ve been using XML processing features not available in PHP 4. Now that I’ve shifted to a more modern host and the holidays have come along I can finish off the section and add it to my website :). It is something that I have been developing with help from some researchers at The Open University and hopefully will eventually be published on SourceForge.

During the switch I’ve also taken the chance to change to a much cheaper (and less flexible) hosting package. This unfortunately means that I have had to say goodbye to a lot of content which I was hosting for various people. Although I say ‘unfortunate’ I am actually rather glad to be rid of them, as I no longer have to worry unduly about breaking my website on a whim.