Perspective

It's traditional to write a new year blog post. I'm not very traditional.

The big news at the moment is the Israeli assault on Gaza in apparent retaliation for the rockets that Hamas has been firing into Israel. No opinion on that here, but I think that I'm more knowledgeable on the subject than the average Brit. Even at school, I did a whole semester researching the background of the conflicts. The course was called "West Asian Studies". Clearly that's a better name than "Middle Eastern Studies".

Also from much earlier school history classes, I recall early ignorance about why Upper Egypt was shown below Lower Egypt on maps in history class. Of course it's obvious now. But because we are so used to arbitrarily seeing North at the top of maps, it confused this poor schoolboy. I know there are some novelty maps (typically Australian) that reverse the world, but actually I don't think these maps should be "novelty" at all, there should be more varieties and perspectives, then it's harder for little kids to grow up with flat earth or other biblical misconceptions.

The Economic Ape

Like a minuscule version of Scott Adams' blog, I try to find new ways of looking at old issues, merging economics with psychology with statistics - and consequently there is a fair overlap with Freakonomics. However although that is an excellent site, I think they usually don't do enough to look at the fundamental causes of human behaviour, the basic science. But yesterday they did ... as there was an interview with Frans de Waal. One of his key observations was that it is part of our inescapable nature to be concerned not so much with absolute wealth as with relative wealth and perceived notions of fairness, something I constantly echo at this site.

It's also worth directly quoting his views on a particular Oxford-based scientist: [He] is the most underrated behavioral biologist (ethologist) of his generation. His books have shaped the view of many, because he openly discussed, with great humor and flair, the human-animal connection before we had sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and the like.

I admire the guy, because it took guts to write what he wrote. As a student, I learned about his book because my professors kept warning us not to read Desmond Morris.

That is almost exactly what I said here just a few months ago.

The CV Newsletter

Why join a social networking site? Why write a blog? There have been numerous articles written about the risks, and there have already been many cases where something published on-line has come back to haunt. All of us in the on-line world also have a life in the real world, and reputation is slow to build and easy to destroy.

I've covered the basic reasons before, and this is not the place for a repeat of self analysis and psychology. This time the argument is simple economics, the benefits outweigh the costs.

The ever-readable Seamus McCauley recently noted that a friend of his had recently enrolled in a graduate program at a reasonably well known university in England. However, his experience there was poor, he soon realised that the course was basically just a pathetic degree provider for high-paying foreign studeents, especially from China. So great for generating fees for the particular institution, not so great for the reputation of English universities as a whiole.

But more interesting was this comment in the article: I will not advertise my degree at UEA on my CV, whether or not I graduate.

Whether or not he realises it now, it is too late for that unfortunate student. I consider that everything that he has written on the blog is already a part of his "CV", whether he likes it or not.

Employers, isn't a current, comprehensive, searchable evolving blog a much better guide to a candidate than a couple of typed pages anyway?

Measurement, Control and Negative Feedback

A few days ago I mentioned a problem of measurement, and I was delighted to get a bit of feedback in the comments there.

The "observer effect" is a term for when the act of measurement causes a change to the variable being measured. For example, using different examples to Wikipedia: a speed camera emits radar that strikes the object being measured, thus changing its speed, a flowmeter in a water pipe causes a restriction that impedes the flow.

But the effect is perhaps most significant in infinitesimal physics experiments, which do not concern me, and in behavioural economics, which does.

In sociology, in society generally, the knowledge that people are being observed causes those people to change their behaviour. Hence the need for double-blind studies and libraries of other control techniques. And when the actual thing that you want to measure cannot be measured directly, or if you want to predict future change, then you need to find a proxy measure.

It's amusing that Tim Harford in the FT has asked a very similar question today. Sometimes historical performance of the same variable will be the best measure, but for the "big economic measures" (interest rates, stock indexes, inflation, etc) we must constantly evaluate underlying variables looking for causal ones. There is much potential for statistical correlation techniques here.

Despite the practical difficulties with its implementation, the idea of an expenses-based evaluation of office need had theoretical appeal because the incentive works in the opposite direction to the benefit. This is what you would want from a measure designed to control anything, you want there to be "negative feedback". That phrase has new meanings in the user rated world of eBay and customer surveys, but I refer to it in the Engineering sense of Control Theory - negative feedback is an essential component of almost all systems to keep them operating within desired parameters. Ideally, the greater the force pushing something from the ideal, the greater the force of the automatic counterbalance. I've mentioned this before but my college tutors would kill me for the oversimplification and overgeneralisation.

I am conscious that I am combining two separate problems - how best to measure and how best to control. One day I'll try to elaborate on the fundamental differences, but I'll leave you with another quote from the same Financial Times article mentioned above: My guess is that it is just a matter of time before economists embrace methods from other disciplines in an effort to understand dynamic processes better than we do.

Animal Management

A few days, in an oblique reference to our overcrowded island, I thanked the author of The Human Zoo. He was born eighty years ago today. As a populariser of science, someone who brought the immense timescale of evolution down to simple schoolboy comprehension, Desmond Morris was a giant of the twentieth century.

He has immense detailed knowledge and scientific qualifications, he even studied under the genius Niko Tinbergen and published nearly fifty scientific papers. However in his popular books he sometimes oversimplified his arguments with the broad brush strokes of a trained artist. Some of those arguments have been refined and adopted into today's acknowledged facts, others are still contentious to this day. But his single basic point was blindingly obvious yet fundamentally enlightening - if we accept that human beings are animals, then much is explained.

After a few years of engineering, I studied economics and management at college. And I still remember sitting in lectures about management theory, some of it based on serious psychology experiments, some of it based on solid economic statistics, and some of it just the buzzword bullspeak that still resounds today. Normally I read the recommended books and did the recommended work. But one time, and it was just the once, in a graded essay about the definition of an organisation, where I was expected to discuss leadership concepts of "common goals and shared consciousness" (I can't believe I even vaguely remember that), I dropped in a line that said that we should also explore how some ideas from the Naked Ape could help to define and explain organisational behaviour.

That line got a big red question mark next to it. My university was fairly unusual in facilitating cross-disciplinary migration, we were encouraged to drop into lectures in totally different departments if we found interest there, but my idea did not come from any lecture. To credit my tutor, he did not completely rule out my suggestion, but he strongly emphasised that if I wanted to make such points in future then I should back them up with proper academic references instead of popular paperbacks.

But I stuck to books from the management library for the rest of the course, and indeed through my career. Meanwhile Dr Morris has continued to educate and entertain on the page and on the screen while I see his ideas validated everywhere. Happy birthday Desmond.

School Ties

This is unusual, but almost a short "this is what I did today" post. Perhaps it is justified because the last two posts have been comparatively lengthy pieces about the tenuous nature of measurable marketing (about which I could write books), and also because at the lunch today I promised to provide some "publicity".

The lunch followed an informal alumni meeting. And I heard that Woodstock School appears to be having some trouble with recruiting and retaining staff, and also with attracting students from its traditional sources. I am sure it could get more than enough students if it just filled the intake with all the newly minted from India's growing middle class, but that would dilute the well balanced diversity that was so prominent twenty years ago.

I have neither the space nor the authority to provide details here, but there are various programs available to allow high school kids from Europe and America to spend an exchange year in the Himalayan foothills, and equally there may be contracts available for qualified teachers willing to spend some time there.

This is the official school website. I should confess that I disagree with the stated christian ethos, but other than a request to "bow your heads" for a few minutes after assembly while the principal waffled a prayer, I did not find that religion was forced upon me. Back to the brave new world of proper marketing tomorrow.

Village

For reasons that I explained earlier, primarily simplicity and speed, there are very few pictures on this site. In particular, there is no picture of me.

One day, more than twenty years ago, my school organised a trek to Jumnotiri. At an altitude of perhaps 3000m we passed through a small village. Using that word is being generous, it was a couple of houses and a chai shop. But the place had a basic little signpost, and I had a basic little camera …

Compared to London or New York or Delhi or Grantham or Cheam or virtually anywhere you have heard of, Rana is very small and insignificant. Few people know that Rana exists, even fewer know where to find it. Only a few people ever visit. Rana is fairly clean and unpolluted. Rana is close to the source of famous Hindu springs. Some consider the area to have a deep spiritual aura. Some consider it to be dangerous.

In summary, Rana is not well known, there is not much there, but the views from there can be amazing :)

Does a bee care?

As I briefly mentioned the United States yesterday, another quick word about US politics before the moralising gets too demoralising. Most of it is sickening. But one statement was almost funny. "It's scientifically impossible for the bumblebee to fly ... But the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, flies anyway."

Obviously it is not scientifically impossible, but equally obviously, nobody ever claimed that it was.

It would be easy to dismiss this proposition as a harmless urban myth, except that such statements are deliberately used by those who delight in defeatism, those who want to retreat from evidence-based development into a mythical fairytale bronze age theocracy.

Oh well. According to another idiot, Freedom Requires Religion, so I'd better convert to Islam, that's a religion, so that will increase my freedom.

Not Rocket Science

Jet exhausts get very hot. We need turbines in the exhaust to power the compressors. How would you stop the turbine blades from melting?

That was the strange question that greeted my eighteen year old self in the interview for college. I can't remember exactly what I answered, but it was enough to get me in the door.

There were two tutors doing the questioning. The professor was my main tutor through the course and after a long career as an expert in thermodynamics he finally retired this year. The young research fellow, after a year of continually stressing the importance of our department, left to pick up big City bonuses. I have learned that sort of thing happens a lot in business.

And why did they ask that question? After so many years, Rolls-Royce Aeronautics are still sponsoring the Engineering fellowship at my college.

Two per cent

I should add another note to yesterday's question instead of hiding clarification in the comments - damn this artificial hundred word limit :)

But I was not trying to trick anybody. There was no lateral thinking required. I was not hiding anything. The weight of the basket is completely irrelevant. It was really just very simple maths. Nothing else.

I was only doing the same thing that I often do in my job as a marketing consultant, showing that a very simple mathematical result does not always correspond with what your "intuition" tells you when you first see the question.

What is correct, the maths or your intuition?

Education for real life

The GCSE results were released today. We got the annual predictable complaints, linguists say that not enough people are learning languages, chemists say that not enough people are learning chemistry, historians say that not enough people are learning history, and the same for every other subject. With whom do I agree? All of them! Maybe kids should never be allowed to leave school until they pass?

But I agree with the modernisers too. In the age of the internet, there is no need to learn so many facts by rote. What is important, regardless of subject, is the scientific method. Being able to analyse increasing numbers of apparently contradictory facts, opinions, trends, facts, customs, superstitions, developments in a critical manner, then being able to draw sensible conclusions.

But sometimes even the archetypal creative ends up doing fairly routine office tasks … maybe there should be special training just for bengalis to learn british bureaucracy … there used to be!

The enemies of common sense

A few years ago I was speaking outside work with a senior manager in a large consulting firm and the subject somehow came round to organ donation after death. He genuinely said that he would not allow anyone in his family do it, even to save another life, because his religion had prohibited it. Was he pious or stupid?

Anyway, there are other kinds of madness...

Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.

Well I don't. "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

That was Charlie Brooker previewing tonight's TV. Hmmmm.

The Language Instincts

Our brains work differently as we get older. Not just in the obvious things, but also I think in the fundamental structure of neurological connections. I threw in a bit of German a few notes ago. I found it very easy at school and did the GCE after just two years. Perhaps it was the rules and the logical structure, after all maths and science were also very easy. Yet I struggled in French. I never knew why. If this post is wrong, then I still don't.

Yet now I can converse ok in French, and albeit more slowly, can also read and write Spanish without any problems. More practice is a partial reason - most German speakers that I have encountered over the years have been fluent in English, whereas a fair proportion of the French and Spanish have not been. And I spent far too long at school concentrating on my French teacher's cleavage instead of her lessons. But that does not explain it all. I simply find languages easier now.

We rarely get something for nothing in this life, so I can no longer do complicated equations in my head. This is apparently normal, revelations in maths or science are rarely made by older people. But that's a fair swap for me, I'm a more rounded individual now…

… not only in the beer belly :)

Democracy

Yesterday evening, I watched some TV.

Imagine that you are a normal schoolkid. Imagine that you and your family have lived in the same neighbourhood for hundreds of years, in the same house for generations. Your parents have jobs. Your friends live nearby. Maybe you were once in that position. Maybe you are now.

Then imagine that you are suddenly told that because you are part of a "minority" (even if that minority is many millions of people) you must leave immediately. You are not told in so many words, but your house is burnt down by a mob, and if you are lucky then you are not beaten to death. You cannot take anything with you, you have no money and no food, and you will have to walk hundreds of miles to reach relative safety. As you walk for week after week, many of those who escape mob attacks will die of exhaustion or starvation.

If you make it over the border to safety, then what's left of your family has to start again from nothing. It has to battle with a million others in the same position. No job. No land. No home. No money. No support. No history.

I also spoke with my parents yesterday.

You don't think

in English.

I speak plenty of languages with varying degrees of fluency. I'm sometimes asked what language I think in. A ridiculous question. For the first few years of my life, I only spoke Bengali. But I don't think in Bengali. I don't think in English either. And, whoever you are, neither do you!

The whole concept of "thinking in English" is nonsense. No-one does it. You think because you are human, and the language is universal. If you want to go somewhere, you don't translate the feeling of wanting to move into English before moving. When you are choosing things, you have the concept of what you want and then you search your mind for it. Sometimes you can't remember the precise word and stumble for a longer phrase or foreign expression to express the thought. But obviously the thought came first.

You see kids in Southall speaking a mixture of Punjabi, Hindi and English. They aren't thinking in any one of those three. As their mouths catch up with their thoughts, the first word that drops in is usually from one of those three languages. Some struggle with all of them.

It is so obvious. Yet people still use the phrase "I can think in x languages" as though it made sense.

Do mind the full stops

Each blog note could be a short review of something that I have seen or read, although that would not be very ambitious. However, a few days ago I quoted Melvyn Bragg, Bill Bryson, Robert Burchfield, Anthony Burgess, Lewis Carroll, David Crystal, George Orwell, Stephen Pinker, John Simpson and Lynne Truss all within one short note. I also said that I didn't entirely agree with them. That needs clarification, even correction.

It's probably best if I go one author at a time. Conveniently enough, my list was alphabetical.

Melvyn Bragg wrote The Adventure of English. An excellent book, and an excellent TV series to go with it. Very erudite and very entertaining. Facts. Nothing to disagree with.

Bill Bryson is probably more famous for his travel writing and his countryside campaigns, but I know him best for writing a book called Mother Tongue. Absolutely fantastic writing. Not only informative, funny and educational, but also very easy to read. And I completely agree with him.

Robert Burchfield has written wrote more scholarly accounts of English. I have found them tough going, but they are probably written to be reference guides rather than leisurely reads.

Anthony Burgess, better known for mangling futurespeak in his Clockwork Orange, wrote an awesome book called A Mouthful of Air. It has a very different tack from the others mentioned here as it concentrates on how words developed, how they are spoken instead of how they are written.

I leafed through David Crystal's books expecting a very prescriptive approach, and instead got a refreshing emphasis on clarity and precision of meaning, not an edict on grammar. Excellent.

Lewis Carroll was in the list on behalf of his alter ego, the legendary Humpty Dumpty. Jabberwocky is perfect poetry. Words can mean exactly what you want them to mean. A genius. The Douglas Adams of his generation.

A very different kind of genius, George Orwell is a true inspiration. Keep it simple. Never use a long word or a long sentence when a short one will do. Every journalist and politician and management consultant should pass a test in this before any public pronouncement.

And so to the books of Steven Pinker. In my opinion simply the best non-fiction written in America since 1792. The pages are fairly dense but the ideas, like all great ideas, are blindingly obvious. They are not specifically about English. But they are about grammar, about language, about communication, about what it really means to be human.

So we have had the clarification, what about the correction? Lost for Words echoes George Orwell in its hatred of deliberate obfuscation, but it also has a load of grumpy old moaning thrown in. It was written by John Humphrys. Did I really say John Simpson? How could I have confused the two? One is a highly-respected deep-voiced silver-haired BBC journalist …

It's almost lunchtime and I have a busy Saturday. I need to eat, post and leave. So I will conclude this little note by quoting some Pinker: Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since ...

Not Charlie Brown

A daily blog note starts with some little trigger that I have seen or heard or done within the last 24 hours, then heads off to some generalisation or attempted witticism about the world. It is not often that trigger leads back to little old me.

Yesterday I met up with a few old friends from school. Which school? About two years is the most that I ever spent in any one. From east London to Essex to southern Africa to south London back to India to the north of England, I've experienced every different kind. And I got on ok at every single one. I was not bullied. I have no traumatic childhood experiences to relate. Yet when I refer to my school, there is only one that I mean.

Woodstock is a strange little community in the hills of northern India. Though only a tiny fraction of the size of any comprehensive in the West, it housed the most diverse group of kids from every corner of the globe. From children of christian missionaries to Indian expatriates to foreign diplomats to refugees to locals to those who just couldn't cope in the lowlands, we had every kind of freak that you can imagine.

And so it fit perfectly :)