Approach.

I'm something of a gadget nut. Love them. Can't get enough of them. When I get a new phone my first thought is "Okay, let's see what we can make this thing do."

There are two products that have received a fair degree of publicity lately; the OLPC and the iPhone. These represent two fundamentally different approaches to the "gadget" philosophy, however the philosophy itself remains the same; make technology accessible.

The OLPC is a laptop designed from scratch to be durable, functional, low power, and - above all - affordable. It is the application of the ever-decreasing cost of technology to the minimal requirements for the developing world's education sector. It look's like an outstanding product, bringing technology and connectivity to students at a previously unheard of price - around $US100. A magnificent achievement. On a technological level, it actually surpasses many "western" products in many important areas - screen readability, wireless access range, battery life, software adaptability, and many more. The operating system is an open platform that can be extended by the students themselves. The OLPC foundation is looking to change the world, shipping five million (!) of these things in their first year, starting mid-2007.

The iPhone, in contrast, brings cutting edge technology and interface design together in a beautifully small package. It is a phone, a PDA, and an internet access machine all in one. It is a luxury item, and is priced accordingly. It is a closed platform and that is tightly controlled by the manufacturer, however it looks to provide an exemplary user experience.

Of course, these two projects are serving entirely different markets, and have almost entirely different goals. On an idealogical level, the OLPC project wins hands down. The iPhone, however, looks to solve a signficant problem in many people's lives - frustration at awful phones - that is no less real.

They Can,

Why can't you?

Rock On.

As a child I felt I wasn't allowed to like rock music. Not by any authority figure, but rather by mself. I had already pigeonholed myself as a fairly straight-laced, follow-the-rules kind of kid, and I had always thought that rock music was "too cool" for someone like me. Add to this some fairly misconcieved ideas about what "rock music" actually was (think thrash metal), and I basically ignored rock music for quite a while.

Then, of course, I stumbled across music that made me go "holy crap, music can sound like this?"

That's what happens when you base your behaviour on misconceptions. You miss out on wonderful opportunities. We do it all the time; the food we don't try, the people we don't talk to, the books we don't read, the jobs we don't try.

What have you dismissed as "not for me"?

Footnote: Growing older, I have since learned that most thrash metal band members are nerds. Make of that what you will.

A Historic Scale.

I recently heard a quote in an interview on the radio, regarding the slow - but steady - acceptance of women through the medical profession. It was taken in the late nineteenth century, and ran "female doctors are a novelty, like midgets and fat boys." Aside from the obvious humour to be had at misinterpreting the use of the word novelty - I, for one, would hardly enjoy receiving a fat boy and a midget with a happy meal - I am more interested in the use of the fat boy as an example. Obesity has been increasingly (though incorrectly) referred to as an epidemic over the last few decades, so I find it refreshing to hear of a time where an overweight child was rare enough to be considered a curiosity.

"The Monk and the Hare."

Keeps running through my head as the title of a fable, but I can't seem to find it. Perhaps I just made it up. Still, it seems important to me now, so I'll bother spending some effort on it - even if it isn't real.

If you can create an impression of value in something, then that impression tends to perpetuate itself. In Japan, for example, the Kit Kat chocolate bar sells out before every exam period, as it is considered a lucky charm for students. Many people have attributed this phenomenon to the similarity between "Kit Kat" and a Japanese phrase for good luck, "Kitto Kattsu". But if the only reason is linguistic, why did it take 70 years of Kit Kats being available for people to notice the connection?

Simple. The chocolate maker created an impression of value in the product.

Does this relate to any actual value? Of course not. But people are still buying Kit Kats.

Keep 'em Happy.

I just received an email from my internet provider, Exetel;

"From January 1st 2007 the 12 midnight to 12 noon period allowance will increase from 32 gb to 36 gb.

No current or applying user has to do anything to benefit from this increase."

Are they simply passing on a saving? I'm sure. Could they have charged extra for this? You betcha. And I've received more than a few of these emails over the past year.

What was more important; the quick buck from charging for downloads, or the ongoing goodwill from telling your customers "Yep, we see you, we value you, and we're going to keep on trying to give you the best value service we can. We don't care if we've already got your money, we're going to try as hard to keep you as we did to get you in the first place."

At last, a company that understands the second part of "Customer Relationship".

(But don't get me started on Optus.)

WWF vs WWF.

When faced with instances of copyright infringement, do professional wrestlers issue a smackdown notice?

Best Man's Friend.

I've come to the conclusion that the purpose of the best man's speech is solely to make the groom's speech look good.

I've been both a best man and a groom, and my theory holds in both cases.

How Not To Demonstrate A Broad Knowledge Of All Things Historical.

Step 1: Don't take an interview on the radio and say things like this;

"The church of England, in how it tells us to live our lives today, is very different to how they would have told us to live our lives in AD 33."

A Matter Of Timing.

I was recently given directions to a difficult-to-find doctor's surgery. Did I listen? No. I wasn't yet in right frame of mind to plan the trip. Once I hopped in the car and tried to find the place I started thinking "Gee, I could do with some directions..."

It's no use trying to talk to someone until they're ready to listen. Then you've got to hit them with everything you've got, because that moment is when they need you the most.

Sigh.

I really need to clear out my junk mail.

I'm constantly amazed at the ability of Google's spam filter to shield me from the incessant barrage of "BE&A*&B!!GGER M@N!!", normally by some descendant of Nigerian royalty.

The success of any new medium can be measured by the rapidity with which it attracts charlatans; The postal system had mail fraud, the telephone attracted con-men, television created late-night TV shopping, and email has brought spam to the world. These are all variations on a similar mindset, with only slight variations in scale and methodology.

There have been attempts to fix the inherently broken messaging system that is email, however it was created at a naive time by a naive community. Filtering provides a certain level of relief, but there always exists the risk of a false positive or negative. Other suggestions require a complete replacement of existing infrastructure - far too expensive, if you ask me.

Spam owes it success to the success of email itself; a medium in which there is zero cost to send a message to any other person. There is no weighting or priority associated with the messages; they are all treated equally, with no higher level notion of "trust" or "friendship" built into the system. Conversely, a posted letter from a close friend will almost certainly be opened and accepted at face value, but a generic mailer to "The Householder" is likely to be treated with caution.

There are a number of proposed solutions that incorporate some level of trust, however they all leave the underlying messaging system intact. I personally don't believe that email can exist without spam, and thus both must be abandoned.

I think we need to look to a different mode of communication for a solution. Blogs are currently being used to hold public conversations, so why not extend this further? Why can't my blog hold a private conversation with your blog? We could invite other blogs if we wished, and there would be a significant barrier to entry to prevent insincere participants.

Chat rooms are also an excellent forum for trusted communication; participants can be removed if their motives are not genuine, and irrelevant material is usually ignored.

Instant messaging, as an extension of the chat room, is also an excellent option. Unfortunately the lack of a broadly adopted instant messaging standard has segregated the community into silos (MSN users cannot talk to Yahoo users, etc.), limiting it's usefulness. The "Jabber" standard allows such interaction and is a step in the right direction, but it will take most of the major players to make it a success (it is already in use by Google Talk).

Another possibility arises out of the current success of RSS feeds - a simple system for bookmarking and receiving regular updates to your favourite Internet content. What if you simply checked my RSS feed regularly for messages to you? Or, perhaps, what if I published a separate feed for everyone I wish to keep in contact with? This reverse the current email system from "push" to "pull", where the user now actively seeks the messages they want. Ten years ago I subscribed to a whole host of email newsletters, however these days I simply subscribe to their RSS feeds. I receive updates when *I* want them, and I only receive content that I actively seek. The same principle could be applied to personal messaging; you would only receive messages from people you actively wish to contact.

These are just a few ideas, obviously with their own set of problems. I hope it at least provides some food for thought.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 1008 messages to sort through.

I Fell For It.

Yep, I did. I didn't think I'd fall for it again so easily (and so soon!), but it happened.

I made a critical lapse in judgement.

My previous post on childhood development and television has one major, serious flaw; I wrote what I believe. Why is this a flaw? Quite simply, what we "believe" - our "world view", if you will - has a vetoing effect on what we say and do.

This may seem obvious, but bear with me.

Over the course of writing this blog I have attempt to look past my own personal beliefs, and try to understand the motivations and thought processes behind certain courses of action. Some have mistaken this for complaining; this is not the case.

In the previous post I allowed my own world view ("TV has a devastating effect on early childhood development") to interfere with my judgement. I allowed my own personal bias against TV as a shaping force in writing the piece.

I'd like to maintain that I never once supposed that the study was correct, however it led me down a train of investigation that may have implied I did.

Looking back, I can see I fell for what almost seems the (perhaps even unintentional) point of the study; To provide people like me with material to support their worldview.

So, let's start again;

• Does TV in early childhood affect development?
• How would we be able to tell?
• What was the motivation of the people writing the study?
• Were there any preconceived hypotheses?
• Given that the report will either be wholeheartedly agreed with, or wholeheartedly dismissed, what use does it have, aside from propping up existing worldviews?
• What effect would the report have if read by the uninformed or uninterested?
  

This last point is an important one, as reports such as these only ever make it to popular conversation through a headline. Leaving aside issues of whether these reports are designed solely to produce an eye-catching headline, we now have two ways for people to interact with the report;
1) Through a headline, sound bite, or hearsay
2) Through reading the report directly
It is an obvious, yet important point that interaction through the first method will far outweigh the second, such that the number of people that actually read the report is proportionally insignificant. Taking the next logical step, what then is the point of writing the report in the first place? Surely we can just publish a headline, as this is all most people read?

Unfortunately, no. Even though our "actual report readers" are a small minority, they are the gatekeepers and filters of information for the rest of us. We trust a doctor to filter information from the drug companies, we trust sites like webjet.com to filter prices from airlines, and we trust academics to filter information from research papers.

So if you're writing for publication, bear two things in mind;

1. It will most likely first have to pass inspection by someone fairly intelligent before it is trusted, and
2. It needs a good headline.

Bad Advice.

I recently stumbled across a page entitled "12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations," composed by a "Document Production Expert" at Microsoft.

What amazes me is not the banality of some of the tips, but how they focus on almost entirely the wrong things. Autolayouts? Autocorrect options? Not only do their "before" and "after" shots look almost identical, they are all terrible slides filled with paragraphs of 8-point writing.

And the worst part? My manager will read this page and think that this is what is meant by "Good Powerpoint".

Is bad advice better than no advice?

Autism, TV, and Early Childhood Development.

A research paper has just been published by Cornell University entitled "Does Television Cause Autism?".

The results of scientific research often bear out our intuitive understanding of a situation. Unfortunately, many people often need a giant slap in the face to realise it.

For years few people would have argued with the effect of reduced socialisation in the development of children, an effect which is exacerbated in those susceptible to autism. Any time spent in front of the TV takes away from opportunities to socialise, and promotes non-interactive behaviour. This may be unhealthy for a normal child, but it is devastating for the autistic.

The plural of anecdote may not be data, but I have watched my autistic nephew raised in front of the TV from day one. I'm not talking about the occasional time out, I'm talking about all day, every day, spent in front of the TV. Instead of going to the park. Instead of playing with other kids. Instead of going to daycare. Instead of reading. Instead of playing with toys. Instead of drawing. At least eight to ten hours in front of the TV, every day.

Though they are a welfare family, they refused to aknowledge their son's autism until far too late. The child is now nine years old, and has shown marked improvement since he started attending a special needs school - he can now speak some words, socialises far more enthusiastically, and makes ever more confident attempts to communicate through body language, sounds and actions. Needless to say, his transformation began as soon as he started attending school, and stopped watching so much TV. Though his improvement continues, I harbor great concern that the early damage was permanent.

I tell this story not to draw sympathy, but to illustrate a simple point; Intelligent people know that television has an adverse effect on development, unfortunately too many people wait until "scientists" say so before they believe it. One may assert that we have evolved to identify and react to immediate dangers, and long-term dangers tend to elude us. I respectfully disagree.

I don't care whether or not there is a "statistically significant causal link". Call me irrational, but I sincerely believe that most people can recognise unhealthy behaviour. Whether or not they choose to believe their instincts - or act on them - is another question entirely.

I have noted a disturbing tendency to take a lack of "scientific proof" for any specific behaviour as implicit endorsement of the behaviour as "not unhealthy". Not exercising is bad? where's the proof? Smoking? Fast food? Fossil fuels? Does anybody honestly believe these things are good? We justify instinctively unhealthy behaviour with a "lack of scientific evidence".

We have the opportunity now to be healthier than at any other point in history. It's a shame we don't take it.

[ADDENDUM:]

To clarify, my point is this: Socialisation is a key part of early childhood development.

I do not suppose that television itself causes any specific "damage", rather that TV time takes away from socialisation time. In extreme cases - such as the one I describe - it takes away from it entirely. Watching TV is almost entirely a passive experience. This is not a good thing for a child's development, autistic or otherwise.

The "damage" I refer to is the lack of opportunity for early development. Part of reaching your potential is being given the right opportunities at an early enough age. As an example, a great deal of research has shown that if a child is not given the opportunity to learn to speak (grammatically) by around the age of seven, then they will never learn at all. Too much time in front of the TV takes away from the opportunity for this development.

[ADDENDUM 2]:

We have done an excellent job of extending our livespan, though we have come close to picking all of the low hanging fruit. (On a side note, a great deal of past statistics regarding average lifespan were skewed by high infant mortality rates.)

I'm talking about taking advantage of the opportunity to be healthier, not just healthy. Look around; There are those that get by - the healthy - and there are those that exercise, eat right, exercise their minds, and do all they can to ensure their physical and mental health. We have a greater opportunity for this than at any other point in history, why are so few people taking advantage of it?

Bad Form.

I just received a fairly obvious form letter from a site that managed to acquire some of my personal information;

Dear Sean,

I notice your birthday is coming up on 1 October 2006.

How's that for destroying a sentence? Read it out loud just to accentuate the absurdity. Imagine calling up a friend and saying "Hey Bob, I just remembered that your birthday is coming up next 2 JULY 2007." You'd probably get some odd looks.

Being casual can be a great way of initiating a conversation with a prospect - if it's sincere. If there's a pitch, then make it honestly. If you're going to wish someone a happy birthday, then make it seem genuine. It doesn't help when the email ends with;

P.S. If 1 October 1980 is not your birthday, please change this information in your profile.

If you have so little faith in the information in my profile then why bother using it at all? The information obviously came from me, so if I gave you false details then I probably had a good reason for doing so.

All you need to do is remember that there's an actual person on the other end of the line, and treat them appropriately. Easy, no?

Roll Models.

Why are we constantly bombarded with idealised images of success? We have it driven into us that success means being Richard Branson, or Donald Trump, or Bill Gates. We are taught to feel an obligation to make the most of what we have, to the point where abject guilt sets in as soon as we begin to relax into daily life.

But why should we all be like Bill Gates? Surely the best person to be Bill Gates would, in fact, be Bill Gates? After all, he's proven very good at it so far. Isn't the simple fact that none of us are Bill Gates evidence enough that none of us are supposed to be him?

Linguistics aside, an unfortunate effect of this is that we miss the real successes in our lives; our friends, our family, our children, our community. When our parents are eighty years old and still independent, when our children are born, or when they grow into mature, well-rounded adults; these are the things that matter, these are the real successes in our lives.

It just a shame that we're so preoccupied with some ephemeral "big break" that we tend to miss them.

"I know you're in a lot of pain..."

"...but we need to fill out this form."

This is a line that should never be heard at a hospital admissions desk. Who is insisting on having this conversation? Surely there's a better way.

Perhaps the right people have never been admitted to hospital.

(For the record, I was told this line when I was admitted to hospital - in extreme abdominal pain - a little over two years ago. I live in Sydney, Australia.)

Relative Positioning.

The taxi driver, cruising next to me on the freeway, had an uncanny habit of matching every small variation in speed I made. Perhaps it was a mild effort to prevent me from changing lanes, though more likely it was just a general focus on maintaining their position relative to the car next to them, rather than where they are overall.

Often this attitude works in your favour; You need to keep up with the other cars, and make sure someone isn't wildly veering in the wrong direction. They might cause an accident for all of you.

There are some drawbacks, however. Your focus should be on *your* destination, and how you're going to get there. The car next to you probably doesn't have the same destination, or the same time frame. It stands to reason that you can't get to where you need to be by following everyone around you.

Perhaps, though, some of them *are* heading the same way. So why not ask for a lift? Or car pool? Who knows, that might even save time and energy for everyone.

Staying Visible?

This is a photo taken of a slide at a very, *very* important presentation in my workplace. It concerns the rollout of a certain software infrastructure that will change the way our organisation works. It has the potential to completely revolutionise our work practices. It's great stuff.

Except the slide is illegible. Though taken from a camera phone, the quality of the slide is actually quite well represented. I couldn't read it at all in person, and I was sitting in the front row, around four metres from the screen.

If you want people to buy in to your revolutionary idea, make sure they can understand what you're saying.

Two Taps.

This sort of thing really bugs me, even though it happens all too often. Walk in to most public bathrooms and you'll see, on the sink, two taps; "hot" and "cold".

Tell me, without thinking about it too hard, under what circumstances would a person want to wash their hands under *either* scalding hot or freezing cold water, but not some combination of the two?

Someone, somewhere, didn't take the twelve seconds to think about the experience. This says a great deal about who they are, what their priorities are, and the kind of place they work in.