Eloise's thoughts and fancies

I'm going to be, almost certainly, commenting on things that annoy or engage me about the build up to our election for the next parliament. In fact there's a building and ranting post that inspired me to write this one that will come soon.

This one, however, is to give a quick overview of how the UK works (or not) and how our elections work. Although most first world countries are democracies, the detail of how it all works vary quite widely between countries.

The UK is a constitutional monarchy with a famously unwritten constitution. That means that the monarch (Queen Elizabeth II) is the head of state. Prince Charles (or possibly Prince William depending on some circumstances) will be our next head of state. They're entirely unelected but, at the same time, they are essentially powerless. The monarch actually signs the acts into law (and thus is the ultimate law giver in the land) but only has the right to refuse bills of self-extension of government (i.e. refusing the need for elections and establishing a dictatorship) if the act has been properly passed through parliament.

Our constitution is unwritten, except it's not. Much of our constitution is contained in acts of parliament, court judgements and the like. It is actually quite largely documented but it is NOT centrally documented. It is fair to say parts are not written, tradition affects a number of things and that is unwritten, but still important.

Our system of governance (as opposed to government) is confusing. We're bicameral, but only the lower chamber is elected, the upper chamber includes old politicians, hereditary lords, various judges (the law lords), most of the old bishops and archbishops (that's not old as in aged, old as in long established), plus a variety of experts in various fields who are appointed as life peers. Although it's not entirely true, we expect our MPs (elected in the lower house) to largely step aside where personal interest clashes with voting - much as you would expect a board member in a company to not vote on an issue such as increasing their pay or awarding a contract to another company they run - but most of our upper house are there as experts to scrutinise the laws and make sure they're just, reasonable and do the job they're intended to do and many lords will only trust the opinions and speechs of those who have a declared interest in the topic. Quite famously Alan Sugar (hirer and firer in the UK version of The Apprentice) is now a Lord, to comment on industry and entreprenneurship in the UK.

Parliament is balanced by the courts. Our courts are unelected and pretty rabidly non-political. Individual judges may or may not be political animals of course, but they are appointed to serve the law and not politics and the impression we basically all have is that they do this job pretty well. If parliament passes laws that are stupid, unjust, or contrary to other laws and treaties, the judiciary will tell them so, often abruptly and rudely. Michael Howard, who was a politician in the Thatcher years (just after the Regan presidency in this case) and who had been a barrister before entering parliament was famously 100% successful as a barrister in his appeals, and 0% successful in his appeals as a politician. MOST laws that are passed are better than this, but most people in the same office as Howard occupied (Home Secretary) have lost one or more cases about laws that they've passed. The Attorney General is a political appointment and nominal head of the judiciary, but he is not usually a judge, certainly does not sit in judgement in court any longer. His role is to (try to) advise the government of the day on the legality of what they're planning to do.

And this is also all balanced by the police. Our police are independent of both parliament and the courts. They obviously work closely with the courts, and they apply the laws that parliament passes. They, at senior levels, talk to politicians quite a lot. But they're all unelected, they're promoted on merit and experience but if a judge breaks the law, they'll get arrested, if politicians pass silly laws the police will neglect to find the manpower to enforce it.

The media (TV, Radio, Press etc.) fancy themselves as the public scrutinisers of all of this. Sometimes that's certainly fair - the current MP's expenses scandal was released through the press and has mobilised the populace and through that the MPs like nothing I can remember. However, quite publicly since the rise of New Labour (1994 or so) the politicians have been learning how to use and "spin" the media to try and get their stories out in a way that manipulates the populace. This isn't new of course, but it really came to prominence with Alistair Campbell who appeared sometimes to be the most powerful person in the country despite being unelected and wildly unloved.

The civil service (these are the people directly employed by the government to run the ministries and government offices. It doesn't usually apply to the military or police but it's sometimes hard to see precisely what the differences are in terms of employment lines and routes of command) have a two-fold role. They do research and present it to ministers so they can make (allegedly) informed choices about new policies. They are also responsible for dissemination of information and putting new policy into effect. They are largely quite political as individuals but apolitical en masse - they almost all have to put policies into effect with which they disagree at some point. Their jobs are not largely political appointments except in a very small number of liaison roles right at the top of the tree. If you remember "Yes Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" think Sir Humphrey and Bernard.

Finally there are various independent bodies. Perhaps the easiest to understand is the National Audit Office. They look over government spending and point out where money is being wasted, targets missed and the like. Parliament is pretty much meant to buck its ideas up and "do better" next time. They have mixed results - many big projects, particularly big IT projects, continue to be a black hole for spending; many other recommendations have resulted in increases in efficiency being identified and implemented. There are a load of these, for example there is a statistics office (I think it's the NSO but I'm not 100% sure) who release a wide variety of statistics on a huge range of subjects... health, crime, income etc. publicly as well as to the MPs etc. It's supposed to help make sure people don't abuse statistics too much and it often works, as long as people can read the numbers! (Rather infamously, the current opposition attacked the government because 54% of girls in... (blah, blah, blah) which sounded pretty shocking. The actual number was 5.4% which might have sounded shocking if it had been released first, but sounds pretty good if you've just been shocked by 54%!)

It's not a system that would be easily duplicated. It's had hundreds of years, in some parts more than 1,000 years, to get sorted and have the rough edges sorted out. It doesn't work perfectly, particularly if you get a few rotten apples in the wrong places - but it's not a bad system and it usually works pretty well.

OK, so with all of that... there are a lot of unelected people in there. But our elections run in their own unique way too, particularly compared to the US.

Essentially every few years (often 4, never more than 5) the whole of the bunch of MPs stand for re-election. This is a "general election" and it is not fixed in time, it is called by the current Prime Minister under all circumstances (although his/her hand can be forced by a motion of no confidence which requires him to call an election). Every single MP tries to get reelected simultaneously. This is quite a big deal: the prime minister and most (or all) of the cabinet (the ministers - roughly equivalent to the various "secretaries" in US government, the Minister of Defence and the Secretary for Defence etc.) are MPs and stand for election too.

We don't, directly, elect our new Prime Minister (like the US do their president) as he (or she) is an MP and has to be elected only by a small number of people in their constituency. However, our politicians are organised into political parties and the party with the most MPs after the election forms (or tries to form) the new government, using the team of MPs that have been elected. In England there are two main parties, Labour and Conservative, a third significant party (Liberal Democrats) and a small number of other parties that sometimes have MPs (UKIP, Greens etc.) and occasionally an independent. Wales adds Plaid Cymri, Scotland the SNP, and in Northern Ireland there are a range of totally different parties, but relatively few seats. If you vote Labour (for example) you are partially voting for your local MP and partially voting for the Labour party as a whole to form the whole government under their chosen leader (Gordon Brown at the moment). Where that balance point lies in your decision making varies from person to person - your MP is supposedly elected both to represent you but also to vote according to the party lines. There are no parties with policies that I whole-heartedly support so it's not wholly a decision on party politics. Independents are usually elected on a single local issue - saving a local hospital, standing against a corrupt MP and the like.

The situation is not quite as haphazard as it might seem. There are "safe seats" which have gone with one party or the other for decades - a bit like the recent election to the Senate where it had been democrat for years. In general 'important' politicians are in safe seats: Labour in Scotland, South Wales or the industrial North, Conservatives in the Shires and rural South broadly speaking. Every now and again there is a shock - the last governor of Hong Kong under UK rule had been a conservative minister in a safe seat, until the Lib Dems ousted him for example but mostly you know these ones will be returning a member of the same party for the next few decades too.

There are a small number of floating seats (that change between parliaments fairly frequently) and of these a fairly small number of floating voters who ACTUALLY make the decision for the country. They reckon, in the year that John Major's Conservatives got returned to power (1993) about 400 voters, if they'd voted the other way, could have made all the difference. In years when there is a real change (1997 for example and the election of Tony Blair and New Labour) that can change - Labour won seats that they'd never dreamt of before and safe tory seats fell before the public's desire for change.

WAY more than I'd planned to write but it's moderately important to have some context for the posts that will doubtless follow. I'm not a political scientist, so apologies for any errors in there.

So, Second Life 2.0 Public Beta is here.

If you look at some of the features it is bringing you might think I've had an inside track on it - and thanks to some work I did with Linden Lab you'd be right.

You will, doubtless, make you own minds up, but there are a lot of changes in there, some big and some small. Undoubtedly the biggest one to the people I routinely talk to is the fully implemented HTML-on-a-prim. You can set up a prim with a URL - slideshare for example, or Google Docs, and watch them, work on them even, together, directly in Second Life.

Sorry whoever it was that just wrote a fancy whiteboard scripted object in Second Life and released it... we'll be using the existing and familiar web tools to do the job. And, to be honest, I have no doubt we will. Yes, we'll still work on them in a browser as well, but if you're writing a paper about your build in Second Life how much easier to have a prim that links to your google doc so you can work on it while looking at the build. In fact you can just turn one of the walls or windows into the google doc, write, save, change it back, move on... it's really like the internet is now wherever you want it to be in Second Life.

Alpha layers for bodies and tattoo layers for the face - they've been on the wishlist (not mine personally, but in general) for all the time I've been in Second Life. Want to make yourself an insect avatar in insect size? Just alpha out the human shape, wear the ladybird, away you go. Not sure if Jacek reads this, but I can imagine a tiny cuttlefish avatar soon. Tattoo layers for the face don't sound like a big deal? Just watch the make-up artists go wild! Plain faces on skins will suddenly become common so you can choose your makeup layer to put over it.

Other things I'm not so sure about: will I use back buttons in the teleport history? Not sure. I've got a lot of muscle memory of other methods that work for me. But for new users, they won't have to learn a new paradigm, they're used to that one, and it will work for them, I'm sure.

I mostly use keyboard short-cuts. It will be interesting to see where I don't and how long it takes me to get used to the new menus - but equally there I have no doubt that the new structure is easier to learn for new users than the old one.

2.0 is a big step. It really is a revolution and let's hope it achieves what it's meant to. It certainly should.

Second Life, in particular science in Second Life and education in Second Life (and science education of course) have both been in the online media again this week.

Jeffrey R. Young wrote a terrible piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a fairly high profile journal. Randall Hand wrote a much better piece for Vizworld.

Both of these pieces are critical of Second Life; speaking as someone who criticises as well as supports I don't have a problem with that. But one article makes my blood boil, along with the several thousand other educators working in Second Life, while the other gets my tentative support and approval. Falling back to my academic discipline, the temptation to compare and contrast is immense.

So why is one good and the other bad?

Well, Young's piece betrays to anyone who has spent a little while actually using Second Life that he hasn't. Apparently, for example:

I regularly get stuck between pieces of virtual furniture, wander around aimlessly looking for the person I'm trying to meet up with, or lose patience as I wait for my online avatar to walk between virtual classrooms.

Well, very few people after their first 20 minutes or so regularly get stuck, and after an hour or so almost never get stuck. Why lose patience walking between classrooms when you can fly and teleport? Talk about getting off to a bad start: we're supposed to believe he's done his research when he's clearly not spent any time learning how to use Second Life. Come off it!

The list of mistakes, errors and bad choices of language continues to the point it is not really safe for my blood pressure. I'm not a jounalist nor a journalism teacher but if I was working with someone intending to hand this in for a mark on a journalism course there would be a lot of red ink all over it and a strong suggestion to do it again. Since you probably know something about Second Life if you read this, have a look and see just how many mistakes you can see.

The rest of the piece adds a fair degree of partiality that makes it clear that Young is rather opposed to the whole concept but also makes it appear he has a mate that works at Duke and is writing a piece about their new system - Open Cobalt. It might be great, but to describe is as "the most ambitious alternative" seems rich when compared to Reaction Grid, Wonderland, etc. which don't even get a mention. Similarly one or two failed experiments in Second Life are mentioned by name, with no mention of the successes - which are not hard to find.

And one I would not have caught if I hadn't seen others talking about it - there are a lot of anonymous comments cited in the piece. Aren't journalists meant to identify sources where reasonable to do so. Doesn't that add veracity and confidence? Of course getting the facts right helps too!

Hand, on the other hand, writes a more balanced and accurate piece. He had come to Second Life to explore and try to find things he considered science, and given the nature of Vizworld, his rubric being "science is visualisation and analysis of multi-dimensional huge datasets" should not be a real surprise. Nor should his essential failure to find many things that met all of this rubric. However, he explains why it shouldn't be a surprise in terms that are pretty accurate. Additionally, he does go on to say that there is a lot of science education and there is a lot of other science going on as well. Not science as he first thinks of it, but science is clearly there nonetheless. It is interesting to note that Hand talks about spending "several weeks digging around" - and makes absolutely no comments about the interface, difficulty in moving and the like to compare to the other piece.

He also provides names, links to various alternative systems and the like - plenty of veracity and making it obvious he has talked to people and that he has done his research.

Another interesting little aside - both pieces have drawn a stream of comments from Second Life educators. They're not entirely divided along the lines of my post: although it's very hard to find anyone supportive of the Young piece there are people saying "what about me?" in the comments to the Hand piece. It's worth reading the comments too if you want a fair robust description of the shortcomings of the pieces, particularly the Young one. But it's also worth noting that Hand has responded to the comments and added two addenda driven (in part) by the comments. Young seems to have submitted his piece and retained his pristinely closed mind.

There are plenty of valid reasons to criticise Second Life. A good journalist wouldn't have to dig very hard. But when they don't dig at all, it shows and it shows in ways that do a lot to undermine the credibility and professionalism of the author, the editor and the place in which it is published. Surely it's worth doing right?

For the first time my hearing loss significantly affected a film for me. I can't lip-read an animated movie, certainly not a Studio Ghibli one and with two child characters their voices were high enough pitched that I really struggled to hear them.

That said, I still got the story and enough of what was going on to really enjoy it, and as you might expect the drawing is magnificent.

The rub comes in trying to explain it without spoilers. Let's just say it's a magical story about how humans treat the sea (like a bin) and the relationship that develops between a boy and a magic fish, and his and her parents with a particularly unsubtle message to the rest of us about how it could all get. That is, entirely, true, but doesn't do justice to some of the twists and turns that are here. Nor does it do justice to the glorious animation.

Despite what at least one critic has said, this isn't a hard story to unravel, but it is still beautiful and well worth some time. If you can, try to get an evening showing. Our cinema doesn't do them for this film, so we had a fair number of young children around. It is aimed at them of course, and suited to them, but might be a distraction for you.

If you read my review of Up In The Air you'll have noticed I thought replacing f2f meetings with video conferencing to fire people was wrong. I would go so far that I reacted to it as a gut level and thought it was morally indefensible.

And then I had to wonder why. I was trying to work out how to write a piece called "Sacking people over the internet is wrong" and I couldn't; I don't believe that sacking people over the internet, via video conferencing etc. is automatically wrong. It's not fun, nor easy, but sacking people rarely is. It's the sacking of strangers in that fashion that is wrong as far as I am concerned.

I fervently believe that "the internet" - Second Life, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, blogging and so on - allow you to create new relationships, develop new or existing ones and maintain relationships that started online or in the flesh. I have a number of friends that I have only met virtually who are close to me, know about as much about me as my close atomic space friends - a small number in both groups that I basically don't distinguish internally. I have a wider range of acquaintances, work contacts and the like, again some in atomic space and some in virtual space. They're relationships that I have created and do develop and maintain that way.

With a work contact, particularly a work contact from an online setting, being fired online seems eminently morally OK (well still very undesirable). It's the stranger part that makes it an outrage for me.

And that, I think, is because whilst relationships can be developed and maintained online, we are still set up to react to face-to-face meetings - we've got a few hundred thousand years of evolution and social expectations to help us there. The person that you've never met on the other side of the table telling you that you are fired might be a complete stranger but you are set up to react to them as if they are someone you have met, someone you know. In particular as you go through the process, which is pretty crappy after all, there is something in there that will help you believe that you are in a situation where someone can help you, can react to your pain and the like. Over the internet, over a video conference, that is not there UNLESS you have an existing relationship. And that's why it's morally wrong to sack a stranger that way - you have to cause them pain by sacking them (assuming you must sack them) so you owe it to them to make the process as painless and supported as possible.

Up In The Air is, in some senses, a classic road movie. Except it's set on aeroplanes and in airports. But it's the story of a man going through a mid-life crisis and travelling around the US.

Clooney is effortlessly charming and the (many) small part actors around him are interesting and not all Hollywood-pretty types which is refreshing to see.

It would be quite easy to stop the review there and leave you high and dry. But let's just say that there is a good and interesting ending as well, one that we hoped for and that were horribly convinced at various points it was going to wimp out of.

And then, whilst not interesting for everyone, there was a second interesting string to the bow. Clooney's character is a firer-for-hire. Apart from being appalled that such a job might even exist, that isn't what's interesting. He is a dinosaur, effectively. He churns up the air miles (he admits that he aims to reach 10,000,000 soon at one point) and does everything face-to-face. The company hires a bright young thing (the other Hollywood Pretty actor) who has convinced the boss to try and replace all this travel with video conferencing. Given where I work and how I work, and how I run many of my relationships or all kinds, my reaction to this put me on the side of the dinosaurs. It appals me even more to consider firing a stranger over video conferencing than face to face.

There's probably a long blog post in that thought. Brace yourselves for it! But there is poetic justice when the BYT gets dumped by her boyfriend by text!

It's got a lot of heart-break as you watch the "You're fired" interviews. It's got a lot of moments of high levity. It's interesting and engaging. It's probably not going to be a great movie in anyone's books, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

It occurred to me, after writing my post about what the iPad would need and would replace for me that my iPad, if I get one could not only replace upwards into the MacBook territory (if there's a graphical Second Life client) but could replace downwards into iPhone territory.

I am quite deaf and getting worse - I will be getting hearing aids in the near future as my responses are now poor across a wide range of frequencies - and as a consequence of that, at least in part, I hardly use the iPhone as a phone.

The iPhone is nice because I can check email anywhere, whereas an iPod would need wireless access but I don't use it as a phone. But, for those people perverse enough not to contact me by email, texting is the commonest approach. So, if I can find a service that will give me (well let me buy) a number for a text service that I can then have automatically forwarded to email, and a reply via email to text in there too, I won't need the phone. I found a couple that are on an industrial scale "Send your text to up to 10 million accounts at once" when I need a service that's for a few texts per month.

I'd probably need the 3G iPad so there would be those monthly costs on top of the texting service but if that's less than the monthly costs of the iPhone then it's a winner as far as I'm concerned. If Skype-over-3G becomes available too, with a push system, then I'd have a potential phone for those times it's essential that has a visual cue and will almost certainly be louder than a normal phone.

So, anyone seen a personal level sms-email-sms gateway system that runs in the UK?

This month's big question concerns instructing people in an information snacking culture.

In case you're not familiar with the concept of an information snacking culture it is a sort of combination of "they all have attention deficits" and "google is making us stupid" - the concept that everyone will only look stuff up immediately and quickly, skim what they want and move on. As you might tell from this I'm not convinced.

That's not to say that as a culture we don't exhibit this behaviour sometimes. I certainly do. The other day I had the TV on and an actor I recognised strongly and couldn't place at all walked by in a trailer. A few minutes later, looking the show up, scanning through the cast list, hitting the relevant wikipedia page and I knew who he was and where I remembered him from. Given in one show he was a short-haired, sharp-dressing lawyer and in the other a long-haired, drop-out, criminal with cowboy roots and there's about a decade between the shows, I'm kind of surprised I recognised him at all!

Using this example, think of what you might have done in 1990 and 2000 with the same set up. In 1990, you'd have been pretty stuck but might have asked your friends for help. By 2000 you probably had the internet at work, maybe dial-up at home. You could probably (but not definitely, although TV shows were adopting the internet for advertising and information by then I seem to remember) have found the information out (not on Google and Wikipedia though) but you might well have waited until you were at work, or until you dialed your ISP for your email or similar before looking them up. Now - you could do all of that with your phone in the pub, and get a faster download than over a dial-up modem too!

The point I'm trying to make is that we now have the capacity to find out the answer to these (relatively idle) questions quickly and easily, however, we always had the desire to have them answered.

Learners, on the other hand, at least in a formal learning environment and at post-compulsory educational age, are able to concentrate for longer periods. They cope with 1hour or longer lectures, 2 hour seminars, 3 hour long practical classes and the like. They still manage to focus for long enough to do an honours project spread over several months. Are the five year olds any different? That's not clear to me, not from personal experience, but a large part of me thinks not. My dim memories of being 5 at school, and talking to my mother who used to teach that age group when I was 5, and who talks to her neighbour's daughter who is doing it now, says that while some things have changed - the national curriculum for example has changed the way they structure a day somewhat, as has the increase in children who have been to kindergarten before school (almost unheard of when I was 5, now almost ubiquitous) however broadly there isn't a big change. Primary teachers have to work to teach children how to study and work for longer periods of time, now and then, even if this isn't clearly written into their lesson plans. By and large they succeed.

If you go through to the other end of the educational spectrum, the proportions of students taking Masters degrees and Doctorates hasn't changed that much. Numbers taking degrees have increased, at least in the UK, because there is a drive to get more students into university - this is supposed to indicate that we're all brighter and better educated, but the ones that thrive and go further have remained about the same. Proportions leaving school without basic literacy and numeracy skills have stayed the same too - so those that the educational system fails hasn't really changed. (There are better systems in place to catch adults without basic literacy/numeracy and offer them training however, but that's a different story.)

So it looks like, despite this ability to have our idle questions answered easily, in formal learning situations, the best learners and the worse are doing about the same. The middle ground is harder to determine, at least here, because of political changes to make it easier to get into university, but despite a flood of people studying for media studies and the like, and away from chemistry and the like, it's pretty tempting to suggest that the middle, educationally speaking, has probably stayed the same in terms of aptitude and ability - just the labels that they get have changed somewhat.

Based on that, do we, the instructors need to change how we teach? No. We do for other reasons, but not for that one. We are for other reasons too, by and large. One thing that we might, culturally, like to consider however is the following: let's twist my example of the actor I wanted to "information Snack" about to something we might consider a less-than-idle question. Perhaps something about the inheritance of diabetes, or the origin and context of a famous quote "I wouldn't be a member of any club that would take me" to use a recent personal example. These could both be things that you might want to know idly or as part of your studies, although in different subjects. Maybe we should invade wikipedia, create a "deeper learning wiki" and link to and from wikipedia. Support those that want to skim for idle questions AND those who need to get the deeper information.

And, of course, another question springs to mind. By the end of the educational process we expect learners to be able to engage in deep learning. But just about all forms of that require discourse in any sense that I've seen. Perhaps we need to work out how to encourage that too - the internet is a great place to do that after all.