Eloise's thoughts and fancies - General

Cricket and British Culture

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:24:26 -0600

So, some time ago I wrote a blog post about British sport in which I mentioned that Cricket is probably the sport with most influence on our culture. In case you need to refer back to it I also wrote a longer post about Cricket and the rules.

I hadn't expected such a dramatic reinforcement of those statements.

Last Sunday one of the Sunday papers (the News of the World, nicknamed News of the Screws because it specialises in salacious gossip rather than news usually) carried a story about a sting operation in which someone had taken money to fix betting on a Cricket match.

Although I didn't know about this in advance, Cricket allows spot bets - that is bets about the outcome of a particular delivery. You might, as a fan, turn to your neighbour and say "I bet the next ball gets hit for six" for example - although informal that's the nature of a spot bet. Of course the betting fraternity is a bit more organised and does it for money. The allegation is that this person could guarantee certain deliveries would be no balls - another possible bet and one that's essentially fixable because the bowler can deliberately overstep to make it happen. If Cricket leaves you confused, imagine being able to bet that the first pitch of the second innings would be a ball - that's the same general idea and then that someone gets to the pitcher to encourage them to do this.

Since that time this has been in the news every day. And I do mean every day. In fact, except for Wednesday which marked both the publication of Tony Blair's memoirs of his time in power and the minor event of the end of US combat operations in Iraq, this story has been the leading story on every news bulletin, the top story on the BBC News website and more. It still is today.

The "Bloodgate" scandal in Rugby, various scandals about cheating on the rules trying about trying to induce transfers in Football have, in the past made the news. Sometimes they make the front pages where the serious news is printed, well was, but normally it's the sport's headline not the main news headline. If you search for Pakistan, for it is three of Pakistan's cricket team that have been accused of this cheating, on the BBC News site, there are more stories about this than trivial (in the sense of obviously less newsworthy) things like the floods in the last month!

How embedded in our culture is Cricket? More deeply than perhaps I'd imagined. We certainly have our share of criminals and cheats but there's something about Cricket and its image of honesty, fairness and friendly competition that seems to resonate within our culture. Seeing it threatened like this makes it a news story that is much more important than it would otherwise appear. I'm not quite sure what the equivalents would be in other cultures. The only one I can really imagine is fixing now the winner of the Superbowl. "Oakland haven't won recently, it's their turn" and being caught doing it.

Having been rude about The News of the World (NOTW), it's worth pointing out that the Pakistan Cricket Board are saying that NOTW faked the sting operation after between the Friday (when all the incidents took place) and the Sunday when they ran the story. Normally this would get short shrift but NOTW is all over the news for another story today - illegally hacking or attempting to hack mobile phones. Several people with a fair degree of influence are saying that if things are not cleared up and made clear they are going to be taking NOTW and the police force that investigated it to court for judicial review. NOTW are certainly not angels in terms of what they do to make or get a story.

Will our social networking implode?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:48:57 -0600

It's hard to move these days without mention of social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter and if you read this blog Second Life (OK, SL isn't a social networking SITE strictly but it has a number of features that make it resemble such a system) are regularly mentioned.

But various people have been talking for decades now about hard-wired limits to stable social networking in humans. Most famous of these is doubtless Dunbar's number at about 150 (100-230), although other estimates are up around 230-300 (notably the Bernard-Killworth estimate which has the benefit of being based on actual observations rather than a theoretical model from ancient primates and the hypothesised nature of the neocortex).

The number doesn't actually matter for this argument, just the idea that there is some limit. So what fills up that limit?

For most of us we have family - be that parents, siblings, spouses, children and in some cases in laws, cousins and the like fill some of that limit. Some of us have virtual relationships, partners, possibly those we relate to in a style similar to parents/siblings/children too. Work colleagues, whatever the environment with which we work with them atomic or pixel space and possibly only some subset of the work colleagues too, take some some of that limit. Your boss, any underlings, long established colleagues. Pre-doctoral students in your lab and the like if you're in academia, tutees and tutors, mentors and mentees all contribute to the mix. Your PLN is certainly something that bites into your Dunbar number or your Bernard-Willworth median.

Add in some friends and neighbours - the people you call, IM, Skype, email or whatever, the people you see and chat to most days around the home, in the corner shop, at the coffee shop, on the train when you're commuting or whatever the mix is.

You might notice in all of my categories I've actually put SL colleagues, friends and loved ones in the same category as atomic space colleagues, friends and loved ones - that's not accidental. Regular users of SL develop those relationships in ways that are, except for touch, largely indistinguishable from RL ones in my opinion. What does it say about our Facebook and Twitter friends though? Well some proportion of them are people inside our limit of course. They are extra ways of keeping in touch with those self-same colleagues, friends and loved ones. But the rest?

It is worth at this point remembering what the Dunbar number and Bernard-Killworth numbers are about. They are limits to the size of stable social networks for humans. When you have 2,000 friends on Facebook and 250,000 followers on Twitter you don't maintain stable social networks with them all. That probably doesn't actually need to be said you're thinking. But I would say that it does need to be said and considered. Unlike Second Life, which facilitates opportunities to turn casual acquaintances into stable social network members and also facilitates the normal processes by which acquaintances are made, maintained for a while and then moved into the "people I vaguely know" category or even "people I used to know" category rather than active members of the social network. That is, if you like, part of why Second Life works as it does.

Facebook and Twitter may facilitate the odd extra real friend, the person you meet through Mafia Wars or whatever who becomes a real friend and a genuine, stable member of your social network. Largely, though, it is either an extra tool for communicating with those you would communicate with regularly anyway OR it is a tool that allows you to stably and persistently send and receive noise to people with whom you should not strive to maintain a stable network. Suddenly there's noise in the signal. Potentially lots of noise of in the signal. When you reach saturation point with noise what do you do? You leave the network behind, secure in the knowledge that your stable social network will survive intact.

Facebook may still be growing - although like Second Life it's very hard to eradicate your account details on Facebook even if you say you're leaving so maybe it's not really growing, unlike Second Life there's no data about distinct users in the last X days available that I can find - but how long before they go the way of MySpace, BeBoo and the rest?

And, as a sideline to that, maybe that's part of why SL works for some and not others once the first hour is past but before the first month. You stay for a bit in SL and realise you're going to start making genuine friends. You don't have to be Billy No-Mates to have a bit of space in your limit number and decide (consciously or otherwise) to remain and make some new friends. You may very deliberately come in to SL for work and make some new stable social bonds with colleagues. That may also contribute to the age demographic of Second Life residents too. In your 30's and older you don't have millions of class mates and the like. You're starting to learn that some of your work mates will remain, some will be transient. You're losing touch with former close friends thanks to moving around the country and the world for work, marriage and the like. You are, sad to say, starting to lose friends and relatives to death as well. If you accept most people are social creatures and want to be connected, want to be close to their stable limit, then Second Life gives you a space to make those stable connections that is divorced from geographical accident. You make, to paraphrase one of those dreadful adverts for a dating site, connections based on similar inner values. But you have to have the space there in the first place (and get past the limits of the UI etc.). And perhaps too, that's why at various points so many people come to SL looking for cyber-sex and why the cyber-sex tag stays. We all know sexual relationships aren't necessarily stable but we mostly live in cultures that say the best ones are. It's a way to look at establishing one or may be a few extra stable social links. And it still won't help Facebook and Twitter survive unless they can offer something different.

The walls come tumbling down

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:09:35 -0600

Like a lot of inhabitants of virtual worlds there's a blurring of experience between "real life" and "second life" or atomic space and pixel space or whatever terms you like to try and distinguish them. My brain just processes experience and as someone (in the atomic sense) that strongly embodies in my avatar I would argue I even acquire some form of muscle memory. (Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy that produced such greats as Andre Agassi used visualisation of shots without actually moving as part of his training, skiers practise through visualisation, martial artists too, why would people be surprised that watching an avatar with whom you identify can evoke muscle memory too?)

Detractors from the position that virtual life can affect real life maintain there's something special about reality although I'm going to call it atomic space. If you search this blog and Google you can find a lot of examples of successful education in Second Life and other virtual environments. That has to count for something to counter their argument but doesn't stop it.

The walls may not be tumbling down in their entirety of course but it's increasingly easy to ask "what is reality?" and expect an incoherent answer. We are used to photoshopped pictures. To the extent that, rather like googling it, the terms are entering the common vocabulary as verbs rather than proper nouns. You can easily beautify someone, fairly easily insert someone who was never there into a picture even.

But this week Autotune, and possibly in the near future to autotune, has become big news. Autotune is one of a range of tools to help clean up a vocal performance. Very crudely put it takes a note (say a sung one) and moves it from where it was sung to where it was meant to be sung by changing the pitch. Cher's "Believe" used this to the extreme - you can hear the difference between her (largely unchanged) voice in the chorus and the "bubbly/warbly" highly autotuned voice in the verse. In that case it was a deliberate effect, she wanted the electronicy-roboty sound.

Of course this illustrates one of the problems that might become a lot more important in times to come. I remember the first time I heard the song (sorry, my street cred is falling, but I've always liked Cher's music, well big chunks of it) and I recognised the chorus as Cher but wondered who she was singing with. We use a lot of little tone and pitch cues to recognise the singer.

If you watch this video (embedding disabled, sorry) and the one below (same song) they're sung in similar registers. One is sung by a far more accomplished singer - one is an actress who sings and one a professional singer after all. That's not the issue. The issue is that you can (even I can with my dodgy hearing) recognise the difference between voices from the subtle differences in tones.

Just like photoshop allows you to insert a part of an image, including someone in the picture that wasn't there (and potentially making a harmless and much nicer holiday snap of the whole family say), Autotune can help you clean up a performance and/or lay down some interesting extra effects. But how long until it lets you set up an ability to perfectly mimic someone else's voice? Imagine shifting, if you're British, Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech into David Cameron's voice and playing it back... oops. If you don't know Rivers of Blood, imagine a KKK rallying speech converted into MLK's voice - that's a similar sort of speech and culture shock.

Just where is reality these days?

Confusion and smear tactics?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:53:52 -0600

I like to think I'd make a good juror. I'm smart, I under the science, I have a lot of training in basing decisions on evidence. Sounds like a good combination for a juror, no? In all that I have to admit I'd probably be a terrible juror on a rape case. I think the whole situation around the way rape cases are put together and tried makes it such a hard thing to do that the victim of the crime has to be pretty convinced that it's that person and to want to carry it through possibly even force it through.

So imagine my surprise when I read this article about the founder of wikileaks being charged with rape and thought "what bullshit." A few hours later I was quite relieved to hear the arrest warrant was cancelled.

The reason I'm confused is partly that my instant reaction was "That's bogus" rather than the "castrate the bastard" that I'd normally think. And I wonder what it says about my attitude to the supposed leading nation of the free world that, to be honest, my instant reaction was that this was all a sort of James Bond-like smear campaign straight out of the cold war. Julian Assange very clearly embarrassed the US Government. The, to my ears at least, bleating of the DoD spokesman that he was risking lives may or may not have any validity (I'm inclined to think little or none but that's just me) but it just sounded too much like a statement of "how dare anyone embarrass us by the telling the truth we don't want to have told, we'll try to make him look wicked too" to gain any traction. I'm guessing that in the US it probably convinced a section of people who think that the government can do no wrong and hardly anyone else. Attempting to smear him with a crime like this, a crime that evokes a very strong emotional response in most people, just feels like the next step in the escalating campaign.

So I'd just like to congratulate the US Government and whoever came up with this wonderful idea. You've probably just created the only person in the world who can commit just about any crime with impunity for the next year or more. Unless you manage to assassinate him and claim he was resisting arrest AND make it look really good in the inevitable evidence and video footage, who is really going to believe he's guilty of anything more than embarrassing you?

Good and bad bad science

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:07:37 -0600

On occasion I rant about how terrible the science is in a TV show or film.

I recently had a revelation about this. On Tuesday we had a CSI Miami episode where the script writers were obviously short of ideas on how to make the episode run to length so what did they do? The CSIs suddenly lost a basic awareness of food hygiene and forgot that, by miles, the commonest source of E. coli food poisoning is faecal contamination and trotted out the old, hugely incorrect, line that "all E. coli are poisonous" - so how about the billions and billions in your gut right now? ARGH!

At the same time I've been watching Fringe which often has bad science mixed in with it's fringe/loonie science and there were a couple of mistakes in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (the radio with perfect reception in the Faraday Cage, really!). But I stop and watch them quite happily.

What's the difference? In Fringe they make no bones about the fact that the plot devices are junk science. When they mix in just plain bad science, so what. They tell good stories where the junk science is core to the plot and worked in. I'm willing to give up the "Uh oh, crap science" problems because the whole premise is crap science but it makes for a good story. In the Sorcerer's Apprentice I was also quite happy watching a film about magic so a little bit of bad science that didn't affect anything was OK.

In CSI they tell the story as a piece of hard science. When they screw up the science they're messing up the plot. No, NO!

OK, that's not perfect. If the bad science is sufficiently egregious I'll still complain at the time. I still notice the bad science in Fringe and TSA and so on. But rather than hair-pulling I get on with the show. When CSI Miami does it, I start wondering about just giving up on the whole show.

Fun, games and sexism?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:44:03 -0600

Last week our wonderful new government announced that Christina Hendricks' and her 'fuller figure' is a healthier ideal for women to aspire to than the ultra-thin model look.

Part of me, I must admit thinks this is basically a good thing. The implication that it's OK to have curves is great for those that have them and might prevent some people attempting to starve themselves to lose their natural figure. I'm not going to even suggest it will generally stop people developing eating disorders but it might stop a few who are borderline about whether they will develop some sort of eating disorder from actually developing it and that's a good thing.

But... what happens if you're naturally slim and, in the commonest parlance athletic rather than voluptuous. You can, most definitely, be healthy and attractive with a figure like that. Will it encourage more women to go down the route of breast augmentation? Whilst various workers in and around the sex trade and glamour modelling may regard this as a positive move and there are absolutely times when it's the best solution to a medical/surgical situation, I'm not convinced it's a good idea to encourage it more.

But that's my academic background as a BioMedical Scientist showing through.

Where is the figure to aspire to for men? If our government is going to tell women this is the healthy ideal when it's clearly one of a range of healthy options and it's a figure that is almost certainly maintained with the aid of a rigorous personal training regime that many people won't have the time or money to try and emulate, why aren't men being told their healthy ideal is Jason Leonard if they want a fuller figure (he was nicknamed The Fun Bus by his fellow rugby players, that might give you some idea of his build) or Phil "The Cat" Tufnell if you want a thinner figure. (He was nicknamed for his relaxed attitude and ability to catnap supposedly, but he's still built like a lean, lithe cat). Why is it only women need to be officially told what they should like?

Sixty years ago, it might have been acceptable, but in the 21st Century? Really?! No.

Of iPads, UPS and Hearing Aids

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:58:11 -0600

UPS first. In general I have nothing against UPS, but when they arranged to pick up my iPad up for repairs on Monday, I said not between 1 and 3 because I knew I was going to a lunch meeting and then the doctor. Nothing serious, but a chat about the hearing aids and the support they offer combined with a prescription renewal. Given that appointment was set for 2:30, 3pm home seemed reasonable.

I was unimpressed when I got home to find UPS had called at 14:28. Grr. I appears, after complaining bitterly, that they can't arrange appointments more precisely than "after 2pm" which I could probably have coped with if they'd told me the first time. Other than that though, very good.

My iPad returned today. Hooray! Actually that's not true. A brand new replacement iPad turned up today. So, I plugged it in, restored and updated. And... exactly the same thing started to happen. I was NOT a happy camper. Phoned customer support and spoke to someone different who talked me through an alternate fix. It's a bit of a fiddle, but if you set up a new account on your Mac, connect that way, you can sometimes solve a system update bug like mine. Then you have to go back, and install all your apps and stuff. It's taken a bit over an hour but I have an iPad running 3.2.1 with all my stuff on it again. Hooray! Thank you nice man on the support line. He said it's a trick that's not in the manual for iPads but that works for iPhones. The person I spoke to last week is relatively new so he was going to share that trick with her and get it added to the 'try this' manual so that's a result too.

And finally hearing aids. As someone asked me yesterday when I was moaning, "Is it all worth it?" The answer is, to date, an unqualified yes. There are a few more places where I need to see how well they work, but I can use the phone again, I can hear people in the shop when they tell me how much, I can chat to people over coffee in the coffee shop I frequent and so on. All the things that I've struggled with before. That's not to say it's a perfect solution. Water noises seem really, really loud - this was something I was warned about and is well known. They confuse the poor amplifier and get boosted lots and so become painful. It's (currently) amazingly tiring too - because I'm hearing all kinds of noises that I haven't heard for ages and my brain is responding to them. That isn't a complaint really, just an observation, albeit one I will have to come to terms with. This is wrecking my sleeping patterns too but it's tolerable because the upsides are good. You will, probably hear me moan in future about them - but remember if I'm moaning that's an indicator I'm wearing them still so they're doing enough good things to make we want to continue to wear them.

A couple of things...

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:45:18 -0600

If this was Neil Gaiman's blog it would be an entry called tying off the tails. It's a few little bits that have crossed my mind recently and either made me laugh or relate to previous posts but aren't big enough for one of their own.

Although these things don't normally appeal to me, I was channel hopping the other day and caught Steven Seagal: Lawman. I'm not hugely bothered by Seagal either. But I have to admit I was interested enough to stop and watch. Why? Well Seagal captures the attention of the camera and viewer better than most cops - no shock there I guess - but because of that you get what seems a more candid ride along. There's none of the "most dangerous police chases" nonsense. He might see a crash one minute and then go and chat to a bunch of drunks the next just to make sure they've got a sober driver of they've travelled by cab or whatever. It's not enough to make me want to watch it really but it was an interesting slant on a cop show for 10 minutes before bed.

Related vaguely to that, a story on TUAW about the worst iPhone to nick. Imagine the scene, you're a phone thief, you ride along, see someone with a shiny new iPhone, nick it and 10 minutes later you're under arrest. How come? You only nicked the phone that is all tricked up with a demo of some software for police and armed services personnel to let them give an alert and be tracked real time. Oops.

Finally, a while ago I asked about the app store being a walled garden and likened it to AOL. I said AOL were now a laughing stock and an afterthought. Although he's far too polite to have posted a link to his data in the comments, Troy McConaghy pointed out that AOL is still employing nearly 10,000 people and is still one of the most visited sites on the internet. (I would say in my defence I was talking about AOL as an ISP and there seem to be no data about that in the list.) But regardless of whether AOL are still a popular ISP, in business terms the company is still going strong in America.

Hearing aids

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:12:30 -0600

So, I've had my aids in for about 2 hours now.

It's odd. Some things seem unchanged. A lot of the things I'd been told to look out for haven't (yet at least) been an issue. I've nibbled on a biscuit, that's OK. Had hot and cold drinks, that's OK. Ice-cream might be next... but I can't see that being a problem.

Some things I've had to adjust a little. My TV instead of being set in the low 40's on the volume control as it was on the way out is in the 20's on the same station. If you'll forgive the indelicacy, flushing the toilet was painfully loud.

Some things feel like a return to a normal I'd not realised I was missing. I heard someone approach me from behind as I was walking home. When I left the booth where I'd had them fitted I could hear two nurses discussing a hunk in a TV show, 20m or so away at the far end of the corridor.

Some things are less comfortable. There's a gradually building urge to take my aids out, stick a finger in my ear and waggle it. This is, apparently, quite normal at first - your ear had to get used to this piece of plastic being stuck down inside it after all. It rained a few minutes ago and that sound was unpleasantly loud too. I'm dreading when a train goes by, even without aids that was uncomfortably loud!

I'm supposed to give it 3 months to let it all settle down. That's OK. But first impressions are good overall. A bit of discomfort for being able to hear properly, I can cope with that.

Going deaf

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:52:46 -0600

As most of you know I'm going deaf. In fact in about 3 weeks time I should be sitting here with a hearing aid in each ear and trying to get used to that!

But it occurred to me this morning, after an incident yesterday, that I've not really recorded anything about how it feels and what the process has been like. Obviously this is going to be a very personal account. It's worth, I think, pointing out some of what I've been told at various points too, and tying that to the impact it's having on me.

So, as a child I had unusually sharp hearing. There was an infamous incident in my early teens when I complained that I could hear the television that my parents were watching so clearly I couldn't get to sleep for the noise. This was through three closed doors and on the longest possibly diagonal through the house. I was complaining that night of this hyper-acute hearing, and complaining I could still hear the TV clearly when it was quiet enough that my parents couldn't hear it from inside the same room. That seems unusual, and kind of ironic from my current perspective, but even into my thirties people would comment that my hearing was unusually acute. Of course, to me, it was just normal, because it was what I was used to. The relevance of this? Well it probably explains why I'm going deaf like I'm in my mid-to-late 60's when I'm in my mid-40's according to one of the experts I've spoken to. Very crudely speaking, going deaf in old age is wear and tear on the inner ear (with apologies to any experts on the field), and because of that former acuity I've had more wear and tear. Fun! It also means I've probably been going deaf, gradually, for longer than I think - I was starting from a better level than expected.

For me, going deaf was a bit like getting fatter and greyer as you get older. I have no real consciousness of becoming deaf because it's a gradual process. But just like you look in the mirror one day and wonder who that grey, fat old fogey looking back at you is, I woke up one day to the realisation that I couldn't follow conversations, and as time has passed that's got worse - for example I often don't hear the phone ring if there's background noise, and I struggle to follow conversations on the phone unless I turn speaker phone on to hold the phone to my ear when I do hear it ring. However, unlike getting fatter and greyer, which seems to be very slow processes, I have good or bad days with my hearing. Well, better or worse but generally not good now. There are days when, to hear the radio (which is often better for me to listen to than TV news because the presenter is concentrating solely on being heard and the medium is all about clear transmission of sound so I tend to manage better) I have to have it so loud my neighbours are prone to complaining. There are, equally, days when I might not hear a pin drop, but I can hear quite clearly. I have a numeric component to the volume control, and on bad days it's often in the 40's for me to hear it, on a good day it might be in the high teens. Normal days are currently in the mid-30's. When I got this radio, normal days were in the low 20's.

The places for me it's worse are basically any place there's background noise. If I can sit and talk to you in peace and quiet, combining what I hear and what I lip-read, I probably don't miss anything. Transport us to a busy cafe or a random meeting by the street, and even with lipreading I will struggle. Without it, you're worse off than if you were speak Venusian - your words just disappear into the background noise and I'm clueless. Sometimes, in fact, so clueless that I don't even know you were trying to speak to me.

Yesterday was, for me, a really bad day. This was bought home to me when I was nipping out to the shop. Two young women from the building next to me came out and headed up the road about 3m in front of me. Given the weather they were wearing loose sandals and I could see them flapping, bouncing off the pavement and the like. But I just couldn't hear it at all. That may seem like a small thing to you but for me it was weird. It's a bit like when you watch one of those "making off..." documentaries before they add the sound effects. The world seems oddly dead, at least to me, presumably because my sensorium is just lacking that input. Or perhaps they were just ninja, sneaking silently up the road...

The process, here in the UK, of getting diagnosed and fitted with aids is not quite over. It will have taken several months to complete. And the last little bit of this is going to be a comment on the audiologists and doctors I've met - without names. All the audiologists have been very good. They've explained what is going on, and they've almost always arranged their workplace so I can see their mouths clearly. They haven't been put out at going back over things either. The fact that they're operating in essentially sound-proofed rooms has made it much easier all round.

Because of my relative youth (gosh, how odd that feels to write) I had to also be assessed by a medic from the Head and Neck clinic. Presumably he's not an expert in working with deaf people, although you'd have thought he'd have some experience. It didn't show. He sat to my right, facing further to my right, in an office with the door open. Between the background noise and the fact I couldn't lip read him, I just couldn't see his lips which makes it tricky!, he ended up asking me questions three or four times before I understood them. This seemed to irritate him, but eventually he learnt to face me. But still not good! He then added insult to injury by sticking an otoscope into my ear and asking me something whilst there. Given I'm there to be assessed for hearing aids, and he's just stuck a piece of plastic in my ear, is speaking from behind it whilst rattling it around in my ear, how much do you think I heard of his question? I heard just enough to work out he'd said something and I think he was lucky I heard that much.

This particularly annoys me as a teacher. I don't know about you, but in my teacher training, we had sessions aimed at understanding and working with students with disabilities. Probably not enough of them compared to some of the other topics in my opinion, but we did have them. This included best practise when teaching students with hearing problems - most of which actually is best practise most of the time. This doctor managed to break every one of the rules that he had a chance to break - and yet this is a legitimate part of his area of specialisation. If I hadn't been half asleep thanks to the ungodly hour I would have complained about it there and then. Perhaps I should just write a letter complaining about it anyway.

It will be interesting to see how things go when I get the hearing aids. I've been warned, by both the audiologists I've seen, that there's an adjustment period. That could be fun. But one thing that worked really well - one of the audiologists was wearing hearing aids, in fact a very similar aid to the style I will be getting. Having her to talk to, at quite some length, and discuss the pros and cons of the various options with someone who has actually been through the process - THAT was really useful to me.

Random thoughts on TV

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:04:02 -0600

Let's start with an interesting one: what makes an adult show?

One obvious option, one often not available in the US, is enough sex or violence to tip it into being "adult" in the Second Life sense. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and others have gone down this route. In the UK, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is currently trying the sex and violence route for a change and is, it appears, taking great delight in being R-rated TV.

There are alternative routes, however. The Vampire Diaries, which recently finished broadcasting in the UK, is based on a YA paranormal romance series of books and was broadcast in the US on what I understand to be a teen-focussed channel TheCW. School girls with crushes on vampires might make you squirm but if you're prepared to accept that, they leave everyone basically clothed (you get to see more skin at the beach, but they're not always fully dressed) and whilst it has a bit of violence it would probably get a 12 rating at the cinema but the plotting is intricate, devious and delightful. It's adult in the other way - many characters are morally ambiguous, doing bad things for good reasons, or good things for bad reasons. The show quite deliberately misleads you at various points, and the complexity is such that it leads to an interestingly adult entertainment without being "adult" in the other sense.

Whilst Six Feet Under also had excellent plotting, the almost childish glee of Spartacus: Blood and Sand with its obsessions of gore and sex being crammed into every show seems to me to do more to appeal to the teen market than the adult market, despite (or possibly because of) its R-rating.

And then we have the sweep of the Procedural Drama. To my mind CSI was the first of these, although there may have been others before it. Ironically a show format that focusses on the team, the procedure, the story almost to the exclusion of the characters seems to build massive loyalties to the characters/actors in the minds of the audience. As actors retire, move on, get written out etc. it often (with the possible exception of CSI itself where it appears that the departures are well managed, planned and written into the series in the main) seems to disrupt the story far more than in a more traditional character-driven show. Why? Well one thing, obviously, is that in a cop-buddy drama (Cagney and Lacey, Starsky and Hutch etc. to show my age) if one of the stars chooses to move on, the show stops. If Starsky gets shot and killed by the villain at the end of season 5, season 6 doesn't happen because there's no Starsky. When Sara Sidle, Gil Grissom, Warrick Brown moved on, new characters moved in to replace them. The team dynamics changed but the show carried on. That, perhaps, causes those loyalties to some extent because you know, at some level, that your favourite character can be just written out and the show can keep going. But I also wonder how much this sense of identification with the characters is because we respond to the work environment? You may well become best friends with someone you work with but mostly you don't. You find out bits about their life as you go along because a lot of the time you're focussed on work and so are they. (You do focus on work when you're at work don't you?!) Deliberately or otherwise, the procedurals tap into that process as well. You don't have (as we had in Dr. Who this season for example) "character establishing" shows because they're not relevant to the format - you gradually learn about the characters as time goes by and so they become, somewhat, like improbably good-looking work-mates and if they move on without warning and a proper exit, it's that disruptive too.

And finally, Matt Smith and Stephen Moffatt. w00t! What a tour de force. Of course Stephen Moffat wrote, to my mind, many of the best episodes of the Tennant/Eccleston years and so he had form going forward. But he continued to excel over this season, more than ably helped by Matt Smith who brought an odd mix of some of the former Doctors and himself to the role. Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston too - the River Song character has definitely added something interesting to the show - at least in part a character who poses more questions than she gives answers, as well as an equal to the doctor who is mostly an ally - that helps too.

The saga of a computer that died...

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:30:34 -0600

As you may or may not be aware, my computer died last Monday morning - woke up and it was off, which was worrying, tried to turn it on and got the start-up chime, a white screen as normal, and then three loud (very loud, even to me) beeps in a repeating cycle.

Enter the iPad... a quick browse suggests there's a memory module problem. Not something I can fix easily. Living on optimism more than realism, I tried it a few more times during the morning and early afternoon and... nada.

So, a quick search shows there's an apple repair shop based near where I live. Enter Janine... who happily dropped her settling back in after holidaying to run and my iMac out to the shop. A really big Thank You! to her for that. And enter Jennings, the repair shop too.

I went through what I'd done and observed with the iMac, plus giving them my details and left the machine in their tender care. A few days later they get back in touch, tell me they'd been unable to replicate the problem, but they'd fixed some file permission errors and thank you very much. This was all done very politely and professionally. Janine to the rescue again... abandoning her gardening to whisk me out and reunite me with my iMac. Hurrah!

I plugged it in, started it up and all seemed well, briefly. Then it started going a bit flakey, and I got back in touch with Jennings. No problem, and they talked me through some things that again appeared to fix things. Sadly this was an illusion... the things that seemed to be causing the crash were, but for different reasons than expected. A little later into the evening and it had given up the ghost entirely, back to how it had been before.

So, get in touch with Jennings again. Explain the situation. Without batting an eyelid they arranged for an engineer to come and pick it up. He dropped his planned day's work to sort out my iMac. About 3 hours later there was an answer... and they replaced the memory module that was broken when they stress tested it (I always have enough going on to stress test my memory cards). I had to pay for the new module of course, but they delivered the iMac back to me. I was, in addition, just about to head out to meet a friend when they said it was ready... and they happily arranged a time to drop it back off. They were accurate to the minute too.

All of this was done with a smile, good explanations, and quickly - despite me being more than a little stressed when the iMac that had been reported as fixed started showing the same symptoms again an hour after getting it home. Although I obviously wish they'd managed to catch the error first time around, the Jennings staff, all three of them that I interacted with, were professional throughout and went beyond common courtesy into the realms of excellent customer service to make sure everything was write for me. Fourteen hours later and, touch wood, it's all still working happily.

Thank you Jennings, for going that extra step to get the job done. And thank you again to Janine for helping a friend in need.

Linden Lab's new direction 2

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:21:58 -0600

Whilst I'm still reeling from the news and wondering what the impact will be, Gwyn's posted a very optimistic piece on her blog.

Much though I like Gwyn, in fact she's my longest-standing friend in Second Life (there are friends I have who have been in Second Life longer, but I haven't known as long), part of me feels this a Kool-Aid intoxicated piece. That said, another part of me feels that if Linden Lab have really decided to move to focussing on making the experience for me-the-resident better, me-the-content-creator better and so on, and stop trying to drag us into a world suited for big business at the expense of the individuals then personally it might be a good move.

Reducing the support for education seems to be part of this drive - but I find myself wondering if they're improving the typical resident's experience they're hopefully looking at things like:

speeding up texture loading
improved IMs and groups
Fewer crashes
More stable voice chat (possibly, although not of interest to me)

None of these things will actually make Second Life any less attractive to educators - having students able to use Second Life faster and better won't be a disaster.

I won't, for the moment, speculate on the "SL in a browser" direction. It's not necessarily bad and there's NO information about what it will entail. It's rampant speculation and whilst that's fun, it's not particularly constructive. I might, after a few days, think about publishing a wish-list though.

Linden Lab's new direction

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:10:38 -0600

So Linden Lab announced, via both press release and blog post a massive restructuring programme. When I say massive - they're trimming 30% of the workforce.

Some of that is thanks to shutting satellite offices and the like which sounds and feels like a cut-back despite the "our revenue streams are strong" spin in the information offered. Mind you, restructuring like this after the worst of the recession seems both odd and rather like a kick in the teeth.

But some of it is clearly a much more strategic redirection - a number of Lindens that I know and chat to moderately often have been shown the door. I'm not going to name all the names, it's not fair for one thing, but to my mind there are two really notable casualties amongst the widespread carnage:

Claudia Linden, who took over from Pathfinder Linden as the education liaison some time ago, has rather more promptly followed Pathfinder into alternative employment. Educators in Second Life may not be a massive resource stream for Linden Lab but they are not an insignificant user group either. They do a rather good job of spreading both the user base outside the core demographic and the awareness of Second Life into a range of "respectable" areas that aren't reached by other routes. We have yet to see who the new liaison will be and how well they will be received by the community and what news they will have for us of the future. This comes at a particularly bad time for the Lab - there is a lot of unrest and disappointment on the SLED list for example - as a number of changes to various things over the last few months are still causing bitterness and doubts about the future.

Babbage Linden has also gone. You might not know Babbage, for one thing he's based in the UK and usually works an early UK-hours day, so he's typically wrapping up for end of the day when many of you are thinking about your second coffee of the new day. But Babbage is the person that led the porting of lsl from it's old engine to Mono. He has been, so far as we know, hard at work extending the SL-mono infrastructure to enable other programming languages to be used in Second Life. Presumably a direction the Lab no longer wishes to take. When tied in to the rather loose "developing for other platforms" I have to wonder what that means. Will Second Life be following people into something like Lua? It worked so well for Metaplace after all. Or if they are going down the browser based interface route, something more like Javascript or PHP maybe?

It has to be said that M's even-more-content-lacking-than-usual post raises a lot more questions than it answers.

"...improve our focus as a company on the projects that matter most to Residents[sic]"

...doesn't actually say what any of them are, nor how they will be assessed as "matter most" nor to which subset of residents. Educators, clubbers, shoppers, parents, blind residents, deaf residents, builders, scripters, professional developers, major corporations, conference organisers and all the other niche groups of residents (and yes, like me, you might belong to several of these groups) have different opinions about what matters most for the future.

"...we can invest in platform improvements, new products, and new lines of business"

...well you have yet to sell the idea and support it with any evidence that the new viewer is a good product or a platform improvement. There have been a range of (sometimes boring in the detail but interesting exercise in openness) quite technical posts about background changes to improve stability. Again not much hard evidence of the impact of that - anecdotally I'm not seeing much in the way of a change, but I've had a pretty stable Second Life experience for quite a while and I am only one small dataset. Platform improvements like the porting of SLEx to the new Marketplace experience? It appears they've sacked the architect of that brainchild too according to a post I read somewhere. Or maybe that's a new product that's been axed? What other new products are in the pipeline? New lines of business? Like what..?

I've seen too many instances of people running around screaming "The sky is falling" to believe that this is the end quite yet. But it does feel sobering and waiting to see what these new directions will be has me feeling unexpectedly nervous. As I'm sure I've said before, with Phillip at the helm I often disagreed with specific decisions but felt that the vision was quite clear and shared. Phillip would often come and explain the reasoning to us in a variety of ways. With M, I feel no connection to his vision because platitudes and posts that create more questions than they answer don't actually succeed in sharing it.

If you like Aristotelean dichotomies for your population, I'm in the neophile camp. There's a shock to you all, I'm sure! That's a camp that may pay lip-service to "may you live in interesting times" being intended as a curse but which generally doesn't really understand it. Today, that's not the case. It certainly qualifies as interesting times but it's with a fair degree of nervousness, even trepidation, that I'm looking forward to what's next.

The iPad - the downsides

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:02:09 -0600

There are three things I'm going to discuss here. Of these I'd expected one and half-expected another (that is I'd sort of expected it, but not quite the impact it would have) and the other is totally unexpected. I'm also not entirely sure it's a downside.

First the expected: The iPad screen gets greasy. Really greasy, really easily. If there is an oliophobic coating, either messieurs Jobs and Ives sweat differently to us mere mortals, or it would be incredibly bad without what is there. In fairness, the iPad's screen doesn't seem to degrade in performance or visibility whilst you are actually using it. But, in just over 48 hours, it's become a habit to turn it off and clean the screen already. It's not as bad as it could be of course - it just means packing a lens cloth or similar too, but it is a noticeable downside before you show it off.

Second the partially expected: The ancillary costs of owning an iPad are quite high. I've probably spent £60 (about $100) on apps since buying it, and I'm being deliberately restrained. Some of those costs were expected - I'd planned to buy Pages for example, so was expecting that cost. Some iPhone apps (TouchCalc for example, my favourite iPhone calculator) come with a universal version (iPad and iPhone, in this case both free) so those upgrades were easy. But quite a few apps for iPad don't have a free -lite version and the $0.99 pricepoint becomes a $2.99 or $5.99 pricepoint typically (69p, £1.75 and $3.50 ish). That was... acceptable. I knew there was going to be such a flurry of spending but I've spent a bit more and in different areas to what I expected. Which brings us neatly to -

Third the unexpected: I'm using the iPad in ways I didn't expect. Actually that's slightly misleading. I'm using it in all of the ways I expected, but in some more too. I'm now splitting RSS reading across my main machine and the iPad in a way I never did on the iPhone. That bigger screen makes it easy to read on the iPad and a pleasure. I've gone with Freeder because of the number of feeds I have, but the pro version adds functionality I want and use, so there's some money I hadn't expected to spend. I've changed my "read later" habits to Instapaper and reading on the iPad or the iMac. That's free, but the fully featured iPad Instapaper reader is a pay-for app. The story continues like this. In fact, it's not all about spending money - using the iPad from bed, from the armchair, wherever is very seductive. I'm looking at changing my email workflow from POP3 on the iMac to IMAP, and IMAP on the iPad too so I can work smoothly across both. The iPhone was always IMAPing email, but although I did check it most days I was working away from home, I find I'm likely to check the iPad whilst away from the iMac - cooking and having a 5 minute simmer... fire up the iPad, check email, RSS feeds etc. and having them not all previously downloaded to the iMac's mail sounds like a positive.

So beware - buying an iPad might just disrupt your working patterns. It's seductively, dangerously seductively, fun and easy to use. Tablet PCs, if they're as good as this, will become the future.