Meetings

We are often told that the Chinese are very good at turning out well educated young people and from time to time we are invited to answer the sort of maths questions their youngsters are expected to be able to cope with - to find that we cannot cope at all.

But one of the less mentioned features of the schools that they run for their future leaders is the priority given to looking-interested-alert-and-awake classes. Provided one starts early, by the time the future leader is 25, he or she is able to cope with all-day meetings like that illustrated.

They don't, on this account, need to allocate that many places in the re-education camps set up on the Tibetan plateau for those junior leaders who show disrespect to senior leaders.

Prompted by a very similar picture in yesterday's DT, but this particular picture comes from http://www.turkishweekly.net/.

The C-word

I used to moan from time to time about how so many of the results of publicly funded research used to be hidden behind commercial paywalls. Whereas now, for the sort of stuff that I am interested in, this is no longer true. A lot of such research is published in open access form and a lot of what is not leaks out, in part, I suspect, because the authors want to be read. The average reads-per-paper is quite low enough - of the order of one or two? - without putting up barriers.

And given that researchers don't find time to read each other's stuff, maybe even fewer find time to actually review somebody else's work, so maybe peer review is not all that it is cracked up to be.

That, however, is not where I am at today. Today is the cautionary tale of a Chinese team who used the word 'Creator' three times in the course of a paper about the mechanics of the human hand, the general idea of which seems to be that the hand is a very clever bit of machinery. It would be hard to do a better design job than that turned in by evolution.

This use of the C-word has, it seems, triggered a big row in the world of PLOS, one of the biggest players in the open access movement. See reference 2. To the point where the paper has been retracted (hence the bit of red banner visible in the illustration above), although not removed from the PLOS site. So perhaps we will get the eating disorder effect noticed yesterday at reference 3, with this paper actually getting read on account of its notoriety. Maybe it is a good paper and all the publicity will make the careers of the authors. Which is all well and good, but which might well start a race to the bottom, a disease which affects many public affairs. Aka market forces.

But without making any attempt to judge the merits of the paper - which looks just like many others out there, full of fancy statistics and diagrams - see, for example, figure 5 - I suppose that all the fuss reflects the sensitivity of scientists in the US to anything which smells ever so faintly of creationism, given the large numbers of serious creationists in the US. Creationists who cause a lot of trouble in places such as schools - which, in part in consequence, turn out more of the same. How can you run a sensible country when so many of them hold such bizarre beliefs?

So I can see the point. But maybe in China the word is just a shorthand for something far more vague than our Creator, as set down in the Testaments, and not really a threat to science at all. Maybe, even, they were just attempting some humour, an attempt to liven up what would otherwise have been the normally safe & leaden  prose of science - in which case it all goes to show that you need to be very good at a foreign language before you try to be funny in it.

Reference 1: googling 'Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living' will get you there.

Reference 2: https://www.plos.org/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/pro-eating-disorder.html.

Pro eating disorder

I thought I would share a curio at which I was pointed this morning.

It seems that there are lots of places out on the internet, for example Instagram (about which I know nothing, beyond the fact that a lot of people use it), where people who have made an eating disorder lifestyle choice can share - people who are a big public health problem in some countries.

In response to pressure, Instagram at least tried to damp this sharing down. First, they stopped a small number (17) of eating disorder words - for example bonespo and thighgap - from being used in searches and, second, they added warning pop-ups called advisories to results which included such words.

According to a study by Georgia Tech (googling 'georgia tech eating disorder instagram' will get you most of the way there), this damping down has not worked. The people with eating disorders rapidly evolved the shared use of uncontrolled variations of the banned words and their activities continued unabated. Indeed, according to Georgia Tech, who can be found at reference 1, shared use by this community went up rather than down.

The experts are now pondering on what else, if anything might be done. How to square the circle of helping people with a serious problem without infringing their, or anyone else's human rights. As so often, a question of judgement - but whether we manage to make the right judgement call in this tricky area remains to be seen.

Maybe part of the answer is that we, collectively, have to feel our way. There is no magic bullet.

PS: I am reminded of my dim view of the smoking ban, at the time it was introduced. My line as a light smoker was that banning, in such a strong way, something which consenting adults chose to do to themselves, was not right. Not to mention the massive fall-out arising from the abuse of entirely legal and freely available alcohol by said consulting adults. Now that I am a non-smoker, I am not so sure, although, on balance, I still think the ban went a bit far.

Reference 1: http://www.gatech.edu/.

Reference 2: https://www.instagram.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram.

Ebay'd

Some weeks ago, noticed at reference 1, I thought I did rather well with ebay, buying some Maigret from ebay France. Maigret which is presently bed-time reading and entirely satisfactory, the three or four missing volumes notwithstanding - athough I suppose there may come a time when I start on about them. Combing car boot sales to make up the set.

Then last week we happened to watch 'A Pocketful of Rye' - in the 2009 McKenzie version - on ITV3, and as is my wont, I wanted to read the book in order to compare and contrast. Was it one of those stories into which Miss. Marple had been intruded by the marketing people? Careful inspection of our slightly incomplete Heron Christie - bought on ebay some years previously - revealed that this story must be in one of the missing volumes. So back to ebay to see what could be done.

I ask ebay for 'pockeful of rye agatha' or some such and up comes lots of them, the first few hits being of the Fontana-Collins edition of 1967. But, feeling a bit too clever by half, I thought to push on and see if I could pick up an odd Heron, so going towards completion as well as meeting the immediate need. Some way down the list, sure enough, was a small red book called two thrillers. Fair enough I thought, the Herons are red and do generally come two stories to the book - so buy for £2.50 or so.

A few days later the book turns up and turns out to be from the Daily Express Fiction Library: were they once given away free with the Sunday Express? The book was undated, but, judging from the editor's forward, appeared to date from before the second world war. Almost collectible, had it not been in a slightly smaller format than the Heron, so would not sit well on the shelf with the others.

At which point I discovered that it was not 'A Pocketful of Rye' at all, rather a Poirot story called 'The Underdog', paired up with a short story by one E. Phillips Oppenheim, apparently a very successful writer of the time, called 'Blackman's Wood'. What had happened, and what had not occurred to me in my eagerness to buy, was that the ebay query worked rather like a google query and did not just return exact hits. It did the best it could with what you asked for and what it had got, a system which worked for them on this occasion as they did bag the sale. And which when was not buying books would be entirely reasonable. Caveat emptor!

The book came with a pro-forma which I could have used to return the book to sender at no cost to myself, but that seemed far too much bother. Far easier just to read them than to return them. The Poirot turns out to be an entirely satisfactory short story, silly enough afterwards, but carrying you along well enough at the time. And written with enough art not to need the layers of complications and red-herrings that festoon the average 'Midsomer Murders', complications and red-herrings which can be taxing for the older brain. The Oppenheim story is even shorter, but satisfies the same description. It also reflects the description of the author as a keen shooting man, as the story revolves around a shooting party, the sort of thing which one supposes to have gone on outside the sort of country houses in which so many Christie stories were set - so a perfect pairing in that sense. Also demonstrating that the then readers of the daily Express were as keen to do a bit of vicarious living among their betters as the now viewers of 'Downton Abbey'. I don't suppose many of them would have had a clue how to load a shotgun, never mind kill a pheasant with one.

Sobering to think that Oppenheim wrote over a hundred novels before dying in 1946 at the then respectable age of 80. According to wikipedia, lots of his books were made into films in the 20's and 30's and he looks to have been as rich and famous in his day as Simenon or Christie. But now unheard of. Sic transit gloria mundi!

PS: we have now sourced 'A Pocketful of Rye' from elsewhere and I am pleased to report that it is a genuine Miss. Marple story. She had not been intruded.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/simenon-1.html.

Balance of payments

Google cars is the text for this morning's worry. The full story being at reference 1.

Suppose google delivers a computer program which can drive all our cars and lorries for us.

Then lots of drivers get made redundant and a proportion end up on benefit.

Meanwhile, the work they used to do has been transferred to a small computer which was probably made with (relatively) cheap labour in the Far East and imported from there into the UK. Maybe most of the computer program was written out there too.

So all we have really done is put a lot of our chaps on the dole in order to take a few of their chaps off the dole, along the way making our balance of payments even worse than it was before.

While the chaps from google trouser a percentage, a percentage which they can use for good works - of their own choosing - in due course. Perhaps they are fans of Dame Trace, which would at least get some of the dosh back over here, back where it belongs. See reference 2.

PS: I associate to the problem which Aldous Huxley put his finger on eighty years ago. It is all very well getting machines to do all the work, but what are all the people going to do instead? How on earth are we going to keep them happy, given that most people are happiest when they are busy?

Reference 1: https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/detritus-3.html.

Heath 2

Back to Dorking for the second of the three Heath concerts last Sunday.

Got on rather better than on the previous occasion (reference 2), perhaps because the vegetarian lunch we had taken weighed us down less than whatever it was we had had previously. There was some blood supply left over to service the head, after attending to the demands of the bowels.

Haydn F minor, Op.20 No.5, as good as we have come to expect of him. Perhaps we have finally got what the Endellions told us, in the course of another concert at Dorking, some years ago now, about Hadyn being the first master of the string quartet. The place where it all began. He might have knocked out a lot of stuff, but he maintained a good standard, certainly in this department.

The first time that I had ever heard the Ravel String Quartet, although BH was familiar, probably from the radio. Considering it was both French and modern, I got on very well with it, as did BH - but then she has long inclined more to the modern than myself. Not sure how well it would wear though, depending so much as it does on texture and colour.

Tchaikovsky No.2 was good in parts. The middle sections were good but I found myself floundering a bit in the first and fourth movements, where the music did not seem to be going anywhere.

The cello paid more attention to his posture than last time, not appearing to be bored at all. Much better.

Puzzled on the way home by what appeared to be black cows on the steep approach slopes to Box Hill, above Rykers. We have not been on these slopes for a while, but last time we were, the grass was in a very sorry condition, presumably the result of far too many walkers. The thin grass on the thin soil over the chalk just couldn't take it. And I would not have thought that it could take cows either - most unsuitable animals for such a place, far too heavy on their feet and far too heavy with their eating action. Have the trusties who look after the Hill fallen prey to the same mad cow disease which has afflicted the Epsom Common trusties? Don't they know about how cows are an important driver of global warming?

Further puzzled by a copse on the left just before the roundabout where one turns right over the M25, a copse in which almost all the trees - tall spindly things - appeared to be infested with ivy. Not just the trees on the edge of the copse where the extra light seems to encourage the stuff. What was wrong with this copse to have ivy all the way through? Possibly gmaps 51.297177, -0.316315.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/heath-quartet.html.

Reference 2: Ravel to be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNVVONYkivM.

Tweet, tweet

Just spotted a pair of goldfinches in the apple tree across the fence, behind the back of our garage. Only a couple of months since last time, but as far as my memory served, it could have been a couple of years. Good job someone has proper retrieval capability.

PS: a few minutes later. Now up to half a dozen of them, perched on the edge of our extension roof, right under my nose.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/stop-tweet.html.