Good vibes down the time line

In the middle of a conversation with Clarissa Vincent, she used the expression "good vibes" ... and I found myself wondering whether the Beach Boys invented "good vibrations", or whether we already had them?

Being a terminal nerd (not to mention terminally bad mannered), I wandered off to find out.

The first use of the phrase, in a book in English, according to Google Ngram, is from 1893: Law and the prophets: a scientific work on the relationship between physical bodies, vegetable, animal, human, and planetary by one Frank Earl Ormsby:

"You are embodied for the purpose of expressing your own spirit, see to it that no one robs you of the right. Receive all of the good vibrations that spirits can give you, but do something for yourself, if you expect results."

From then onwards, occurrence of the phrase in literature pootles along close to the bottom of the graph (though with a modestly significant increase from 1925) until 1966 ... after which it rises to a maximum in 1972 before dropping off again.

The Beach Boys released "Good vibrations" in 1966. So, it seems that the phrase had already been in existence for a century, but my generation (actually, probably the previous generation ... I was 14 in 1966, 20 in 1972, not yet writing books) picked it up from the Beach Boys and made it mainstream.

After 1972 it dropped back, but remained regularly used, until 1988 ... when it surged again, reaching a peak between 2004-2006 from which it now appears to be dropping off again.

(I've looked for Law and the prophets in the British Library catalogue, without success; the Library of Congress (probably a better bet, going by the author's name format) isn't responding at the moment ... perhaps later...)

[Later addition, 1611Z: Library of Congress still isn't talking to me ... but I've found Law and the prophets in the Library of Michigan. Published in Chicago by A.L. Fyfe]

[Later addition still, 1626Z: Thanks to Ray Girvan, voice of JSBlog, for an actual copy of Law and the prophets, from the cover page of which I note that Frank Earl Ormsby was "a magian mystic" whose book was "designed for the instruction and guidance of students in the occult sciences". It makes for fascinating reading.]

[And again, 1639Z: from Livia Passini, an MP3 copy of Good vibrations ... complete with authentic scratched vinyl 45rpm clicks and hisses...]

NaNO3

NaNO₃ is a collaboration between Luis Bustamante and his son Sebastian: a magical, captivating exploration of marks ( natural and artificial, permanent, temporary, ephemeral and momentarily fleeting) on landscape.

With Luis's two previous books (Brief Encounter and Confluence 1974-1979) amongst the most valued on my shelves, this will have to be my next target ...

(I wrote about Confluence a while back.)

Bringing technology to life

Biomimetic electromechanical prostheses are delivering the first generation of active replacement parts, but between biological inspiration and industrial delivery comes a lot of data analysis. [more]

Case in point

A collection of case studies from recent science literature highlight the importance of statistics...

• Beating the drought: using GenStat to investigate drought tolerance in chick peas.

• Reading the future: multivariate data analysis of brain patterns using IDL gives improved prognosis for improved reading in dyslexia sufferers.

• Committing fluicide: OriginPro analyses the viricidal potential of hydrophobic polycations.

• Fishy business: Statistica analysis of otolith microchemistry data illuminates population relationships amongst Atlantic herring.

• Wears the diamonds?: Multiple linear regression in SPSS offers a way to better prediction of wear rates in industrial cutting tools.

• Learning from past mistakes: Pursuing future geopolitics through historical data with Wolfram Mathematica.

Tentative optimism and crossed fingers

So ... bar the shouting, the game appears to be up for Colonel Qadaffi and his régime as I start my day.

Now to see what comes next.

I remember, nervously, how joyously my younger selves welcomed the success of rebel forces in (for example) Zimbabwe and Eritrea, and the corresponding fall of odious systems. Neither Zimbabwe nor Eritrea is today a good advertisement for such transitions.

The transitional governing committee in Benghazi looks promising; but its power depends upon an ad hoc coalition of many, very disparate, factions with wildly different agendas. If that alliance now flies apart in the centrifuge of victory, the model for the future may not be Zimbabwe or Eritrea (nor even the more hopeful ones which do exist) but fragmented and desperate Somalia.

My fingers are firmly crossed. As the Arab Awakening proceeds, it's not just Libya that badly needs a good outcome.

The "real" thing - the flip side

It's high time, having talked often enough about my lack of æsthetic pleasure when reading from digital devices, that I redress the balance; and an inner city café conversation has given me the push to do so.

When Matt Revell commented on my "The real thing" post, regarding his change of feelings on this subject he emphasised “the convenience that the Kindle offers”, which I couldn't deny; I have never disputed the convenience of electronic readers, only their æsthetics. However, he also opened with one nuclear deterrent of a point which trumps everything: “I'm reading a lot more” ... and with that I cannot argue. It's the same argument which I've now encountered in a dramatic way.

P is the "alpha" in a group of young women whom I encounter within an education outreach programme: all of them intelligent, all of them educationally disconnected, all of them exploring, suspiciously, ways to escape the trap into which those two facts have led them. I mention her alpha status because it is crucial to my relationship with them. They are all there because P is there; if P lost interest and left, none of them would stay long without her.

P could not be more different from Matt. Whereas he was already a reader with an profound interest in literature, for whom the electronic reader has enabled continuance in a busy life, she is someone whom literacy let down at an early age: she found reading slow and difficult, something to be worked at if the payoff was worthwhile, but not in itself a source of any enjoyment. It's P's story which has, nevertheless, echoed Matt's.

P says that she had never in her life read a book beyond the first chapter or so, never mind all the way through. She would sometimes start one, always when there was nothing else to do, but “couln't be arsed with carrying it around”. The next time she was at a loose end, but only if she happened to be wherever she had left the book, she would pick it up again ... but couldn't remember where she'd gotten to, or what had happened, when she put it down days or even weeks before. After a while she would “get fucked off with it and give up”. Later she would try another, repeat the process, reinforce the negative feelings, give up again.

Christmas 2009, she was given an e-reader. She thought it “a rubbish present” and it sat on a shelf for months, plugged in but unused and ignored.

Then came the day when she was bored, it was raining, none of her friends answered the phone, and in desperation she picked up the reader. It was preloaded with a dozen books; the giver had obviously thought carefully about them, since they included Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga vampire quartet and P had enjoyed the first two films adapted from the first two novels in that sequence.

She started reading Twilight, the first novel but, as usual, put it aside as soon as another diversion offered itself. She forgot it again for a couple of weeks but, when she returned, the device remembered where she had stopped. She moved back one page to recover the thread and then took up where she had left off. After a couple of such returns, she stopped reading to go shopping. Encouraged by the new continuity and by the small size and weight of the reader, instead of putting it down she unplugged it from the wall for the first time and dropped it into her bag. On the bus, she pulled it out again and continued reading until she reached the shops. When she finished Twilight she went on to Eclipse.

To cut a long story short by leaping about a year to the present (you can, I'm sure, construct the intervening steps for yourself), P is now reading “about a book a week or ten days”. She has also investigated some surprising material, including a complete works of Shakespeare which was on her reader alongside Meyer: “Most of Shakespeare is crap”, she assures me, “don't waste your time on it. But a couple of his plays are cool, like The tempest is well wicked f'rinstance, and some of the sonnets are absolutely fucking amazing”.

She has moved beyond fiction, too. She has a number of reference guides related to things that interest her and that, it seems, was what brought her (and thus her group, too) to tentative reengagement with education through the outreach programme.

Lacking my moral squeamishness about copyright, P has recruited an unrequited technophile admirer to supply her new habit with free hacked copies of most titles she wants. But she does buy “about one new book ever six weeks or so, 'cos I can't be arsed with waiting for the crack”, so the writing and publishing industries are still benefitting from her to an extent. I'm turning over in my mind the philosophical relationships between this and public libraries, but haven't formulated any opinions as yet. Her local public library, in fact, plans an ebook loan service shortly, and perhaps that will be a hook to draw her deeper into what the system has to offer her intellect.

---

• Stephenie Meyer, Twilight. 2005, New York: Little, Brown, 9780316160179 or 2006, London: Atom. 1904233805 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1904233651
• Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse. 2007, London: Atom. 9781904233893 (hbk.) and 9781904233909 (pbk.), or more recently 2010, London: Atom. 9781905654635 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1907410505
  
  

Keep taking the tablets (2)

OK ... continuing from my initial post in this thread ... Question 1 (from Clarissa Vincent, Frank Jones and Zuleika Ferris in particular): what contribution does a tablet, as such, make to my personal ICT ecosystem? This has to be the core of the thing; unless a tablet, in and of itself, does something which I need, it will be dead weight. So; here, in no particular order, are (to keep things short) four of the many praises I could sing:

• I spend a fair amount of time in meetings. I tend to make meeting notes on paper and type them up afterwards, so a keyboard isn't a necessity here. I do, however, use a computer as a reference resource: everything from the agenda to retrieving statistics, reports, collateral information related to whatever is being discussed. A conventional clamshell, even a small netbook, sits between its user and the rest of the table like a barrier; it changes group dynamics. A tablet, lying flat on the table, however, has no such effect. Furthermore, mouse and keyboard have a distracting effect which fingers moving discretely across the surface of a flat tablet avoid.

• I make a lot of use of visual material (maps, charts, plots, photographs), both on my own and in discussion with others. A tablet provides a far more intuitive way to interact with such material – especially when several people are interacting. Just before writing this, I was talking to a dive master, a fishing boat captain and a marine biologist about plans for a sea bed search; all four of us, as we talked, were interactively pinching and zooming and panning a composite satellite image and seabed chart to illustrate our own points or explore and understand each others. you can't do that on a conventional display. The same is true in discussing concepts with groups of students.

• Despite my repeatedly aired æsthetic preference for paper books over digital, I do use e-readers for many practical purposes ... and unlike most people I talk to, I find the quality of reading experience on the tablet far superior to that on an e-ink device. There is also the advantage that I am not tied into any one format or content provider; I have a virtual Kindle, so can buy and Kindle texts, but can equally well move to any other alternative as required. Switching back and forth between books is quick and easy compared to any of the dedicated devices, too. Then there are the same advantages of quick and easy resizing as I mentioned in connection with maps and so on: reading a paper, I can enlarge a diagram to exactly the right size for close examination with a flick of finger and thumb, then return the page to normal reading size just as quickly. I have to admit that weight and size are greater (but I'm carrying it anyway, for the other reasons listed here), and battery life shorter (but still plenty long enough; I'll cover this later, in another section) than in a Kindle or equivalent reader, but find the trade offs more than worthwhile.

• A tablet is a wonderful replacement for a photographic portfolio. I can carry as many sets and sequences of pictures as I like, without any weight penalty beyond the table itself – and the display quality is superb. When my niece asked to see a particular sequence a couple of days ago, in a pub, in the middle of a meal, it was no problem to do so. When an editor who asked for one set suddenly shows an interest in another, I have them to hand.

Heads up - Elvis has left the building!

Steve Wheeler yesterday mused on the social implications of head up display (HUD) devices as a projected way of unifying all the various screens (TV, computer, games console, phone, eReader, etc) which we now use in our daily lives.

It’s an interesting question ... especially as such development seems very plausible. I wrote a quick comment at about half past ten last night ( in a nutshell: that technologies don’t cause processes of social cohesion or fragmentation, but are used by them), but went on thinking about it.

The application of HUDs, and of ICT carapaces in general, is a topic which has interested me for some time. Ray Girvan and I (in our Babbage and Lovelace alter egos), wearing science spectacles, visited it in a Difference of Opinion piece, twelve years or so ago. In his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson gives his cyborg mercenary character Molly the ultimate HUD by implanting it directly on the optic nerve. Some current thinkers, such as Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading, believe that this is a likely future. The implanting of technology raises a lot of issues of its own but, from the viewpoint of Steve Wheeler’s question, it makes little difference whether the technology is internally or externally worn.

In an unusual reversal, I found myself thinking about an issue which Steve hadn’t mentioned: not the broader social picture but the specific application to educational spaces.

The classroom now is, to state the blindingly obvious, a different place from the ones in which I was a child. The dominant information retrieval technology, then, was the book, backed up by collections of books in a library; now it is the web. The dominant medium for execution and recording of learners’ work, then, was paper; that’s still true to greater or lesser extent, depending on level of the education process, but digital media are rapidly replacing it across the board. Surreptitious interaction between students in my primary days was by notes passed from hand to hand or (more daringly) written on paper darts; now it is by SMS or Twitter. The most important educational discourse of all, between students outside the classroom, used to take place in small social huddles in a café or other gathering place; it still does, but is now also amplified by networked digital media.

In some rural African schools, however, I’ve also had the opportunity to see an earlier model still. With only one copy of a key book, or perhaps no books at all, information is delivered verbally from teacher to child. Slates provide a writing surface for working on, but not for storage of information, so the educational model is based very much on memorisation. There are no paper notes or darts, because there is no paper and because constant attention is essential in a single serial flow of unrecoverable information. Most interaction takes place outside, again in physical gatherings.

Between those rural African schools and my British, Irish and US students lie two distinct step changes. There have, of course, been processes constructed from numerous other changes, many of them radical ... from books as expensive investments to cheap mass publication, for instance; the arrival of radio and TV in schools ... but let’s keep it simple: from slate to book to networked digital information. Thanks to programmes such as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), some children in the developing world are leapfrogging the middle step: from slate directly to the constructivist possibilities of WiFi global interaction. (I said children. Older students too, of course, but the process often starts at the root, with children learning to read and type rather than read and write, using laptops as primers and learning to maintain them as well.) This sudden leap really does produce social tensions: primary school age children suddenly have access to an informational world which is not just incrementally different from that of their parents (and teachers), as has always happened, but an inconceivable leap in paradigm. Grandparents (parents, for teenaged students) in Europe and the US talk of a disconnect from their children’s educational processes because of the ICT explosion since their own school days; magnify that a millionfold for a physically and culturally isolated rural developing world community into which comes an OLPC powered educator bearing clockwork or solar powered laptops.

We are, in the liberal democracies, already looking at an educational landscape which is detaching itself from physical location. How far that detachment will go, we cannot yet guess. I am inclined to think that human beings are strongly gregarious, and the desire for some components of education to be sited within a mutual physical space is likely to persist; but there is no longer any absolute need for it to do so. There is certainly no future for a model which restricts education to the classroom or lecture hall, nor probably even for one which focuses it primarily there. Already, more than half of my students come into a physical campus very rarely and a small but significant (and growing) proportion never do so at all. Some colleagues in the Scottish Highlands and Islands (or in Scandinavia, or the Australian outback, or other areas of scattered population) reverse my position: they only ever meet a small minority of their students. Increasing use is made of virtual worlds. In that sort of world, too, there is no necessary reason to tie faculty into a physical location which their students no longer inhabit.

We are perched on the cusp of a dispersion about which we can only hypothesise imaginatively. And replacement of multiple screens by personal HUDs could, I suspect, be a trigger for the next step change. What essential need will there be for a student sit in a computer centre to study material which is as easily available lying on a grassy bank in the sunshine, or sitting with a cup of coffee in the kitchen at home, or even walking around the neighborhood like (as my nephew pointed out to me recently) Aristotle’s peripatetics?

One of the things about which I agree with Steve Wheeler (there are many, despite areas of difference) is his conviction that the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a dinosaur. It does have necessary functions. In the short term, it serves as a vehicle (admittedly very imperfect) by which old codgers of my own generation migrate from old ideas to new methods. More persistently, it is likely to remain an essential repository for some institution specific information for privacy and commercial sensitivity reasons. Those are, however, a very small rump of the functions which institutions, stuck well behind the rapidly expanding wavefront of socioeducational reality, presently try to cram into it. Ironically, though, I suspect that as education from the students’ point of view evaporates off into various mixes of physical location, the institutional VLE will gain a very modest second lease of life, as the management core for administrative interconnection of increasingly subdivided and diversified personal learning programmes.

---

• William Gibson, Neuromancer. 1984, London: Gollancz. 057503470X. [more recently 2001, London: Voyager. 0007119585 (pbk.)]

A sink that drains goodness

To my annual "Hiroshima Day" post on the 6th, Dr C made a comment which deserved to be a post in its own right. I wish that I had said “Nuclear weapons are a sink that drains goodness out of those who have them.”

He also quoted aptly from Auden's "Epitaph to a tyrant" (1940):

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Nice one, Doc.

Dr C also refers to an editorial in Science last year. To save blog readers the necessity for looking it up, the full text is available here (you will need to sign in to read it – if you don't already have a subscription to the site, just ask: it's free).

Keep taking the tablets (1a)

Since putting up Friday's post, I've had several queries about writing on the Asus TF101 (Transformer) – variations on the theme of “did you write this post on the tablet and, if so, using what software?”

Answer: it was shuffled back and forth across three machines, two of them Windows (laptop and netbook) and one of them the Asus/Android tablet/keyboard combination. Roughly half of it, altogether, was written on the Asus; final fiddling and subediting before upload was on the laptop.

On the Windows machines, writing was in WordPerfect though final prep was in OpenOffice Writer.

On the TF101, the office suite provided free with the machine was used: Polaris Office. I have tried several alternatives, and bought the two main market leading standards which I've used happily on other platforms, but Polaris, to be honest, knocks the socks off both.

I'm afraid that there is, if you are doing this sort of cross platform shuffling, no alternative to using Microsoft's file formats. Polaris reads/writes DOC and DOCX; so do the other main alternatives; nothing reads anything else. Even RTF is badly served. If you have a favourite word processor (like my WordPerfect), and prefer to stick with its own native file format, then ... tough. You can write in what you like, but use "save as" to store it in Microsoft's form.

Today

Today is Hiroshima Day

If you are new around here, you can find out why I think this worth mentioning in the equivalent post two years ago. There have been plenty of new examples since then, but the principles remain.

If you're not new around here, you will already have recognised my annual marker and moved on.

Keep taking the tablets (1)

This is really a response to all those who have asked me, in greater or lesser degrees of puzzlement, why I have decided to use an Android tablet and what I plan to do with it. Or, rather (returning to this paragraph after finishing the post), it’s the first part of such a response.

I had watched the growth of tablet computing for a decade now, and stood back from it. I knew the value of such devices, employed them enthusiastically in certain educational and professional contexts, but could see no real place for one in my own personal ICT environment.

I had also seen, liked, and appreciated the potential of multitouch capacitative screen devices. These were, again, valuable in some educational and work niches but either too small or too large to be very useful to me as part of my own, personal kit. I do, as I’ve mentioned, use an iPod Touch ... but only because (a) it serves as a platform for the best pocket calculator I’ve yet found and (b) it is small enough to carry without noticing it.

Then came hybrid devices like the iPad. A cross between pocket and laptop computers, both of which are useful to me. Light and small enough to be carried as well as the netbook which is the cornerstone of my peripatetic life, but at the same time large enough to work on with both hands (rather than just the finger and thumb which a phone can accommodate). and to exploit the real potential of the technology, but small and light enough (unlike those superb one, two or four square metre laboratory and studio displays) to use on the road.

Not the iPad itself, however. Not for me, that is ... I know that it serves many people excellently well, and that’s great. For me, however, both of its manifestations so far are sitting around the place, truly beautiful things, but (thanks to the closed Apple business model) too annoyingly restrictive for my liking.

There are, of course, several alternatives to the Apple iPad. True tablet PCs, running Windows or Linux, are coming down in size and weight to challenge the iPad; I’ve tried out and seriously considered them. Those which use Windows have the very real advantage of running the same software as my other computing hardware ... and, in particular, allowing direct viewing and editing of files from my beloved WordPerfect (lack of which was drove me to abandon Linux as a netbook OS last year). But, there are other issues which caused me to turn away from that option. Battery life was one; the fact that I really can’t see myself making much use of my key Windows applications without a proper, physical keyboard is another. (That same point, by the way, has been made by several people with whom I've discussed this: “I prefer a physical keyboard” or “I have to do a lot of typing”.)

Android devices weren't a real alternative to the iPad until well into this year. There were Android tablets, but Android itself was strictly a phone sized OS and didn't scale up well to a larger screen, let alone the sorts of things for which it might be used. Then, towards the end of February, Android 3 (Honeycomb) arrived, and things started to look different. The OS was now ready to be considered usable for real work on large screens.

Even so, there were to start with almost no applications which yet made use of the improvements. There were only a couple of machines running it, too. I got hold of those devices which were available, and tried them out. After a while, I started asking around amongst friends who might have informed opinions, though most of them expressed interest in hearing, instead, what I might decide or discover.

Those early machines, though impressive in themselves, were not quite what I wanted. I've never been what the marketing people call an "early adopter"; I see no point in committing my life to what is available in the first days of a new idea when something better will almost certainly come along in time. And, after a few months, better did come along in several forms.

To cut a long story short, there were eventually two Android tablets between which I had to choose. Neither was perfect in every way, but both offered enough of what I needed to be worth settling on. They were a 180mm device (I won't identify it, since I ultimately decided against it for personal requirements and not on any fault of its own) and the Asus TF101 (aka Transformer).

From the start, I had taken it for granted that if I bought a tablet I would also end up using it with a BlueTooth keyboard (if that seems odd, I'll ask you to wait for a later section). But a keyboard of a useful size is bigger than a 180mm tablet, and a keyboard physically separate from its tablet is awkward to use compared to a laptop or netbook. The TF101 has a "dockable" keyboard: that is, one with physical attachment and support to present the tablet as if it were the screen on a conventional netbook, the two also folding flat together into a thin clamshell sandwich for storage or transit. This keyboard also houses a proper touchpad and buttons, two USB ports, and a full size SDHC card slot (in addition to a microSD slot on the tablet itself).

Furthermore, that TF101 keyboard contains an additional battery which extends usage considerably. It's intelligently wired, too. Plug the complete tablet and keyboard assembly into a power supply and the tablet charges first – so if only the tablet is required, it has all of the available charge. Use the complete assembly, and the power is drawn from the keyboard battery until it is drained, so the tablet retains its full charge for separate use. Use the tablet separately, and when its is reconnected t the keyboard it will draw power until again fully charged.

There are, of course, down sides to the TF101. The biggest is probably that it doesn't (at least in the version available to me) have its own 3G card for accessing cellular networks, as many of its competitors do. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have that option. However, I carry a portable WiFi hotspot router so when no open fixed network is available the TF101 can connect through that to a cellphone, 3G dongle, or satphone.

In the end, though, it wuz the TF101 wot won it.

To keep this down to a reasonable length, and to get it posted this side of doomsday, I'm going to break here. I'm aware that I've not answered most of the questions posed in the first paragraph, but they will follow under three headings (not necessarily three separate posts; we'll see how it goes):

1. Freestanding use as a tablet
2. Use alongside a netbook, as a supplement to it.
3. Occasional use as a netbook replacement.

(As I write and post each, I'll provide two way hyperlinks between them and this.)

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• Picture credit: that image on my Asus TF101 desktop, in the illustration above, is Lisa Milroy's haunting painting Searching Geisha. See the original, if you can.
  

Now playing...

... "A church is burning", sung by Paul Simon.

It used to give me the shivers in my mid-to-late teens. It wasn't just the protest song nature of it (though that was the genre that most moved me at the time) or the fact that it came from one half of Simon & Garfunkel (which, I confess, also gave it a head start for me) or the rousing tune (which certainly helped). I was also deeply impressed, then, by its ecumenicalism: the identification of a Jewish singer/songwriter with a oppression of Christian victims. Christian imagery ran through other parts of Simon's repertoire too: not always to Christanity's credit, as in "Blessed" for example, but ecumenical nevertheless.

It gives me the shivers still.

---

• Paul Simon, The Paul Simon songbook, "A church is burning". 1965, London: CBS.
• Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of silence, "Blessed". 1966, New York: Columbia.