Nutshell truths for the breakfast table

I came across this quote a few years ago, when I did a talk on the nature of a university. I love phrase 'nutshell truths for the breakfast table', and it is surely a phrase for the age of twitter.

As the great man's guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table.

Cardinal J. H. Newman, Preface to The Idea of a University, 1852

Of course, he was contrasting 'nutshell truths' with liberal education:

A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom… a philosophical habit.

…Liberal Education… is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know and to digest, master, rule and use knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression…

J. H. Newman The Idea of a University. Discourse 5. 1852

Andrew Keen on inequality of the internet

My thoughts on Andrew Keen and The Cult of the Amateur in a nutshell. I think he's wrong about amateurs (he presents a mistaken 'golden age' of the press and is frankly offensive with all that stuff about monkeys), but otherwise his scepticism is a breath of fresh air. He's spot on with the likes of this, from his blog:

Rather than creating more equality, it [the internet] has actually generated massive accumulations of power amongst a tiny new elite of attention-economy aristocrats like Silicon Valley new media baron Tim O’Reilly who has more than 500,000 loyal Twitter followers. For all the promises of democratization, real-time landed gentry like O’Reilly and increasingly monopolistic technology companies like Google and Amazon might actually be reinventing the radically unequal hierarchies of mid 19th century capitalism in the new digital age.

(This was a theme he addressed in a couple of short broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 a couple of months back, entitled 'The Few')

Next generation passports

Here's something I need to find out more about - the next generation passport:

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has announced De La Rue has won the contract to produce the next-generation British passport book under a new £400 million contract.

The passport, which will be available from October 2010, will have a new design and improved security features including the capacity to hold fingerprint biometrics. According to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), it will give citizens added protection from identity theft and help secure borders against passport and identity fraud.

The contract will ensure the British passport keeps pace with international standards for travel documents.

"The British passport is recognised as one of the best in the world and we want to keep it that way. Today we are affirming our commitment to making this travel document more secure than ever by using fingerprint biometrics," said IPS chief executive James Hall.

"Upgrading the British passport is essential to keep pace with the most advanced international standards for travel documents and will ensure that British citizens have the freedom to travel easily world-wide.

ICTs in an unequal world

Today I'm going to interview Hannah Beardon for a podcast to use with OU Course T324: Keeping ahead in ICT.

Hannah is the author of a report on the use of mobile phones for development that we are using in one of the assignments for T324 this year.

One of the contributors to a video used in T324 ("African Renaissance', originally produced for the discontinued course T305), a phoneshop owner in a South African township, says that cellphone are 'what Africa has been waiting for', and there's no doubt that mobile phones have been taken up and used by the people in developing countries in remarkable ways. But, as ever, it is not quite that simple.

Hannah says in the final section of her report:

As this guide shows, mobile technologies have great potential to enhance access to information and communication capacity and contribute to social development or change objectives. Some of the issues of access, affordability or usability which may undermine the sustainability and scalability of work using other ICTs, such as computers or video cameras, are less pressing when it comes to mobile phones, which have been widely adopted and adapted by people in even the poorest areas, with least capacity. However, many of the other issues and concerns around the digital divide and ICT as it relates to social change do remain. [...]

For one thing, users in more developed markets are able to take advantage of the highest functionality, and usually the cheapest rates. There are great differences in opportunities provided by the mobile market throughout Africa (i.e. the difference in network capacity between South Africa and other African countries) and within countries, such as between urban and rural, or rich and poor.

Manchester University Development Informatics group found that despite the potential of mobiles to flatten information asymmetries there is still a “mobile divide”, which has its roots in fundamental access barriers of electricity, network coverage, and income, as well as difference in functionality of elite high-end models. So while mobiles provide a fantastic tool to enhance community-based development and social equity work, they also are another area to watch as regards inequality of opportunity.

These sorts of issues don't only apply to mobile phones in developing countries, they are to do with the relationship between technology and people everywhere.

John Lanchester on the banks

An interesting, informative, but alarming piece about the banks, the financial crisis and the UK response by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

First, one intiguing fact.

RBS is today, by the size of its assets, not just a big bank, and not just one of the biggest companies in Europe. The Royal Bank of Scotland, by asset size, is the biggest company in the world.

I find that a bit difficult to get my head around. Bigger than Microsoft? Bigger than Toyota? I suppose being a bank, the assets are a bit different from companies that manufacture things, but still, RBS "Royal Bank of Scotland" the biggest company in the world?

The piece is alarming. Look:

It is possible that we are on course for the worst-case scenario. [...] Britain itself could become insolvent. [...] Sterling would be more or less worthless. Travel would be next to impossible, imports would be unaffordable, interest rates would zoom up and stay up, there would be cuts in all aspects of public sector spending, especially employment. It would be brutal. Nobody thinks this scenario is likely, but quite a few people are willing to admit that it is possible.
[...]
Even if we fall short of the IMF option in favour of a run-of-the-mill severe recession, the consequences for Britain are going to be horrific. Roads and schools and hospitals will go unbuilt and unrepaired, medical treatments will go unbought, nurses and policemen and council workers will be laid off.

There's a sense in which I have some understanding of how economics can make this happen - there's stories I can tell about it - but at another level I marvel that ecomonics can have this effect. One day people are building hospitals and have enough food and clothes, and the next they are sitting at home unemployed and short of food. What's changed? Information, that's what. The numbers saying who has got what money. That's all that's different.

Farewell to T305: Digital Communications

We had little lunchtime gathering today, to say farewell to the Open University (OU) course, T305: Digital Communications. (Today was what was probably the final meeting of the course exam board.)

In some ways the course was a 'run of the mill' OU offering. There are many more innovative OU courses, and there are courses that have had lots more students, but look at these (approximate) statistics for the course:

Ten presentations (1999 – 2008) and something like:

• 10,000 students
• 280 TMA (tutor-marked assignment) questions
• 900 CMA (computer-marked assignment) questions
• A quarter of a million TMA answers… each marked by a tutor
• Not far off a million CMA answers
• Millions of viewers for our TV programmes
• Lots and lots of FirstClass electronic conference messages - which means lots of students helping students, lots of tutors helping students, and lots of students telling staff what they think of the course
• Total income to the university measured in £ millions

and that’s not counting the Singapore or the Arab OU presentations.

………………………………… then there’s still the long tail on OpenLearn….

and if you search the web you’ll find all sorts of bits of the course scattered around the world.

I quote these statistics simply to draw attention to the scale of the OU. Maybe if someone from, say, China, India or the USA is reading this they'd be less impressed, but within the context of the UK and Europe generally, these are big numbers, are they not?

Peter Singer

About Peter Singer in the Guardian today:

Singer's argument, as first laid out in an essay in 1971, isn't hard to follow. "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it ... If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." As he added, however, the "uncontroversial appearance" of this argument is deceptive. Considerations of distance, or of how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant to Singer: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond. Spending your surplus income on consumer treats rather than efforts to end extreme poverty, he concludes, isn't greatly different morally from leaving the toddler to drown.

[...]

Needless to say, this is a challenging position - "almost impossible to argue with", as the political theorist David Runciman once wrote, "but also very difficult to accept."

[...]

Singer's own approach to ethics, a version of utilitarianism, has deep roots in the English-language tradition, but it's scarcely uncontroversial. One famous criticism, associated with Williams, is that it's implausibly demanding, making people as responsible for the things they fail to do as the things they bring about. Williams's ultimate point was highly technical; Singer, in discussing it, soon brings the argument back to practical outcomes. "I think we can set standards that limit our responsibilities to help people. But I wouldn't want to say, therefore we're only responsible for our acts and not for our omissions.

(As an aside "Things they fail to do" has strong echos for those of us brought up in the C of E:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us:
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders
Book of Common Prayer

I don't know you'd find much support for that expression ('miserable offenders') nowadays - within the church or without - but, there you go, the money I spend on, say, going to watch football, could have saved lives. How can that make me anything other than a miserable offender?)

But, back to Singer in the Guardian, on why you have to include 'things undone':

If you draw a hard line there, you end up saying that really quite trivial things are wrong because they're violations of my positive responsibility not to cheat or whatever ..." He casts about for an example. "Well, we have it all over the tabloids, don't we: I charged the government £5 for watching porn movies, right? I had the opportunity to save a child's life, either by ruining my shoes in the pond or by giving some spare money I had to Oxfam, but somehow that's not as important to assessing whether I'm a decent person or not as whether I cheated the government out of £5 to watch a porn movie. And I think that's the wrong set of priorities, that sends the wrong sort of message."

This leads into issues of moral equivalence (I don't think that's quite the right term, but it'll do for the moment), and I'd like to explore, for example, fiddling expense against the death of hundreds of thousands. Shame Hazel Blears is implicated in both! But thats for another time.