Some stuff to read....on peer review, marketing, witches, school dinners, parks, Africa and Uber

My choice for World Book Day

Worth it just for the title alone - an interesting and depressing read about peer review and the fixing of academe:

In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

Marketing as engineering - pretty interesting even though I don't really get the argument. Certainly makes you think (apologies for the presentation behind that link - ad agencies, pah!)

So how do we re-engineer corporations so they are able to thrive? I think we need engineering thinking. Engineering is defined as ‘the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes’. It has been applied in many different areas leading to different types of engineering - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical... I think we have a new one to add to the list and that’s digital engineering.

Do you believe in witches - how it has to be someone's fault...

Meanwhile, the sciences of human behavior have not been so successful. True, many scholars now understand that social phenomena such as prices are, in Adam Ferguson’s words, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” But many ordinary humans still think that prices (and immigration, and drug use, and practically all other social phenomena) arise directly from the actions of capitalists or legislators, and thus that the ill will or goodwill of such people shapes the world directly.

How Jamie Oliver made school dinners worse:

Today, I watch my students play with tiny bowls of sugar-free jelly and fruit salad. I’m all in favour of five a day but those who deem banana and pear to be an enjoyable dessert for a 10-year-old need their head examined.

A traveller's case for Uber:

These scams all have to do with one of three things: the choice of the route, the setting of the fare, and the exchange of money. When I use Uber, all three of these issues are solved, utterly. Firstly, Uber’s satnav/GPS system tells the driver what route to take, and I as a passenger am shown the route on a map. If the driver diverts too far from that route without a good reason, I make a simple complaint, my money is refunded to me, the driver suffers reputational damage, and he does not get paid. The fare is decided by a third party (whose terms and conditions the driver has agreed to) and quoted to me in advance, either as a flat amount or a fare per mile. The “meter” is controlled by that third party, and cannot be rigged. And I pay the money to a third party, and the money is essentially held in escrow until I have completed my journey and have said I am happy with it. The driver knows he gets paid if he does his job properly, and I know that there will be no attempt to scam me over money. Because I know he is not going to scam me and he knows I am not going to scam him (and anyway, because there is recourse if one of us does) there is no reason for us to not trust one another, and we are therefore invariably polite and friendly to each other. Which makes my day nicer, and very likely his also.

All a bit boilerplate and local government speak but still any creative thinking about parks is welcome:

Accurate financial data and park user insights, working with partners who bring new skills, resources and ideas, and providing space to quickly test ideas are all necessary to find out what mix of management practices and revenue opportunities are best able to sustain their park.

There's much that's not right about Singapore but no-one can deny its success.

The year of independence was 1965. It was the ninth day of August. In a national broadcast, a tearful Lee announced the separation between Malaysia and Singapore: “The whole of my adult life… I have believed in Malaysia, in merger and the unity of these two characters, you know, it’s a people connected by geography, economics and ties of kinship.”

Want a reason to leave the EU? Forget migration - focus on the damage it does to Africa:

There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences.

African leaders would like to escape the colonial trap of being viewed simply as raw material exporters. But their efforts to add value to the materials continue to be frustrated by existing EU policies.

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The ten books every child should read before leaving school (or why I hate English Literature revisited)

"These are the ten books every child should read before they leave school". So proclaims the headline of yet another attempt to create a new canon - this time by the time-honoured process of surveying 500 English teachers. This list (with the possible exception of Harry Potter) is unsurprising - the obvious couple of George Orwell books, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, some stuff by Dickens and the godawful Pride and Prejudice (or Gold Diggers of 1815 as I like to call it).

It really is time these teachers got out from under their obsession with Dickens, Austen and 20th century American literature (almost all of which is much better in film than prose). And chose a different, more interesting, relevant and challenging set of texts for children to read. Is it any surprise that people are turned off reading for pleasure if the dreary existence of Lennie Small is rammed down their throats at school. I can't think of a less relevant book to a 14 year old Pakistani girl in Bradford.

And the same goes for the rest - again with the possible exception of Harry Potter. What we haven't got here is any literature that presses the sorts of button that film and TV are pressing in the minds of modern British children. And it shows, which is the worst failing of English literature as a subject, the sad narrowness of the way it's taught. So here's a two-fingered salute to the English teachers and Simon's list of ten books every child should read before leaving school (except I don't mean it, of course):

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson's birth of cyberpunk novel, a picture of the on-line world created before we were all on-line.
2. Dune - Frank Herbert's masterpiece: want to know where the Star Wars themes came from? A pseudo-religion based on mind control, a galactic empire, good vs evil, giant worms and psychoactive drugs on which everything depends.
3. Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner takes us to an over-populated world filled with pop-up ads, drive-by shootings, suicide bombers and dysfunctional governments
4. A good translation of Beowulf - either Tolkein's prose translation or the stunning (if less true to the text) epic poem by Seamus Heaney. This is where we come from - ur-England and we should not lose it
5. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks explores teenage violence including the eponymous wasp factory. More contemporary than Lord of the Flies by encompassing mental illness and isolation, issues of importance to teenagers
6. The Lord of the Rings - it wasn't voted the best novel for nothing and Tolkein's great work isn't merely a fantasy. It's themes grow out from the myths and legends of Northern Europe and link to the idea of quest and the powerful message that, in the end, we all have it within us to do the extraordinary
7. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - OK the original radio series probably sets the bar too high for later books and films but the books are funny, interesting and filled with thoughts and ideas that really do speak to modern life
8. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick's alternative history is brief, telling and a great reminder that we all have in us the capacity for good and for great evil.
9. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov's best robot book (and nothing at all like the film of the same name) coins the three laws of robotics which every child should discuss and debate for it really is their future now
10. Swallows and Amazons - we've sort of forgotten about how childhood should be and, more than any other novel, Arthur Ransome's tale of kids mucking about on boats in the Lake District is the best evocation of the glory years of childhood.

You can pick your own ten or a dozen or fifty. The point here is that my list is every bit as good - no better - than the list those English teachers have churned out. I think it would be great if every child read these books but I know that some would be hated - as I hate Pride and Prejudice - by young people forced to read them or told that this stuff they don't like is what we mean by "good literature". I'm sure that your list might feature a different emphasis - urban grit, mystery, romance or whimsy. There's no right answer and what we should be doing is hoping that every child reaches 18 having created their own list of ten fantastic books that really mean something, that they'll bore their own children about and maybe write up in indulgent blog posts.

Get reading folks!

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Some more good stuff for your reading lists

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Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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Libraries really do need to change, you know

Yesterday, I had an interesting, if inconclusive conversation about the future of public libraries. Partly, this took place in the context of funding being withdrawn from the Bookstart** programme – a decision, some suggest will result in thousands of illiterate youths littering our streets unable to take a full part because they didn’t have “access” to books when they were at school.

Now, stepping aside from this argument (although I do note that even with this wonderful scheme we’re managing to churn out a truly depressing number of innumerate, illiterates from our schools), I think it sensible to consider the point and purpose of the public library. And, indeed whether the manner in which we organise the service continues to fit the purpose.

Bradford has 32 libraries (plus a mobile service of which more later) that get around 29,000 visits each week (which is around 1.5 million each year) from a population of 506,000 – which means that just below 6% of the district’s population visit in a given week. For a service seen as so critical to the future of the district this is a pretty poor show especially when 36% of library users are over 60 (and 31% describe themselves as “wholly retired”)*.

The truth is that public lending libraries are – to most of us – something of an anachronism. A generation of people brought up to use libraries continue to do so but there isn’t a replacement generation – or more accurately, not sufficient of a replacement generation to justify sustaining public lending libraries in their current form.

At the same time we continue to read – and in growing quantities if book sales figures are to be believed (these are for Q1 2010):

It reports that home sales have grown marginally by volume from 84.3m to 84.4m units, while value decreased by 3.3% from £287m to £278m. Conversely, export value sales grew by 2.4% from £196m to £201m, while volume sales decreased by 4.5% from 54.2m to 51.8m units.

And the biggest driver behind that increase was “volume sales of children’s books”!

Any local councillor will tell you, however, that you meddle with libraries at your peril! And you certainly don’t close them – that’s a sure recipe for petitions, protests and “more-in-sorrow-than-anger” letters to the local papers. Yet those same people protesting are often the very same people who have stopped using the library. The 94% who won’t be visiting this week.

Moreover, that 6% aren’t the needy, the poor, those who can’t afford to buy books. They are people who like the fact that they can get reading for free from the local council. Most of them are middle-class folk who also buy a lot of books. We should not kid ourselves that the poor are going anywhere near libraries – except on those one or two compulsory occasions when, in a search for scenery change the class teacher drags her charges down to the library.

We should begin to think more creatively about libraries – co-locating them with schools, increasing the use of mobile libraries that allow places like Cullingworth to have a service despite not having a library, targeting specific groups such as the housebound and disabled (particularly those with impaired vision where the general market doesn’t always suit) and making use of the library buildings for a wider range of services.

Above all thought should be given to what attracts folk – the old reading room concept no longer works, the lending library function is declining and specialist services (film, music and such like) are often better provided on-line. It beats me why great town centre libraries like that in Keighley don’t partner with one of the coffee chains – taking a leaf from the bookshop book so to speak. And why should we not charge those borrowing books a modest subscription? Most could afford £25 a year to use the library (and we could give discounts to children and workless) and that would go some way towards securing the service.

Lending libraries came about because books – and they were hardback books – were expensive. It meant that people who couldn’t afford all those pricey publications could have access to them – could read the wonders of our great canon of literature (or – as is more common – six romance novels a fortnight).

Today it isn’t the price of books that stops people from reading, it’s that people aren’t interested in reading. They don’t want to bury themselves in what some smug literary critic (in this case from the Guardian) calls “thought-provoking books” because, to put it pretty bluntly, most of the literary novels that clutter up the prize shortlists are really dull. A little bit of me smiles with pleasure at the fact that Katie Price (or rather whoever wrote the book with her name on) outsells the entire Booker shortlist!

The time has come to free local councils from the straitjacket of their statutory duty and to allow a new generation of creative centres of knowledge, learning and pleasure to replace the old, stale and declining public lending library.

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*I will add a caveat to this by saying that the user survey – because of the way it is conducted almost wholly fails to capture numbers of users under the age of 15

**As a slight aside - I fail entirely to see why the publishing industry, filled as it is with wealthy, righteous lefties like Paul Hamlyn can't find it in its heart and deep pockets to find £10 million or so to carry on the programme. That seems a more honest and honourable approach than holding a gun to the taxpayers' heads