Tom Murphy - Notes

Abstruse Goose » Rite of Passage

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:32:00 +0000

Gadget shoppers branded 'stupid'

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:34:00 +0000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8241509.stm#

"Delivering excellent customer service is at the forefront of everything we do, and so we are very disappointed that a small number of our colleagues have made these comments on a social-networking website." Came the response. And in a sense there is nothing wrong wit it. As platitudes go it is fairly standard.

But the claim to some abstract standard of behaviour is grating. It's not just Dixons. I am sure there are whole chapters in management-speak books that say things like"customers are at the forefront of everything we do," "we commited to superb customer delivery," and so on. One hears it all the time.

So much so that it has become meaningless. If a company doesn't have something their customers want they wouldm't be in business. They can be as excellent and as committed as they like.

What would have been more human and honest would have been to say. "While we have a great ongoing relationship with nearly all of our customers some of them do provide some difficult and frustrating challenges to our staff. Clearly we have not spent enough time supporting our staff in training them to deal with them with the sort of challenges they face when dealing with many different kinds of people on a daily basis. Nor have we taken into account that in this age of social media where outlets for frustration are many and varied that maybe we should have provided a safer and less public space to give vent to concerns that were unable to be dealt with at the time they arose.

We are an organization made up of humans that are dealing with humans and we like to treat everyone, customer and staff alike as humans."

Or words to that effect. It may not be grand but it would be real and everybody would understand.

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GSPCA - Twestival Galway

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:56:00 +0000

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What people on twitter aren't interested in.

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:35:00 +0000

By any standards I am not a big player on twitter. Out of the followers and followed I don't think there is more than ten, twenty max, people that I regularly interact with. I retweet when I can and use bitly to shorten my links when I tweet myself. One of the interesting things about bitly is that it gives information on how many people clicked on my link. It acts as a rough and ready interest meter.

Most of my tweets generate between ten and twenty click throughs. I don't think it has ever gone beyond thirty. The subject matter of the links varies with my interests. Some are clearly have a greater broader interest than others. However, the one subject that almost invariably receives no interest is the tweeting around the hardships that journalists face in hostile environments. The sort of environments that I specialize in. (Less and less so these days.)

I can't imagine that it's indifference. It is clear from the tweets of followed and follower alike that there is a great deal of awareness and good sense present. I think it is more that this sort of lifestyle is so outside of most people's ken that it just fails to trigger a response.

Regardless, I shall still carry on tweeting links to these sort of stories because I care.

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Rainbow

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:17:00 +0000

Yesterday at Spiddal harbour a most beautiful rainbow appeared seeming to straddle Galway Bay. Instinctively, I reached for my camera but remembered that it had gone walkies in Kuwait and the phone I have here doesn't have a built-in camera.

So I had to resort to just looking at the rainbow - watching it intensify and fade- and enjoyed myself immensely. Normally, I would have been concerning myself with exposure and framing issues and attempting to create some sort of defining image but it was a relief to not bother with any of that at all and just sit there and enjoy the spectacle.

It's great to be able to instantly archive our lives but sometimes it is just great to enjoy things for what they are without an interloping digital barrier.

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Baghdad Notes

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:33:00 +0000

What was it like filming in Baghdad? It seems that not that many people do it anymore so I thought I might try and give some idea of what it is like.

First of all it is very hot and dusty. It did not get beyond the low fifties last week. Not great but not torture either. Unfortunately, most of our gear is rated only to plus fifty. We did lose some time code because a thermal fuse went but we were careful not to push our luck. We never took the dustcover off the camera. It is really difficult to shoot with that thing on but the alternative was not really an alternative.

We spent most of our time with the Americans and although we were allowed to go wherever we liked in the International Zone we always needed an escort. This time around our escorts were great and we had the feeling of being one big team. There have been other times when the Public Affairs Office has given us folk that give new meaning to the word obstructive. Not so this time. The PAOs were just great.

To move around Iraq we had helicopters. Not at our disposal unfortunately. The Blackhawks travel in pairs and we took spare seats in bird number two. We only got into bird number one when we interviewed the General. Joao, the sound recordist, has a special little connector that plugs into the comms system so we could record audio from the headsets.

We did not have to wear our helmets and flak jackets that much for which I am very, very grateful. But we did get to schlep them around quite a lot.

It is some way from our sleeping quarters to our workspace and once we had to catch a bus. There is a regular shuttle service from and to various points around the International Zone, IZ. It felt really weird but it was better than walking.

The IZ used to be called the Green Zone and some people still refer to it as such. However, the area outside the IZ was referred to as the Red Zone. I couldn’t go with that at all. I used the proper names of places. Calling the rest of Baghdad or Iraq the Red Zone seemed like a dangerous step in the direction of demonizing the ordinary citizens that lived outside. I know people did not mean to use it like that but I was and still am uncomfortable with its usage.

We ate at the dining facility or DFAC. It has set hours of opening so I sometimes found myself grabbing something to eat even though I was not particularly hungry because I knew I would not be able to eat later.

The food is American. A regular home from home. Under General Order no.1 the American service people are not allowed to drink. Alcohol can be had. I didn’t bother. There were enough other potential headaches without having to deal with self-induced ones. Also, a hangover in plus fifty must be some kind of wretched hell. Not worth it.

A lot goes on in the IZ but there is also a huge amount of security. I counted five different passes in my possession at one point. To get one particular pass we had to give our biometrics and have our information circulated around various federal agencies for background checks. It took the longest to get was also the most useless and got us into precisely nowhere. Go figure.

Once, I think Joao do Valle, the sound recordist, flashed his driving license and was allowed access into somewhere or other. The problem with all security is the sledgehammer to crack a nut thinking that goes along with it. The prior assumption of guilt and that we have to prove ourselves innocent is not only paranoid but doesn’t reflect how people really are. Blanket counter measures may guard against opportunistic attacks but what to do about vile geniuses except be grateful there aren’t that many of them around.

Anyway, it takes forever to do anything even with all the ducks in a row. If you are filming in the IZ bring an ipod or book.

We only went on to the streets of Baghdad once. We went to three locations with a self-imposed time limit of twenty-minutes at each place. (At the third location we pushed it by ten minutes which was not a good thing to do.) I was surprised how easy it was to approach people. Five years ago no one wanted to be seen anywhere near a westerner for fear of reprisal but this time around people talked to us openly and were really quite friendly. I felt a little rude with my platoon of Iraqi soldiers escorting me.

So in one sense things have got better then they were before.

Security is a big deal. But just by going to Baghdad you are possibly putting yourself in harm’s way. One shouldn’t be reckless but there is also danger in being too careful and second guessing yourself. The Arabs say Inshallah, God’s will, and one has to accept the risks of what one is doing. It’s a fine line between fatalism and determinism.

Ultimately, your security comes down to the people you are with. As mentioned our PAO guys were great to be with and I soon learned to trust them. Also our little team of Joao, Tamara Banks and myself got along really well. It is not always necessary or possible to like who you are with but you do have to be able to trust them. In a situation like that the people around you become your whole world.

Our accommodation was basic but fine. Joao and I had a three bed room to ourselves which was luxury by Baghdad standards. At the military transit camp on the way in and on the way out we slept in tents with eight other guys. The lights were always on as people came and went at different times of the day and night and storing valuables was an issue.

When we first arrived we had to catch an armoured bus called a Rhino from the airport to the IZ. It was all very Mad Max. Fortunately we did not have to catch it riding back.

The one really odd thing about our trip was that as we were based out of the HQ we were constantly surrounded by colonels. More than sixty in fact. I guess it’s an enlisted soldier’s idea of hell.

I am getting on now and the Colonels were all about my age so it was all quite agreeable really. A bit like a golf club do in battle dress.

I am very glad I went. I got to see how things were for myself at first hand. I think Iraq has a chance if wise heads prevail but there is so much that can go wrong and that I think probably will go wrong that I am a little bit glum about the possibility of peace and calm for at least a few more years.

If I can fly in, get a cab to a hotel and pop down to the streets where I was filming without being escorted by a bunch of Iraqi soldiers in their humvees and have a chai and a chat with whoever is around then that would be my definition of a peaceful outcome. Inshallah.

Iraq August 09

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:45:00 +0000

Just back from Iraq after shooting a documentary for HDnet World Report about the transition from American to Iraqi authority in that country.

A lot of the ensuing chaos after the invasion of 2003 was caused by Donald Rumsfeld willfully making no effort at all to implement some or any kind of post war reconstruction plan. We know this from an engineer that we met at the main railway station in Baghdad in June of that year who had sat on a committee to do exactly that but Rumsfeld had it disbanded shortly before the onset of the war.

What Rumsfeld did put in place was the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA.) An organization based on US government dictat and operated without any clear goal or mandate. It can be said with hindsight that some of the CPA’s decisions were a mistake. But that wouldn’t be true. A lot of its decisions were clearly seen to be a mistake at the time. Clearing out all B’aathists from government jobs and disbanding the army were the worst two of many ill-thought out measures.

As a direct consequence of these decisions things went from bad to worse at an alarming rate.

Events in Iraq reached their nadir towards the end of 2006. The ethnic cleansing was nearly completed and the internecine violence began to abate. The Shias and the Sunnis of Baghdad were now living in separate areas for the most part. Then we had “The Surge” of early 2007 led by General Petraeus put extra boots on the street and thereby helped to tamp down the violence to a ‘reasonable’ level.

The Multi National Security Command - Iraq, (MNSTC-I. Pronounced minsticky by one and all.) arose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the CPA in 2004.

Its priority has been the formation and training of the Iraqi Army and the Federal Police. The reasoning being that without security none of the other functions of society, trade, education, normal socializing and so on could take place. Parents can’t send their children to school if the streets aren’t safe. Business is hard if not impossible to engage in. Just attempting to buy bread can mean putting oneself in immense danger.

All through the worst of the violence MNSTC-I had been engaged in laying the foundations on which a nation could be built.

The effects of the efforts in training and equipment supply at every level was quite amazing to see. Pre-invasion the Iraqi army was nothing more than cannon fodder with one or two better prepared units and police were merely goons and shakedown artists feared by everyone.

Even though not being terribly military myself I could see enormous changes in the way the Iraqi Army now conduct themselves compared to before. I even went out onto the streets of Baghdad with them which I would never have done previously. I wouldn’t have known which one was more dangerous, the insurgents or the Iraqi soldiers.

Although there has been heavy indoctrination regarding the value of professionalism and fairness some old-regime habits are still going strong. We got involved in a shakedown that went wrong. We prevailed because our officers outranked their officers all the way up the chain of command. The tale will be told in the film so I will leave it there.

What was worrying was that the incident took place inside the International Zone. What happens on the street outside can only be worse. It gives me a shiver to think about it.

The standards we take for granted regarding the behaviour of police and other authorities does not always cross the cultural divide. Cultural mores and differences are meant to be understood and respected but when they conflict with the precepts of Human Rights then a greater justice must prevail. Bahksheesh may be ingrained in Iraqi society but its effects add up to a “second insurgency.” It can be removed or at the very least become socially unacceptable in the same way drink and driving has become in the west through training and behaviour of the army and police constantly being held to high and consistent standards of professionalism.

I think it is possible but it will take time. And despite great progress there isn’t enough of it left to complete the process of building an Iraqi Army and Police force unblemished by corruption.

What the American forces have achieved in training their Iraqi counterparts reflects well on the men and women involved in that endeavour. The American ‘Can Do’ attitude when given the correct goals is a wonder to behold. But the odds are stacked against them. Trying to build a nation in less time than most people spend in college getting an education is an almighty struggle especially as troops are drawn down to either return home or go on to fight in other conflicts.

The American military, like every other national force, is a group think force. Whatever its leaders are thinking becomes the prevailing doctrine as the message passes down through the ranks. In 2003 it was all about shock and awe and kicking ass. On this trip it was noticeable how many officers spoke about building relationships. Not in the winning of hearts and minds way that we heard from the Vietnam war. But in the practical doing business way that is the hallmark of getting anything done in the Near, Middle and Far East.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and probably the President himself see the need to think differently as the circumstances change. This change of attitude seems to have percolated down through the ranks. Certainly the officers we met, while retaining their warrior mindset, were very aware that a little cultural understanding can go a long way.

But relationships take time and there doesn’t seem that when the US does finally pull out on December 31st 2011, (there have been no US patrols that have taken place without the permission of the Iraqi Defence Ministry on Iraqi streets since June 30th this year,) that there will have been enough time to develop the really deep relationships that are needed.

One constant gripe is the resistance of the Iraqis to being taught anything by outsiders as their sense of pride makes them feel they are fully sovereign in every way. Feathers need to be smoothed down after being ruffled by what many Iraqis see as invasion and occupation and again that takes time. This resistance to learning from the outsiders has been overcome time and time again but it takes time.

Some Iraqis want the U.S. to leave as soon as possible but most that we spoke to are fearful that the Americans are leaving too soon. Life simply hasn’t been safe enough for long enough.

As we arrived US Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a possible drawdown of 5,000 soldiers in October. I remember thinking great, that it was a good thing that we are getting out of here. But after two weeks my opinion has changed. There is no need to prolong Coalition involvement any longer than it has to be but there is great danger in leaving the job of building security in Iraq half or three quarters done.

President Obama found, shortly after being elected, that for a number of sound reasons it wasn’t actually possible to shut down Guantanamo Bay overnight but was castigated heavily for not doing so. Likewise, the commitment has been made to pull out of Iraq at the end of the year after next the possibility of extending a year or two longer will open his administration to all sorts of allegations of reneging on promises made to the American people.

So unless something totally unexpected happens there will be no extra time. Time which I think is needed.

So will the Americans in the form of MNSTCK-I and its coalition and NATO partners be able to build a secure Iraq by the time they leave? Unlikely. Will they have done as much as they possibly could and leave Iraq with the means to thrive should the Iraqis choose to? Certainly.

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Robert McNamara

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:40:00 +0000

The first I heard of Robert McNamara was his appearance in the "The Fog of War." I thought the film gimmicky but in an interesting way and the story of his role while Secretary of Defence in waging the war in Vietnam was both disturbing and compelling.

However, I had not realized that the movie only scratched the surface. It seems that this technocrat exemplar is going to have to do a lot of explaining at the Pearly Gates.

He was a prime mover in the following events:

Project 100,000: Where the poorest of the poor were considered totally expendable. He referred to them as the “subterranean poor” much in the same way, I guess, as the Nazis used the word ‘untermensch.’ These were Americans, his own people, so clearly any talk of him being any kind of patriot would be ridiculous.

Agent Orange: I used the Airforce Magazine article as a link for its account of how the herbicide was delivered not for its conclusion. There is more than enough evidence of the damage that it did.

The body count as benchmark: Scroll down just a little to find the the essential problem with the body count. If the dead are not armed surely that makes them civilians. A ridiculous and terrible flaw.

Switched defense policy on nuclear weapons from “no cities” to “Mutually Assured Destruction” (See 10th paragraph.) I just don't where to start with this one.

He was also involved in the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. Here is his quote from “The Fog of War.”

”(General Curtis) LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

A bad old man died - so what.

His deeds are past but his legacy continues. He was at the Ford Motor Company throughout one of the most successful decades of the car manufacturing industry ever. But that wasn’t all down to Robert McNamara. After the war people had money and they needed to get places so being a car manufacturer could not have been easier.

In the same way that Bill Gates thrived by having a product that barely worked in a world that desperately needed it the car companies were the Microsofts of the day

With cars selling themselves there was plenty of time and power made available for the accountants as he progressed up the corporate ladder to count the the paper clips and whatever else was around.

Without actually having to design, make or sell a product technocrats could busy themselves with the organization of organization. Nirvana for McNamara and his ilk.

The legacy of can be seen in every corporate structure extant today. Managers managing managing.

This is his dehumanizing legacy he left behind. That numbers matter more than people. That the rationality of numbers is of more import than fairness and justice.

But the tide is turning. If social media has anything to offer then it is the idea that humans matter very much. That the most important thing in the world is not a line on a chart but our relationships with each other.

Digital Britain - Final Report

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:24:00 +0000

The Digital Britain report came out this week. Its overviews of the digital world and the analysis of its effects on our daily lives were interesting and informative and would not contradict the views of most interested parties.

The report covers so much ground that a book rather than a blog post would be needed to comment on it all. However, here are a few points that stood out for me.

“ Today almost half the UK population use the Internet to access information
about Government or local council services, or to complete a Government
transaction online.” (p24.76)

With levels of interaction such as these and with the figures certain to increase in the future it is important for everyone to know what plans the government has in mind for ensuring good services and facilitating growth.

The government’s most direct contributions to digital growth are in legislation and infrastructure.

As far as legislation goes;

“it [the UK government] did not see the case for the sort of large scale intervention that a small number of other governments have embarked on.” (p123. 71)

Most of the legislation proposed concern intellectual property and the authorizing of powers to various government departments. There was a stated awareness that preemptive action could be just as risky as acting too late. Therefore, there was the announced intent of closely monitoring this fluid situation.

On infrastructure there is a lot of huffing and puffing but the only concrete proposal is a levy.

"...a supplement of 50p per month can be expected to raise £150m-£175m a year “ (p65.58)

The interesting thing about this levy is the logic of how it was derived. Connection charges have been getting cheaper and cheaper. Therefore, the government feels entitled to use 50p of this 'saving' to fund the outreach of broadband access.

Apart from the essential unfairness of being taxed on one service so people can use another the money is not going to go to improving the infrastructure by laying bigger cables but by extending the cable network. This is a sleight of hand. More cabling does not equate with bigger capacity in terms of bandwidth.

Virgin Media, BT and others are going to be left to enlarge the capacity of their cables while the government is going to concentrate on outreach.

“...today, over 15 million adults in the UK still do not use the Internet. If we are going to maximise the benefits across society, we must also ensure that we address the needs of those 15 million.(p32. 12)

So what does this outreach consist of? Since the caves and moorlands of the UK are not populated by these people and we can assume they are either in an urban area or near one then most of that 15 million already have the opportunity for access. But for one reason or another they have not connected themselves to the internet. Doesn’t add up.

But enough of dubious taxes raised for dubious purposes.

It appears despite all the grand talk things will carry on, more or less, as before.

Inner urban areas will benefit from bandwidth capacity enlargement first therefore requiring high bandwidth users to remain in the centre of town.

Some remote areas will probably get broadband a little sooner then would have been reckoned on originally.

There won’t be too much direct legislation but various departments will be given increased powers.

In terms of digital progress, contrary to the Digital Britain report’s own bullishness about its importance in the digital world we will still have to rely on individual commercial companies to push along progress.

Of especial importance is the role of the BBC. It is mentioned 190 times in the report. The BBC's independence is asserted but you wouldn’t know it from reading about the various plans and strategies that it is likely to be involved in.

The BBC does a good job and it has a lot of people working there who really care about it doing a good job. But it does distort markets it operates in through its size, the resources it can draw on and the fact that it does not have to adhere to normal commercial practices.

Although the BBC seems the obvious choice for implementing government strategy in the digital world there is a real sense of power being concentrated in one organization. With the reduction in advertising revenues cutting the privately owned television companies off at the knees the BBC has very little true competition in the UK. Being allowed to lead the vanguard further into the digital age may consolidate power to such an extent that competition and the associated benefits of innovation and good ideas that come with it may wither.

My verdict: A classic fudge. Which is a shame because despite all the talk about inflection points this was a great opportunity to lay the ground for the benefit of maybe not all future generations but at least the next one.

Iran: Organization by Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:46:00 +0000

I was in Iran two years ago for the first time and I was struck by how the reality on the ground was so vastly different from the views both inside and outside the country.

Despite the headscarves this was not an Islamic state like one finds in other countries.

Iran seemed to be two different worlds. The official one where the religious state with its social restriction and concentration of power in the hands of the clerics and the other world that went on behind closed doors.

Once I was behind closed doors I could have been at the home of anyone in the West. Alcohol seemed to be everywhere and all the places I visited had the most up-to-date satellite systems and all the DVDs one would find in the library of a normal home in London or Los Angles. It was really quite disorienting to step back outside the door and head back to the hotel and its wall to wall government spies knowing that all the time there was this other invisible but real world out there.

As I watch the pictures coming out I keep remembering all the computers and sundry technology I saw back then and can envisage that in those two years siince a third world of social media may have come into play. That the ability to communicate through social media channels may be a cause and an associated affect to the events going on in Iran.

The Iranians I met were all tech savvy. There would be no hesitation on their part in taking advantage of the communication possibilities of twitter, facebook and so on.

This New Third World beyond the official regimentation of the state and compartmenalized existences in their apartments and houses adds an important dimesion in the present unrest.

Social media may not be the reason but it is an important contribution. The Iranians had enough reasons to rebel on the streets. The desire for freedom was there, the anger at the injustice in not being able to have a say in the running of their lives was there too. The resistance to the repression of the simple human need to associate freely was there in abundance. One clearly rigged election and the blue touch paper was lit.

This has been a long time coming and if it wasn’t this election it would have been something else. It was inevitable.

But what is key here is that social media allowed like-minded people to be able to discuss their thoughts and their feelings, share their opinions and reduce the isolation engendered from the only freedom to be had was the freedom found on the inside of a closed door.

This is not like the fall of the Berlin Wall where the Gorbachev basically said, we give up, it’s over. East Germans knew perfectly well what was going on in the West. They could see West German programming for a start but they couldn’t talk to each other. They couldn’t share ideas or make plans. While they could act individually they could not act strategically or tactically. In the end it wasn’t up to them.

The situation in Iran is different. From the twitter feeds alone one can see actions being planned and advice being given on places to avoid.

I am sure that new leaders will be soon emerging (if the police don’t get them first) who can use this technology to make an effective stand against the State.

The authorities are catching on but there is not a lot they can do bar shutting down their entire telecommunications facility. Could it even be done?

I don’t think anyone knows. But we do know that a great many Iranians are just the same as us and would very much like to enjoy the same sort of rights that we enjoy.

Maybe, through modern communications and services such as social media they will find a way to organize themselves in such a way to make that possible.

Why couldn’t email or chat rooms have been so useful? Partly timing, a rigged election is an insult to everyone. Something so transparently dishonest became the necessary spark.

But it is the instant public outreach of twitter, facebook, friendfeed etc. that has played a vital role in this uprising. It is the element of public discussion. One tweet or post and any number of people get the message and any one of them can contribute to the group discussion.

Tweeting and posting publicly in a shared timeline has to be the best way of organizing coordinated group activity yet.

Tiananmen Square

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:32:00 +0000

A Look to the Future

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sun, 17 May 2009 07:19:00 +0000

Ireland has many great things going for it and an educated population has to be one of the greatest attributes on what would be a very long list.

It has well over 800,000 people who have completed third level education of some kind. (We'll leave out the half a million that are coming through the system for the while.)

These are figures from the Central Statistical Office.

Adding the third level graduates together we get a figure of 829,201.

Now to compare this to UK statistics. Like it or not English is the lingua franca of business and trade. Wishing it wasn’t so is just not helpful. Also, it is more of a competitor in economic terms then say Italy or Greece.

Wolfram/Alpha compares the populations thus.

So the UK, with a population of just over 14 times the size, one would expect a matching proportion (fourteen or so million,) of people having completed third- level education.

Not so.

From a PDF download at the site of the Department of Children, Schools and Families.

Attainment at level 4 or above
• 30.9 per cent of all adults aged 19-59/641 have a qualification at level 4 or higher. This equates to 9.1 million people

So by taking these government figures we can make a useful comparison.

UK 60/9.1 = 15% of the population with third-level education
Ireland 4.3/829,201 = 19.2% of the population with third-level education.

With proportional adjustment; this means that for every 4 Irish persons with a substantial education history there are three UK citizens. Or if Ireland were the same size as the UK there would be 12million 3rd level to 9 million.

There is a greater depth of education in the Irish population by a truly enormous 33%.

By any standards that is a phenomenal difference that reflects very well on the potential of the Irish population to make great progress in the future.

Knowledge workers even those with acute specialities are better able to switch careers or direction then untrained workers. The individual nature of degrees or awards is not a drawback in the way it would be to a labourer or construction worker.

The point of all this: At present things are not so lovely in the garden but there is a lot to look forward to.The potential for achieving great things is clearly evident and when the credit taps eventually open again, as they will, then Ireland will not be starting from scratch. Quite the opposite.

PS: There is statistics and statistics and while I grant there is a great deal to quibble about in methodology one cannot deny the huge gap that exists in attainment and potential. Even if this potential cannot be put directly to use at the moment it should be celebrated as an achievement and factored in to any future plans that business or government are making. (If indeed they are.)

I didn't do an Ireland on Ireland comparison with now and thirty years ago because even though there is much to cheer in terms of progress the past is not an awful lot of help now.

PPS: In this argument density counts for more than absolute numbers and as you can see I have tried to weight the figures accordingly.

Manin Bay, Connemara

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:52:00 +0000

View Manin Bay in a larger map

Filler

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:29:00 +0000

It's been almost a month since I last posted.I haven't been doing anything particularly exciting but I thought I would post of things that I am engaged with at the moment

Books:

Netherland by Joseph O' Neill seems to be about immigrants playing cricket in New York but it somehow captures that strange post 9/11 mood. Those feelings of fear and disconnectedness. That strange lost space when one life script is torn up and one is waiting for a new one to be written.2

It will be of great interest to the history students of the future. Historical events as well as a good many current events mostly described from the outside. Objectivity tends to be limited in inverse proportion to one's proximity to an event but nothing is as easily and as well remembered as an eyewitness account of what it was like being in the middle of it all.

Videos:

I don't really much watch TV anymore. Certainly not since Maid Marian was killed off in the last series of Robin Hood. Someone, somewhere hasn't read their Jungian archetypes and their relevance in the stories and myths we tell ourselves.

Maid Marian is not a character in a story to be killed off for a plot twist or a season finale. She is the virtuous face of authority and without here redeeming qualities then authority must be destroyed and we are left with anarchy. Anarchy sucks, I have seen enough of it.

Maybe the writers were 'brave' or 'challenging assumptions' but clueless would be a better adjective.

It could be that they thought they were engaged in a post-modernist deconstruction. But that time is past. We all know now that the deconstructed stories just became a different version of the old stories. Confirming, as we all probably suspected, that post-modernism provided a fun perspective on life and literature and was not to be taken too seriously.

So these days, it's YouTube and Vimeo for the likes of me with odd doses of iplayer thrown in.

This BBC4 series of "The Story of Maths" is on youtube. Iplayer is sort of great. Great because it is an engineering achievement for the BBC. But not so great because the easiest thing to have done is to make a link to YouTube.

The BBC like so many other institutions and corporations, seem not to grasp the idea that no one can own information anymore. The only way that content producers, artists, writers, film-makers and so on, can extract money from its audience is by having a social contract of goodwill and trust with the people that appreciate what they do to the extent that this same audience will handover cash for their wares.

I don't mind paying for a song but thanks to itunes I don't have to pay for the other eight tracks that I don't want.

How will all this work out? I don't know - time will tell.

Music:

This video from Ghostland Observatory came to me through a tweet. I thought I was a good dancer but it seems I have been outdone.

After the initial amazement horror wore off I found I quite liked the song and a couple of others besides particularly Silver City. I would very much like to see them live. Just to check out if it is all for real.

Cinema:

Star Trek this weekend. Not a trekkie but I think J.J. Abrams is interesting. Plus it is a long time since I have sat in a cinema and had my senses assaulted.

Podcasts:

These are great for the long drives I am having to do at the moment.

Nightwaves on Radio 3: Nothing like it really. I have a love/hate thing going on with Philip Dodd. There is a point in almost every interview where he gets slapped down for some wrong-headed and usually pretentious interpretation of the interviewee's work. Sometimes they struggle quite hard to remain polite.

On the upside he is an enthusiast and clearly cares about the arts. I suppose he makes the experience all the more engaging.

LSE Podcasts: They have some great speakers but a few of them are quite specialist and are clearly not for everyone. Also they need to get some decent microphones and the levels can be all over the place. But that aside some of the speakers are fascinating and surprising in what they have to say.

The talk from the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, in November gives a very interesting angle on the "Troubles" and views Ireland in a warm and optimistic light.

The talk by Andrei Grachev, one of Gorbachev's assistants, about Perestroika and how it came about is very revealing. Also, rather frightening, as things could have turned out very differently.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcasts from Stanford University Venture Programs has some great speakers from the people who are building our new online world. Some very interesting insights into the mentality of Silicon Valley.

Diamond Hill, Connemara

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:09:00 +0000

The approach to Diamond Hill. This is the start of the Red Loop.

Ballinakill Harbour with Tully Mountain on the Rynvale Peninsula.

The path was well-laid and interesting in itself.

The Summit. It was too windy to hang out here for very long but the views were wonderful.

A view from the descent.

There is a larger selection over at flickr. Some of the pictures are on the moody side but it was that kind of day.

Photography and Pedantry

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:58:00 +0000

These pictures by Klavs Bo Christensen which feature in this article were thrown out of competition because the judges said they had been fiddled with too much.

How can some types of processing be OK and other types not. Surely, processing is processing?

Even the supposed authenticity of RAW files vary greatly. Raw is what they are not. As soon as the signal leaves the chip it is modified according to the algorithms of the manufacturer in the circuitry of the camera and then stored in a file.

There is no pure signal. There is no pure image outside of what the photographer saw in that moment.

Processing is inherent in digital photography and also in film. Photographers have been manipulating images since the beginning. Dodging and burning are part of a picture-taker's DNA.

Why should there be some arbitrary line be laid down across which some pedant says this is an acceptable amount of manipulation and this is not?

What is important is that the photographer conveys to the viewer what he or she saw. Or what they thought they saw.

From a photojournalism point of view it is vital that the scene remain untainted. If the photographer in one of the cases here went and set those fires then he should be locked up in jail. Likewise if a bulldozer had been commissioned to drive through that woman’s neighbourhood to add that bit ‘extra’ to get the point across then hanging would be a let off.

But that is not what happened. All the photographers did was to use the tools available to them in photoshop to, in their opinion, convey what they saw more accurately.

As long as the original scene isn’t faked, then what is the problem? Showing the truth is what is going on here - not creating it.

(Personally, I think they over-egged the pudding but that is showing poor artistry which is not the same thing as faking a scene by a long way.)

Who is to say how much a photographer can manipulate their own image? Not these judges, for sure. The real danger here is that adjudications like these will take on a life of their own, in and outside the world of competition photography, and quickly lead to some mindless, bureaucratic set of ‘guidelines’ which will only hinder photographers in expressing themselves and ensure that credit does not go to where credit is due.

Twitter/FF/FB

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:13:00 +0000

None of these social media sites are all things to all people. It is self-evident as each of them have either been created or evolved to serve a specific communication function.

A more useful discussion around social media at the moment would be to define at what points that it becomes indispensable. Were any of these three services to be suddenly discontinued how adverse would the affect on society be? Also, for all those non- social media users, at what point does not being active in these arenas become a handicap?

This is a response to a Techcrunch article.

Croagh Patrick

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Possessed by a an inspiration I set off yesterday to climb the highest mountain in Ireland, Croagh Patrick.

The final ascent is made up of scree and is quite steep. Much steeper than it looks.

The church on the summit. (Use cursor for 3D view.)

The weather was changeable to say the least. But that's how it is on mountains. Himalaya Tom speaks.

But just a few minutes later...

Stuff I picked up on the way down. Shame.

But it's views like this across Clew Bay I will best remember the day for. Apparently, a lot of those islands are drumlins.

Ireland Victory

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Good Time

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:14:00 +0000

The Media Gap

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:22:00 +0000

Newspapers as we know them are changing as readership falls and the techological landscape shifts.

Some may carry on as they are. Some have and others will go online like the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Yet others along the line of the New York Times may distribute an online and print edition.

Most, however, like the Rocky Mountain News and the Tucson Citizen will go bust.

Evolution is inevitable and change for the most part in technological matters is good if somewhat disruptive. We could all see the steam-roller coming so one has to ask, could the management of the changes been handled better?

Clay Shirky in a recent post claims that fossilized thinking is a large part to blame.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.”

Another explanation is that the mainstream media, the print papers in particular were simply not doing their job.

Could the series of willful distortions and misrepresentation surrounding intelligence documents which were used as justification to start the Iraq War which in turn led to hundreds of thousands of people losing their lives have passed media scrutiny twenty years ago?

There are hundred if not thousands of more financial journalists than ever before and barely one of them got the scoop on the Credit Crunch. Despite all the evidence that banks were lending unswisely and that self-regulation was working not major financial news service revealed the truth until it was too late.

The reasons for this failure are well-documented in Nick Davies' book"The Flat Earth News."

He says that journalists are so busy feeding the monster that they don't, won't or can't go out and cover stories properly anymore. Instead of doing the labour and time intensive, not too mention dreary and soul-destroying work pounding of the streets running down leads reporters sit at terminals rehashing the wires and cobbling articles together from Google searches.

These two factors, Inadequate journalism and the Credit Crunch, have hastened the demise of mainstream media. So instead of an awkward but unavoidable morphing of the news industry we have its sudden collapse.

There is an information abyss looming before us.

Twitter, along with other social media tools has already proved itself to a terrific reporter and tracker of both major and minor public events.

One has only to compare coverage of Mumbai, Gaza, USAir in the last few months on twitter as against mainstream media to see that social media has a clear advantages in those situations.

Enough people with enough camera phones equals more than enough coverage. But only up to a point.

But there are two major problems.

Firstly, social media isn't ready to carry the burden yet.

As I write there are 10 million twitters up from 1.5 million when I started posting regularly in January. Amazing figures but in a world population of 6 billion, not a lot.

Social media will become ubiquitous but that is in the future. At the moment it needs more participants to make it more meaningful and it also needs services that can contextualize and explain better.

Secondly, and in some ways, more importantly, not all news takes place in front of a camera phone regardless of how many there are.

Many of the most significant stories that have broken over the few years have been done by dedicated reporters digging away at the truth for months and sometimes years. Watergate is probably the most famous.

GW2 and the financial bubble leading up to the Credit Crunch should have been reported better but they weren't. And there is nothing going on in social media that suggests that powerful a social force as it is could have done any better.

Social media, at the moment, and hopefully for the shortest while lacks the means to source its own material in a reporterly way. There is no method now for a journalist to pursue a story for months or sometimes years against intense official opposition. Nor does social media offer any kind of alternative to the dedicated footslogging it takes to maintain the system of checks and balances that keep a democracy accountable to its voters.

A way round this problem may be found in the future but right now in the bad guys could be up to anything and without vigilant reporting we will never know a thing about it - until, like the Credit Crunch, it is too
late.

Google Fatigue - Time for a Change

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:38:00 +0000

After ten years of almost daily use I realize I have been trained by Google and other search engines to ask questions in a certain way.

It may be a reflection of smartness - maximizing the usefulness of a service for my own benefit. Or it may be evidence of human adaptability, learning to drive a car, hold a cup and so on.

But essentially, I am adapting my life to a piece of technology. Google is wonderfully simple but searches do have to be phrased in a certain way to ensure that you find what you are looking for.

Many times I have had questions that I could not get answered by gaming the Mountain View algorithm.

What I want to do is ask my computer a question and have it understand what I mean just by writing or speaking perfectly normal question. The sort of question that a friend with more knowledge of the subject than I would be able to answer.

Html made the web possible and search engines made the net manageable. Amazing as the online world is our basic interaction with this modern marvel is through an interface designed by humans to make robotic operations tolerable.

I have heard about Wolfram Alpha and while it sounds promising I just know it is going to be another Universal Algorithm that I am going to have to learn how to make work.

Why can’t the net be more human? I don’t expect any one person in my life to have all the answers to my questions (and I probably wouldn’t believe them if they did,) but I do have various people to go to with different problems or different questions we want answered. Most of us do.

There seems to be a belief in techiedom that if all the data available were to be binarized and placed on the web then we will have all the answers to our problems waiting for us there just waiting for the right search phrase.

I suppose a it is like the technical equivalent of God - one source that has all the answers.

But it seems to me the most useful source for answers to human questions are other humans. Very rarely do we have experience aspects of life that have not been experienced by someone else before us.

Maybe there is another place to look for answers to questions and that is in social media areas like twitter and those yet to come.

Instead of getting computers to understand humans the resources may be much better used in getting humans to understand each other.

It is a very nice feeling on twitter to ask a question and to have another human come back with an answer. Instead of a list search term results one gets an answer that is more in line with the meaning of the original question and sometimes a request back for clarification. Very much more conversational, very much more human.

Instead of mathematically derived options one gets a sense of meaning to one's online activities from understanding and being understood.

What is the role of cloud computing, web 2.0, and web 3.0 semantic technologies in the coming era of transparent, collaborative, connected e-governance?

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:55:00 +0000

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: It is a briefing/sales pitch to the government but the explanation of cloud computing and the semantic web is interesting.

The future won't be this as predictions about the future are nearly always spectacularly wrong. Imagine my disappointment to find I was all grown up and still not commuting to work in jetpack.

What is the role of cloud computing, web 2.0, and web 3.0 semantic technologies in the coming era of transparent, collaborative, connected e-governance?

View more presentations from Mills.

A Comment made on Jim Long's blog

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:43:00 +0000

The original post can be seen here.

Twitter and its social media counterparts are great but so is TV. I don’t think there is a need to set up a media schism where old skool = bad and new school = good. For TV to stay relevant it has to focus on what it does really well and which other forms of media do not offer as much.

For instance this very evening I watched a programme made by NBC and reshown here in Ireland on RTE about the ‘Octomom.’ There was an in depth interview with the mother, Nadya Suleman, a well laid out story that joined up the events that led up to the births and footage of the mother at home with the kids and some pertinent comments from the kids on the new additions to the family.

I had heard about the multiple births as an event from twitter and had gleaned facts from the web and newspapers but it was only a TV programme such as this one from NBC that could bring it all together and give me a visual/visceral understanding of the life of that woman and her kids and the issues surrounding it.

I am sure and I hope that there will always be a demand for that sort of story-telling.

It is not an either/or situation but a constant morphing of how we communicate according to the tools we have available to us.

Keep up the good work.

Clarification on previous post.

noreply@blogger.com (tom murphy) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:27:00 +0000

Just a bit of clarification on my previous post.

I don’t think society will go all freelance. It isn’t necessary or practicable.

However, the growth of the independent worker or micro company is inevitable. Not because we have to but because we can.

In McWilliams' blog he says that “people are clustering because they are scared” which for some maybe so. But that is merely the stick. The carrot is the increased possibilities and opportunities that arise from living in a networked world.

Peter Drucker, a writer on the idea of management, suggested that management was not an end in itself but was a means to organize individuals towards a purpose.

Simple observation suggests that the goal of most management seems to be to preserve and propagate management itself regardless of their contribution to the job at hand.

All the pointless rules, the mindless targets and the vaporous and nebulous jargon were created and instigated by people with nothing better to do.

If management were really busy on their business we would have had none of the above.

The Credit Crunch, as horrible as it is, has revealed just how much vaporware was in current corporate and institutional thinking. It was all a self-deceiving lie.

But with the dramatic economic changes there have been equally dramatic technology changes.

Social media is just one aspect. The use of services such as twitter, linkedin, and a whole host of others eliminate geography and perceived hierarchy. Anyone can reachout to anyone, anywhere.

There is also the imminent advent of the widepread use of the semantic web from which whole new industries will emerge. (You can quote me on that last one.)

In this post-industrial age (for the West anyway) the organization of society can take place outside of corporate and government largesse. More than ever not only can we decide to associate with and how but we can do it with an ease unimaginable just two or three years ago.

One of the biggest objections seems to come in the form of “not everyone is cut out to be a business person” or variations of that theme. It is true not everyone is but it is not as if we are living in times where we have that much choice about our working preferences.

The main attraction, up until now,for working for a large scale organization, government or private, has been the promise of security. That is clearly a promise that cannot be made at present or possibly ever again.

But it is not the end. Just the beginning of the beginning. (Churchill nicked that from me.)