Another Sunday, another Houzz email, another decorator buying books for visual effect for a client and arranging them by colour.
I find this depressing.
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Birds of A Clef: Mex
I have a sketchblog on the go (also on this domain) but I haven’t really been publicising it much.
Anyway, I have a couple of projects on the go, one being the vans, and the other, rather suddenly, being a collection of birds from a project called Birds of a Clef. It has caught people’s interest for some reason with the net result that requests have come in.
Like this one, for example.
I see these taking more control than the van did.
Getting around Dublin
There was word during the week that in terms of some new investment in public transport infrastructure in Dublin, DART Underground would be shelved and money would be put into Luas via Broadstone to Dublin Airport. During the past week, there was an editorial in the Irish Times pushing BRT because it was cheaper.
I was extremely disappointed in the Irish Times. If you read the BRT documentation at the time public feedback was sought, you might be aware that on the day BRT went into operation (if it did), demand for it would already surpass capacity. As such, building it was never going to be anything other than utter folly.
Doing things because they are the cheapest option is incredibly stupid, particularly if they don’t actually work. You might as well not do them at all, save the money and push it towards something that does work. We are incredibly wasteful in this country sometimes. I do not know how we change this, but our theoretically national paper of record could go someway towards not supporting inadequate schemes because they are cheaper than the alternatives when compared to the alternatives they are inadequate.
There appears to be no coherent, encompassing vision for transporting people around Dublin beyond the city manager’s desire to get everyone to cycle everywhere. In terms of public transport, there is disorganisation and chaos, and an utter lack of a future plan. I get told that when we eventually get all the private transport off the roads, the buses will be grand. This makes me sick in my stomach for a couple reasons, not least the fact that there is a long way to go before the bus transport network in Dublin is grand and removing the cars is not going to cater for that.
Dublin’s public transport system is a collection of errors cobbled together in a “yerrah it’ll be grand” way. Most of the people who tell me it’ll be grand, it’s fine, sure we don’t need…probably do not get the buses at the times I do. They do not sit in a bus on Eden Quay for 8 minutes while a driver change is not completing because the second driver hasn’t arrived on time. They don’t spend 15 minutes on O’Connell Street waiting for passengers to board a 16. They probably don’t wait forty five minutes for that 16 because they have bunched on the route and now, there are three of them within 5 minutes of each other, and they are 45 minutes behind the most recent bus before them.
What is needed is a coherent plan for the city that doesn’t depend on the political generosity of a minister for transport. These things need to be planned for the needs of the city. But we can’t even get these things right in Dublin where the lack of efficiency in the system causes me night mares five days a week and this has to be costing the city money in lost productivity and frustration. What hope have the other cities of getting any sort of a reasonable plan and financing in place when the main road between Limerick and Cork isn’t being funded properly either?
Currently, if you are transiting the city from north to south using a bus, in most cases, you need to get through what I now call the Pass of Thermopylae, basically the slip of a road from D’Olier Street onto College Green. It currently has one lane because of Luas works. Dublin Bus’s social media team explained that this was causing delays.
But these delays are never going to go away because at some point, presumably, there will be a tram running along the lane which is currently dug up. On several mornings it has taken 20 minutes to get from Eden Quay to Dame Street purely because buses aren’t getting onto D’Olier Street, a combination, I suspect, from a lack of bus stop space, and limited flow capacity onto College Green. The current works, remember, are being done now because we didn’t want to do them 20 years ago.
Ultimately, at some stage, someone is going to have to sit down and say “we have X flow rate of people through these areas and buses are perhaps no longer the most appropriate way to do this. There are 21 bus routes going through D’Olier Street. There are 10 bus routes coming down through Drumcondra. And ultimately, we are going to have to recognise that this costs money and needs to be managed over a time frame greater than the lifetime of a Dail. Public transport in the urban areas will have to stop being the sweeties of a transport minister.
Coldwater pleasures
Probably one of my favourite kite photographs of all time. Sometimes it doesn’t feel so long again but it was taken in 2009 and that means it is more than five years since I was seriously taking kite photographs.
Living in the real world
One of the things which annoys me about discourse in general is that if you are discussing things like work, unemployment, the downsides of work, at some point, it is likely that some person will say something along the lines of “they need to live in the real world”, or “you’re living in the real world now”.
Without wanting to go into it in too much detail, I got told I was living in the real world now in response to a comment that I was finding my city centre bus commute to be a hassle. It is a hassle for various reasons. It is unpredictable in length, depending on what bus model I wind up on, I have a greater or lesser likelihood of being extremely travel sick by the time I get to the city centre, and a journey distance of 6.7 kilometres can take anything between 25 minutes and an hour. If I’m getting really travel sick, it’s likely that the journey is also taking longer than usual. Some bus drivers are absolute killers on the clutch. I thought the buses were all automatic but some days I wonder.
Anyway, this apparently means I am now living in the real world. I find it annoying, and to be honest, dishonest. It’s been a feature of my life for the last 3 months. Prior to that, for 9 months I was “resting” meaning I was applying for jobs after finishing college, and prior to that, I was commuting over and back to UCD, leaving home at 6.55 to a) get across the city in a reasonable space of time and b) get a parking space at UCD. I have no doubt there are some people who would assume that because I was a student for a year, I wasn’t living in the real world. Prior to that I drove to work for more than a dozen years. That must have been a fantasy universe as well.
This real world nonsense is flung at people in a lot of debates. Teachers get told they should try living in the real world. I’ve taught teenagers. I don’t know one person in any job that I’ve worked in who has done the whole spiel about teachers having an easy life who has any even remote concept of what’s involved in teaching. It may not be the real world, fine. But as a dream world, it’s a lot bloody harder than most of the other jobs I’ve worked in. I think people use the real world as a signifier that they are, or have been envious of people for some reason. Sure, you’d like not to go into work for 9 months. Try dealing with the stress of managing finances in those circumstances. The real world varies. For some people it’s incredibly easy, compared to others. For some, it is incredibly hard. Often, over time, it changes.
Life doesn’t become more real either which way. It only is as it is and it’s up to you to recognise what you can change. I’ve played every game around the bus schedule to try and minimise the impact of it on my life. My life didn’t magically become more real in the last three months because I was getting the bus to work compared to the last 15 years where I mostly drove.
It is a pure intellectual insult to split people into those who live in the real world and those who do not.
Main Railway Station, Helsinki
It’s three years since I was last in Finland – I’d say it was far too long but there was a 14 year gap prior to that.
Anyway, for various art related reasons I wanted a picture of an icebreaker and I knew there had been one near the hotel where I stayed the last time and given I was still dragging a large camera around then, I would have been surprised if I didn’t take a picture of it. So I rooted out the relevant hard drive to find the pictures from Helsinki, and while I was scrolling through them, I found this.
Basically, this is the railway station in Helsinki. It’s a rather austere looking building – a lot of discussions online suggest it’s a bit Soviet Union. The day I got the train to Tampere, there was, however, a train to Saint Petersburg on one of the quays. Finland does share a border with Russia. I’ve always remembered the other picture I took of the train station, or made anyway as the processing was rather unique 
So I’d forgotten about this. Whether it is the passage of time, or the mood I find myself in now, I suddenly find I love the black and white picture now, and particularly, in full screen version as my desktop image. Helsinki is a lovely city. I really do want to go back.
For what it’s worth, I did take a picture of the icebreaker too. Here it is.
Language learning supports
Last last night, I hit one of the many small milestones I give myself in the ongoing quest of learning/teaching myself Finnish. I hit 650 words covered in my Memrise vocabulary course. This is very slightly over 20 per cent of the quest.
If you spend any time around the world of language learning online, you tend to come across any number of methods that promise to make things easy to learn to be fluent in a language. There is Fluent in 3 Months, for example, and then there is Duolingo which everyone rams down your throat when it comes to educational software.
If you drill down to what you need to learn to be able to speak a language, it generally amounts to learning a lot of words, and learning the framework for putting it together. So a lot depends on your response to the idea that to at least have a fighting chance of learning a language you need to learn some grammar, and you need to learn some words, a number in the thousands. A lot of people, particularly English native speakers, have problems with both because they have never been motivated enough to handle this for any language other than their own, and very often, they have not gotten a decent grammatical framework in their own language owing to teaching policy changes over the last 30-40 years. In that context, easy solutions seem enticing; but they do not remove the need to learn some grammar and learn some vocabulary.
There are no discussions around “what is fluency anyway” which removes from you the need to learn these things.
So currently I am learning Finnish (again) in a country where, it must be said, teaching support is thin on the ground. My tools in this task are (a) four weeks of Finnish in Finland in 1998 (b) a bunch of text books acquired around then (c) Tunein.com (d) YLE’s website (e) Memrise (f) Facebook and (g) a notebook.
Tunein gives me access to radio to listen to. I listen (if I am awake) to the morning program on YLE Puhe because it covers international news so I have context that I can get an idea of what’s going on. What matters is that I learn to hear words that I’m learning else where.
YLE has the news in Easy Finnish for learners. One of the most useful things there is that as you pick up Finnish vocabulary, this gets easier and easier to read. Facebook has newsfeeds from a bunch of Finnish media organisations. I don’t have time to read them all but most days I get to look at things and try and figure what is happening in Finland. Yesterday was National Nature Day in Finland, a day on which Finns are encouraged to go out and enjoy the wonderful nature around them. I can categorically say that Finland is a stunning country and I fully endorse this exercise. Bring mosquito repellent.
But for those to work for you, for the radio and the newspapers to start making sense you need to start looking at vocabulary and basically, a lot depends on how you want to approach that; either via long printed lists, or handwriting your own lists, your own testing cards for example. I’ve always know that you don’t learn vocabulary by trying to learn it off, but by constantly testing yourself and aside from creating some system to do it yourself, Memrise is actually the handiest tool to do that. They dress what they are doing up in some science in terms of identifying when you get tested on stuff which I haven’t fully worked out yet but it doesn’t matter. The important thing from my point of view is that Memrise has a handful of Finnish tools, including one vocabulary list of 3000 words and another list of verbs as a vocab list. They have similar large lists for other languages.
Learning 3000 words of Finnish isn’t going to mean I speak or write Finnish although it does mean I understand more of it, so the other thing that I am now doing most days (now that I have 600 words or so to play with) is write some Finnish – simple and all as it is – daily.
So I have a daily schedule that now involves the following:
- reviewing the vocab I already have
- learning new vocab
- learning new verbs
- conjugating verbs per info in my grammar book
- reading the news in Easy Finnish from YLE
The thing is, learning a language takes time and effort. I’ve targetted next year to see about taking advanced Finnish exams which means the ante has to be upped as I get better. I know from past experience that the more words I know, in general, the easier subsequent words become to learn as you start to develop a language instinct. I know from past experience that the more I read, the better I will write.
There is really only one thing missing from all this and that is the problem relating to speaking. I am not yet doing any of that. I know there are online options for language exchange but the last time I looked for one, my language interest wasn’t available. But I’m resourceful and I dare say that I will figure something out, either through finding an online message board in Finnish related to some other interest I have, or by hacking the Finnish community on twitter. There are always doors which can be opened.
Blindly fighting on
I had an interesting one during the week when someone made an assertion about the place I came from and I pointed out – politely – that they were wrong. I added I was from there.
My normal reaction when I’m the person making an assertion about Italy, and an Italian says “well actually…” is to assume I might be wrong. What seems to be increasingly evident is that most people assume they have nothing left to learn. The response I got was “this is a joke right, because based on other information I have which is entirely irrelevant and inadequate to the debate this is completely wrong, include major league misunderstanding of language”.
The social media scene in Ireland was upended by an argument on Twitter, primarily, about comments which Rosanna Davison may or may not have made regarding gluten and a number of illnesses. In one respect, it was, in an era of celebrity trumping all, gratifying to see a significant number of people pointing out that she was wrong.
But…it doesn’t really end there. At least one commentator took the view “so what if she said something stupid”
Reaction is kind of ridiculous though. Who cares what she says about it, really
and at least one commentator suggested that this was pretty much bullying.
Remember a real person reads all those tweets
So it’s bullying to point out someone who is not a qualified doctor, who talks about her “qualification in nutritional therapy” is making assertions, in the field of health, which are wrong. And Harbison worries about Rosanna. What about all the people who a) are coeliac and know a whole pile more about it that she appears to and b) all the people with rheumatoid arthritis who really don’t need this misinformation becoming widespread. If nothing else, people start having to constantly field well meaning ignorance of the lines “you should…” and “why don’t you try this I read it in the Sindo once, you know Rosanna Davison, she has some kind of qualification in nutrition, so she knows what she is talking about….”
This is a sad state of affairs. Much of the commentary – from people who were deeply angry with her – was still unfailingly clear and polite. It is not bullying to point out someone is wrong. Davison’s response was to block commentary on twitter from experts in the field. This is the classic action of someone who doesn’t want to learn they are wrong.
And it is extremely important to point out when someone says something wrong, and potentially damaging in the field of health because it goes to the heart of keeping people healthy.
So an argument around a piece of history in one small town might be unimportant but there are subjects where it is not so unimportant.
At no point in their lives does anybody know everything about everything. It is entirely possible that one of the most useful skills we could pass on to people is learning to recognise when a) they are wrong and b) have something to learn from others.
In the meantime, XKCD will continue to provide one of the most accurate reflections of interactive discussions online today.
In the meantime it’s worth nothing that Davison has made a statement suggesting the comments disputed are not in her book, she doesn’t really believe them and she has been misquoted.
On a wider note, I wonder how much the need our media has to sell newspapers has allowed themselves to abdicate their responsibility in terms of information gatekeeping. Put simply while it’s hard to prevent misinformation getting to the web courtesy of the democratisation of access to broadcast, one of the selling points of the newspapers was, in theory, that they were supposed to be better than that. But that is a debate for another day.
Amazon Driven by Data
Possibly this belongs on my datablog and I might write it up there later (or I might not).
The New York Times has published a piece on working conditions in Amazon. It does not make for comfortable reading and certainly does not paint Amazon as a company which I would want to work for. But I did want to pick up on one comment in it.
“Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians.
That comment about driven by data is something that worries me. Sure, data is very sexy at the moment in the tech but data in itself can be meaningless and what matters is the information you can derive from it. But the information you look for is generally skewed by humans who decide what questions they want to ask of that data. Data isn’t the answer and how it is queried is not benign or completely rationally independent.
The average tenure in Amazon, apparently, is one year. You can argue that this might be as a result of a toxic culture. You can argue that Jeff Bezos is a genius. But to my uncertain knowledge, Amazon does not turn a profit and I think, has never turned a profit. We have an ongoing assumption that this is somehow okay, that it’s a new paradigm, and times have changed. With an average tenure of a year, you have a company which cannot possibly have stability in output quality, and you have a company whose knowledge base never develops.
Amazon’s search is atrocious and its recommender system has deteriorated badly in my experience. A hypothesis for why that might be is that they appear to have rapid staff turnover and by definition, limited continuity.
Many of the datapoints in Amazon’s evaluation system appear not to be datapoints at all. They are entries in the AnyTime Feedback Tool:
Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management.
…
However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly.
Anyone who implements a tool like this either a) expects it to get gamed and considers that a value or b) doesn’t expect it to get gamed in a high octane organisation is naive at best and making decisions on potentially faulty data. Either way, they are unlikely to wind up with the best staff. Such organisations, however, can only operate on the comfort blanket of never admitting this.
Amazon can call itself a data driven organisation, and if it wants to measure everything down to the nth degree, they should be bright enough to know the limitations of what they are doing. Going by the content of the NYT’s article, they probably aren’t.
Apartment sizes in Dublin
Reports in Dublin abound lately that the city council is considering reducing minimum apartment size regulations in the face of supply issues in Dublin and with a hope of getting construction companies to start building again.
I’m appalled. I’m aware that Dublin has supply issues but personally instead of letting the construction companies – who hardly covered themselves in glory much in the last 15 years – dictate or influence regulations in a bid to maximise profits, I’d be looking at who has what planning permission, how long they have it for and putting in increasing tax as time without completed building elapses. When I came to Dublin in 1999, a mortgage advisor insinuated that all the building land with planning permission in Dublin was held by just 8 companies. The price increases we were seeing then paled into nothing compared with what was to come.
I don’t know if that was then true or whether this is still the case. However, the fact remains that buildings are not like loaves of bread, out of date and disposable overnight. If we continue to build poor accommodation, and god knows most of the apartments in Dublin are unattractive to buy or live in, then we are stuck with it for years into the future. I’m not happy about this. Our regulations need to focus on the future of the city as well, and not just the desires of the builders.
Dublin is an increasingly unattractive city to live in. Maybe our city fathers need to do a brainstorming in terms of what sort of city they want. Already I’m having difficulty answering the question “why would anyone want to live in Dublin”. It’s a hard city to live in when you bear in mind the accommodation stock, the public transport system, the roads system and the ongoing feeling that you’re being hit day after day, after day, by more good reasons not to live here.