Category Archives: annoyances

annoyances, being me, life in general

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.

annoyances, being me, living in ireland, on the web, science

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.

Duty Calls by the inimitable Randall Munro

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.

annoyances, technology

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.

annoyances, living in ireland

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.

 

annoyances, living in ireland

Assumption

Ireland is a country of assumptions and judgements, sometimes it seems, and one of the most irritating assumptions I know is the assumption that everyone drinks.

It’s not that I don’t drink alcohol, it’s that I so rarely drink it that the unit count is rarely more than 2 units a year. But it seems that the only reason people in this country would not drink is because they are compelled not to. So I get a metric tonne of sympathy for not drinking because I’m driving.

Questions I don’t like: “Would you not just have the one?” It hasn’t gone away. Or looks of disappointment on my behalf from waitresses because I’m driving. In truth, I’m driving, but I’m also lying. I don’t need that sympathy. I wouldn’t be drinking anyway.

Most people, when you say “well I’m driving” assume that if you had a choice, you wouldn’t be driving, and then you’d have a drink. I’d love to get a taxi some evening and not drink and say “I’m not drinking”. I’ve tried that before and the answer is generally “But sure you’re not driving”.

The assumption seems to always been that people would want to be drinking and it’s only the demon car keeps them from having that 10 euro cocktail, pint or whatever. It’s rarely accepted straight off that someone might not want to drink alcohol.

People choose not to drink for various reasons. It would be nice if no one made any comments about it and just accepted other people’s choices. I just don’t want a drink shouldn’t be a defensive response.

But in Ireland, the assumption, the default position is that sure everyone wants a drink.

annoyances, being me, technology

Automated newsfeeds

One of the things I liked about Facebook over Google News (and in practical terms, there are few enough of those) is that I could set the newsfeed up to deliver me stuff from a lot of different language sources. Google assumes monolinguality; it’s constantly offering me tips for searching for English results only and for someone who is multilingual and interested in what’s happening in the communities of her other languages kens, it’s a bit frustrating.

However, as an advantage, it really is waning and the reason for that is the famous Algorithm. Now, in simple terms, algorithm is just just a method for achieving some result. The result which Facebook allegedly wants is for me to have the most relevant material turning up in my feed as that enhances engagement, and engagement is a handy asset for getting money out of advertisers.

Whatever way it works, it’s serving me a lot of drivel I don’t want, particularly on the news front, to the extent that shortly, I’m going to unlike pretty much all the news sources. I’m sick of them. I get pages of Royal Weddings, pages of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner, pages of entertainment rubbish that I really don’t care about, don’t want to see, and can’t switch off without switching off news altogether. Note to twitter: do not mess with the time driven method by which you serve me content.

Facebook is a time sink. Today, it’s been highly negative. There has been a preponderance of news stories that annoy me, and drivel that, if I’m truly honest, I don’t want to read, but still wind up reading. Much of it is repetitive with the same stories coming from several different sources, and the occasional marginal different angle. A lot of what turns up serves to make me feel inadequate too as there’s the stuff that tells you what you need to do to have a good career, what vegetables you should eat to get healthy sleep, the ten, fifteen or a million habits of Steve Jobs.

I loved computers and technology but I realised last night that possibly the two highest profile tech companies in the world, namely Facebook and Google, make money from advertising. You can spend all the money you like developing a better newsfeed selector but it’s not going to make the world much better. The tech industry often solves the wrong problems.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the things that made me happy about the internet 20 odd years ago when my life got Netscape Navigator. It was the pretty things. The things that made me happy. The things that opened the world to me, and opened the possibilities.

It wasn’t a constant feed of news that I couldn’t directly influence myself. I haven’t worked out what to do to make FB give me politics not celebrity rubbish from the Guardian. And so, the news orgs are going to have to go and just maybe, FB will no longer become a pit of stuff that irritates me.

annoyances

Loving pinterest and the search for search

If you read my tech blog at all, you’ll have seen me occasionally refer to issues with online search, mainly with Google because that’s my default search engine across all my devices. They don’t index this site for some  reason either.

I’m finding that the returns I get from Google really aren’t great lately, particularly in the area of image search so I’ve changed the default search on my machine to Bing (which is a really stupid name albeit better than Yahoo). Their image search is better. I also started thinking about search in general. Google has a monumental amount of the market in Europe and I wonder how much of that is linked to their localisation practices in the early days. But they aren’t fulfilling my needs lately.

The Bing image search, which I didn’t much play with until very recently, is far better for several reasons – in certain respects it works more effectively like the Pinterest search which is extremely good at drill down searches and associated search strings which might return useful information to you. The underlying AI for pinterest is very good, but then it is basically image focused and, I suspect, exploits both textual and associative data. Bing has a similar offering which I like very much and ultimately, this is a good thing. But it also handles pure web search as well.

Google revolutionised web search but it seems to me that search is ripe for disruption. I think disruption to image search will come through something like Pinterest. In the meantime, I don’t think that Google’s qualitative evaluation of its search returns is as good as it might be given that they have had years to scale it and are investing heavily in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ultimately, search, which has been gamed by search engine optimisation, now needs to game search engine optimisation.

 

annoyances, art and related

bleurgh

Another sketchbook tested and another sketchbook found wanting to my needs.

Note to self, so far, if I don’t want to pony up for the paying for the label lark that is Moleskine, some sort of reliable journal needs to be found.

annoyances, being me, life in general, living in ireland

the loss of CLerys

I read last night that Clerys had closed yesterday. I never saw that coming.

When I drilled down and thought about it more, I realised that, well, I hadn’t been in there in years. And if I wasn’t alone, well then, I should have seen it coming. Running a business in the centre of Dublin is a risky and high cost endeavour. Clerys was a big shop and it needed people to buy a lot of stuff in there to keep it going. RTE reckon about 400 people will have lost their jobs from this. In an economy which is theoretically growing again, that’s a lot when we measure changes in the jobless rate in the low thousands.

The problem is, even if I hadn’t thought about Clerys specifically, I had thought about the problems which probably have befallen it. Basically, it’s on O’Connell Street and this is, in fact, a major problem for Clerys. No one goes to O’Connell Street to do much shopping. The other two big stores on the street profit from proximity to Henry Street and the General Post Office. Otherwise, O’Connell Street is a bit tumbleweedish. Mostly when I get a bus into town now, it’s to run quickly to Henry Street and then, when I come back, the trip to the bus stop home doesn’t take me past Clerys. And why would it? There’s nothing much else there.

I was at the Road to Rising event on Easter Sunday this year and for the duration of that, O’Connell Street was pedestrianised from Abbey Street North. The weather was stunning, and there was a lovely atmosphere. It really was wonderful. And unique. Most days, even when the weather is good, the atmosphere on O’Connell Street is one of people passing through. You’d hardly know it existed really.

But O’Connell Street is a beautiful wide street and if, dispassionately, we considered reconfiguring the city to pedestrianise it, and reconsidered the businesses which open there – very few of which are attractive businesses for footfall – and turned into into a genuine city centre plaza, we could do a lot to open up the heart of the city. It would be a huge job and the sad thing for Dublin is that they take huge jobs with a lot of reluctance. In some respects, I’m amazed Grafton and Henry Streets ever got pedestrianised. The idea that you’d shut down O’Connell Street to motorised traffic, including buses, is something that would cause heart attacks all across the way. A city with a bunch of lovely, well presented shops, and nice café (and not just the fast food chains and a few pharmacies) and terraces. Instead of making O’Connell Street a arterial thoroughfare, which is basically what it is now, we could make it into a central civic square that people go to for the same of going there, to meet friends, have coffee and do some shopping.

In that context, a store like Clerys might have a future, and the rest of the small shops around O’Connell Street might be more interesting shops. In many respects, it could probably draw more shopping around it because Henry Street is already a decent store.

But even if we started to do it today, it’s too late to save Clerys and it’s too early to draw someone like Brown Thomas or even Marks and Spencers to the Clerys building.

Most of O’Connell Street was built in the early 20th century because lots of it was levelled between the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. A lot of the buildings, with some notable exceptions, are actually beautiful building. There is also some thought going into development around Parnell Square, another vaguely grimy part of town.

It seems to me sometimes, we have no vision for Dublin as a city. Dublin people seem to get very defensive about the idea that the city isn’t already perfect, which it isn’t, as anyone who navigates the public transport system would attest, and so discussions are often inconclusive.

Owen Keegan, the city manager, is looking at traffic and moving people around. I wish we would start the dialogue in terms of what we want the city to look like, rather than how to move people around. The second might come easier then. I just can’t see it happening.

 

annoyances, living in ireland, music

2015 – Dublin International Piano Competition

This is just a brief note. I was at the finals of the Dublin International Piano Competition the other evening.

There were four finalists, including one who had been in the finals three years ago. I missed most of the early rounds so my judgment really is based on what I heard in the finals.

My personal view is that the most promising of the four was a 20 year old American called Alex Beyer who played Beethoven. After that, I would have given a toss between Catherina Grewe and Nathalia Millstein. In the end, the jury went with Ms Millstein. I hope I am spelling the names correctly.

In terms of the music we heard, there was a preponderance (as usual) of Russian concertos, with only Beyer venturing too far west to Beethoven. In general, four very good performances, and to be fair, Nathalia Millstein did a technically very precise rendition of Prokofiev 2. I am not a fan of Prokofiev’s piano music, it must be said.

What annoyed me most, however, was nothing to do with the stage, but the behaviour of the audience. One pair got up and left – from the middle of a near front row – in the middle of the first performance. Someone else had a mobile phone text message in the middle of the third performance. A significant number of people arrived sufficiently late that they were not allowed in until the second performance. Over the course of the evening, a lot of people saw fit to leave mid performance.

Dublin has one of the finest piano competitions in the world. It would be nice if it wasn’t taken for granted. John O’Connor has ended the last two pleading for money.