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Where do you want to volunteer today.

I had a long conversation with someone about volunteering the other day, someone who has spent a good deal of working life outside Ireland. Specifically he was talking about volunteering time to help local schools with tech knowledge transfer and training. In addition to that, someone sent me this this morning via twitter and it got me thinking about how it can be done rather than the barriers that tend to block it. Obviously there are elements of that last one that are irrelevant to kids outside America because we’ve different ways of doing things but some of the general comments about approaching problems of this nature and how girls tend not to push themselves are not yet history.

I did, at some point during my college years volunteer to help students in disadvantaged areas with some tuition for state exams but I don’t know, given the change in legislation and the need for background vetting whether programs like this still exist. I also like a lot what James Whelton has done with CoderDojo, and things like the Mathsjam movement.

I’m also aware that there is a lot of concern about maths teaching in secondary schools, the perception of maths as hard, as somewhere we’re poorly performing and from past personal experience, the lack of support, sometimes, for girls doing maths. I had a great, great maths teacher at secondary school – I gather he’s a head teacher somewhere now. But he had one hell of a battle and argument to try and keep girls from dropping out of the higher level maths courses.

So I’m looking at the possibility of setting up maths clubs not unlike the coderdojo idea but with some mad cross between mathsjam for kids, purely on a voluntary basis, or possibly going out as a speaker to secondary schools and colleges be it under the auspices of some sort of future planning/careers talks (do we still even do these) or some sort of maths talks and I really, really need to know what I need to know what from a legal standpoint…

 

Bug blaming

Yesterday, I came across an interesting post on Programmers.Stack.Exchange which caught my attention for one reason or another regarding additional fields in bug tracking software.

In one of the latest “WTF” moves, my boss decided that adding a “Person To Blame” field to our bug tracking template will increase accountability

It was not, it must be said, universally welcomed by the PSE community. Allegedly, this post is from the boss in question and it didn’t do a whole lot to win him any favours.

Blame is a dangerous word. It is not the sort of word that aids in root cause analysis, it is the kind of word that causes drawbridges to be pulled back up, the kind of word that causes staff to avoid taking responsibility for anything because it means they will get the blame for anything that can stick. It makes it difficult to get teams to work together, and it damages collaboration. Why? Because people are looking for blame and fault where they could be looking for cause and learning.

According to the second post above:

We anticipated the increase in production bugs when we moved away from having a dedicated QA team.

I’m utterly stunned by this. I don’t usually – in interviews – ask questions about these things – but it’s almost inconceivable to me that any place which wants to release good quality software doesn’t have a dedicated testing team. I mean it’s good they recognised they’d wind up with more production bugs but now they want to blame individuals for those bugs when they result from a half assed management decision to get rid of dedicated QA? Why would anyone want to work there?

The thing is, root cause analysis is important. Very important and often ignored over time. For an effective root cause analysis, you need to drop the idea of fault and blame and get in the concept of up-front honesty. I’m a fan of taking responsibility for my mistakes. This is the only way I can learn from them and more to the point, it’s the only way that other people can learn from them. “I goofed up” is a better starting point than “You goofed up”. Accusations and blame result in lousy team atmospheres, less willingness for people to work together; it causes isolation.

If the guy above was serious about getting people to take more pride in their work, he’d not be looking for a “person to blame”. That’s a bullying, hectoring field title and it negatively impacts morale. It’s not the sort of thing that makes people want to take responsibility for their faults and it doesn’t support the desire to be better. It more supports the desire not to be caught.

 

 

Data science

The last few weeks have been pretty busy on the assignment front as there were three in total due in the last couple of weeks, two maths and one statistics so I am really only catching on up on things here.

I started studying mathematics and statistics for a couple of reasons; (i) I liked mathematics a lot as a kid, but when push came to shoved aged 17, languages got higher up the priority list and (ii) the amount of data in the world is increasing; the number of people equipped to interpret it however doesn’t seem to be increasing. Also increasing are the number of people creating information graphics and data visualisations.

Some people are very good at this. The New York Times, for example, do sterling work in this area, as does the Office for National Statistics in the UK.

Some are not so good in interpreting underlying data. I’ve seen one absolutely beautifully drawn graphic that purported to display the strength of FaceBook in the social media world which compared FaceBook pageloads with Flickr image uploads. A fairer comparison would be pageloads for both sites. And this is a very simple criticism.

In other words, without a reasonable grounding in data analysis, it probably isn’t guaranteed that good datagraphics are going to appear.

Big Data is a buzzword which is turning up in my newsfeeds increasingly often. I’m not always sure what people understand by it but it is definitely flavour of the month and so we turn to this report from Silicon Republic on the subject of support for data science courses.

I am of the opinion that STEM (not sure I like that term for science, technology and maths courses but it has its uses) is definitely something worth investing in the future. However, like a lot of things, important and all as it is, it isn’t often adequately rewarded economically. Here, there are debates about how much people working in universities get paid; typically in the UK, funding for research is falling, and a lot of privately funded research is moving out of the UK, or its validity is being criticised purely on the grounds of the commercial nature of its funding (see pharmaceutical research as an example here – it is difficult to make any conclusion without some accusation of bias). In certain respects, research into options for the future is between a rock and a hard place.

EMC are best known to me for data storage. It’s interesting to see one of their senior guys talking about the importance of data science and I’d be interested to know if it’s coming from their interest in providing storage for large, nay massive quantities of data, or whether they also have some interest in how that information is organised. Obviously the big name in terms of how information is organised is Google. I will be interested to see if UCC do actually put a data science course together.

In the meantime, I have another 3-4 years of my own maths/stats to go and no doubt, the industry will change a bit again in that time.

 

Shortchanging investment in the future

Via Ninth Level, I find myself reading of all things, a Fianna Fail press release.

I can’t find a news report confirming the matter but feel the need to comment on it anyway:

At a major conference on Ireland’s competitiveness in Croke Park today, Minister Quinn attempted to defend his decision to abolish the Modern Languages in Primary School Initiative (MLPSI) by saying that he has bought several German cars in his lifetime but never needed to speak German to do so.

Release was issued by Averil Power, Fianna Fáil Seanad Spokesperson on Education.

No doubt a key reason we cancel initiatives like this could include the fact that we’re effectively bankrupt at the moment, don’t have money, the initiative is not really delivering, but that’s not, apparently what Ruairi Quinn said.

I have a declaration of interest. I speak fluent French and very good German. I’ve lived in France, Belgium and Germany. I have had that opportunity because I speak foreign languages.

Currently, on the propertypin, there is a discussion regarding schools in Dublin and while it covers a number of aspects of secondary schooling, there are comments from parents for whom language learning is very important. In other words, the mere purchase of a German designed car is not the only thing people might have ever used German for.

We also have calls from various business men for us to teach Chinese. I’ve written about this in the past also with a view to the practical implications of such an idea (clue – I’m not totally certain a blanket policy on Chinese because Richard Barrett, a business man with interests in China, says we should implement it). The point here is that there is an interest in teaching our young people other languages.

We suck at it. I’ve written about this in the past on one of my other sites and my view can be summed up as the country just being lazy at learning languages. We do not put in the effort, same as we don’t really put it into maths and science either. We could try a whole lot harder.

The comment attributed to the current Minister for Education just underlines that.

 

 

Leaving certificate maths.

I’m prone to complain about the streamlining and simplification of the maths syllabus here so having come across this blog post on aperiodical by Card Colm, I think it’s worth noting some of the points raised in it that just have not occurred to me.

Regardless, a system such as this ensures that one has some idea of what incoming university students know about mathematics.  Every single one of them has had 12 years of maths without a break.  It simply isn’t optional.

This is true, in my experience. Maths, of some description, is mandatory right up to the leaving certificate.

This is all in stark contrast to the situation in the USA, where I currently live and teach. There, there is essentially no guaranteed minimum level in mathematics that one can expect an incoming university student to have achieved. Some have not taken mathematics for several years before they show up at the gates of third level institutions.

I find this astonishing in many ways.

We complain quite a bit about maths coverage here and while I’d venture to say it’s been better in the past, I wonder, in truth, just how badly we are doing.

Viz, there is a debate going on in the UK regarding maths teaching up to the age of 18. Timothy Gowers has posted on this today and there is some interesting stuff there too. It’s also worth noting Christian Perfect’s comments on Card Colm piece above if you click through to Colm’s piece.

Solving problems

Some of the more interesting things I find myself reading turn up via my twitter feed. I have not yet identified who is best at identifying the things I find interesting, but someone during the week was reading about brainstorming and creativity.

I found this interesting because one of the things I have hated about brainstorming is the lack of critical analysis of the output. I find that where you have discussions where the merits and the demerits of an approach are considered – and you are prepared to listen to them – you’ll get a far more positive outcome. What interested me about that article however was not the discussion on brainstorming, but the discusssion on building design. This is something that I’ve been thinking about lately not necessarily in the context of effectively getting things done but in the context of utility (which indirectly leads to getting things done I suppose).

What I have been leaning towards is that concentrating on the beauty of an environment is of secondary importance if the utility is limited. A key example I have to deal with lately is the idea of beautiful dustbins which are miles from anyone’s desks. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone that this was probably not a good idea as people will just get dustbins and put them near their desks anyway. Utility wins over form. To some extent, when I look at the examples cited in that article, that’s what I see happening. People will do what they can to create an atmosphere where they can get their job done.

I’m not familiar with what research is done at an architectural or interior decor level into this. I know a lot of work goes into looking at the built environment but that’s not the same. I know that a lot of interior decorators who have decorated kitchens in houses that I have considered buying or renting in the last 10 years have clearly no idea how to cook. Or else they weren’t interior decorators. Apartments with inadequate storage, for example.

And work offices. I’ve worked in a few over my time and can say without any shadow of doubt that the aesthetic beauty of an office is of secondary importance to me than whether it makes it easier or harder for me to get my job done. This leads to me – for example – introducing headphones to shut out the noise which gets amplified by the aesthetically designed ceilings, or photographs on my desk to provide some humanity to the stark black and white design.

But the environment is only part of the problem. Communication while facilitated or hampered by environments is still controlled by human beings and a lot of human beings are happy to talk but not so happy to listen.

Somehow if we could more people to listen and analyse rather than talk and reject anyone else’s talking, the world might be more efficient.

What do we tell the youth of today, anyway?

I picked this up on my twitter feed this morning.

If you were giving a talk to 16 yr olds about economy, would you be upbeat to inspire them or more downbeat to snap them out of complacency?

(Liam Delaney, Professor of Economics Stirling University. Research Fellow UCD Geary Institute, occasionally blogs here also.)

We’re talking about 16 year olds here. Complacency is not what 16 year olds do. They dream, and old fogeys put a lot of effort into getting them to attach to reality. Being downbeat is part of that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is an utterly stupid way to go about things. Here’s the basic truth about economies. They generally trend towards improved life but they do it in wild cycles. There is not an economist nor a business man in the world who truly understands those cycles because those cycles are the collective output of a lot of small economies acting together in non-centrally planned ways. They are not rational and what’s more, they can be changed at the microlevel without any reference to any sort of economic theory about what the right thing to do is.

In other words, what you say to teenagers is Economies go up, economies go down, you try to learn to ride the cycle, and, although I am sure Liam might not agree with me on this, you can probably ignore economists dealing in economic theory because despite its pretensions, it is barely a measurable science, dismal or otherwise. The most interesting economists I know are not really economists; they’re statisticians.

Yes,  Economies go up, and they go down and you, coming into a down cycle, difficult as it might look, have massive, massive advantages over those who come into a good cycle. You have the chance to be creative in how you deal with issues and difficulties. You learn to be resourceful. You learn to achieve an awful lot with comparatively little. And you’re in a good place when the good times come.

And you have dreams and with the resourcefulness that you can be delivering now, you can try to exploit them. Not everyone will be a pop star but I’ll bet Steve Jobs wanted to be a fireman when he was 5. Lives change. Different things, opportunities, people come along. The way you look at life now will change. So while you’ll need to plan for the future – this is where I say get a decent education – you need to look at how you’re doing now as well. Play that guitar. Do that gig. Never regret that you didn’t try something at least once.

What you do will make the economy of the future. The more you believe in what you are doing, the better that future will be. You may travel. Travel and temporary migration will be one of the best things that can happen you because the world will change, the lens you look through to see it will change. Some of the best things that have happened to Irish society happened because people left and came back. Societal change in Ireland was driven by the diaspora who came back. Look on it as an opportunity and another building block in your life and your future and not something to be negative about.

This is what I would be telling sixteen year olds if I were Liam Delaney. And I wouldn’t be thinking of being negative to kick the complacency out of them because if nothing else, that will destroy the economy and society for a further generation. We need them to build the future, not lie around wondering just how bad things are going to get before they get a job of some description.

Ireland has been poorly served by her experts and ruling class. We need to change that.

When you’re done, read this from Ronan Lyons, last August.

Bottling Silicon Valley

One of our TDs took himself off to Silicon Valley a while back to see what was special about the place and more to the point, could we create something similar here in Ireland. In a way, it was a laudable objective, and you can read the article he wrote subsequent to the trip here.

I honestly believe that collective will would allow something special to be created here; but that will isn’t something you’d find in SIlicon Valley. There are a couple of things which make the Valley special – I’m not necessarily going to go into this in detail but the following are obvious advantages:

  • proximity to high quality education
  • infrastructure
  • access to finance

There are a couple of other small items as well such as greater tolerance of business failure, and faster recovery from said business failure.

Eoghan Murphy didn’t really talk about these in detail except the business failure side of things; he concentrated on solutions that involved importing people, via programs of paying people’s salaries, for example.

I’m not sure this is the way to look at things. We need to teach people to have ideas, and the faith that they can carry them through. Ireland is appalling at this; I suspect, in part, because of the social judgmentalism which I think the Catholic Church gifted us. How we judge people’s success is depressing. It’s not often because they have created something special, but only because they went to the right schools, or, made money and talk to the right people.

In my view, the ecosystem which is Silicon Valley, or some functional equivalent, might be better grown here if we look at two key things:

  • education system
  • how we fund start ups.

We do neither particularly well. If you look at both Facebook (which I don’t like) and Google, both of them grew out college projects to some extent. In the early days of Google (and if you have not read In the Plex by Steven Levy you should), they got huge support from Stanford University. It’s the sort of support that not one university here could do because they don’t really have the money.

Via a ridiculous job creation scheme, the government appropriated money from pension funds to do something about our unemployment. If we want to create something innovative and special here, Job Bridge was not where we should have put the money; and nor is it in “trying to create Silicon Valley”.

We have some useful advantages here. We have the wherewithal to build decent data centres. We have the wherewithal to teach people to exploit them. That is where I’d like to see that money going; into the future and not just the present.

Hmmm…So..should we learn Chinese?

Via the Journal – a site I haven’t really worked out the purpose of yet – we have this little piece on whether we should all be learning Chinese.

There are a couple of key pieces of information:

Richard Barrett, who set up Treasury Holdings with Johnny Ronan, suggested from the audience that Irish people should be learning Chinese to equip us to fully embrace the possibilities for trade with the surging Asian economy.

I have issues with this, as indeed I have issues with anyone who pipes up and says “we should be learning X language for Y overly simplistic reason”. I may be wrong but I understand that Richard Barrett does a lot of trade in China which will probably explain his interest in getting our young people to learn China. But it’s not the sort of trade I want to see this country wasting any more money on collectively. Treasury Holdings was a development company and yes, some of its loans were taken on board by NAMA. In other words, this is not a sector of industry which would necessarily create a lot of sustainable economic growth for large numbers of enterprises.

I want to see our young people creating things; being given the freedom to create things. They will need communication skills as well – I will come to that in a moment – but above all, before they can trade with another country, they need something to sell. We are not teaching them to create stuff to sell in general. I’m sure there are people out there trying…individually – but if we were going to put any money and effort into the economic future of the country it should start with problem solving and creating things. So if we’re going to bring something new into the education system, it shouldn’t be ONE particular language, suggested by a property magnate.

I’d be in favour of much improved programming and design skills but that’s another argument later.

The thing is…we don’t trade much with China; not compared to how much we trade with France and Germany. And we already have problems getting our young people to learn to speak either effectively. I’ve written about this elsewhere so I am not going to go into the details now. To get our young people speaking any of the Chinese languages effectively out of school is a massive task when we can’t get them speaking an Indo-European language effectively.

One of the issues I have in Ireland is that it’s possible for someone like Richard Barratt to pop something like this out and have the Taoiseach have to respond to it without any real understanding of how possible it is – where are all these Chinese language teachers going to come from, for example – and how much is it going to cost given the rarity of the skill – and what directly is it going to bring the country if we don’t also – and more importantly – teach our young people to create something that we can trade with? Being able to speak Chinese and English is not enough. You need something to trade with.

Maybe I am missing something here.

oh and on the subject of the reading list.

Currently I am supposed to be reading Alex’s Adventures in Numberland – it is fascinating if you’ve any remote interest in maths by the way – and a couple of science books, one of which is Earth in 100 Groundbreaking Discoveries by Douglas Palmer. It’s been fascinating and it’s upping my knowledge of geology (desirable) without it necessarily being via a DVD narrated by some unknown with an ominous voice (serious – watch documentaries on the History Channel to get a vibe for what I am complaining about here). There’s a review from Popular Science here. Also in the pile beside my bed is The Science Book: Everything you need to know about the world and how it works.

I go through phases on the book but have found that, with some notable exceptions (Terry Pratchett being the most noticeable), most of my books are generally non-fiction and mainly drawn from science, mathematics, linguistics, history and travel. Oh, and photography. I have a monumental library of photography books at this stage, with a certain specialised interest in sports photography. And cookbooks.

I should probably stop digging on the pile of books front. Suffice to say, Kindle software and ebooks will be revolutionising my life the more the catalogue grows.