Just a mini-rant for today, but one which I think we can all get behind.
I had a rather disappointing dinner last night, partly because I was using own-brand sweetcorn rather then Green Giant (ho, ho, ho!), but more because the pasta stir-in sauce I used (classy, I know) said
‘new improved recipe!’
on it.
I can’t be alone, can I, in feeling a sense of fear and dread when I read that on the label of a favourite food product? It does, by and large, mean ‘new not-quite-as-good recipe’, doesn’t it?
The problem with that message as a concept is that the people you’re telling it to, your existing customers, presumably liked the previous recipe just fine. That’s why they buy it! Does anyone load a jar of sauce into their trolley saying ‘well, I’ll buy it for now, but until they change the recipe it tastes pretty shit to me’? No, people buy a product becasue they’ve maybe tried a few different varieties and settled on that one, or just tried that particular one once and liked it.
This is one of those times when marketing people have been asked to make some bad news more palatable to consumers and they decide that the best way is to treat us like fucking idiots and pretend that it’s actually a good thing, and that they’re doing it in order to serve you better. NO! What’s happened is the maker of my favourite brand of stir-in sauce (which might rhyme with fuck-me-oh) wanted to cut costs by using cheaper ingredients but their taste testers said it tasted worse. Oh well, just polish the turd and say it’s a ‘new improved recipe’.
Let’s go to the horse’s mouth and see what the Council have to say about it to begin with (though of course the BBC chose to add this at the bottom of the article):
He said: “Ashcombe is a primary school and they believe that children under the age of 11 are still emotionally and socially developing and therefore cards declaring love can be confusing.
“Any families wishing to send cards are asked to send them in the post or deliver to home addresses by hand.”
The Mail gives this quote from the headmaster to sum up his position:
‘Some children and parents encourage a lot of talk about boyfriends and girlfriends,’ he said. ‘This often leads to children being upset when they are “dumped” and other fuss which interrupts their learning.
‘The school believes that such ideas should wait until children are mature enough emotionally and socially to understand the commitment involved in having or being a boyfriend or girlfriend.
‘For this reason, we do not wish to see any Valentine’s Day cards in school this year. Any cards found in school will be confiscated.’
Seems reasonable – cards can still be exchanged, just not in school. I’d also say the argument that pre-teens are too young to have any idea about love, let alone declare it to classmates, seems a sound one.
Wait, what am I saying, it must be PC gone mad!
Says a parent:
“It’s a tradition, I can remember when I used to receive cards from boys in school. It’s a lovely thing to do.”
Yes, it is a ‘lovely thing to do’ when you do get cards. When you’re a picked upon pre-adolescent without the emotional capability to process such things, and everyone else in your class gets a Valentine’s card, and you don’t (or just get a joke card accompanied by barely disguised sniggers), it’s an awful experience.
Her argument goes along the same ridiculous lines as a hypothetical ‘Well I can walk up stairs perfectly well, it’s a lovely thing to do. Why do we need to install all these pesky ramps everywhere, clogging up the street?’. Sometimes – I have to break it to you – rules are put in which might slightly inconvenience the many in order to greatly improve the lives of the few. Is that a bad thing? Is it so terrible that if your
“six [year-old] … had a little girlfriend since nursery”
you now will have to take him round to the girl’s house to deliver the card rather than have him take it to school, so that those kids without that kind of relationship with the opposite sex don’t feel excluded?
Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe also criticised the move.
She said: “It’s only a bit of fun once a year and it doesn’t mean anything to kids that age.”
This is Ann Widdecombe, expert in child psychology, is it? How the fuck do you know it doesn’t mean anything to ‘kids that age’. Have you spoken to all of them? She continues:
“I just think it is rather silly. Haven’t they anything better to worry about at that school?”
Ah, you’re probably right. The headmaster has probably spent the entire last 12 months solely focussed on whether to allow Valentine’s day cards and how best to stop the fun of all the little kids. Rather than, you know, observing that the tradition has in previous years caused some emotional stress to some of the pupils and deciding that this year, overall, it’s better to have a blanket ban. A decision which might have taken 15 minutes out of his day.
The Mail, of course, have a similar line. And the comments are what you’d expect:
Mail readers reply
So no-one’s fussed either way about the environment, LizH is downmodded for agreeing with the school, and Tony makes a gay joke. Sigh.
Eric Lippert is probably my favourite computer science blogger (even narowly beating the mighty Joel Spolsky) as not only do his interests in language design and linguistics intersect quite nicely with mine but he manages explains very complex topics in incredibly clear and concise ways, and still have the odd humourous side comment. If you’re not a software engineer and don’t care about identifying cycles in type hierarchies then just read the following few paragraphs:
First off, what is this thing called the “reflexive and transitive closure”?
Consider a “relation” – a function that takes two things and returns a Boolean[1] that tells you whether the relation holds. A relation, call it ~>, is reflexive if X~>X is true for every X. It is symmetric if A~>B necessarily implies that B~>A. And it is transitive if A~>B and B~>C necessarily implies that A~>C.
For example, the relation “less than or equal to” on integers is reflexive: X≤X is true for all X. It is not symmetric: 1≤2 is true, but 2≤1 is false. And it is transitive: if A≤B and B≤C then it is necessarily true that A≤C.
The relation “is equal to” is reflexive, symmetric and transitive; a relation with all three properties is said to be an “equivalence relation” because it allows you to partition a set into mutually-exclusive “equivalence classes”.
The relation “is the parent of” on people is not reflexive: no one is their own parent. It is not symmetric: if A is the parent of B, then B is not the parent of A. And it is not transitive: if A is the parent of B and B is the parent of C, then A is not the parent of C. (Rather, A is the grandparent of C.)
It is possible to take a nontransitive relation like “is the parent of” and from it produce a transitive relation. Basically, we simply make up a new relation that is exactly the same as the parent relation, except that we enforce that it be transitive. This is the “is the ancestor of” relation: if A is the ancestor of B, and B is the ancestor of C, then A is necessarily the ancestor of C. The “ancestor” relation is said to be the transitive closure of the “parent” relation.
I think that’s about as clear and concise way to define closures over relations anyone can write. If you really want your brain to flip then read his series of articles on covariance and contra-variance – mind blowing. Or if you want a bit of lighter relief, read his rants
Since learning about the BCA v Singh case through the authoritative Jack of Kent’s blog I’ve become rather too obsessed with skepticism/liberlism – I haven’t changed my political thinking very much (maybe moved from just right of centre to just left) but these writers seem to speak the same language as me and argue things I generally agree with, so I’m happy to stand under their metaphorical collective banner. Crispian Jago’s blog is the light relief in the crowd – in one video he wagers that ‘if homeopathy works I’ll drink my own piss’ and then proceeds to prepare a homeopathic solution from said urine and drink the result. Genius.
In the above linked cartoon he turns well known skeptics into South Park characters. Have an explore around his site for more gems.
An article from a real newspaper – the Grauniad Guardian. As is all too well known to anyone who knows me, I’m quite a fan of Mr. Brooker, and I think this stands as one of his best rants. Particularly the following:
Watching Marks and Spencer’s Christmas ad is like sitting through Children in Need. Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Myleene Klass, Jennifer Saunders, Twiggy, James Nesbitt, Wallace and Gromit . . . it’s so chummy and cosy and thoroughly delighted by its own existence, I keep hoping it’ll suddenly cut to a shot of a deranged crystal meth user squatting on the cold stone floor of a disused garage, screaming about serpents while feverishly sawing their own hand off at the wrist.Instead it jokily tries to undercut itself by including a cameo from Philip Glenister, standing in a pub to prove what a bumptiously down-to-earth Mr Bloke he is. His job is to stand at the bar claiming that the best thing about Christmas is the sexy girl from the Marks and Sparks ads running around in her knickers. Then it cuts to the sexy girl from the Marks and Sparks ads running around in her knickers, as though this is somehow as iconic a Christmas image as Rudolph’s nose or the little baby Jesus. Listen here, M&S: few things in life are more pukesome and hollow than a self-mythologising advert – so next year do us all a favour and just shake a few sleighbells, flog us some pants, and then piss off back to your smug little shop and be quiet.
Another rant to be finishing off with, this time from Anton Vowl (who’s catchphrase should really be ‘reading the grotty, seedy newspapers so you don’t have to.’) – an angry, angry man. For extra comic value try reading his diatribe on getting parcels delivered in the style of Christian Bale’s famous shouty-fest[2]:
You tried? Oh good for you. What do you want – a fucking round of applause? How about I whine to you about a series of unsuccessful ‘attempts’ to pay you the money I owe you?
Proper service should be resumed tomorrow.
Mark
[A Boolean is a true or false variable - Mark] [↩]
Polemic time again. One facet of advertising which profoundly annoys me (and there are many facets of advertising which profoundly annoy me) are adverts where the advertisers act as if the thing they wish were happening were actually happening. ‘Oh, I wish people were so excited by our new range of loo scrubbers that they held celebratory parties in the street and in years to come related with teary eyes to their grandchildren the magical day when the new Bigger Better Bog Brush bounded into their lives!’ is what I imagine they say in their trendy Soho offices. And so in a masterstroke of public wankery they shoot an advert where people are giving up their first-born children for a chance to own one of their poxy new products.
Don’t get me wrong, passion about what you’re selling is entirely admirable, and it’s right that some pride in your products should come across in an advert; my problem is when advertisers try to shoe-horn in an emotional response to a product where no such response previously existed. It’s not sexy just because you tell me it is.
I won’t reveal which major technology company a while ago sent me an advert for an upcoming developer’s conference on the use of their technologies which had the following strap-line:
Get ready. It’s almost here. The free techie party that everyone talks about and no one misses because hey, you do not want to miss out on this kind of learning and fun!
Wow, that’s some pretty bold claims; ‘no one misses’ it, apparently. It’s a ‘party’ of ‘learning and fun’[1].
Let’s be honest, no one will find a programming conference on Delphi unnamed coding tool fun, unless they’re an imbecile. However, despite the patent lack of fun, many people might yet be interested in attending; on the more visceral end of the scale, those whose livelihoods depend on advance use of these technologies will be very interested to learn of a (free, by the way) conference on how better to use them, on the other hand the basic satisfaction of intellectual curiosity is something which many people actively seek. It’s rather churlish to describe such pursuits as ‘fun’ – is watching the news ‘fun’?; reading a history book?; engaging in a robust debate on religion? No, I would argue, it’s not ‘fun’, but it doesn’t have to be – it’s enough to be intellectually stimulated and emerge from the experience more knowledgable and mentally enriched.
By all means advertise in passionate terms what this conference will provide, but be honest – don’t try to pretend it’s going to be a rip-roaring ride of fun, it’s insulting to the intelligence.
In a similar vein, though with a very different agenda, a few years ago the UK government (I would guess through it’s touchy-feely ‘DirectGov’ money sink nebulous concept – don’t get me started on the execrable ‘I’d Go Direct Guv’ advert) launched an advertising campaign to convince teenagers that unprotected sex is irresponsible and likely to fuck up your life (which I think few would disagree with). Now they could have chosen a number of approaches to achieve this aim; perhaps they could have used a stern authority figure to proclaim the dangers of ‘going commando into the pink jungle’, or they could have used talking heads of those of their peers who have met with the nasty consequences of ‘riding the Indian train‘ as a shock cautionary tale of the dangers. But no, they made a series of adverts which depicted what the government dearly wished were true; they had a bunch of teenagers acting like unprotected sex was uncool, and you’d be ostracised if you dared go in unsheathed:
Haha, they’ve put him in goal because he didn’t use a condom – it’s funny cos it’s not true[2]. Now while there are a great number of teenagers who do know the dangers of unprotected sex and would always use a condom, they are not who this advert is aimed at. The people it’s aimed at would, by definition, never be having that conversation. Does the government really think that those teenagers will see that advert and think ‘God, that must be what everyone else at school is really thinking, I’d better start using a condom – I don’t want to play in goal!’[3]. Very few people are that stupid or gullible. It’s not cool just because you tell me it is.
Till tomorrow, I hope.
Mark
I’m somehow reminded of the Complaints department of The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation – ‘Share and Enjoy!’ [↩]
There is a joke in there somewhere about David Seamen but I can’t find it at the moment [↩]
Releasing their inner Seamen if you will (found it!). [↩]
Start of an occasinoal series of posts about how journalism seems to work in the 21st Century. Inspired in no little part by Private Eye, Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe and Anton Vowl’s Enemies of reason.
BBC News provides an RSS feed so that readers can stay up to date with their stories. All well and good. But very often the short link title is very different to the published headline and both are often different to the actual content of the article.
So the article’s lead paragraph heavily implies that playing classical music is a more effective deterrent to classroom disruption than not playing it, yet the actual article doesn’t back this up in the slightest. An executive summary of the article might more accurately be
Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.
The RSS link title is even more misleading -
‘How Mozart is the ultimate deterrent for naughty pupils’
‘Ultimate deterrent’! ‘ULTIMATE’! ‘DETERRENT’! That means it’s the bee’s knees, the dog’s bollocks of ‘deterrents’. But notice how both quoted words are never vindicated in the actual answer; there’s no mention of any other forms of discipline for comparison, not even by inference. We’re not told that this school has found a marked improvement in classroom behviour, nor is the school compared to similar schools with a different discipline policy.
There’s also no concrete evidence to back-up the ‘deterrent’ angle. We can I’m sure agree that the style of discipline is unusual and seems well thought out and, actually, quite a good idea (I think the aim of making detention a way to try to instill the joy of learning is an extremely admirable one) – but it can only be a ‘deterrent’ if it has been shown to actively make kids more reluctant to risk a trip to detention. This, of course, is what the BBC is trying to make us think in the way the article is couched. We’re supposed to imagine these kids so abhored at the idea of listening to Classical music (to rhyme with ear-rape) that they’ll do anything to avoid the horror of The Magic Flute, even if it means behaving in class!
But there is nothing in the artical that suggests anything of the kind. No statistics of ‘repeat offenders’ as we might call them, showing how the figure has gone down since the introduction of the policy, no soundbites from pupils saying how they ‘hate dis classical shit, innit?’. Nothing. As I said, you could replace the entire article with one sentence:
Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.
