Day: 23 August 2006

In a recent post titled On Control, I wrote about what happened to LIFE Magazine in 1972; in it I referred to a number of quotes from something called Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers.

As an aside, I asked if anyone knew where I could find my favourite LIFE photograph, one that has eluded me for three decades. And amazingly, based on my description alone, (search engines eat your heart out!) one of you managed to find the precise one. Thank you again, Zigzackly.

Here’s a thumbnail of the image; full attribution to Gerald Waller (though I remember the original credit as Wahler not Waller) and to Life Magazine and to the Red Cross and anyone else who’s entered the fray in those three decades, image posted by me on a fair-use basis. In fact I”ll go further. Whoever owns the rights to that photograph, if you see this then please contact me so that I can buy it off you and make the photograph available to the world.

The thumbnail really doesn’t do it justice. So please follow this thread, as suggested by Zigzackly, to see the full-scale image for yourself. Then you will understand why I love the photograph.

I followed that thread immediately, found the larger image, and felt great. Reunited. Then today I decided to rummage further, see whether I can find ways to order a large print. And was bemused to find that the site I went to was moderated by …. the very same Dirck Halstead I borrowed quotes from.

So I tried to find out more about Dirck Halstead, and have some reason to believe he lives in …. Austin, Texas.

Which is where I was when I wrote the post. I’ve contacted Dirck by e-mail just in case he can help.

Regular readers will know that I have a thing about education, and that my dream is to build a school from scratch as and when I have no role to play in traditional enterprise. A school that makes use of social software and Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder; that knows how to create value from “globalisation and disintermediation and the internet” (as Ken Ohmae said a few decades ago in The Borderless World); that works like an efficient charity, with 95% of the income being used for the purpose it was designed for (to teach and to learn) rather than “administration and management”.

I have been extremely impressed with what I have heard and seen about ARK, a meta-charity that treats all the funds it generates as investments with a measured social return and low administrative costs; I believe that something similar can be done in education. A model where we treat school funds as investments with a clearly defined social return (you can call it educational return if you wish) and have a clear basis for keeping administrative costs appreciably low. But I digress.

One of the reasons I have such a passion for education (I have many reasons, but this time I am concentrating on just one) is an out-and-out belief in nurture being more important than nature. I am not a fan of The Bell Curve or related works and ideas.

You can imagine my delight when I chanced across this article in the August issue of Scientific American. [And thank you, Scientific American, for not hiding it behind a DRM wall. And thank you for bothering to ask me, via a simple survey, whether I was a subscriber or not when I looked at it, and if so what I subscribed to. Do share your results when you have them, if only to prove that subscriber recommendations are an incredible marketing process, particularly when unhampered by DRM walls].

The article, headlined The Expert Mind and subtitled Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well, is well worth a read. It goes through why chess could be “the Drosophila of cognitive science” in terms of measurement, synthesis, scope for laboratory experimentation and repeatibility, ease of observation in natural environment, many things. I’m personally also very keen on the fact that it is cognitive and as language- and culture-independent as possible; there’s a lot of good stuff in it that relate to apperception and Gladwellian Blink, on stored-and-recallable knowledge rather than pure analytical power, even on memory and chunking theory.

There’s also some solid backing to the Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration argument, to the importance of perseverance, to the importance of an early and strong motivation.

But what did it for me was the coda to the article. I quote:

Instead of perpetually pondering the question “Why can’t Johnny read?” perhaps educators should ask “Why should there be anything in the world he can’t learn to do”.

For educator read manager or mentor or whoever. This is not just about schools. But it is about education.

Nurture.

OK, I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m passionate about cricket and therefore feel I must say what I feel.

I’m appalled at the playing of the race card in recent discussions and debates about the last England-Pakistan Test.

• Umpires can and do make bad decisions. They’re human, and often have to make the calls without any technological aid.
• Players can and do make bad decisions. They’re human, and sometimes their gamesmanship overwhelms their sporting instincts.

That’s cricket.

One of the finest things I can ever see in sport is to watch a batsman walk before an umpire gives him out, because he knows he’s out. I have seen this a number of times in Test cricket and every time I see it, my heart fills with glee.

Cricket is essentially a gentleman’s game, one of the last few remaining, and we must do whatever we can to retain that.

Sport and politics make unnatural bedfellows.

Darrell Hair had a right to do what he did. At worst he can be accused of a lack of courtesy, in not warning the Pakistan captain prior to taking his decision. This may have defused the situation. But it does not make Darrell Hair wrong, or a racist.
Inzaman had a right to do what he did. Just because we’ve never had a case of a Test Match being forfeited, we cannot criticise him for his action. [An aside: Have we had a batsman “timed out” in a Test Match yet? I can’t remember an occasion. Must check]. At worst he can be accused of a lack of care about the history and ethos of the game, given that it hasn’t happened before. This does not make Inzamam a bad cricketer all of a sudden.
We all learn from challenges to rules; sometimes the challenges are saddening, but the world learns from them. We learnt from the Bodyline tour;  the D’Oliviera incident; the Kerry Packer breakaways; the Ewan Chatfield incident; the Gatting-In-Your-Face-Shakoor-Rana sessions; and we will learn from this one as well. Rules for games like cricket are their own form of complex adaptive system, and will evolve. They will improve.

But not by making this a race incident. I support both the English and Indian cricket teams, watching them whenever and wherever I can. [Before you ask, just like the Scot at Twickenham, when it comes to India versus England, I fail the Tebbit Test gloriously].

I have been known to “watch” cricket on teletext, when a match is not transmitted live via radio or television. I love cricket. And I have felt hard done by as a spectator when umpiring decisions went against the team I supported. Darrell Hair was himself responsible for some of them, particularly in an Australia-India series some years ago. But on balance Mr Hair has been an exemplary umpire, even if I haven’t always agreed with his decisions, especially with my benefits of replays and comments and hindsight, and even some supporter bias.
But I never thought he called it wrong because of race.
Let’s keep it that way.

Just a thought.

Why is it that the spam I get is usually about sex (porn sites and performance enhancers), drugs (performance enhancers and weight loss) rock & roll (ringtones and downloads) and money (every get-rich-quick scheme possible, along with a few that defy belief)? 99% of the stuff that Akismet blocks for me (thank you Akismet) falls neatly into one of these categories. Is this true for everyone else out there? I’m waiting to see what emergent category comes along to break up this long-standing quartet.