Ti Point Tork

Holiday Road Toll

January 2, 2012 – 10:02 pm
Every long weekend we hear how many people died, as though it means something, but there's never any analysis beyond whether it's more or less than last year's number. It doesn't help me know what's going on: are we better drivers or worse? What's the point of measuring if you don't analyse? After all, I just kissed goodbye to my wife as she set out for a 100km trip to Auckland to see a friend. Should I have encouraged her to stay at home? Comparison to last year's number is largely useless without knowing what the variation is. Is a 50% increase within the bounds of normal, or does it represent a nation of speeding drunks, blearily passing out behind the wheel and mowing over toddlers as we tow our boats back from the bach? If you want to make sense of the holiday road toll (as I write, we've had 17 ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

2011 in Books

December 31, 2011 – 4:03 pm
I've been conscientiously using Goodreads to review every book I read. I've used the Goodreads API, some Perl, and some Javascript to boil down my year's reading. Without further ado, I present ... My Year in Books$(function() { $('.bookspermonth').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' }); $('.starspermonth').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' }); $('.bookspershelf').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' });});Books: 100 Reading Rate: 3.6 days/book Monthly Breakdown: 8 books/month on average 11,9,12,5,6,6,7,1,9,15,6,13 Busiest Month: Oct (15 books) Slowest Month: Aug (1 book) Total Reading: 29,696 pages Shortest Book: Your Business Brickyard: Getting back to the basics to make your business more fun to run. at 64 pages Longest Book: The Crimson Petal and the White at 900 pages Average Book: 309 pages All Reviews: 47,905 words Shortest Review: No Dominion (Joe Pitt, #2) at 9 words Longest Review: The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World at 3,467 words Average Review: 479 words Average Quality: 3.3 stars Quality over time: 3.7,3.3,3,2,3.3,3,3.3,4,3.6,2.7,3.3,3.8 Best Month: ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

National Standards, Charter Schools, and a Pint on the Future

December 5, 2011 – 12:03 pm
tl;dr: Charter schools aren't a panacea, they don't appear to be compatible with the emphasis on National Standards, and this seems like the top of a slippery slope which will result in us all being as stupid as Americans. Background New Zealand introduced "National Standards" last year. In the past, the curriculum talked about competencies and learning areas in general terms and defined stages through which children would pass. It didn't say "at this age, children should be able to do X". That was the gap that National Standards filled. The debate has been around timing (too fast) and how those standard age-based skills were arrived at (not soundly). It's important to note that National Standards is not standardised assessment. That is, it's not the same test taken by every child once a year to determine what the child can do. Instead, teachers use their professional judgement to assess ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics, Rant | No Comments »

Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

November 23, 2011 – 10:07 am
It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in libraries for a few years now, and am always humbled by the expertise, hard work, and dedication that librarians of all stripes have. Yet it's no revelation that libraries aren't the great sources of knowledge and information on the web that they were in the pre-Internet days. I wanted to push on that and challenge the National and State librarians to think better about the Internet. I prefaced my talk by saying that none of this is original, so it shouldn't come as a surprise. I merely wanted to bring the different strands together in a way that showed them how to think about the opportunities afforded to libraries for the digital ...

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | 16 Comments »

Innovation is a Moral Good

November 20, 2011 – 9:54 am
Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it's old news to you. You have three options to make more money: Lower costs. Sell more of the same stuff. Make new types of stuff to sell. In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can't catch more fish because you don't have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell. These are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT propositions. If you lower costs, you don't increase the overall size of the market. If there's $5B in sales, you can make more of that $5B by lowering your costs. This isn't entirely true: elasticity of demand might increase revenue because lowering costs means you can lower the price, so more people may be able to afford it, and perhaps this new number * new ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand | 1 Comment »

Questioning University

November 16, 2011 – 8:17 pm
There's a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the case; now you have access to The Same Class of Unemployment Benefit. Even degrees in subjects without immediate business application (classics, art history, etc.) were valued as a sign of studiousness, discipline, etc. at least in so much as they put the possessor into the class of People Who Have A Brain. These days so many people are emerging with degrees that a degree alone isn't enough to separate you from the herd. That this happens in the liberal arts is understandable. But there's also a move afoot to reject Computer Science degrees: "go straight into a startup!" people say. I used to oppose this: university taught me ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Personal | 5 Comments »

Week 2

September 29, 2011 – 11:42 pm
A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and managed to informally acquire a new project (codename: Bagley). Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I'm helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we've passed through the "oh my god, it's going to happen!" stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We've started the conversations of how many of which type of person we'll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we'll nail down the specifics and budget. I finally got my kick-off email out with MacLean yesterday. Everyone had informally agreed to ...

Posted in Weeknotes | No Comments »

Two Upcoming Auckland Gigs

September 25, 2011 – 1:41 pm
Our band has two gigs coming up in Auckland and we'd love to see you there! We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good 'un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we'll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It's a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you're in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O'Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don't want to tell you about just yet. A week later, on Sunday October 9, we play the Devonport Bunker. That's two sets, featuring new material we haven't played in front of people before. The bunker is a small intimate venue, ...

Posted in New Zealand, Personal | No Comments »

Week 1

September 23, 2011 – 1:07 pm
I love BERG London's weeknotes and have resolved to follow suit myself. I'll do it for the rest of this year and see how it goes. So, onto it! Monday was when I wrote the talk I gave on Tuesday to Orion Health. They have regular hackathons (though they don't call them that, it's the idea of setting developers and other coal-face makers loose to build things for a few days, then report back). I was their first speaker for this hackathon, and was given a very wide brief—every topic I raised with the development manager there seemed to work. So I worked backwards from what I wanted to accomplish (firing people up at the start of a hackathon) and decided that I had to point out how awesome and important software people are (they are). I had been listening to an In Our Time ...

Posted in Weeknotes | No Comments »

100% Pure Chickenshit

June 23, 2011 – 11:56 am
New Zealand has, for a long time, marketed itself as 100% Pure. In the last year, this slogan has taken a beating. The climax seems to have been when BBC Hardtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur gave Prime Minister John Key a colossal roasting over the discrepancy between reality and the slogan. The slogan was watered down to "100% Pure You", and the pressure on politicians eased off. "Whew, our international PR slogan is saved!" Call me slow, but I just realized what a disgusting cop out this is. "100% Pure" isn't just a tourism slogan, it's how we see ourselves. We have a long tradition of believing we're clean and green, and of trying to act in league with that. It's a fantastically ambitious high standard to hold ourselves to. If we pollute streams with dairy farming run-off, stop doing that. If we ...

Posted in New Zealand, Rant | 2 Comments »