Nick's Blog

I have a faith. It's not a very common faith. I have faith in the world. Not the world as in the Earth, but as in everything. Just as it is. Another way of saying this is that I don't believe in providence. I don't believe there is anything steering the course of events from 'outside' them in any way. No higher power, no visible or invisible hands, no 'objective Truth' (but there are small-t truths). Nothing providential. Why is it so hard for people to respect what is given to us, in our experience? Why do we always want to add levels to things? It's easy to think this is something only religious people do, with their other-worldly gods and hellfires, but it's rampant in all parts of life. If you think there is such thing as 'society' lording over what all of us do, there's providence. If you think there are only individuals and no society, there's providence again, just in the opposite direction. If you think science peels away laye...

The Gartner Group provides some very interesting analysis of the IT world. In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday they weighed into the iPad discussion, and gave a very good summary of the 'content' side of Apple's genius. The article was about Google's plans to launch a similar device. Gartner analyst Robin Simpson said other companies including Google would have trouble competing with Apple's iPad because Apple had already developed a strong ecosystem around its products, allowing users to buy content from iTunes with one click. There is its. There is no such thing as technology, the reason devices succeed and continue to exist is if you get the whole 'ecosystem' surrounding them right. It's all the one thing, a device or technology is not separate to getting all those other ecosystem things right. He goes on: "You can make great hardware, you can have a fantastic, easy-to-use operating system, but to make it commercially successful I think you n...

So what's the genius of the iPad? Time will tell if it sells, obviously, but it's a fascinating experiment. You always know when somebody is onto something new when others struggle to describe it. Specifically the best they can do is describe it as being 'like' other things they know. That's what most of the descriptions of the iPad have been. It's like an oversized iPod Touch, and like an ebook reader, and like a tablet PC, etc. The (always so spectacularly clever) reviewers then jump to what their hamster-cage brains then think must be the logical conclusion, that the new technology is 'nothing but' some variation on these other things. (Art and music reviewers do the same thing, and nearly always miss new talent, for the same reasons.) Steve Jobs gave an insight into the sort of there-is-no-such-thing-as-technology thinking Apple does in his presentation for the iPad. He described the iPad as fitting between the iPod Touch/iPhone and the Macbook i.e. ...

The new iPad. Just like something else, or something new? Apple has put the cat amongst the technology pigeons again with its new iPad. There are diehards for and against everything Apple does. Most technology writers and the majority of IT professionals tend to take the view that Apple produce expensive trinkets, when there are much cheaper and more feature-rich options available. I think they miss the point completely. Apple understands technology better than any of the other consumer electronics companies. And much better than most IT professionals. The IT industry in general is pretty immature in its outlook, although not in its size. It has taken a long time to get to grips with being a mass-level consumer industry, rather than a specialised cosy group of widget boffins. It's clear that it still has some way to go. What Apple basically understands is that there is no such thing as technology . Sounds a bit bizarre, but technology isn't (or shouldn't be) a noun. It...

Shaun Carney in today's Sydney Morning Herald sets out the case for the Rudd government having a longer-term strategy with the school data currently creating a fuss. So that sneaking suspicion I put in the last post might be what's really going on, which would be great for everybody. Carney sums it all up very well. The flight of the middle-class from the state sector, stimulated in part by the Coalition shovelling increasing amounts of taxpayer dollars into private schooling, has been relentless. This process has fed on itself, creating a middle-class mentality that assumes that state schools are a place of last resort for parents who could afford something better. Exactly what happened, the conservatives always do this. It's what they believe, that the public system is a safety net only and the real action should be in vibrant private enterprise. Of course politically they rarely say this, gushing about the wonders of the public system. They say the same thing about medic...

Having said unkind things about the government's school statistics website, I forgot to add one important caveat, from my point of view. From memory I wrote here before that it is possible the government is playing a clever, strategic long game with this website. John Howard was determined to preferentially fund private schools, even those with already vast resources. But he couldn't just up and do that without looking elitist and losing votes. So he devised an objective-looking formula based on postcodes to assess the wealth of particular schools, a formula that (he knew) ended up saying the richest schools in the country somehow needed millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars (often because these are boarding schools where wealthy parents from remote parts of Australia send their children, and those remote areas are poor if you average across the whole postcode). So the government of the time could hide behind a 'formula' for channelling vast rivers of taxpayer gold in...

Samuel Marsden (Reverend). Bring Back the Biff. Uninspiring portrait by Joseph Backler, but then Marsden was in many ways an uninspiring man. Different faces. Same hymn sheet. Julia Gillard is quoted in today's Sydney Morning Herald at length about the need for parents to get into their schools and sink the boot into underperforming teachers. Now any parent who can't wait to don the steel caps and march their righteous indignation in the front gates may know of one or two miserable taxpayer-funded leeches parading as educators. But how to identify them all, in the name of a great purge? Julia is here to help. Ms Gillard told the Herald the Government welcomed the fact that the website would empower parents to badger school staff to lift standards. ''We would expect parents to have robust conversations with teachers and principals,'' she said. This must be a step forward. Teachers had nothing to do already, now they can expect hordes of badgering parents wavi...