Corrrect spellling? Why bother?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers occur in a word. The olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

I pinched this off a website a friend sent to me. I'm always carrying on about carelessness in spelling and grammar on blogs and in emails. Is that why the friend sent it to me?

A turning point in human society

What would get me so excited that I'd write this, as I did to a friend the other day: “Will change dramatically the way humans interact with one another.”

And further, to say we're at “a turning point in human society.”

Would you believe, I've been stimulated by a video – a celebration of Web 2.0.

But what are we celebrating? What is Web 2.0? That's part of the fascination – nobody is really confident of a definition. It's like, “I know it when I see it.”

The World Wide Web, and other services which use the internet, have rocketed ahead in just over a decade. In 1993, only 80 websites existed around the world.

The simple HTML tags conceived by Tim Berners Lee to control how text would display on a computer screen were steadily supplemented and superseded by much more complex coding which can make the tyro's head swim and the website sing and dance – CSS, PERL, Javascript, CGI, MySQL, and all the rest of it.

So, considering the breathtaking history of the WWW's development, what makes Web 2.0 so different that people are numbering it to suggest a whole new generation?

You could define Web 2.0 as a basket of technologies which carry the World Wide Web into a new era. But I feel the excitement comes not from the technologies per se, but from the extraordinary speed at which they are reshaping the Web into a world community which anyone can join without high-level computer skills.

If anything, it's the way that it's now so easy to participate – in two-way traffic – which defines Web 2.0. And this participation is what makes me think we're looking at the one of mankind's biggest social revolutions.

It's a rough analogy, but perhaps we can compare it with what happened after modern nations began extending universal, if rudimentary, education to the lower classes in the 19th century.

Many of the newly and poorly educated people went no further, although they created a mass market for the penny-dreadful press which met their needs – the equivalent of today's readers of "celebrity" magazines.

But others grabbed that basic literacy, then built on it with study in politics, economics and social theories at mechanics institutes, schools of arts and literary institutes.

[To Australia's good fortune, many of them then escaped the ossified class structure of British society – if you were born to a farm labourer's family, you were expected to remain a labourer – by migrating. Check out a biography of Sir Henry Parkes to understand what I'm rabbiting on about. ]

Where once we opened opportunities to entire populations with rudimentary public education plus a self-improvement movement, today we have the Web 2.0 revolution.

As with elementary education, the majority of users will have simple needs – sending news and photos to far away family, or running a Britney fan club. Nothing wrong with that.

Millions of people – idiots, savants, fanatics, as well as sensible people like you and me – are already out there on the playing field. The blog ranking service Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) now tracks almost 60 million blogs. Every day, 10,000 new blogs are created and some 1.3 million entries are posted to blogs. (Puts my little effort into perspective.) Yes, blogging is part of Web 2.0.

I'd like to see a debate about where Web 2.0 may take us. Will we see a mob psychology, or will it deliver the biggest leap in participatory democracy mankind has ever known? Will it encourage a new elite of thinkers and activists to emerge? (I think this is already happening.)

Will an intelligent woman in a Sudanese village, perhaps using a computer costing only a few dollars because of Bill Gates's philanthropy, be able to offer insights into our world because she can connect to like-minded thinkers around the globe?

Will we have to redefine values such as ethics, equity, copyright, love, family, etc? Or, more to my thinking, buttress them against the pressures rising around us all – even if we have to reevaluate the methods by which we sustain them.

Quality and integrity will have to be constantly in our minds, both in evaluating the information we exchange and in our dealings with people who otherwise remain unknown to us. But how do we make sure that happens?

Young people are right on top of the technology, but do we have the right type of teachers and mentors to stimulate and guide their thinking on issues of quality and integrity. (There's more discussion on this in my other blog.)

Who is going to preach literacy, that precious skill which allows civilised people to communicate with precision, with nuanced subtlety or sledgehammer force as the need dictates?

Big questions, worth thinking about. I'm an optimist. I think the answers will emerge along with the technology.

Okay, I've tried to make you read this essay before giving you the link to the video, which is on YouTube (yeah, that's Web 2.0 too). Here's the link. Hope you enjoy it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&NR

If you haven't got your kids around to tell you what to do, this may help. YouTube will open with the video in a small window. You can freeze the video or replay it with the buttons and slider below the image. The button on the far right below the video window will enlarge the video to your full screen

---

Note: I have an associated blog, Grumpy Old Tutor, in which I have developed some of my ideas about education. You'll find it here.

---

A toast to my health

GOOD NEWS: My prostate cancer remains under control. I've just learned that hormone treatment has brought my PSA – prostate specific antigen – level down to 0.65 from 2.6 six months ago. A year ago my PSA was 96.3, the result of a prostate tumour rated aggressive and already spreading into my pelvic lymph nodes. Now we'll see how I go with three months off the hormone tablets (sorry ladies, not enough to get me back in action).

Apart from sharing the good news with friends, I'm also posting this to emphasise to you guys the value of screening.

If I'd done nothing until I felt symptoms, it's likely my cancer would have spread into my pelvis and perhaps it would have been too late for any treatment with a good chance of success.

One thing to cloud the good news. The blood test which revealed the PSA fall also revealed diabetes. Damn! I should have listened to my wife about beer and exercise and all that sort of stuff. Still, I'd rather have diabetes than out-of-control prostrate cancer.

Women at the birth of a nation

Sometimes, when I'm feeling mischievous, I suggest European settlement of Australia really began with a drunken orgy on February 6. Perhaps we should observe that date as Australia Day.

After all, it's the day women joined the settlement.

On that day in 1788, after the male convicts had laboured for more than a week setting up rudimentary buildings at Sydney Cove, it was time to land the women convicts. The disembarkation took all day.

Then the sailors asked for rum “to make merry with upon the women quitting the ships.” From contemporary accounts, all that night there were scenes of debauchery and riot which beggared description. Even a sudden Sydney thunderstorm could not drown the revelry.

Nobody putting their hands up for February 6? What a lot of wowsers we've become!

More seriously, how about January 1? In 1901, that was the day on which Australia became a nation, rather than an assortment of British colonies. It would be a day for all Australians – it's not for nothing that many Aboriginal activists refer to January 26 as Invasion Day.

A Christmas wish for Candy

The festive season started too soon. A fortnight of mawkish seasonal songs pouring out of the radio and filling the shopping malls – bah humbug, even a saint would become grumpy.

However, I'm lifted by the quiet elation that follows a win over writer's block. I'm moving through the autobiography of the novelist Kylie Tennant, convinced hers is a story which would fascinate today's readers, and a good subject for one of the essays in a website I hope to develop.

About 1950, this country schoolteacher's wife lived in the inner Sydney slums with prostitutes to gather material for a novel, and managed to be jailed in Long Bay for a week, making friends of the mattress workers sharing her dormitory.

As I read Kylie Tennant's story, the ABC radio beside my desk says a man has been charged with the murders of five prostitutes in England. I reflect that the British media have depicted the victims as ordinary women, albeit driven by drug habits. Does that reflect a shift in public attitudes to sex workers?

I remember a young woman with whom I enjoyed a chat early this year. She crept up as I sipped a beer in my favorite pub, and asked for a few dollars. A good hard luck story. Her husband had emptied her bank account. I reached into my pocket.

Candy – that's not her name, but if you've seen the film you'll get the picture – looked from side to side, leaned forward, and said: “Actually, what I really need is forty dollars, and I could make it worth your while.”

I could only stammer: “I'm almost seventy – I couldn't ...”

The change in her demeanour startled me. No longer a beggar, she had become the artisan confident of her skill. “I can get you up,” she said.

But where would we go? “You've got your car?” Well, no, actually, I rode my bicycle up to the pub. Candy thought for a moment, then asked:

"You know those old tennis club buildings over in the park?”

It was time to explain to Candy that commercial sex was unlikely to turn me on – and certainly not in the filth of a derelict squat. I expected her to move on, but she stayed and we chatted, moving to another bar so she could scrounge a light.

She insisted she'd completed a methadone program and was now clean. What about those tracks? – I'd never seen a woman with such badly scarred arms. They're old, she said. What about those blue bruises above your elbows? My husband did that when he hit me. (Later, a friend tells me such bruising can result from injecting methadone, a syrup which needs to be pushed in with a horse needle.)

I enjoyed our chat, and the unexpected rapport which developed. I liked Candy. And yes, I did offer to lend her forty bucks. There's no fool like an old fool.

I thought I'd seen both Candy and my forty bucks for the last time. I was right about the forty bucks, but wrong about Candy. About two weeks later she came in, looking for me.

She looked jittery. High perhaps, or hanging out for the next deal. “I'm going into the city,” she said. “I'm working tonight. Know what I mean?”

Oh, Candy. You told me you weren't using any more. “I'm not, but I've got a lot of bills to pay.”

But what of the danger? What if you get bashed, or killed? “It's all right. My husband comes too, and he takes down the car number plates.” And what good will that do if you go off with a psycho? I leave the question unasked.

As she leaves, I wonder why Candy went out of her way to tell me of the night's plans, and I believe she saw me as a friend, someone non-judgmental in whom she could confide. It was flattering, but I believed she was still using drugs. That, sadly, is a compelling reason not to develop a friendship.

Q. How do you know a heroin addict is a true friend?
A. They post you the pawn ticket so you can get your valuables back.

A few months later, I learn Candy is in jail. Is she coping? Candy might have street smarts, but can she handle the heavies inside? I decide to send a Christmas card, but I'm too late. She's been released. I've lost contact.

But I thought of her yesterday, as my wife Merry and I joined our children and their partners, and our grandchildren, in a happy Christmas picnic beside Lake Macquarie.

How did Candy spend Christmas? Is she drug-free at last, attempting to reconcile with the family who had given up on her? Or was she still in that sad line of zombie dolls on the kerb, enslaved by a master which allows no holy days?

If I have a Christmas wish, it's that one day soon a confident and attractive young woman will walk up. “Hi, remember me?” “Of course, Candy, how are you travelling?” This time, she'll be able to tell me the truth.

Cassandra or Pollyanna

I've re-read last Saturday's post carefully, because I'm worried that a friend I trust feels I've become too negative (you may read her comments at the end of Saturday's post). I showed it to my wife Merry, too, and she agreed with my friend.

They have a point, when you count my relentless mockery of Prime Minister John Howard. Generally, I'll stand by what I wrote last time, although I do admit some of it was over the top, a little was mean-spirited, and worst of all, there was too much of it.

But hey, I'm talking about politicians. Robust disputation is part of their trade. They dish it out, and they expect to cop it.

I'm still sceptical about Malcolm Turnbull's claim that “the whole climate change phenomenon has informed and underpinned the policies of the Australian Government for more than a decade,” but in fairness, here's a link to an article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph on the matter.

Did I go over the top when I brought in a reference to 1984's Ministry of Truth? Of course, but this is a blog, not an academic treatise. Think of it as the text equivalent of a newspaper cartoon.

Nor do I think I'm unfair with my comments about Howard's laggardly conversion on climate change, and his parliamentary stumble on Tuesday did not surprise me. I believe political editor Peter Harcher's comments in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday back up my comments.

I guess I over-did it when I went on to mock Howard's ultimatum to George Dubya to charge David Hicks or release him. A more sober approach would be to analyse his commitment to the rule of law, given that Hicks is likely to have suffered more than six years of near-torture before he faces a military tribunal of dubious competence on dubious charges.

Oh dear, I'm still a bit negative. I promise to try harder. Shorter blogs, more wit, and some generosity.

Actually, I thought I'd been doing reasonably well, ending my last post about making fig jam, and before that a piece suggesting we should celebrate Orgy Day on February 6 instead of Australia Day on January 26, more about my fig tree, and a yarn about my encounter with a junkie prostitute whom I liked.

Should I be Pollyanna, the child in a 1913 novel who brought gladness wherever she went? Or should I continue to delude myself that I'm Cassandra from Greek mythology, with the gift of foreseeing the future, but also the curse that no-one will believe me?

Thoughts while building a boat

Just colour the sails tan, and you'll know what to look out for in a few months on Brisbane Water, Broken Bay or Lake Macquarie. A designer's sketch of my boat.

A grab-bag of jottings today, thoughts I saved as I worked in my hot shed trying to complete a boat that's been years in the building. And it's not that big either. A largish dinghy, really, at 4.47 metres (or 14ft 8in for we oldtimers).

Old fashioned too, with a big standing lug mains'l and a triangular mizzen hanging out over the stern. With both sails tan coloured, it's going to attract attention wherever it's launched.

Cap't Flint is a stock design by Hobart naval architect Murray Isles, designed as an “adventure cruiser” for voyages in more open water. Looks safe for an old guy, even when single-handed. Younger fellows may even enjoy camping in it, as Murray intended.

I've already built one of Murray Isles's designs, a delightfully nippy sailing dinghy, but at 9ft 7in it gave me moments of terror when a stiff breeze swept across Lake Macquarie.

Building boats is fun, but Cap't Flint will be my last. My Scottish skin is becoming too allergic to the chemicals you mix to make epoxy resin.

Alas, it doesn't take long for a respected journalist, lawyer and merchant banker to sink into political life when he's elected to the Federal Parliament. Take Malcolm Turnbull, our new Environment Minister, quoted in this morning's Weekend Australian: “The whole climate change phenomenon has informed and underpinned the policies of the Australian Government for more than a decade.”

The truth, as Malcolm must well know, is that Prime Minister John Howard has denied evidence of climate change for a decade. A stubborn man who overestimates his own intellectual abilities, he listened only to those scientists who had the Quadrant Seal of Approval.

The result: We lost 10 years in which we could have been looking for ways to deal with the crisis.

Now we're looking at such measures as clean coal technologies, including geosequestration to bury carbon gases deep into the soil. The trouble is, there's at least eight to ten years' research before the technologies could be found to be viable. And we, thanks to John Howard, are just starting.

I think John Howard is in trouble with this in an election year. Even those dear old blue rinse ladies who still vote for that nice Mr Menzies are going to think twice about voting for a man who has helped leave a damaged world for their grandchildren.

Howard knows the danger, and as a taxpayer you may expect that millions of dollars of public funds will be expropriated for Liberal Party spin doctoring that Howard has been on top of the global warming issue right from the start. George Orwell's Ministry of Truth still in action, more than two decades after 1984.

It's a pity to see Malcolm Turnbull getting down to their level with such misinformation.

But then, he's the Republican who once wrote of Howard: "Whatever else he achieves, history will remember him for only one thing. He was the prime minister who broke a nation's heart. He was the man who made Australia keep a foreign queen."

A politician, unlike a leopard, must change spots to survive in the jungle. But surely, one can stop short of telling porkies.

Sorry Malcolm, you've lost me. Once I thought you'd be a great prime minister.

For some reason, the people in my household rolled about laughing and hooting tonight when John Howard came on TV to say: “I'm delighted to say that the charges have been laid and that the deadline I set has been met.”

Howard giving an ultimatum to the United States? “I demand you charge David Hicks or release him by February.” And the simpleton who happens to be the leader of the free world responding, “Of course, Old Buddy, I'll see to it right away. When was that election, again?”

Oh, pass the tissues. The comedy is just too much.

Sorry folks, more mockery of our beloved Prime Minister. “The tyranny of incrementalism and the lowest common denominator must end.” Goodness! What does that mean? Prime Minister John Howard's words to the National Press Club show he's got something momentous on his mind, like winning this year's election.

Still, there is merit in his plan for the Australian Government to take over management of the waters of the Murray Darling Basin, promising $10 billion to improve water efficiency and address the over-allocation of water in rural Australia. Provided it's not a non-core promise.

I don't suppose we can do anything about using taxpayers' money to buy back over-allocations of water from irrigation farmers. I've heard enough rumours over the years to suspect National Party ministers overruled public servants who advised against the over-allocations.

Perhaps we could send the buyback bill to the Nationals. Some hope!

And for those who heard the National Press Club speech, there was a real treat – you had to listen carefully, but John Howard came closer than ever before to admitting he'd been wrong in the past. Take a look at his speech, find the sentence “I regard myself as a climate change realist,” and read on. You'll have to read carefully, because this is a masterpiece of the spin doctor's art.

On Newcastle's NBN3 news, I watched NSW Opposition Leader Peter Whatzizname present the Liberals' $132 million plan to save the Central Coast from its desperate water crisis. And, as you'd expect, Whatzizname bitterly attacked the State Labor government for the mess we Central Coast residents find ourselves in.

But hey, surely much of the blame for the mess attaches to the Gosford City Council and the Wyong Shire Council, which jointly ran the Central Coast water supply as its dams dropped to around 13 per cent full.

It's been months since Central Coast residents have been able to use town water for any outdoor use – gardens, car-washing, pools, anything.

Perhaps that's why I didn't spot Liberal candidate Chris Holstein on the TV at Whatzizname's water policy launch. A prominent member of Gosford City Council, he might have faced some interesting questions.

Gosford Council members appear to have put more effort into resisting fluoridation than they did in making sure we actually had a water supply.

The fig tree saga continued as hot days brought on a bucketful of ripening figs at once. So it's out with my mother's old Golden Wattle cookbook, published way back between the wars as a textbook for WA schoolgirls and "to set before those taking up life in rural districts of the State simple directions for bread-making, jam and jelly making and fruit preserving, which will secure success at the outset." Simple enough even for me.

Later editions, from 1973, are a bit disappointing. They omit old recipes like cow heel jelly, and my childhood favorite, celery soup. But they've still got fig jam, and the result is marvellously thick, chunky and spreadable.

I'll email the recipe to anyone interested.