Lego, Raspberry Pi and computing skills

I’m happy to cheer on the government’s plan to include computer coding in the national curriculum for primary schools from next September. I also have concerns about its chances for success, but I think these could be improved by learning a few lessons from the history of Lego. Yes, those toy building blocks that a lot of us played with as kids. I’ll get to the reason in a while.

Placing computer coding on the curriculum makes sense. We need a population of coding savvy youngsters to lay the ground for computing innovations in the future. And it’s a fair argument that even those who don’t follow careers in IT will benefit from coding, learning to think with a combination of logic and creativity. It will be good for them and good for the UK.

But I can’t help remembering a previous effort to do something admirable in schools, when John Major’s government wanted to ensure that all secondary students learned a foreign language to proficiency. That would have corrected a long term failing in British education; but it foundered, largely because there weren’t enough people with the existing language skills who liked the idea of teaching for a living.

The effort to ingrain computing skills faces a similar barrier; anyone with any degree of expertise can earn a lot more money in a different environment, and they won’t take the stick that is often aimed at teachers by politicians the press. It’s easy to see why secondary schools are struggling to provide decent courses in computer science.

Hopefully, the plan for primary schools will get over this by taking a different approach.  The availability of Raspberry Pi, the tiny single board computer that can be used to explore the basics of coding, should enable unskilled teachers to learn with the first group of children. It won’t require the existing knowledge needed at secondary level.

But you need to make sure the kids want to learn. I listened to an interesting talk at Cass Business School last week, when Alex Klein, founder of start-up Kano Computing, warned against a learning by rote approach that would be no fun and dampen the youngsters’ interest. They are more likely to learn if they can play in doing so.

That prompted a thought about the previous week’s episode of ‘The Culture Show’ on BBC2, which looked at the influence of Lego on architecture. Some of the top architects around the world grew up messing about with with those plastic, clip-on bricks, indulging their imaginations in weird and wonderful constructions, and getting a feel for symmetry and design.

Lego provided a tool for the nurturing of lively minds, and this is what Raspberry Pi can be. I hope that teachers don’t use it as a tool to drill a bunch of dos and don’ts into the kids’ heads, but as something that’s fun. Treat it as they do art or storytelling, something that lets their imaginations run riot. In the long term it can give a generation of red hot computer scientists, and people who can turn creative minds to many other lines of work.

Mark Say is a UK based writer who covers the role of information management and technology in business. See www.marksay.co.uk

Risks v benefits in the Care.data row

Privacy activists are giving themselves a big cheer following NHS England’s  announcement that it’s putting the launch of Care.data, the central database of NHS patient records, on hold for a few months. It’s acknowledged that it did a poor job of telling the public about the scheme and their right to opt out, and is now stepping back to do it properly.

It wasn’t just the privacy groups that had protested – the British Medical Association, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Information Commissioner’s Office had all expressed their concerns. Given a few months, NHS England might take steps that will make these bodies happy. But I doubt if it will ever get the more militant privacy campaigners on its side, as they’ll still be able to make a noise about the more important issue – whether the data can be used to target individuals.

When the data becomes available for research, by public or private bodies, it will be anonymised. But there are some big question marks over whether that really protects people from someone digging into their medical records. There is evidence that if someone really wants to break down anonymised data they can do it by cross-referencing with other data sets; a report by the World Economic Forum has said the ‘triple identifier’ of birthday, gender and postal code is the giveaway for most people.

It’s a scary thought but one that should be kept in perspective. Identifying individuals takes time, and who would want to get at their healthcare data, and what would they do with it? It’s in the interests of the organisations that get access to the data to vet whoever works on it and place some heavy duty security controls in place. There is a risk, but it’s miniscule, and on a par with a lot of others we accept in our lives.

Against this are the benefits of making the anonymised data available for healthcare research, something that most people would understand and go along with. The data isn’t being collated just for the sake of it.

So NHS England could do worse than presenting it as risks v benefits. The more militant privacy campaigners would continue to object because they're concerned solely with the risk. But I expect that with an honest assessment of both the great majority of patients will be happy to part of Care.data.

Seduction by vinyl

Vinyl LPs have always had their champions. Ever since the point in the 80s when CDs became the dominant medium for listening to music, there have been people who swore the swore the sound was always better on a 33 RPM LP, and vinyl albums have often been priced at a premium to those little silver plastic discs.

This seems to have stepped up a gear since digital downloads knocked CDs off their perch, and there have been plenty of magazine articles, radio and TV documentaries exploring the enduring appeal of vinyl. A couple of weeks ago BBC4 gave Danny Baker three hour long shows to talk with various mates about what made the old LPs so great.

So far it’s been a minority interest, but this week I saw a sign that it’s a love affair that has obtained some weight in the mainstream media. On a platform at Baker Street Underground there was a large poster for the online dating service match.com, conveying a sense of expectancy with the words “I listened to her favourite album before the date so I could understand why she loved it so much”.

Alongside the words was an image of a vinyl LP, the stylus on the grooves of the first track. It was a surprising choice, as for the vast majority of people that moment would mean slipping a CD into a slot or pressing a button on an MP3 player, but it was obviously meant to convey that there was something special about the man, the woman and the prospects for their relationship. The message was that it would produce something better than most first dates, or whatever any other dating service could offer, because playing an LP produces something CDs or downloads can’t match.

You could argue over whether it’s a message that stands up to scrutiny, but when the advertising industry stars to use an idea it believes it is sufficiently widespread to seduce a large number of people. It’s betting that there’s a demographic with money to spend and a readiness to accept the association of ideas: in this case that a guy who listens to vinyl is worth a serious relationship.

It might amount to a load of old tosh, but it shows that listening to music on vinyl – or at least the idea of it – has become seductive to more than a few music geeks.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Credibility and kiddie hackers

I can’t be the only person who wasn’t completely surprised by the news that, according to IT security firm AVG, kids as young as 11 are beginning to write malicious hack code to wreak some havoc and steal some data in the cyber world. We’ve heard plenty about hackers in their mid to late teens, but this fits neatly with the image of delinquent behaviour by junior geeks who are happier staring at a screen than going out in the real world, and is something you could believe of those who would like to but don’t have the nerve to spray graffiti or smash up a bus shelter.

But while the story sounds credible, the evidence seems limited. AVG came up with one solid example, and a lot of talk about patterns that suggest there may be a growing number of kids barely of secondary school age who are up to no good in the cyber world. It’s not clear if it’s a genuine trend or speculation based on a handful of cases.

It’s worth remembering that a story like this can do some good for the company that raises the alarm. It says it is paying attention to serious issues and concerned about the wide world in which it works. That’s why they carry out research and publish studies aimed at asserting their credentials as thought leaders; and when it makes the national news it’s a result for the PR team.

But it has to be remembered that this is all part of the marketing effort, and that the overall aim of such efforts is to boost a company’s sales. It would need a lot of time studying the data, and probably a lot of expertise, for anyone to know if the assertions are correct, and I don’t know whether the evidence behind AVG’s warnings is as strong as it claims. But when something like this comes from the private sector you know there’s a commercial element to it.

It might be a real phenomenon, in which case it’s a genuine worry, but it might be just a storm in a cyber tea cup.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

So what’s wrong with eating horsemeat?

OK, so I’m happy to see Tesco seriously embarrassed by the noise over horsemeat in some of its economy burgers. I get fed up with all its self-righteous twaddle about providing value for money when it uses every underhand marketing trick in the book to squeeze as much as possible out of shoppers. But it has made me wonder why people are so enraged at the thought of eating horsemeat.

It’s not just that there are parts of the world where they tuck into equine flesh, or other animals that make us Brits turn up our noses, with gusto. But I would bet that it’s wound up in plenty of things that go through a messy industrial process and wind up in the bargain shelves and cabinets of the supermarkets.

I’ve never knowingly eaten horsemeat, but I’m not disturbed at the thought that I may well have done so unknowingly at some time. The fact is that we tuck into lots of meat products – pies, sausage rolls, processed slices with different names – that have all the odds and ends from dead animals that we would rather not think about. I suspect that the companies who produce this go for the cheapest option on buying their raw material and horse creeps in more often than anyone would admit. You just accept that if you buy cheap meat products you get what you pay for.

I’ve accepted for years that I’m eating things that the manufacturers would want to keep quiet, and as long as it doesn’t poison me I’m not going to make a fuss as long as they  don’t make dishonest claims about it being high quality, unadulterated beef, lamb, pork, chicken or whatever. And if we happily eat cows, pigs and sheep, and do pretty horrible things in raising them as food, why should we get so squeamish over horses?

Probably because we’ve been brought up on movies and TV programmes in which horses had some unspoken empathy with human beings – think Black Beauty or Champion the Wonder Horse – or run around a racecourse to give us a moment of excitement. Who would have wanted to eat Red Rum?

But people in other parts of the world don’t feel like that, and I don’t quite buy into it. And if you want to draw a parallel with domestic animals, I’m in no hurry to eat a cat or dog, but I’d do so if I was facing starvation, and I’ll quite happily tuck into stewed rabbit.

And if I’m ever somewhere that it’s on the menu and I receive a recommendation, I’ll eat a horse.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Tarantino has no right to his tantrum

I’ve felt ambivalent about Quentin Tarantino for a long time. I loved his debut Reservoir Dogs – a great heist movie that was fast, inventive, witty and frightening – but found it hard to feel so enthusiastic about his next film, Pulp Fiction.

I admired the skill with which the story was told, the action set pieces, and dark humour, snappy dialogue, but I had an uneasy feeling that it had crossed a line. In the first film it was always clear that the bad guys were bad guys and deserved a bad end. In the second there were subtle differences that suggested that there was no such thing as a bad guy and the violence was all part of a jolly game laid on for our amusement.

It left me feeling that Tarantino had drifted into morally dubious territory, a feeling that was intensified when I saw From Dusk till Dawn, for which he wrote the screenplay, which asked us to accept as heroes two bank robbers who begin the film by kidnapping then murdering an innocent female bank clerk. It left a nasty taste in the mouth that has put me off seeing any of his movies since.

I have been tempted to break the boycott by the reviews for his new effort, Django Unchained, on the strength from some glowing reviews. The fact that it’s about a slave fighting back in 19^th century America has made me think maybe there are some genuine good and guys in it. But I’m not sure after watching Tarantino’s latest tantrum.

The strop he threw at Krishna Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 for asking about the possibility of a link between enjoying screen violence and inflicting it on others made it clear this is someone who doesn’t want to face an awkward question about what he does. It’s not an easy one to answer, and it’s full of ambiguities. Most of us enjoy screen violence – you can go back to the earliest cowboy or gangster films to see it was a key ingredient of their success – and the moral context or characterisations of those involved affect us all in different ways. But it is a serious that has issue with a lot of implications for a society which has its share of real life random violence.

I don’t expect Tarantino to have easy answers, but he makes a lot of money and has won worldwide fame by depicting violence in a way that suggests it’s there to be enjoyed. It’s the defining element of his career. He has an obligation to at least debate the question, no matter how often he’s asked, and throwing a wobbly at an interviewer isn’t going to win him any friends, and may lose a few who are currently on his side.

And I still haven’t made up my mind about whether to see Django Unchained.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Farewell to Harry Carey Jr

Yesterday I had one of those moments that comes to all of us as we get older, reading an obituary of someone I assumed had died years ago.

It was Harry Carey Jr, a Hollywood actor who, despite not being a big star, is a familiar face to all of us who love old westerns. He was one of the regulars in John Ford movies, which meant that he had significant parts in some John Wayne classics – The Searchers and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon – and a couple of starring roles – The Three Godfathers and Wagon Master. He had his highest profile in the 1950s but used to crop up in movies and on TV until the 1990s, and wrote a book about working on the Ford westerns.

No-one would argue that he was among the Hollywood greats, but he was one of those character actors who always contributed to a good movie and could sometimes provide a redeeming factor for a bad one. And he was one of the faces who would prompt many of us to point at a screen and say “Look who that is!”

I have to mark his passing because I’m a great fan of John Ford movies. I’ve watched some of them several times over – Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Rio Bravo, The Searchers – and always enjoy them even though I know what’s coming. I know there’s something dubious about many of them, feeding a myth about the west that airbrushes the fact that land was stolen and native Americans wiped out in their hundreds of thousands, but they’re great stories with intriguing characters and make magnificent use of the landscape.

Ford was the visionary, and there’s no arguing that the presence of leading actors like John Wayne and Henry Fonda was crucial to their artistic as much as commercial success, but the supporting actors were as much as part of it. They wouldn’t be the same without the likes of Walter Brennan, Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, and Harry Carey Jr.

I believe he’s the last to go, and he deserves a farewell.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.