Alex Steer

144 words | ~1 min

Looking for crime statistics the other day, I came across an article from the Evening Standard in 2007, whose headline told me:

Average age of murdered teenagers is just 16

Given that we're talking about people who aged between 13 and 19, you wonder what the authors of the piece thought their average age might be.

And, as if to labour the point, we later find out...

The ages of those charged in connection with the killings range from 13 to 22, with the average being 17.

Which is, of course, similarly useful maths. And far easier than, say, taking an mean or median of the household incomes of the perpetrators or victims, or their average number of prior contacts with the police, and using those numbers to start digging for stories more insightful than the 'inexplicable teen knife madness' headlines that drowned out everything else a couple of years ago

178 words | ~1 min

Ed Balls's white paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future, published today, contains the breathtaking proposal that teachers should have licences to practice which would need to be renewed every five years.

Incredibly, the general secretary of the NASUWT seems to support this. From the BBC report:

The general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, Chris Keates, said licensing could give qualified teacher status "the long overdue recognition that it is a high status qualification" like those in medicine and law.

No it doesn't. It sends a message that teachers are like bankers: probably inefficient, possibly incompetent, and in need of more government regulation.

When the Children's Secretary says that 'it may be that we will discover some teachers who do not make the grade and some who aren't re-licensed', teachers can be forgiven for not feeling that this licensing proposal is being handed down in recognition of their achievements.

214 words | ~1 min

Hello internet, I'd like your advice.

I am looking for analyses and examples from anywhere in the world of shifts in language use patterns and language policy for a project I'm working on.

These might include information on language loss and endangerment, language protection schemes, language rights issues, language and ethnicity, globalisation of languages, emergence of distinctive regional standards (e.g. Chinglish, Singlish), changing official attitudes to multilingualism, conflicts over choice of language, etc. I'm also keen to see any good papers on theoretical issues in the branches of sociolinguistics that deal with language choice, language cultures and language policy. For this piece of work I'm interested in language use in the very broad and traditional sense - i.e. which languages people use to communicate. Information on morphological, lexical or syntactic change, sociolect or dialect, and similar are not really of interest for this (though always interesting in themselves).

If you've got anything, from a journal article to a newspaper item or blog post, please send it by email to alex@cantab.net, or via Twitter or Delicious to @alexsteer, or leave a comment on this post.

If you know any other language geeks, pass this on.

Thank you!

876 words | ~4 min

Dave Trott at CST Advertising thinks he knows about the origins of on one's tod, meaning on one's own. What he shows with his post is that a) he doesn't, and b) he cares more about winning arguments than being right.

In fairness, that's his point. The blog's argument, which is ultimately about advertising, is that in an ad pitch 'whoever wins makes the best argument', and that 'all that wins is the best argument, not necessarily the best ad'. This is probably true, and he concludes quite neatly:

Think of that next time you’re on an awards jury, or with a client, or an account man or planner, or even your creative partner. Someone might be better at arguing. They might win the argument. But they might still come up with the wrong answer.

Which is fine. But the example he uses to get to the end of this lesson is extraordinary.

Now, everyone's allowed a crazy theory or two about the origins of words. Many of us do it, and we may not be that interested to know whether or not the word 'posh' really comes from 'port out, starboard home' (it doesn't). But hopefully most of us, when confronted with the facts, actually do the decent thing and say, 'Okay. It was a fun theory, but it was wrong. Game over.'

This is where Dave Trott falls down. His pet theory is that on one's tod comes from the name of Mike Todd, the Hollywood producer whom Elizabeth Taylor married in 1957. In fairness, he thinks he has evidence. Here it is:

[Todd] wanted to make the film “Around The World In Eighty Days” starring David Niven. It cost an absolute fortune and he couldn’t get any backing. At the time it was a famous story, how he scraped, and did whatever it took, to finance the film. Against the odds he got it made, and it was a huge success. In those days the biggest TV programme was “Sunday Night At The London Palladium”. The host at this particular time was Norman Vaughan. He used to do a brief monologue at the beginning of the show. One Sunday night he was grumbling that he’d had no help that evening. “I’ve had to do everything on my Mike Todd” he said. It got a huge laugh. Because everyone knew what he meant without saying it. The phrase “on your Mike Todd” caught on. Soon it got shortened to “on your Todd” and eventually “on your tod”. And it passed into the language.

Which is not a bad theory. So far, so good.

Except that the OED cites examples of on one's tod back as far as 1934. 22 years before the film was made. When Elizabeth Taylor was 2.

The OED also gives some of the evidence for the apparent origin of the term. It's rhyming slang for 'Tod Sloan', a once famous but now forgotten early 20th century American jockey who died in 1933 (at around the time the slang term seems to have been coined). A good account is given by the lexicographer Michael Quinion here.

This should really be the point at which you roll over and accept the evidence. However, Dave Trott has decided that, since it doesn't fit his theory, the evidence is wrong, and so are the people who have found it.

All you have to do is look it up in any of the various books on cockney rhyming slang. There are several in Foyles. All written by 30-ish middle class university graduates. All of whom are experts in the derivation of cockney rhyming slang. So to them, all slang must be rhyming slang. [...] So they’ll tell you that ‘on your tod’ is believed to refer to a certain Todd Sloan, a man famous in the east end of London for riding around everyday, alone on his horse. He liked to be alone. Hence ‘todd sloan’ = alone. Except that’s bollocks. These people assume that all slang is derived from rhyming slang because that’s their preconception. So they make the evidence fit their preconception.

No, Dave. First off, your description of Tod Sloan is wrong. See the link above. Second, the people who write dictionaries, middle-class though they might be, are people who earn their livings and spend their lives sifting through the evidence for where words come from and trying to get it right. Some dictionaries are more rigorous than others, but that's the general principle. What they don't do is make up any old nonsense, then go on the offensive when it turns out they're wrong.

So maybe in advertising 'all that wins is the best argument'. But not in lexicography. In lexicography, you actually have to be right.

Game over.

750 words | ~4 min

Since before social media was a term anyone knew, we've been used to the idea that 'content is king' on the web. Any blog post (and now any Twitter post that stands a chance of being re-tweeted) should contain some new information, analysis or synthesis to avoid being lost in all the noise. This was true back when many individuals and organisations thought it was fine to build flashy websites with nothing useful on, and it's still true now that the web is littered with dead blogs with nothing to say.

When it comes to the post-election demonstrations in Iran, though, it seems there's almost nothing new to say. Hours of footage have made their way onto YouTube; it's being covered from all angles by blogs and mainstream news services (who haven't been as ineffective as was originally claimed); Twitter have rescheduled site maintenance to avoid downtime during the demonstrations; and its #iranelection hashtag is being added to more quickly than it can be read.

In this situation, 'content is king' needs rethinking. Yes, some sites, like the Huffington Post, are consistently ahead of the pack for quality of insight, but not everyone who is blogging or tweeting on Iran is trying to do what those sites are doing. Looking at #iranelection, it's clear that many just want to have a say, to show support, and just as importantly to keep the noise and the media chatter around this issue going. If one of the criticisms of mainstream media is that it too quickly loses interest in a story, this is a determination to prevent that from happening. Here it is not just that the stories are standing out from the noise. The noise is part of the story.

This can be beneficial or dangerous. The risk is that Iran's demonstrations will become no more than a social media cause celebre, interesting in itself for a while, then not. What really matters is the aftermath, and whatever government emerges in Iran as a result of this election period. The noise generated by the whole world has to be transformed into a mandate by Iranians, and then into a political programme which places less emphasis on the will and power of conservative clergy and more on secular governance, civil liberties and meaningful democratic accountability. That will be a difficult, dangerous job, and while it is perhaps made easier by the ability of social media to shine a light on political activity and to aggregate small expressions of political will, calling this a 'Twitter revolution' is naive at best. Twitter may represent voices from (not 'the voice of') civil society, but civil society is about action as well.

The effect on social media, especially Twitter, has been interesting. The concentration on #iranelection has shown the power and versatility of the hashtag to create temporary aggregations of people and ideas. The site itself, its parameters rather than its content, is beginning to be used as a political tool. At the time of writing there is a big push encouraging users to set their time and location zones to Tehran to generate extra noise in that zone which will stop security services identifying Iranian tweeters; and a smaller push to anonymise re-tweets, removing usernames which might give away the identity of Iranians involved in the protests. Whether these are legitimate and useful tactics it's hard to be sure, but they are at least a show of solidarity.

They are also an early signal of a growing belief in what I'll call 'civil social media' - social media considered as a tool for direct civil action. This belief holds that social media use is not just speech but action. We have yet to see how successful it will be, and whether content really can bring down kings.

135 words | ~1 min

My post on avocados, ethics and supermarket histories appears on the Futures Company blog today.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may expect that I'd have something to say on the highly-publicised claim by Global Language Monitor that there are now a million words in the English language. I do - their claim is meaningless - but clearly lexicographers think in packs, because two former colleagues of mine from the OED have already said it perfectly, so I'll defer to them.

1145 words | ~6 min

I've just read the excellent The Back of the Napkin, by the visualization consultant Dan Roam. Now, say the words 'visualization consultant' to people and they are likely to recoil slightly, imagining some person or organization churning out fantastically complicated systems diagrams in dense Powerpoint decks. But Dan's book is about representing information simply, and he demonstrates pretty persuasively that most strategic problems can be drawn up pretty simply. (There's a line of thought among strategic analysts that says that the ones that can't arise from faulty strategies.) His cartooning style also makes the book a delight to thumb through.

One of the endorsements on the back of the book troubled me a bit, though. It's from the designer Roger Black, and it says:

Visual information is much more interesting than verbal information. So if you want to make a point, do it with images, pictures, or graphics.

As a linguist you might not expect me to agree. And I don't, but not for purely territorial reasons. You see, while The Back of the Napkin demonstrates that simple visualisation is an effective way of showing the whats, whos, wheres and how-manys of situations and problems, I'm not convinced that it's the best way of addressing the whens and whys. I'm about to undermine my own point by using a bit of visualisation by means of bold text, but syntax - the structural features of language that most of us call 'grammar' - is an extremely good way of encoding processes and argument.

Sometimes, graphics are great. I could read you off a list of the amount of money spent by every UK government department in the 2007-8 financial year, and by the end you'd be mad and you'd only be able to remember a fraction of it. If I gave it to you written down, it would be a long list, and it would take you time to compare spending between the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Rural Payments Agency. That's because writing is not a helpful or intuitive way of representing quantities. So instead I would just show you the Public Spending Atlas drawn up by the Guardian and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and all would become clear.

Visualisation has its limits, though. A good diagram can tell you how a system is or how it should be, but will struggle to tell you why it isn't how it should be. Suppose you run a widget-making business with a faulty supply chain. I can show you a diagram of that chain and a diagram of a new improved chain, and both diagrams could be fairly simple and use no words other than labels for parts of the system. But how do I explain why your existing supply chain is wrong? What I could do is elaborate on the original diagram, adding boxes for the users of your widgets, fat and thin arrows for supply and demand levels, dotted lines to represent delivery time, etc., and hope that the diagram is complete enough that you can work out the problem and recognize that the new system is better. But I wouldn't. I'd use a single sentence to connect the old diagram to the new: 'Your supply chain is faulty because it doesn't get widgets to widget-users quickly enough.'

Within the syntax of that easy sentence are the basics of what the problem is, and why - in other words, what you need to know. I can then elaborate on that. 'This is because you send everything from your warehouse by second-class post. Send it first-class and the time lag will disappear. You can fund the extra postage costs by making your executives fly economy class to meetings instead of business class.' No diagrams required, and if you want you can rearrange the syntax to make the process sound linear rather than relational: 'Make your executives fly economy class; save money; spend money posting everything first class; then your customers will get their widgets quicker. Then they'll recommend you to their friends; then their friends will buy widgets from you; then you'll be rich and beloved of widget-users.' One of the beauties of syntax is that you can reconfigure it fast.

The insistence on diagramming everything seems to be one of the major bugbears people have with strategy consultants. The flow chart is the stock joke of consultant-haters because it seems to be an uneasy attempt to turn grammar into graphics. Powerpoint's ubiquitous process flow arrows come in for even more ridicule, because they describe linear processes with no decision points. They are, in other words, just sentences with arrows around them.

Consultant-haters also loathe the proliferation of bullet points, and not without reason. Just as flow charts try to make graphics do the work of grammar, bullet points do the opposite. Bullet points are fairly useful for simple lists of items, but in that case you might as well use a graphic as it will be easier on the eye. For any kind of argument, they impose an artificial syntax which makes everything look like a linear process. This can wreak havoc with systems, as Edward Tufte shows in his book The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, as it can lead us to assume that the relationship between concepts is paratactic, when often it isn't.

So I disagree that graphics are always best. Continuous prose, despite its fall from fashion in the world of business, remains an elegant and powerful way to argue persuasively. Whereas graphics allow us to see whole systems at a glance, syntax is a much better way of reasoning about change and its consequences, and therefore of explaining the need for new and better systems. Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar model argues that every sentence tells a story about the relationships between things, people or concepts in the world. It would be a shame if systems thinkers were to forget that systems are dynamic, or to abandon their best means of telling a good story.

508 words | ~3 min

Natural disasters are among the most unpredictable drivers of the future. If you're Arnold Schwarzenegger (you never know), governing a state whose economic powerhouses sit along and around the San Andreas fault, you can make as much economic policy as you want, and it won't matter much if an earthquake or an eruption knocks San Francisco off the map and Los Angeles into the sea. There is a science to measuring and predicting this sort of thing, but it's not good enough yet to provide reliable early warnings. For now, natural disasters can still take us by surprise.

The reason we try to predict natural disasters is because the future we're interested in is the human one, not the geological one. While oceanographers and vulcanologists were fascinated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, most of us cared about it because of the destruction and the loss of human life it wrought. We still call these phenomena acts of God, because that's how they feel: immense, violent, utterly unpredictable.

But that's fundamentally not true, and we're being dishonest as a global society if we claim radical unpredictability. While it's true that we don't know when or (to some extent) where natural disasters will occur, we know what happens when they do, and we know why.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction has just published its first Global Assessment Report, Risk and poverty in an international climate. The contents are neatly and powerfully summarised by Tim Radford in the Guardian. The message, based on 32 years' worth of disaster statistics, tells a simple, compelling story about disasters past and present.

The story is that poverty and corruption kill people in natural disaster scenarios. Poor housing, poor infrastructure, poor healthcare, poor governance, poor resourcing, poor urban planning: these are the determiners of life or death for many who are caught in the middle when the earth starts shaking or the water starts pouring in.

These things are not unpredictable, and they are not unpreventable. Those in power cannot know if, when or where a natural disaster will strike, but they can know what impact it will have if it does. A government that does not try to protect against the excess harms caused by poverty and corruption is a government that has given over its people as hostages to the future. It is a bad government.

Whether we're talking about earthquakes, crime rates, epidemics or MPs' expenses (just to be topical), civil society's job is to make sure that the spectre of the unpredictable is never used as an excuse.

1288 words | ~6 min

Two-sentence version: Fakecharities.org thinks government funding makes charities mouthpieces of the state. It is wrong.

Long version...

Bad Science author Ben Goldacre brought the website fakecharities.org to the attention of a fairly wide readership the other day when he wrote this Twitter post:

FakeCharities.org: fun idea, nicely run site http://rly.cc/8qVXn

The link is to a blog post on the website of the free-market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, who describe fakecharities.org as 'excellent'.

Without disrespect to Ben, the purpose of this post is to argue that fakecharities.org is not a fun idea, or a good one. Instead it demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the charitable sector and (I think) a wilful attempt to change public perceptions of what charities are.

A bit of information first. Fakecharities.org says it is edited by The Devil's Kitchen, a libertarian-leaning UK political blog. The fakecharities.org domain is registered to Chris Mounsey, a freelance graphic designer who is also head of communications for the recently reformed UK Libertarian Party.

There site is very open about its intentions. It describes itself as:

A directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments. These charities are usually brought to our attention through interviews in the mainstream media (MSM) in which they support the position of the government that funds them. Further, there is nothing charitable about tax being taken, by force, from you and me: charity is about voluntary giving. These organisations thrive on theft. At fakecharities.org, we believe that these effective QUANGOs and state-lobbying agencies are not only undemocratic but, being funded through taxes rather than donations, are effectively stealing donations from real charities—those that do valuable community work.

Let's break down some of the assumptions that the site makes about charities.

1. There are 'fake charities' and 'real charities'.
2. 'Fake charities' are those who operate mostly on statutory income (money from public sources).
3. 'Real charities' are those who operate mostly on non-statutory income.
4. Charities who operate mostly on statutory income are government mouthpieces principally engaged in lobbying to make government policy look legitimate.
5. Charities who fall outside this group do 'valuable community work'.
6. By extension, these 'fake charities' do not do 'valuable community work'.

Here's why it's wrong.

Government is not throwing money at charities. Fakecharities.org drastically underestimates the extent and complexity of statutory funding. Income from government bodies does not come in the form of massive bungs to charities' central funds. One of the biggest problems charities face is that government money always comes with strings attached, and not in the way fakecharities.org thinks. More often than not it is 'restricted' income - money that can only be used for certain a very defined purpose.

Charities have a role in public services. Most of the time, this purpose is the delivery of public services. It is seldom, if ever, lobbying and campaigning. Historically, this money has tended to come in the form of grants. It is increasingly coming in the form of service-delivery contracts, which place even stronger conditions on how it can be used. Charities have to bid for contracts, often against private companies as well as other charities. This system (known as 'commissioning') is complex, expensive for charities and usually operated at the local authority level rather than by central government. The rather glamorous idea of a QUANGOesque demi-monde in which charities exist to talk up government policy is fantastical. More often than not, charities spend their time fighting for contracts from local councils.

Yes, there is a lot of money in this. We shouldn't underestimate the scale of this: according to the Charity Commission, 60% of medium-sized and large charities deliver public services, and so receive some sort of statutory income. One third of these, it's true, receive 80% or more of their income for service-delivery work.

But no, it doesn't come easy. However, this does not mean that all those charities are in some sort of financial wonderland. Charities that are heavily reliant on government money, far from being shills for government policy, are hugely vulnerable to it. If policy changes, their money goes. Over two-thirds of public-service contracts are for a single year or less, which makes financial planning a nightmare. Only 12% of charities manage to cover the full cost of their service-delivery work from the government, because these grants often don't cover basics like heating, lighting and office admin.

Charities are feeling the pressure. Barely more than a quarter of charities who deliver public services feel that they are free from pressure to conform to their funders' wishes. Charities who operate largely on government money find it very difficult to develop new areas of work because they simply cannot afford it. They are caught in a vicious circle: since they often cannot afford sophisticated fundraising operations, they cannot get the unrestricted income they need to avoid this pressure. They have a tendency to chase government contracts, a process which is itself costly and time-consuming. This is not a world in which charity chief executives are throwing wads of cash in the air while singing the praises of government initiatives.

Most charities do not lobby. The lobbying role of charities is not larger than it should be: it is not large enough. Uncertainties about how campaigning fits with charitable status, together with prohibitive costs of entry, discourage many charities from trying to influence policy. Yes, there are plenty of high-profile examples, but many simply do not know where to begin. They are left mopping up the outcomes of social problems which they believe could be more effectively tackled by early intervention from government. (This is not a view I expect libertarians to share, though of course many libertarians believe very sensibly in a market-orientated approach to early intervention which may be even more efficient. It's just that, bluntly, that market does not yet exist and will take time to be created. At the moment, the best hopes for early intervention lie with the state.) For the full picture on charities' campaigning activities and their many limitations, see New Philanthropy Capital's excellent report Critical Masses, written by some of my former colleagues.

Fakecharities.org's view of the sector is inaccurate. It is also, I think, corrosive. Of course waste in public services is not good, but the website's bold but wrong assertions, and its series of institutional character assassinations (see the A to Z listing), do nothing to improve the quality of public-service delivery or the lot of charities, and provide a very distorted image of the work charities do, completely ignoring the difficulties they face, and inviting the kind of unthinking condemnation of them that makes it harder for them to build independent funding for that work.

I am a former non-profit analyst turned strategy consultant. I know a good deal about the charitable sector and how it works, especially financially, and I'd invite questions in the comments section of this post if anything is unclear.

554 words | ~3 min

Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived areas in London, and in the country. Of England and Wales's 376 local authorities, it's in the top 20 for overcrowded housing and single-parent households (a good indicator for poverty and poor outcomes for children), and in the top 30 for unemployment. It has among the highest levels of gang activity in the capital. To say it has a bit of a youth crime problem would be a generous understatement.

The council has introduced mandatory electronic weapons screening in 15 of the borough's 19 secondary schools. (The Times headline is wrong to call the checks 'random' - they are to be routine. It also repeats the rather uninformed story about stab vests.) So far no knives have been found, but the council has denied that it is being alarmist.

In one sense, it's easy to sympathise, since clearly there are knives (and worse) in circulation around Waltham Forest to some degree, and the evidence from policing suggests that those knives are overwhelmingly being circulated among young people. If the council want to start finding those knives, then schools don't seem a bad place to start. Setting up screening panels in libraries, fish shops and old people's homes would be alarmist.

The problem is, the screening is not a symptom of alarmism, though it is what you might call an unhelpfully broad application of a search methodology. Imagine going to Google wanting to find the engine spec on a new Porsche, and trying to find it by typing 'cars'. By searching every child, every day for knives, Waltham Forest are making sure they are kept busy forever sifting through incredible amounts of noisy and useless results. (Judge for yourselves whether 'noisy and useless' is a term fairly applied to teenagers.)

Normally, when you Google 'cars' instead of 'new Porsche engine spec', it's just your own time you're wasting. Your irrelevant search results won't think badly of you. And this is where the analogy breaks down. Screening every child, every day just sends the message that the council barely knows where to begin to find knives, and therefore that the individual kids and the gangs are smarter and better organised. (If ever organisations understood targeted marketing, gangs do.)

There are even more corrosive symptoms of this approach. It may not be alarmist, but it will cause alarmism. It will erode, probably quite quickly, the idea that schools are safe places, or that they represent something different from, even better than, whatever ideas or ideals drive behaviour in the communities surrounding them. No school in Waltham Forest can ever claim to be a beacon or a city on a hill now. And while it may be true that its schools are not perfectly safe places, there is little to be gained from such a stark demonstration that the council believes this, especially when combined with a search strategy that makes the powers that should protect look disorganised and confused. The sense of isolation and the fear that this will generate may drive more children into the care of gangs which, above all, offer protection and the illusion of control.