The big problem with having things you have to write is that it doesn't leave you any time for things you want to write. Which means that thesis has taken a huge priority over blogging and randomly scrawled fiction.
So I'm about two months behind, here, and am only going to comment briefly.
Straight out of the blocks with:
Man's leg broken in trail-bike accident at Dayboro (Courier Mail, September 19)
Slightly long CM headline, but not too bad. Four paragraphs, pretty complete, nothing to take exception to and they even said "coming off his bike" rather than "the bike crashed."
Motorbike rider dead, pillion passenger hurt as bike hits tree in Ipswich (Courier Mail, September 30)
Now, there's an excessive CM headline for you. I'm not sure they're expecting people to actually read the articles.
Six paragraphs. Fernvale Rd at Brassall, which is fairly straight and through suburbia. No mention of any known cause, which gets the the police bonus points for not having a superficial, knee-jerk speed reference.
"A police spokesman said it was believed the motorbike left the road and collided with a tree."
So, either the headline is not entirely justified, or the police are being cautious to the point of silliness. I would have thought that would have been obvious - a cause, not so much. But having hit a tree that wasn't actually in the road - pretty obviuos.
Oh, well. The impressive thing about this article is that it manages to get three different spokesmen into six paragraphs.
Man killed after hitting tree - same writeup, longer and more informative from, surprise surprise, the local regional paper the Queensland Times (October 1).
Seventeen paragraphs, starting in good emotive style with Shocked residents have told of the horrifying moment...
Puh-lease.
This time we have "veered across Fernvale Rd" and a photo of nice big skidmarks in grass, pointing straight at a tree.
This bit gets me: "The man's helmet landed in our front yard," she said.
Not wearing it, or not done up, or the strap ripped right off? The rider was given CPR at the scene before being pronounced dead and the male pillion was taken to hospital still breathing, so neither were completely dismembered and, therefore, it's hard to imagine helmets coming off unless they weren't being worn properly. Hmm...
Another resident heard the motor "revving really loudly." Yes, well, it's a bike, so there's not a lot we can say about that. Some bikes with modified pipes sound like they're racing at idle.
Okay, not a bad article, but there's a huge whiff of ghoulishness about it.
Okay, one more: Heartache drives man to drink ride (QT, October 2)
Six paragraphs, some quite long, court report.
Attempting to overtake using the left lane, which happens to be illegal (note: Riding on the right without overtaking is also illegal in some states, but doesn't seem to be enforced in Queensland), crashing, blood alcohol concentration of 0.152 which makes it impressive he hadn't crashed before then.
Also: L plates, rear tyre not roadworthy, weeping hydraulic flood (so the brakes weren't working properly, not much else that's hydraulic on a bike), and he broke his back twice, his knee and has to learn how to walk again.
I think we can say, unreservedly: Idiot.
Again, no mention of speed, which is great to see, and nothing extraneous. A baffling story, but a good article.
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Speed camera defences are facile and unhelpful
Recently, while riding or driving, I have done the following obviously dangerous things
Notice anything about all of those? Notice any uniting factors?
There were two of them:
The most obvious reason is, of course, that speeding is easy to police and it's a low-hanging fruit: Set up fixed cameras with radar/laser attached, set up mobile cameras and leave them, put automatic equipment in patrol cars.
It's much harder to police fatigue, much harder to police inattention (although very obvious when the inattention leads to something dangerous actually occurring), much harder to police drug and alcohol usage (just look at the effort involved in running a random breath test) and much harder to police the road rules in general, although we do have red light cameras.
I have four basic issues with the campaign against speeding:
And now here we have another contribution, an opinion piece submitted to the Courier Mail from the chief executive officer of RiverCity Motorway, the organisation running the clusterfuck that is the Clem 7 tollway tunnel:
Speed cameras help keep Clem 7 on the road to safety.
When you read this article, you at first don't notice that it's anything but a news story. Then it dawns on you that it's editorialising a bit, then it gets personal, then you look down the end to notice the byline.
Online, this needed to have been flagged as a column from the very start.
The big problem with this article is illustrated right here:
No logical pathway, in fact, from "For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important safety measure" to "speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel."
No mention of whether the dramatic fall in speeding in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was in any way, shape or form associated with a drop in accident rate.
Speeding is wasteful in fuel, reduces safety margins, is potentially rude and, in traffic, hazardous if you puts you at a different speed to everyone else. The faster you hit something the more damage you do, but this bald claim? I'd like to see anyone get this through an undergraduate essay in any science or otherwise research discipline.
So I have to ask: Have people become so used to seeing the proof that they assume it, and skip over the bit in the middle? Or is this just a debate that runs on unthinking consensus, ideological certainty?
If it's run on proof, then more of that needs to come out in the public debate.
At the moment, there are two factors limiting my speed: What I think is safe, and: the likelihood of getting fined and losing licence points.
And a slavish adherence to the big black numbers in the red circle doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I think is safe. Far more important to me is the behaviour of other road users, the quality of the road, how awake and focused I am, the light conditions, the atmospheric conditions, the vehicle I'm on or in, and the likelihood of somebody or something running across the road in front of me.
I have become used to people I overtook back there overtaking me here because my reading of the conditions made me slow down. I'm used to people who do 75 in the 80 zone then doing 75 in the 70 zone. I've become used to people doing 70 in the 80 zone who do 60 in the roadworks 40 zone, crowding me or trying to get past while I'm riding 2 metres from people wielding shovels.
Speeding? That's the least of the things I worry about.
At the end of this abysmal, preaching article there is this:
It's very difficult to have any faith in the ability of any authority to manage any roads when this is the quality of their debate.
- Strayed onto a white line in the pouring rain, and had the bike slip sideways in the middle of a corner.
- Almost pulled out in front of a car because it was 2am and I had a lapse of concentration.
- Overtaking vehicle leaving its wheels in my lane, next to me, while looking at something else.
- Vehicles cutting in front while driving slower than me, making me brake sharply.
- Vehicles trying to merge into me.
- Vehicles starting to merge in front of me while I was overtaking.
- Vehicles creeping into road in front of me from a side street, leaving me unsure what its intentions were.
Notice anything about all of those? Notice any uniting factors?
There were two of them:
- They all involved lapses of judgement, and (with one arguable exception) concentration, and;
- None of them involved exceeding the speed limit
The most obvious reason is, of course, that speeding is easy to police and it's a low-hanging fruit: Set up fixed cameras with radar/laser attached, set up mobile cameras and leave them, put automatic equipment in patrol cars.
It's much harder to police fatigue, much harder to police inattention (although very obvious when the inattention leads to something dangerous actually occurring), much harder to police drug and alcohol usage (just look at the effort involved in running a random breath test) and much harder to police the road rules in general, although we do have red light cameras.
I have four basic issues with the campaign against speeding:
- It focuses on a factor which has been identified, at various times, in various jurisdictions, as being quite a minor contributor to accidents fatal or otherwise;
- It is conducted in a way which is offensive to the intelligence of all road users;
- It obscures the far more important discussion of driving technique and skill;
- I do not remember any sensible discussion justifying this focus, merely scattered claims in advertising.
And now here we have another contribution, an opinion piece submitted to the Courier Mail from the chief executive officer of RiverCity Motorway, the organisation running the clusterfuck that is the Clem 7 tollway tunnel:
Speed cameras help keep Clem 7 on the road to safety.
When you read this article, you at first don't notice that it's anything but a news story. Then it dawns on you that it's editorialising a bit, then it gets personal, then you look down the end to notice the byline.
Online, this needed to have been flagged as a column from the very start.
The big problem with this article is illustrated right here:
For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important road safety measure it is worth looking at the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, which opened in 1992 without speed cameras. In 1997, it became the first road in NSW to have fixed speed cameras installed.I would like you to notice that at no point in those four paragraphs was there any mention of any accident, crash, injury, fatality, minor bingle, brief nudge, complaint, collision or scrape.
This action was taken when it was found that 30 per cent of drivers using the tunnel exceeded the speed limit by 20km/h or more. The highest recorded speed in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was 199km/h.
After the cameras were installed, the percentage of speeding motorists fell dramatically.
Closer to home, the speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel. Speed cameras are the only practical method for speed enforcement in tunnels.
No logical pathway, in fact, from "For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important safety measure" to "speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel."
No mention of whether the dramatic fall in speeding in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was in any way, shape or form associated with a drop in accident rate.
Speeding is wasteful in fuel, reduces safety margins, is potentially rude and, in traffic, hazardous if you puts you at a different speed to everyone else. The faster you hit something the more damage you do, but this bald claim? I'd like to see anyone get this through an undergraduate essay in any science or otherwise research discipline.
So I have to ask: Have people become so used to seeing the proof that they assume it, and skip over the bit in the middle? Or is this just a debate that runs on unthinking consensus, ideological certainty?
If it's run on proof, then more of that needs to come out in the public debate.
At the moment, there are two factors limiting my speed: What I think is safe, and: the likelihood of getting fined and losing licence points.
And a slavish adherence to the big black numbers in the red circle doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I think is safe. Far more important to me is the behaviour of other road users, the quality of the road, how awake and focused I am, the light conditions, the atmospheric conditions, the vehicle I'm on or in, and the likelihood of somebody or something running across the road in front of me.
I have become used to people I overtook back there overtaking me here because my reading of the conditions made me slow down. I'm used to people who do 75 in the 80 zone then doing 75 in the 70 zone. I've become used to people doing 70 in the 80 zone who do 60 in the roadworks 40 zone, crowding me or trying to get past while I'm riding 2 metres from people wielding shovels.
Speeding? That's the least of the things I worry about.
At the end of this abysmal, preaching article there is this:
It is very pleasing that the vast majority of motorists are driving safely through the tunnel.And the only evidence presented is that only .5% of motorists have collected a speeding fine.
It's very difficult to have any faith in the ability of any authority to manage any roads when this is the quality of their debate.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
The only motivational technique you will ever need!
I believe I have found the most reliable possible method of overcoming procrastination.
Oh, the internet is full of them - planning, project-management, Gantt charts, timers long or short, quiet environments, music (but only the right sort), changes of scenery, turning off the internet, using different web browsers for work and for play, caffeine, alcohol where appropriate, abstinence from chemical aids, fitness, time of day, time of night, calculating your biorhythms, use of tools, abandoning tools, positive attitudes, mantras, self-checking...
The list goes on.
All of them, however, skirt around the edges of the greatest method of all, the one I'm employing right now to write this blog post (and the last one), a method which ties right in with human psychology:
Having something more important to do.
It's that easy.
If you're sitting down and there are several things you could be doing, and the clock's ticking on one of them, what will you actually be doing?
That's right. Not the important one. Suddenly, you will get an inspiration for a blog post that isn't actually all that important.
Suddenly you will remember the email you had to reply to, but it's just a friend and it could wait.
Suddenly you remember that in two weeks a bill will be due, so you may as well pay it now.
Suddenly you get inspiration for the next-but-one article, rather than the one the editor is actually waiting for right now.
You will do everything, in fact, except that task you know backwards, know how to do, need to get done yesterday, but haven't quite managed to build up momentum on yet.
Therefore, if you want to get something done, you have to find something more important you should be doing. The trick here, of course, is to not use techniques guaranteed to get you fired, divorced, kicked out of home or held on child neglect charges.
No. You have to be subtle about this. You have to talk yourself into the sure and certain knowledge that it is absolutely vital that you right now do the dishes because, really, they're disgusting and there are things breeding on the two cups and the bowl sitting rinsed on the draining board waiting to be washed in six hours when there are enough dishes there to justify it.
Have you swept the floors lately? Well get a move on! Don't you know your neighbours will sneer at you if those three stray dog hairs are left lurking in the corner? You filthy pig! (N.B.: No offence is meant towards any members of the pig family, who are clean, intelligent, and only have a bad reputation due to misunderstandings and poor farming conditions).
Have you taken a walk around the garden lately? You lazy slob! Get to it!
After you write another two pages, of course. Just those, then you can get some exercise. It'll be fine, really.
Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 16
Anyone want to guess if there are 16-cylinder motorbikes out there? Drop me a line if you find one.
A brief four articles today, to catch up to mid September:
We start with a rare report of a non-fatal collision, from August 27, the Courier Mail giving us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
There is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, a hurriedly edited one, and overall unsatisfying.
From September 7, the CM also gives us Motorcyclist killed in car collision at Finnie, outside Toowoomba
I can only assume they have a reason for these headlines. There must be a reason.
Six paragraphs, all quite tight and concise but with one clumsy and poorly placed comma, the last paragraph an update on the yearly road toll figures.
Collision between car and bike, 30yo male rider died at scene.
The Toowoomba-Karara Rd is a bit winding, so all the usual country-road risks apply: suspect edges, casual attitude to driving, temptation to go faster than the road affords, loose or compromised surface, etc.
A concise news article, with little information but no randomly thrown quotes or assumptions, either.
From September 9, the CM also gives us Man dies in scooter crash in South Brisbane
A headline that could be improved, but at least this one isn't trying to be a paragraph unto itself.
Eight paragraphs, two different quoted sources, a bit of information and a very oddly worded intro: "A man in his early 20s has died after an accident involving a scooter". What? Was he riding it, or not? Was he a pedestrian?
Further down we are forced to assume he was riding, and appeared to have collided with a power pole.
Bizarrely, he may have been travelling with another scooter at the time. So where, pray tell, did they go? And who called the ambulance?
Most odd.
The article could have been tighter, but the comment below it is a classic - sincere, concerned, stating that the law is ridiculous because riding "these things" doesn't need a bike licence whereas young motorcyclists are restricted by tight laws.
Unfortunately, the article didn't say what type of scooter it was, and he may have had a bike licence. The laws restricting beginner riders don't guarantee good training and don't prevent you getting your hands on something quite capable of getting you in serious trouble, and without knowing a lot more about the accident there is no way of telling that any licensing or training would have made a blind bit of difference.
One more, from September 16 and, yes, the CM again (deep breath): Motorcyclist killed after losing control of bike while overtaking on Bruce Highway at Chevallum (breath out)
I would like to point out that the RSS headline was "Biker killed while overtaking". Sigh.
Ten paragraphs and a call to send in tributes. One other odd quotation mark.
This time, a photo, showing a bike a bit sporty and with considerable rear-end, not front-end, damage, which supports the claim he lost control before hitting the truck, and a spot where I would not have been trying to overtake at all - two lanes and a corner with impaired visibility.
Finally, we have enough eyewitness reports for a decent article - he was seen overtaking other vehicles and "braking heavily" (subjective) before losing control.
Nowhere in the article does it say he hit a truck - just in the photo caption. What the? Wasn't it most likely that impact which killed him, not tumbling along the road?
"Speeding by the motorcycle was a significant factor", Sgt Crowley said. Which seems justified, but he may have been exceeding the speed limit or may have just been overtaking in a stupid manner but inside the speed limit, or may have judged it well then hit a spot of diesel oil on the road.
Also: "was seen overtaking vehicles in the left-bound lane". Left relative to what, exactly?
We finish with some human-interest background profile stuff.
This article was decently written in a very local-paper manner, but it desperately, desperately needed more editing.
A brief four articles today, to catch up to mid September:
We start with a rare report of a non-fatal collision, from August 27, the Courier Mail giving us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
There is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, a hurriedly edited one, and overall unsatisfying.
From September 7, the CM also gives us Motorcyclist killed in car collision at Finnie, outside Toowoomba
I can only assume they have a reason for these headlines. There must be a reason.
Six paragraphs, all quite tight and concise but with one clumsy and poorly placed comma, the last paragraph an update on the yearly road toll figures.
Collision between car and bike, 30yo male rider died at scene.
The Toowoomba-Karara Rd is a bit winding, so all the usual country-road risks apply: suspect edges, casual attitude to driving, temptation to go faster than the road affords, loose or compromised surface, etc.
A concise news article, with little information but no randomly thrown quotes or assumptions, either.
From September 9, the CM also gives us Man dies in scooter crash in South Brisbane
A headline that could be improved, but at least this one isn't trying to be a paragraph unto itself.
Eight paragraphs, two different quoted sources, a bit of information and a very oddly worded intro: "A man in his early 20s has died after an accident involving a scooter". What? Was he riding it, or not? Was he a pedestrian?
Further down we are forced to assume he was riding, and appeared to have collided with a power pole.
Bizarrely, he may have been travelling with another scooter at the time. So where, pray tell, did they go? And who called the ambulance?
Most odd.
The article could have been tighter, but the comment below it is a classic - sincere, concerned, stating that the law is ridiculous because riding "these things" doesn't need a bike licence whereas young motorcyclists are restricted by tight laws.
Unfortunately, the article didn't say what type of scooter it was, and he may have had a bike licence. The laws restricting beginner riders don't guarantee good training and don't prevent you getting your hands on something quite capable of getting you in serious trouble, and without knowing a lot more about the accident there is no way of telling that any licensing or training would have made a blind bit of difference.
One more, from September 16 and, yes, the CM again (deep breath): Motorcyclist killed after losing control of bike while overtaking on Bruce Highway at Chevallum (breath out)
I would like to point out that the RSS headline was "Biker killed while overtaking". Sigh.
Ten paragraphs and a call to send in tributes. One other odd quotation mark.
This time, a photo, showing a bike a bit sporty and with considerable rear-end, not front-end, damage, which supports the claim he lost control before hitting the truck, and a spot where I would not have been trying to overtake at all - two lanes and a corner with impaired visibility.
Finally, we have enough eyewitness reports for a decent article - he was seen overtaking other vehicles and "braking heavily" (subjective) before losing control.
Nowhere in the article does it say he hit a truck - just in the photo caption. What the? Wasn't it most likely that impact which killed him, not tumbling along the road?
"Speeding by the motorcycle was a significant factor", Sgt Crowley said. Which seems justified, but he may have been exceeding the speed limit or may have just been overtaking in a stupid manner but inside the speed limit, or may have judged it well then hit a spot of diesel oil on the road.
Also: "was seen overtaking vehicles in the left-bound lane". Left relative to what, exactly?
We finish with some human-interest background profile stuff.
This article was decently written in a very local-paper manner, but it desperately, desperately needed more editing.
Monday, 20 September 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 15
I shouldn't need to say this, but: No, I don't know of any 15-cylinder motorbikes.
It's been three weeks since my last post - where did they go?
Before I start: I have, in the past, abused (with love) the Queensland Times for their RSS feeds, which consisted of a headline and then a description field filled with a copy of the headline. They have now fixed that, and have a proper, informative, good RSS feed again. Well done.
Today we have four different takes on the same story - the death of an 18yo who hit a truck on the Brisbane Valley Highway west of Brisbane at 5.50am (AEST) on Friday August 27.
In purely alphabetical order we have:
From the ABC News Online: Motorcyclist killed
A pithy title, no? The article describes three separate accidents. The last one is a motorised skateboard, for extra dark-humour value.
Three paragraphs for the bike accident, with a police comment and a note that emergency crews are there and the highway is partially closed.
Nothing to say against this article - I'm guessing it was written from a traffic updates-style radio list.
From the Courier Mail: Teenage motorcyclist dead after collision with truck near Ipswich
Once again, another long CM headline.
Much more informative, concisely written, only a few instances of sentences straining at the seams to fit facts in, one misplaced comma, useful details of what the road closure diversions are, and an unattributed "Excessive speed is considered a factor in the crash."
At 5.50am the highway should have been fairly open, however the Brisbane Valley Highway is one of those two-lane country roads that winds up hill and down dale, trees up to the edges and driveways and towns popping up at random intervals, so dodging somebody else is difficult at best.
That note about speed is my only issue with this otherwise well written article: Why? Looking at the description, the fact that a truck could pull out of a driveway far enough for the bike to hit its trailer suggests that, yes, the bike was going too fast for the conditions. Possibly over a crest, possibly around a corner, possibly just being stupid.
But forgive me for not even slightly trusting an authority who says "Excessive speed is believed to be a factor" without some sort of justification, and that should be noted by the reporter and inserted in the report. "Police say the motorcyclist's inability to stop may have been due to excessive speed" would be good. Just "Yes, he was probably speeding." sounds far too much like towing the party line and jumping to easy assumptions in the face of inadequate information, and it is the job of journalists to hold authority figures honest and make them explain themselves.
Finally, from the local QT: Motorcyclist dies in crash.
The ABC said "about 6am", the CM said "about 5.50am", the QT said "about 5.45am." Um...?
Two paragraphs, which really didn't warrant the use of the word "horrific" in the lead. The second paragraph also looks like three which were joined together by poor formatting. Speaking of poor - "riding a motorcycle, which collided with a truck" is not only my pet peeve of attributing intent to that which is inanimate, but is one of the most egregiously misplaced commas I've yet seen.
I'd also be interested to know if the QT has an opinion about "a" or "an" before "horrific", but that's just a matter of interest.
A poorly written article, but I can't really quibble about the contents.
But wait, there's more!
The very next day, the QT had a proper full-length treatment: Teen dies in bike smash
This time, a definite time of 5.40am, and details including name of the rider and where he was going.
Some casual language, which looks odd but that may just be me, but some good use of the police spokesman and a nicely, classically constructed article let down a little by a couple of instances of poor subbing ("SHE told him", for example).
And, ha-ha, a direct quote from Snr Sgt McCrae: "We don't know if speed was a factor or why the truck driver didn't see him." Up yours, jumping-to-conclusions.
Unfortunately, the article says "the motorcyclist travelling south-bound". He was understood to have left his home south of the crash site and was on his way to work north of the crash site. Um, whoops?
If he was going north, towards Fernvale, but the truck had pulled out of a driveway heading towards Ipswich, which is south, then either the truck pulled across his lane into the south-bound lane, or swung all the way into the north-bound lane in order to exit its driveway. Either scenario left the rider nowhere to go around, leaving braking as the only option. Hmm...
This is otherwise a well done article, very neutral and free from editorialising or judging.
Moving on to a non-fatal collision this time, the CM gives us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
Speaking of formatting, there is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, and an unsatisfying one.
It's been three weeks since my last post - where did they go?
Before I start: I have, in the past, abused (with love) the Queensland Times for their RSS feeds, which consisted of a headline and then a description field filled with a copy of the headline. They have now fixed that, and have a proper, informative, good RSS feed again. Well done.
Today we have four different takes on the same story - the death of an 18yo who hit a truck on the Brisbane Valley Highway west of Brisbane at 5.50am (AEST) on Friday August 27.
In purely alphabetical order we have:
From the ABC News Online: Motorcyclist killed
A pithy title, no? The article describes three separate accidents. The last one is a motorised skateboard, for extra dark-humour value.
Three paragraphs for the bike accident, with a police comment and a note that emergency crews are there and the highway is partially closed.
Nothing to say against this article - I'm guessing it was written from a traffic updates-style radio list.
From the Courier Mail: Teenage motorcyclist dead after collision with truck near Ipswich
Once again, another long CM headline.
Much more informative, concisely written, only a few instances of sentences straining at the seams to fit facts in, one misplaced comma, useful details of what the road closure diversions are, and an unattributed "Excessive speed is considered a factor in the crash."
At 5.50am the highway should have been fairly open, however the Brisbane Valley Highway is one of those two-lane country roads that winds up hill and down dale, trees up to the edges and driveways and towns popping up at random intervals, so dodging somebody else is difficult at best.
That note about speed is my only issue with this otherwise well written article: Why? Looking at the description, the fact that a truck could pull out of a driveway far enough for the bike to hit its trailer suggests that, yes, the bike was going too fast for the conditions. Possibly over a crest, possibly around a corner, possibly just being stupid.
But forgive me for not even slightly trusting an authority who says "Excessive speed is believed to be a factor" without some sort of justification, and that should be noted by the reporter and inserted in the report. "Police say the motorcyclist's inability to stop may have been due to excessive speed" would be good. Just "Yes, he was probably speeding." sounds far too much like towing the party line and jumping to easy assumptions in the face of inadequate information, and it is the job of journalists to hold authority figures honest and make them explain themselves.
Finally, from the local QT: Motorcyclist dies in crash.
The ABC said "about 6am", the CM said "about 5.50am", the QT said "about 5.45am." Um...?
Two paragraphs, which really didn't warrant the use of the word "horrific" in the lead. The second paragraph also looks like three which were joined together by poor formatting. Speaking of poor - "riding a motorcycle, which collided with a truck" is not only my pet peeve of attributing intent to that which is inanimate, but is one of the most egregiously misplaced commas I've yet seen.
I'd also be interested to know if the QT has an opinion about "a" or "an" before "horrific", but that's just a matter of interest.
A poorly written article, but I can't really quibble about the contents.
But wait, there's more!
The very next day, the QT had a proper full-length treatment: Teen dies in bike smash
This time, a definite time of 5.40am, and details including name of the rider and where he was going.
Some casual language, which looks odd but that may just be me, but some good use of the police spokesman and a nicely, classically constructed article let down a little by a couple of instances of poor subbing ("SHE told him", for example).
And, ha-ha, a direct quote from Snr Sgt McCrae: "We don't know if speed was a factor or why the truck driver didn't see him." Up yours, jumping-to-conclusions.
Unfortunately, the article says "the motorcyclist travelling south-bound". He was understood to have left his home south of the crash site and was on his way to work north of the crash site. Um, whoops?
If he was going north, towards Fernvale, but the truck had pulled out of a driveway heading towards Ipswich, which is south, then either the truck pulled across his lane into the south-bound lane, or swung all the way into the north-bound lane in order to exit its driveway. Either scenario left the rider nowhere to go around, leaving braking as the only option. Hmm...
This is otherwise a well done article, very neutral and free from editorialising or judging.
Moving on to a non-fatal collision this time, the CM gives us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
Speaking of formatting, there is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, and an unsatisfying one.
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
There is no such thing as a "will of the people"
I have tried to avoid this. I really have.
Commenting on this farce of an election.
It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.
And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.
But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).
"The Australian people spoke."
May I just say: Piss off.
What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?
"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.
This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.
The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.
I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".
This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.
There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.
Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.
Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.
The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.
Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.
If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.
But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.
Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.
Probably.
Commenting on this farce of an election.
I was not an angry voter, but I was not an undecided voter either.
I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.
On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.
In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.
I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.
On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.
In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.
The simple fact is that I have progressive social views, a strong sense of social justice and a firm belief that the job of a government is to govern, lead and develop not sit back and let private enterprise do it for them, so I am constitutionally inclined, if forced to choose between only the two majors, to pick Labor.
But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election.
But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election.
It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.
And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.
But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).
"The Australian people spoke."
May I just say: Piss off.
What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?
"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.
This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.
The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.
I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".
This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.
There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.
Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.
Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.
The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.
Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.
If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.
But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.
Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.
Probably.
Nokia N97 mini: SlideIT and LightNotePad
(Prescriptus: I finally fixed Blogger's formatting bizareness: There is a button for "remove formatting", which finally returns things to nice, simple HTML. I have no idea why, after I copied the text from a plain text file, it was messy, complicated and wrong HTML in the first place.)
Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.
There may also be better options.
So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?
Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.
And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.
It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.
When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.
Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.
However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.
Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.
So, of course, I added it.
The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.
The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.
On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.
Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.
And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.
This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.
And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.
Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.
I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.
Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.
It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.
No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.
You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.
And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).
I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.
Dammit.
Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.
There may also be better options.
So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?
Text entry
Take the very shiny SlideIT keyboard.Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.
And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.
It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.
When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.
Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.
However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.
Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.
The grammar model could also do with some work: it automatically capitalises the first word after a full stop, but not after exclamation marks. At least, not always. Generally, when it feels like it.
It also insists upon capitalising the first letter of some text fields but not all, and refuses to let you capitalise in the middle of a word, both of which make entering decent passwords impossible. You have to disable it, even on the N97 family where the hardware keyboards don't work, by launching a separate application - you can't do it from within the keyboard interface itself.
It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.
And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.
It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.
And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.
So, of course, I added it.
The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.
The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.
On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.
Text Editors
As far as I'm concerned, every computing device needs a text editor. It's the ultimate basic tool. With a basic text editor you can write letters or emails away from a word processor or an email client, replace a note book, take phone numbers or addresses or other contact details easier and usually faster than using the device's contacts application, and even use it as an ebook reader for device agnostic formats like pain text or html.
So what's available on Symbian? Stuff all, actually.
The built-in Notes application can handle large quantities of text, but that's about it. There's no find, no undo (which has already made my life unpleasant) and this is how you get files in or out to work on them:
- In: open in the built-in file manager (or select "Open with system" in Xplore), which thinks it's dealing with an email attachment and asks if you want to save it to Notes.
- Out: you can't "export", you have to "send". Yes, send via bluetooth, MMS or email, but not actually dump it to a text file on the phone's file system. Yes, you have to email it to yourself.
Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.
And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.
This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.
And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.
Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.
I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.
Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.
It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.
No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.
You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.
And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).
I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.
Dammit.
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