The illusion of spelling reform

Over the years, many people have thrown themselves at the issue of spelling reform.  Concerned about the irregularity and non-phonetic nature of English spelling, clever people have devoted imense amounts of effort to the cause.  But over the last two hundred years, the results have been negligible.   The last successful attempt to impose new spellings by fiat was American Noah Webster's speller of 1785: he managed, in a febrile political climate which was very receptive to the idea of change in general and change to things inherited from England in particular, to impose some minor changes to words like colour/color and theatre/theater.  Since then, all efforts have come to naught.  And they will continue to come to naught.

Leave aside the inability of reformers to agree amongst themselves about the reform they want.  Leave aside doubt about the claim that phonetic spelling is actually necessary.  Instead, let us assume that the basic premise of the reformers, that there should be a consistent relationship between sound and spelling, is true, and that they have such a reformed orthography complete ready for adoption.  It will fail.  Whatever the proposal, it will fail.

Regional Division

Firstly, the proposal will inevitably involve the concept of some form of standard accent that the reformed spelling relates to.  In any significantly sized country which speaks English, there is a variety of regional accents.  Not only will these have different pronunciations for the same words, but words which are homophones in one accent may not be in another.  Londoners might pronounce poor and pour alike; Scotsmen will not; some or all of duel, dual and jewel may be homophones depending upon who is talking.  Any spelling reform will tend to privilege one particular accent, usually something close to "RP", and will become almost as arbitrary as existing orthography the further from that accent one moves.  This will make the reform unacceptable to many, including parts of the English speaking world which have distinctive accents and already have separatist tendencies (Scotland, Quebec).  Separatist politicians will denounce the new spellings as an attempt to impose a national accent; the argument will be very hard to refute while still providing a coherent argument for the reform.  If the spelling is to be national and to be phonetic, there must be a national accent.  If regional accents are to be preserved, the spelling cannot be phonetic.

Age and Class Division

Secondly, even if the reform could be "sold" throughout a country, the only plausible way to introduce it would be via schools.  Many schools would simply refuse to accept such a change, and these schools would tend be those which are already privileged.  They would tell parents that the reform constituted "dumbing down" and that, even if it succeeds, the new spelling will be seen as low status.  In addition, literate parents would not welcome such a reform, as it would exclude them from helping their children, and they would work actively to undermine it.    It is hard to see how the result would not be a two-tier English, with children of affluent, educated parents retaining old spellings while the new spellings become the hallmark of deprivation.  Newspapers and other publishers would not change, as the market for new spelling would be tiny in comparison with that for the existing orthography, and the new spelling would not achieve critical mass.  

International Division

Thirdly, unlike in 1785 when international communication was by sailing ships, and books were published locally on local presses with local spelling, English is now an international language.  There is no central body which manages English, and there is no plausible way that such a body could be set up.  Therefore, any country which altered its "official" spelling (even accepting that it could impose such a thing on its own population) would be cutting itself off from the rest of the English speaking world.  Much of English's value lies in its role as a lingua franca, and complicating that by adding a new set of spelling rules (which would, of course, not be phonetic in the heavily accented English spoken in countries where it is the second or third language) would damage this.  

Objections to these Arguments

Reformers point to successful, or at least partially successful reforms, in other languages.  The German reforms of 1996 would be the most relevant, but do not answer my objections.  Firstly, the reforms aimed at increasing phonetic correspondence were minor, so the issue of accent does not arise (or, at least, arises no more than in any other spelling system for German).  The changes do not seek to impose a standard accent, and the spellings which were altered were brought into closer correspondence with almost all native speakers' accents.  Secondly, the changes were small, of a scale akin to Webster's of 1785 rather than the extensive changes proposed by reformers of English, and do not create a very obvious before and after language.  Thirdly, German is dominated by one country, Germany, which has a particularly centralised education system with a very strong degree of control, so the issues both of refusal by some schools and of international division do not arise.

Conclusion

Spelling reform of English will not happen, no matter how excellent the arguments or how polished the proposal.  It would not be acceptable to people who do not speak RP, it would not be possible to mandate its use on any large scale, and it would not gain any traction outside the first country to adopt it.  It is a waste of intellectual effort to work on reforms without answering these objections. 

Spot the difference

Ofsted inspection in November 2012:

Year on year, students’ test marks get better and better. By the time they leave school, they are ahead of students in other schools and are well prepared for their next stage of education, employment or training.


Ofsted inspection of the same school,  under the same head, without any significant changes to demographic, funding or other external events, in September 2013:


Too many students fail to make the progress expected of them in English and mathematics across Key Stage 3. When they begin their GCSE studies, they have too much ground to make up and, as a result, GCSE results for the last two years have been much lower than expected, given the students’ starting points. 

November 2012:

Teaching is mostly good or outstanding which is why students make such good progress.

September 2013:

Too much teaching is ineffective and not enough is good, leading to students’ inadequate achievement. 

November 2012:

The headteacher and senior staff know what the issues are for the school and quickly sort them out.


September 2013:

Leadership and management are inadequate because the school is not improving quickly enough. There has not been a sufficiently cohesive drive by leaders and staff to raise standards.  Leaders have an overly positive view of the quality of teaching and the school’s performance. They do not analyse the performance of key groups of students sharply enough to help them plan effectively for improvement.


November 2012:

Behaviour is good in lessons and around the school. Students have good manners and respect adults. They enjoy and feel safe at school and their attendance has improved. 


September 2013:

• Some students do not feel safe around the school grounds. 


November 2012:

Students with a visual or hearing impairment or those who have other special educational needs also make good progress in The Hub, due to the high quality of support they receive from teachers and specialist support workers.


September 2013:

• Disabled students and those who have special educational needs, including students in the Hub, make insufficient progress. Although teachers clearly identify these pupils and receive good information about their circumstances, not all teachers adjust their teaching to meet their needs. The large majority of disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs in Year 7 last year, made little progress or went backwards in English.

November 2012:

• The governing body is aware of the quality of teaching and the strategies the school is using to improve its quality. Governors are aware of how well students are doing, including in comparison with students nationally. They regularly ask questions about teaching and attend some of the staff training sessions. As a result, they are aware of which staff are performing well and how performance management is being used to reward staff when they have made a difference to students’ outcomes. Governors themselves are well-trained through a planned programme and hold the headteacher to account for the performance of the school. They have ensured that the pupil premium is used effectively to help potentially disadvantaged students to do better.

September 2013:

• The governing body has not questioned the school’s leaders robustly enough about students’ achievement; the decline in performance has not been investigated and they have not checked on how well groups of students are doing. They have simply accepted information given to them by senior leaders and, as a result, they do not hold an accurate picture of the school’s effectiveness. They do not have a deep enough understanding about the quality of teaching across the school. Governors have not held school leaders to account for their actions and, as a result, have not sufficiently challenged them about needed improvements.

Visiting Universities

A colleague and I have an on-going conversation about how universities in the Russell Group are going to be affected by the 20% drop in the number of 18 year olds over the next ten years.   Simplifying what has been a long-running debate, he essentially argues that any fall in numbers applying at the upper end of the current spectrum of institutions will be back-filled by people who might otherwise have applied to less selective institutions, while I argue that there are practical, cultural, academic and other reasons why people will continue to apply to post-94 universities (particularly urban ones) even if there are places going spare in the Russell Group, even if they go on to get A Levels which would get them a place in the RG institution.  Time will tell, I suspect, but universities whose recruitment is entirely predicated on people living away from home --- most of the post-Robbins universities --- are going to feel the chill more than the traditional metropolitan Redbricks with a large "home" source of students.

However, it's interesting to look over the ocean and see how the high-end US universities are recruiting.  They also face a ten year period of decline in the number of people turning 18 in their country, but with cultural factors that make the situation probably worse than it is for equivalent institutions here.  The Ivy League is at least as middle-class as Oxbridge, and it's the white middle classes where the birthrate is dropping most savagely.  So to get the best students, the Ivy League has both to reach out to new groups and compete amongst themselves for the best from the traditional recruiting grounds.

It's a whole other world.  

The British universities, other than the "tourist destination" old Oxford and Cambridge colleges which offer daily tours of the buildings, have a few open days per year.  In practice, you can usually just turn up, but in principle they need booking.    They are marketed to schools, rather than to parents and prospective students.  Although the middle classes (who are in very short supply, as their birth rate is low and falling) plan campaigns of open days for their children as though they are contemplating an amphibious invasion of France, large portions of the potential student population only make ad hoc visits to a local university, organised by schools on the basis of distance as much as anything else.  Aside from anything else, cost is a major factor: visiting four or five universities, even if like me you regard parents going with their children as a lamentable development, could easily cost 250 quid.  Packing those into the small window of time during which they all happen is very difficult.

The Ivy League and their competitors have campus tours, on a turn-up basis, every day apart from high days and holidays, both in and out of term (all from the first hit of google "visit X", except for Berkeley, where it's the second hit as the first hit is the district rather than the university).

Welcoming, yes?

Contrast with the first paragraph of the result of searching for "Visit [Russell Group] University" (and it's the same for all of them, plus or minus, so it would be invidious to identify it).

Reading through a prospectus is not the same as coming to visit the University in person. ‘Invitation only’ applicant visit days are held from November to April when students who have applied to study at [RG] are invited to a VIP day where you can meet current 

Other examples are available from

There are special days, which you have to book for, but otherwise the university's doors are closed to you.

The US tours are up to a point aimed at prospective students, but they're also more general to raise awareness amongst passing tourists.  Those tours also include a chance to talk to admissions people and student ambassadors, every day.  So if you're near a university for some other reason, you can visit and get a sense of what that universities, and universities in general, are like.

And if you and your parents don't have a background in university education, for Yale you can sit in on _any_ class on campus as a visitor, something explicitly aimed at explaining why universities are A Good Thing:

You are welcome to drop in on a class – just search for classes that you might enjoy. Or, thanks to Open Yale Courses, you can try out a Yale class online at anytime

This doesn't appear to be a hollow offer --- my elder looked up what lectures were happening on the day we intend to visit Yale, mailed the lecturer and within 35 minutes got an enthusiastic response, finishing

Have a safe trip, and I look forward to meeting you next week.
So a holiday in New York can include a side-trip to New Haven, a campus tour and sitting in on a class.  That's a pretty compelling piece of marketing.

Now, suppose a student who happened to be in a city fancied a look at a Russell Group University, or more specifically at a department in such a university.  They're told it's invitation only, and those invitations are only available to applicants.  How likely are they to think better of the university?

ian

How sensible policies conflict with each other

[[ Not theory, not technical, but if you're interested in policy... ]]

It's a sensible idea to provide a renewal schedule for photographic ID, to account for changes in appearance and to "time out" tokens which might have weak physical security. So passports, for example, force renewal every five years for children and young adults and every ten years for old adults. The photographs are reasonably up-to-date (although five year old children can travel on photographs of them as a baby, which might not be good news in custody disputes) and passports only have to withstand a maximum of ten years of attempted forgeries. For example, recent EU passports have the passport number perforated through each page, presumably to defeat the swapping in of pages with visas, or swapping out of exclusion stamps.  Older ones don't, but within ten years of the introduction of that security measure, all passports will have it.  Attackers might choose to forge or modify an older passport, but they can't choose to manipulate a 1994 Blue British Passport with handwritten details and a photograph glued in, because even if they were able to modify the expiration date, the physical design itself has expired as well.

So when photographic driving licenses were introduced, there was a lot of noise about the photocard portion having a ten year renewal schedule, the same as passports. This way, the photograph would always be relatively recent, and at least no worse than a passport photograph. However, it was a lot of work issuing photographic driving licenses, as it required photographs to be endorsed and validated and scanned. Once the passport office started scanning photographs and signatures and printing them in passports, rather than physically attaching a real photograph and sending them out for the bearer to sign, the solution was obvious: link driving licenses to passports, so that the same photograph was used for both. Provided you have a passport, you can apply for a driving license in the same name with the same photograph, modulo other proofs of shared identity. And you can do this irrespective of when the passport was issued.

Can you see the problem?

I've just received my first photographic driving license, applied for using the "linked to a passport" process. My passport was issued in 2003. So my new driving license, valid until January 2023 (when I will be 58), features a photograph taken in 2003 (which I was 38). I can drive, perfectly legally, in 2023 with a _twenty_ year old photograph on my driving license. So, why do we need to renew them every ten years? OK, the anti-forgery aspect of it is an issue. But most uses of driving licenses as driving licenses, rather than as ID cards, are checked online with the DVLC. Because you can't have driving license until you're sixteen, the ability to forge an older, weaker driving license isn't of much use for the main use case of posing as being old enough to buy alcohol, and I seriously doubt that even the Level 1 Security features in the license [1] are in reality checked by publicans. ian

[1] UK Driving License Security Features

Lance Armstrong

Well, I'm not sure that was worth getting up for. By which I mean that by the end we knew more, but none of it was really worth knowing. We learnt that Armstrong doped to win races, but we all pretty much knew that already. Even the deniers knew it in their hearts. We learnt that he denies doping since 2005 which is, conveniently, the point at which the US Statute of Limitations on perjury kicks in to cover his his denials. I doubt even he believes that, but that's a matter for the courts. And nastiest, we had learnt what we also already knew: that Armstrong's a sociopathic, narcissistic bully with the morals of the gutter.

It's not about the bike: it's about him. He dismissed his vile abuse of Betsy Andreu (someone I would want in my corner in a fight) and Emma O'Reily (who did nothing wrong other than be honest and true). In the latter case, he pretended to not even remember what he'd done. In each case, his self-obsession meant that he believed that his mere apology made things right, and he implied that they were unreasonable for not accepting that at face value. It was like some hideous 12-step nonsense (he'd talked about "process" at the outset); under the guise of "making amends" narcissists make hollow apologies, and then blame their victims for not accepting them. It's a manipulative technique at the heart of 12 steps: it's not my fault that they hate me for what I've done, haven't I apologised?

He also tried to blame it on his "flaws". He was flawed, and therefore lacked moral agency, so didn't have any choice. Sophocles unpicks that in his plays, and Shakespeare gives it no credence, so it's as though Armstrong hasn't read a play written in the past two and a half thousand years. Yes, he was flawed, but that doesn't mean he didn't make choices. It's as though his desire to "win" excused, and excuses, any excess, any abuse, any assault on others.

Winfrey has the journalistic credibility of Hello magazine, and the whole thing was obviously staged. Armstrong had clearly been given the questions in advance, and given the way in which some topics weren't followed up had presumably had final cut on the interview. Confused, self-contradictory stories (especially about Betsy Andreu's testimony but also whatever happened in Switzerland) weren't followed up, and the contradictions weren't challenged. This was Frost-Nixon as Nixon envisaged it, not as Frost managed it: soft questions, poor followup, heavy editing, final cut. But what came over, unintentionally, was what an appalling man Armstrong is, and how he clearly lives in a house with no mirrors.

In his mind, all he did was what he had to do. We should move on, shouldn't we?

ian

Oh Tempora, Oh Mores

In 1986, you could bring up a network of half a dozen Sun workstations, each running a perfectly capable 4.3bsd-derived Unix which most people today would be perfectly happy to use in terms of functionality (the 15MHz 68020 might not be such fun) off a single 327MByte Fujitsu Super Eagle disk [1], with plenty of room left to do real work.

Today, the installation image for a Raspberry Pi is 1.8GBytes.

ians-macbook-air:Downloads igb$ ls -lh 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img
-rw-r--r--@ 1 igb staff 1.8G 16 Dec 18:52 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img
ians-macbook-air:Downloads igb$

And the update kit looks like about another 475MBytes, too.

remote: Counting objects: 21472, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7381/7381), done.
Receiving objects: 70% (14868/21219), 331.89 MiB | 32 KiB/s

 

[1] I found the securing straps from the pallet it was delivered on recently: I'd been using them to tue things down in the boot of one of the cars.

Government putting key documents on AWS: what could go wrong?

Politics junkies seeking a copy of the Coalition's "mid-term review" will be amused to note that it's being served from the snappily-named "assets.cabinetoffice.gov.uk.s3-external-3.amazonaws.com". Anyone might think that the UK government didn't have any data centres.

Font junkies will be pleased that, rather than recent DfE publications which have the hideous combination of Helvetica logos and Arial body, it is at least in Helvetica Neue throughout.

ian

Look on my works, etc

Having been watching the demolition of Bournville College, I hadn't noticed that Shenley Court was being demolished as well.  I hadn't been past it in daylight for a few months, so by the time I noticed yesterday it was pretty far gone.   

Police and Thieves

Well, it looks like the Tories have been taken over by student Trots. Never mind putting the disestablishment pistol to the CofE's head over women bishops, and then just shrugging their shoulders and telling the churches to get stuffed over same-sex marriage: that could be principle, or could just be lugging some soft ones to the Lib Dems in the knowledge it's going to be a bloodbath in the Lords'. But the last week has seen:

* Osborne announcing that the government's going to donate the VAT on the Hillsborough single back to the "Justice for the 96" campaign (contrast Thatcher and Band Aid, although I believe that was sorted out in the end), Cameron announcing that the government is going to fund the legal representation of all the families of the 96 and Grieve announcing new inquests for all of the 96;

* Cameron announcing a fresh inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave

* No backing down over police pension, pay and conditions

* Assorted Tories getting ready to take the Met on, unambiguously, over Mitchell.

Time was that Tory policy on the police was to pay them off and grant them immunity in exchange for bashing in the heads of union members. Now it looks like the Tories are seeing that the police (via both ACPO and the Fed) have been behaving like a private army and not one that the Tories either control or need, so are planning a front and centre assault on them. Labour didn't dare, for fear of being seen as "soft on crime", so allowed a culture of impunity to develop in which the police believed that they could write the law as they want it. I guess that perjury in support of an attempt to bring down a minister is taking that a bit far. But it is like the SWP are running Tory relations with the police. Fun times.

Merry Christmas one and all.

ian

Victory for the Mail! Children WILL be protected from online porn after Cameron orders sites to be blocked automatically | Mail Online

Yes, I know, reading the Daily Mail rots the brain, although in my defence I only saw this story because it was on the front page that Paxman showed at the end of last night's Newsnight.  David Cameron is trying to square the circle of the Mail's howling about online pornography and the resounding results of the recent consultation exercise:

David Cameron writes:

Want to restrict access to Facebook after 8pm? Decide to allow younger children to view fewer sites than their older siblings? Or want to stop access to certain sites altogether? Now you will be shown how to do it.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250809/Victory-Mail-Children-WILL-protected-online-porn-Cameron-orders-sites-blocked-automatically.html#ixzz2FaHpxWqU 
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

So, for those of us in the security community, it appears Dave is going to solve the problem of home users sharing computers and/or sharing accounts at a stroke.  All the issues associated with people using one login (or, more commonly, no logins) will be gone.  And, better, devices which don't have the concept of multiple users (such as those iPads which so few people have bought, and which have been so unpopular since their damp-squib launch) will now be locked to a single user and won't be shared around in households.  Excellent!  That's a major security issue solved at a stroke!

ian