One of the sessions I attended was led by Don Miller, of the Melbourne Centre for Ideas. Don briefly spoke about the comparison between western ideas of freedom, and how “total” freedom can actually limit creativity. (My paraphrase.) The point is – when we are given some form of constraint, we can often become more creative.  Some creative fields come with built-in constraints.   For example, an architect will usually be constrained by the available land area, and by design restrictions imposed by materials, technology, planning regulations, etc.  When we start to test imposed limits, we can also frequently break new creative ground.

To my mind, a classic case of this is the design of the Sydney Opera House.  When Jørn Utzon first drafted his designs for the famous “sails”, it was said that it would be impossible to build with the concrete technology available at the time. The design was changed during the development process, yet it is unlikely that the current globally-recognised design would have ever been built if the construction limitations had not been pushed as they were.

Don led us in a brief exercise to illustrate creativity under constraint. We were asked to spend 10 minutes writing – on whatever topic we chose – with the constraint that every word must include the letter ‘e’.  We were also asked to write at least six lines of text. 

Given that ‘e’ is the most common letter in the English language, this is not as severe a constraint as restricting other letters, yet still enough of a constraint to encourage some creativity! For one thing, it completely rules out the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’, forcing some creative use of punctuation to replace them.  (Try it for yourself.)

At the end of the session , we all read out our pieces.  The seven or so of us at the table were all able to complete the task, with a very varied set of results.  One was a “meta-text” – a piece about the task itself.  For reference, here’s my piece:

Wearily, Eve went westerly.  She previously called her boyfriend, when her vehicle expired. He delayed. She waited; she waited. Darkness fell. Remoteness, loneliness grew. She called repeatedly – response lacked. Heavily, she trudged ahead, seeking help.

Lightness somewhere, beyond the trees. Her prayers went heavenward; her feet westward.

Where’s Edward?

This exercise rather put me in mind of the old piece by Stanislaw Lem, in which a poetry-writing machine is challenged:

“Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter ’s’!”

Then, “a melodious voice filled the hall with the following:”

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

… And speaking of constraints, this was originally written in Polish, and translated into English by Michael Kandel.

Talking Cock (v.): A Singaporean term meaning either to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter.
 - The Coxford Singlish Dictionary

Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of traveling to Singapore on a number of occasions to speak at conferences.  I have greatly enjoyed the experience - both the conferences, and wandering around Singapore as a tourist.  I have met some fantastic people there, and have greatly enjoyed the culture – and the food!

Singapore is a land of contrasts.  It is richly multicultural, with all public signage in four languages.  The population is predominantly Chinese, yet most of the public institutions are as British as they were before independence.  It has earned a reputation as a non-democratic nation, yet the country is alive with art and innovation, and not in the least like a totalitarian state.  I feel safer walking around the streets anywhere in Singapore than I do in some parts of Melbourne.

Some would like to portray Singapore as a place where freedom of speech is suppressed by the government, yet Singapore is now becoming increasingly open. One friend I have made in Singapore is Enrico Varella.  Enrico introduced me to a fantastic local web site – Talking Cock.

This site bills itself as “Singapore’s premier satirical humour website”, and includes the delightful Coxford Singlish Dictionary.  (Singlish is the version of English spoken in Singapore.)  Talking Cock presents itself as apolitical: “Our main aim is to celebrate all the nonsensical parts of Singaporean life. We make fun of people in every sector, strata and profession in a completely democratic way.” Yet a sensitive government could easily take much of the satirical content on the site as criticism and take action against it.  The site also warns that “We have employed… language which might be upsetting to some and which some consider unsuitable for children.”

So what does this have to do with Mr. Conroy?

It appears that Australia’s Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed imposing a filtering system on the Internet.  This purports to be an attempt to shield children from inappropriate content.  A number of people have raised many problems with this.  At the very least, it would significantly slow Internet traffic for all Australians – some estimates put it as high as an 87% reduction in speed. If indeed it is primarily aimed at protecting children, then it also takes away from parents the responsibility of making their own decisions on what is suitable for their children.  There are many more arguments about this proposal – others have advanced these very eloquently.

My view on this is typified by the Talking Cock website.  Would this be one of the estimated 10,000 sites that our government is likely to block as “unsuitable”?  Would we block a site that the Singaporean government overtly allows?  If not initially, would sites such as this be blocked in future? Is it possible that our current or future governments would block sites that are deemed to be critical of the government of the day?  And if so, how would we ever know which sites were being blocked? 

This all seems like an attack on freedom of speech and access to information that is far too open to abuse.  Who will be making the decisions about which sites will be blocked, anyway?

If Talking Cock was determined to be a site that should be blocked, will my blog site also be blocked, because of this post?  As I also use this site for my business, would this expose the government to a liability for unfair restraint of trade?  Does the fact that the site you are looking at now is actually hosted on servers in the USA make me more or less likely to be subject to government scrutiny?

It seems that Mr. Conroy is attempting to use a simplistic industrial-age concept to address a very complex problem, and like most simple solutions, I believe that it is totally inappropriate.

Will we be able to say in future something like this statement on Talking Cock’s home page:

We donno how we’ve escaped the speech-smothering tentacles of the state, but we suspect it’s got a lot to do with you Singaporeans and your tremendous (and very touching) support for us since we began.

I have now also registered with SlideShare for the first time, and uploaded a (very slightly modified) version of the slide pack.  Not totally happy with the way it has been rendered, but it seems to be fairly readable.  It is also available for download.  Help yourself! And thanks to those who contributed…

Also had a great conversation with Ian Farmer of Bullseye.  Ian pointed me at a few interesting sites:

• Free web meetings at Dimdim.
• Social language learning at Livemocha.  This apparently provides two-way language learning – with real people.
• How to draw maps using your GPS – and lots of other apps – at Fire Eagle.

Also got a good reference from elsua via Twitter for “Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss – Don’t Forget about Yourself!” This may be of particular interest to this morning’s participants!

Great live Second Life demo from Decka Mah (aka Lindy McKeown) to end the day.  She also introduced us to PicLens – a cool Google plug-in for image viewing.  Second Life is definitely a usable environment for learning, but the interface probably has a way to go yet to be really seamless.  One thing to remember – it really works best as a synchronous learning environment – you have to be there at the right time.  One neat application – a virtual city for immersive language learning.

You’ve heard of blended learning?  Well, with Second Life, you can have “mixed reality”.

Some of us got a Twitter commentary going.  See the tweets here – and a couple of rogue ones here.

Chieftech mentioned this site as a good source for info on RSS for the enterprise – he has also blogged about the day.

Lots of other good stuff, but I really need to make sure I am all ready to present my workshop tomorrow.  A few parting thoughts that caught my attention, (somewhat paraphrased) from various presenters today:

• “So there are photos of me drunk on Facebook.  So what if a prospective employer sees them? If they don’t like it, then I don’t want to work there, anyway!”
• If only 10% of the staff are editing Wikipedia, then don’t introduce a wiki to your organisation.  If 50% are already on Facebook, then provide an internal directory with editable profiles.
• Start small.  Don’t give people too much variety at first.
• A great way to reduce email traffic is to charge for emails, and give each staff member a limited budget.
• World email traffic volume has just dipped below social networking traffic.
• If you stop people from saying what they want to say on internal online forums, they will just talk somewhere else.
• Enterprise 2.0: a journey, not a destination.
• “Change is driven by feelings” (John Kotter).

Oh, and I nearly forgot:

“Let them own it, and they will protect it.”

So which is it?  The score on Google, with links to the top site in each:

• Hinglish – 104,000 (a Wikipedia reference)
• Indlish – 2,900 (a link to a book)

 Maybe that tells the story.

The British government’s call for migrants to be able to speak standard English was the topic of a Telegraph article a while ago.  The article defined the following variants of English:

• Hinglish (Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu-English)
• Chinglish (Chinese-English)
• Spanglish (Spanish-English) – also known as Tex-Mex

As stated earlier, this is in addition to Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish – Malaysian English. 

The article quotes a report that makes the wise statement that English “… is no longer the preserve of the English, who are ‘just one of many shareholders’ in a global asset”. 

One interesting feature of language in India is that many people are not literate in their own language, so English is just one more hurdle.  Apparently a recent project to subtitle songs in Bollywood films (in the same language as the film) has doubled literacy.

It has been observed that given the population, and developments in education, Indian English may well become the most common version of the language some time this century.

Enjoyed the time, but some aspects were disappointing.  Mining is treated as more important than tourism in New Caledonia.

It was fun to practice my French again, but ran into an interesting language barrier.  On our second day there, Marilyn was experiencing some pains.  Fortunately turned out to not require any critical attention, but we did spend a few hours at the main hospital in Noumea – Gaston Bourret.

It was easy enough to communicate that there was some pain, using a mixture of my French and their Anglais.  But the problem arose in communicating the type of pain. How do you distinguish between a dull ache and a sharp pain across the language barrier?  A “niggly” pain doesn’t really translate. 

Looking up “pain” in my English-French dictionary was potentially dangerous.  One of the French alternatives offered was a word that I suspect actually means “labour pains”.  An attempt to use this could well have got us onto the wrong track entirely!

Language barriers become fairly obvious in this context, but how often do we have equally misleading communication when we are all speaking the same language?

Apparently, Bennett looked at the “Made in China” tag in his new undergarments one day, and decided to find out more.  This led him on a rather strange journey to China, and into Chinese history.

The thing that caught my attention was a story he told of one incident during the journey. 

As I remember the story, he was eating in a small restaurant in a lane-way in a Chinese city.  He was the only tourist in the restaurant, among 30 or 40 Chinese customers. The others in the restaurant fairly quickly noticed his entire lack of ability to eat with chopsticks.  He was “spreading food all over the restaurant, and not eating anything”.  Everyone was very good-natured about it, and some began to laugh at his predicament.  He laughed with them.  One came over and gave him instructions on eating with chopsticks.

By the end of the meal, even though he spoke almost no Chinese, and the other diners little English, they were all laughing and joking together. When he left the restaurant, everyone said goodbye to him.  The waitress even followed him out onto the street to return his tip.

Now here’s the good bit – as Bennett said, imagine reversing the situation.  A 50-something Chinese man goes into a restaurant in Sydney (or Christchurch, New York or London).  Would the same thing happen?  Would everyone in the restaurant say goodbye when he left?  Would the waitress chase him to return his tip?

How much of our behaviour and responses to other people is determined by our context and culture, and how much can we change?

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

There has been some discussion on actKM about language translation.  It has been suggested that it is possible to decide that a particular translation can be said to be “correct”, or that one translation can be actually measured and rated as “better” than another. 

The argument has variously referred to single words or whole texts; poetry has also been referred to. 

Is it possible to say that even a precise, simple, factual statement is accurately translated?  Maybe, but I am not convinced.  However, when it comes to translating “knowledge” – any piece of text that is in any way context-dependent, then I must side with David Snowden’s view that “knowledge is closer to poetry than a factual statement.” 

Poetry tends to be strongly context-dependent.  There is no way that a translation of a poem can be judged to be “correct” in any completely objective or absolute way (or thus, by the above argument, knowledge).

To be specific, I find Fitzgerald’s First Edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam far superior (poetically) to later editions I have read.  (Although there are apparently many that I haven’t read!)

Fitzgerald himself apparently admitted that it was not an “accurate” translation – but accuracy is not always poetic.  Is it more important for a translation to be “accurate” textually, or is it more important to convey Khayyam’s thoughts, his philosophy, the sights and sounds of his world, or even the sounds of his words?

Another interesting example is the translation of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (from Through the Looking-Glass) into another language.  How do you translate “nonsense” words?  You pay attention to the fact that Carroll carefully designed his words to have particularly evocative sounds: “uffish thought” or “galumphing”.  In this case, an accurate translation conveys sounds and meanings that will inspire similar concepts in the mind of the reader.  (There are translations following this model in at least French and German.)

Some translations may be more or less helpful to individual people – but beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder.

Yet ever and anon he’d cough
As though his head were coming ough!

“My word!” sad he, “but this is rough;
This flour is simply awful stough!”

He punched and thumped it through and through,
As all good bakers always dough!

“I’d sooner drive,” said he, “a plough
Than be a baker, anyhough!”

Thus spake the baker kneading dough;
But don’t let on I told you sough!

W. T. Goodge (1862-1909)

(Copied from a book of Australian poetry of uncertain vintage.  All spelling as per original.)

The place is totally delightful, decorated with a wide range of pieces of art.  It is only two blocks back from the beach, and only a short walk from where my uncle once had a holiday house, where I spent many happy holidays as a child.  It was interesting walking on the beach here again for the first time for many years.  The beach has changed a lot – a large amount of sand has been washed away.

There is a good supply of holiday reading in the bookshelves here.  One book is of a type I have never seen before.  It is a taste of absolutely brash commercialism from the 1890s (precise date not specified).  It is Dougal’s Index Register to Next of Kin, Heirs at Law, and cases of Unclaimed Money Advertisements.  At least, that is the short form of the title.  The title page expands this out to a grand total of 85 words, including several et ceteras (then spelt as “&c.” – the ampersand sign comes from the letters “et” – the Latin for “and”). 

The book is an absolute teaser.  It is in essence very similar to some of the spam that we see today.  It provides a huge list of names from various advertisements for people (next of kin, etc) being sought to claim apparently huge sums of money from wills, stockholdings, court cases (&c.).  It is also peppered with facsimile copies of hand-written letters of thanks from successful claimants, and “amusing anecdotes on extraordinary windfalls, curious wills, misers, missing relatives, foreign intestates, &c. &c.”

It is not clear if the book was sold at a price or just given away, but the dear reader who finds a relevant name of interest in the book can only obtain the full text of the original advertisement for the princely sum of one pound.

We are also left in absolutely no doubt that F. H. Dougal & Co were at the time located at 62, Strand, London, England, and that we should accept no substitutes:

“We hereby caution the public against unscrupulous persons representing themselves to be in a position to supply copies of advertisements relating to the names in our book at nominal prices.  Our INDEX TO ADVERTISEMENTS has been compiled at great expense and labour extending over a period of 50 years.  The advertisements relating to names in our book cannot be supplied by any other person.”

Indeed.

The fact that it purports to include advertisements for “missing friends” also makes me wonder if the concept behind Facebook is such a new idea.

Another thing that strikes me is that it includes advertisements covering “recover of claims in Great Britain, the Colonies, India, America, France, Germany, Ireland and all parts of the world.”  (The colonies apparently included Australia, New Zealand, Canada and more.)  The way that city or state names from across the world are mentioned directly in the text seems to assume geographic knowledge on the part of the reader superior to that assumed by most publications today. 

Maybe the world was a smaller place back in the 1890s than we might now think?