Foreign Perspectives

Oh, you thought that you had some personal privacy? Sorry, it seems that you’re wrong and that you ARE being watched.

For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

Tiles are a bit of an oddball topic in our house at the moment as we’re looking at redoing both the bathroom (probably) and the kitchen (definitely) which are both more ancient than I’d care to say here. Like really ancient.

Now one common theme in relatively old bathrooms and kitchens was the tiling which, in our case, is just about everywhere and also looking particularly dated in some respects too. So dated that the OH has provisionally ruled “no tiles at all” as a starting point and that’s even including some of the really modern styles like the glass tile which is used really imaginatively in some designs we’ve seen lately.

Of course the problem is that tiles are definitely required in some areas if you’re wanting a new look that will actually stick up the the wear and tear that both rooms get on a regular basis so we’ll have something of a compromise I expect.

Much as we would like to have been able to leave the bathroom well alone after our last experience with a plumber, it’s starting to look like we’ll have to undertake a more major upgrade to the bathroom and possibly something really major will be needing done to the kitchen as well.

That being the case we’ve started revisiting the bathroom faucet issue once more. Although we had all of these replaced earlier in the year if we’re needing to redo the whole bathroom this time then we’d be wanting to take a little more time over the issue rather than going for the quick fix option that we did the last time around.

Regardless of the work needing done in the bathroom, the kitchen is definitely going to need some quite major work done on it over the next few months courtesy of the leak (or, probably, leaks) that we’ve developed. Quite where we’d start on that though is an issue for another day!

Last night Britain’s got Talent rewrote the rules of auditions for itself by allowing Hollie and her mother to get another, undeserved, chance to perform her act. Well, her second act I suppose you could say.

That’s really no surprise as the judges this time around seem to be completely biased in favour of the “cute & vulnerable” where a child performer was involved. Hollie merely took this advantage much further than the other children on the show already have.

Whilst it wasn’t a surprise that they’d do this, it does show just how much the show can get taken in by that cute & vulnerable label. That would be fine if the child concerned was very good but Hollie just isn’t. Whether she’s got the potential to be, I don’t know, but at the moment it just looked like a pushy mother wanted her little girl to succeed regardless of anything else.

Although it’s notionally all down to a public vote in reality the judges by their comments can exert a lot of influence on which acts will go forward. They’ve made no allowances for lots of very professional acts in this and previous editions of the show but then they didn’t fall into that cute & vulnerable category.

Sadly this time around a poor performance from Hollie knocked a very good one from Greg Pritchard. That’s just not right.

The latest assignment on the child psychology course is a bit of an odd one for me in that we’ve to do what is essentially a small research study and write up a scientific report on our findings.

Although in previous times this type of assignment was carried as a real practical involving children, changes in the laws have made that too difficult to do so instead we’ve been given recordings of interviews with various children to work with. Thus we don’t need to contact any children ourselves to carry out the research although I’ve been trying out some of it on my own kids.

It’s based on research that Rosenberg did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is one of those psychological experiments that look like they would make little or no sense to the participants at the time but which turn up some quite interesting results. As you’ll probably gather from my title it’s all about identity and in particular how one’s identity changes over time. Conceptually the experiment is really simple. Children (it works on adults too) are given a sheet of paper with ten lines beginning “I…” and asked to complete them in whatever way they see fit. So, for example, someone might put “I am a boy”, “I like reading”, and so on. Once they’ve completed that, they’re questioned on each statement basically to clarify just what they mean by them and the results are analysed.

Clearly one would expect the younger children to have simpler concepts of self and that’s generally the case in that they will refer, largely, to physical descriptions or activities rather than anything deeply philosophical. Likewise, older children will have a more developed sense of self and wlll usually have more sophisticated answers. However, what’s less obvious is that the younger children are, on the whole, talking about themselves by way of things that others could observe whereas the older ones tend to talk more about things that only they could know ie they have developed a sense of who they are that isn’t dependent on what others can see them do.

Naturally, as we get older that sense of self gets increasingly complex. So, whereas a child will have, for the most part, a single “self”, adults gradually acquire different layers of self over the years. Thus there’ll be the self that’s portrayed at work, the self that paints landscapes, the self that one’s family sees and so on. Clearly too one’s hopes and dreams will generally change over time too: that wishing to be a fireman or whatever mutates somewhat over the years.

As always, Ken’s tutorial on this was fascinating at all kinds of levels. Perhaps the most inspiring example that he gave was of a student who had been doing my current course a few years back. He was 92 at the time and was one of the many people that you meet at the OU who were finally getting around to doing that degree that wasn’t an option when they’d been younger. Now, you might think that this guy had left it rather late to be doing a degree but as he said he just wanted to get it completed before he died so that he could put BA on his headstone. However, as with many such people he got a little carried away with it and finished up with THREE doctorates. I don’t know about you but that certainly set me thinking along the lines of… if that old geezer can do a doctorate, what’s stopping me? In many ways, it’s not the high-flier types that provide inspiration to do something but the people like him who, let’s face it, many people would have consigned to the waste bin of life who provide the real inspiration.

So, who are you right now and who do you want to be?