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Recognizing dormitive explanations

July 11, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

I first heard about the concept of dormitive explanation in university. Ever since, it’s been one of my basic tools for errors in logic and thinking more clearly.

The concept has been articulated several times in the last few centuries, but, so far as I can tell, the person who named it was system theorist Gregory Bateson. The name comes from Moliére’s play The Imaginary Invalid (aka The Hypochondriac), in which a doctor claims that opium puts people to sleep “because there is a dormitive principle in it.”

In other words, opium puts people to sleeve because it puts people to sleep. When the statement is reworded, the circular cause and effect is obvious, but an essential part of a dormitive explanation is that the circularity is hidden by changing the word being used. Often, as in Moliére’s play, the change in word involves using a word with a Latin word rather than a Germanic one, or, at the very least, a more impressive, mufti-syllabic word. In any case, the effect is to leave the impression that something has been explained when it has only been renamed.
Or, to explain the concept another way, dormitive explanation is a fallacy, an indicator of an illogical argument that the classical Greek and Roman studies of rhetoric somehow missed.

Dormitive explanations rarely exist in the hard sciences, although at first they might appear to. Explanatory principles like “gravity” or “mass” might act like dormitive explanations for the semi-trained – for example, things fall because of gravity, which is the tendency for things to fall – but the fact that they can be used to calculate other behaviors indicates that they are more than circular causality hidden by a change in terminology.
However, on the fringes of science, dormitive explanation becomes more common.. For instance, consciousness is often described as the capacity for self-awareness. Often, words like “syndrome” or “complex” or “effect” are used, so that feelings of inadequacy become “impostor syndrome”with no attempt to classify symptoms systematically.

Similarly, in many New Age philosophies, explanations are give in terms of “energy,” which – since the term obviously does not refer to any sort of energy recognized by physics – amounts to just another name for a dormitive principle.

In some ways, dormitive explanation can become an appeal to authority, either to the authority of the explainer, or to the force or principle evoked as an explanation. For example, if you say that men have evolved to be better at mathematics than women, not only are you suggesting an evolutionary tendency whose existence is unproved, but you are mentioning evolution in the hopes of presenting an argument that others cannot challenge.

In fact, dormitive explanation is all about authority. It makes the person who gives it sound authoritative, and, if accepted, gives listeners a sense that something that concerns them has been explained. In practice, no explanation has been given at all, but unless the listeners can analyze while someone else speaks, they are unlikely to recognize what is happening until later.

Many, of course, never recognize it all, and have no desire to do so. After all, which would you rather do: suffer from joint pain, or have arthritis? The problem is not that arthritis doesn’t exist, but that it is a generic term that covers dozens of different conditions. That means that being told you have arthritis actually does people little good. Yet, having a scientific-sounding name for their condition is reassuring for many people, even if the name does little to suggest treatment or prognosis.

What makes the concept of dormitive explanation so important to me is the fact that it is generally unrecognized and used to assert authority and give false reassurance. By contrast, by being aware of the concept, you can learn to notice it when you encounter it, and reject the lack of logic behind it. The result can be not only clearer thinking, but a clearer sense of what to do next.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, dormitive explanation, dormitive virtue, fallacies, Gregory Bateson, logical fallacies, Moliere, Personal, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Taking speech therapy

July 8, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

When I was in the first grade, I took speech therapy lessons. I sometimes think that is the single most influential fact in my life.

I had two main problems. First, I pronounced a hard “c” as “t.” For example, I would say “dut” for “duck” and “tind” for “kind.” Second, I spoke so quickly that I often slurred my words.

These two deficiencies were more than just inconveniences. They were major factors in how people regarded me. I’m told that, when I was in kindergarten, some of the parents dismissed me as mentally retarded (to use the term of the times). More than once, I was aware that an adult to whom I was talking didn’t understand me. These deficiencies were also the reason that, in Grade One, I was assigned to the slowest reading group, along with at least one child with Down’s Syndrome, although what relation my speech patterns had to my reading ability eludes me to this day. But they were major reasons to ostracize me, and I knew they meant something was wrong with me, although I didn’t know exactly what.

To correct my problems, my parents started sending me to speech therapy once or twice a week. For a long time, I struggled through the pronunciation drills, feeling increasingly inadequate, since it was obvious that I wasn’t giving the right response. Being poster-boy for that year’s March of Dimes campaign, pretending to be deaf, helped a little, but even that, I realized, was not an unalloyed honor.

Then, one day, I managed to make the hard “c” sound. Over the next few months, I learned to make it consistently where I needed to. I also learned to pronounce more clearly in general. Slowing my speech down, however, was a lost cause – decades later, I still speak too fast unless I make a deliberate effort.

To say that this experience changed my life is an understatement. Now people understood me, I was soon in the most advanced reading group. Before long, I was leaving most of my class mates behind.

But the experience also affected me in other ways. Having listened on head phones to my own endless efforts to pronounce words correctly, to this day, hearing my own voice makes me remember feeling like a failure, to the point that I wince at the sound. I dislike being judged and tested as well, knowing how fallible those doing the judging can be. And I still speak with a deliberateness that makes me sound far more serious than I am, and that many people – at least in North America – mistake for an English accent.

More significantly, I was left with an unshakeable sympathy for those who are easily dismissed the same way that I was. My social and political feelings, as well as my feminism, come directly from the sense of injustice I automatically feel when I see someone who has been judged less than mainstream. Nor can I ever feel comfortable being part of an elite, knowing how superficial the membership requirements can be.

Even more importantly, I became obsessed with language. My reading ability, which had always been advanced for my age, improved so dramatically that, by the time I was awarded a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for the best student in my first grade class, it seemed too juvenile for me (I only learned to appreciate it as an adult). That summer, I read the entire Hardy Boys series. By the time I started Grade Two, I was reading translations of The Three Musketeers, and my mother was worried what I might come across in my readings.

Meanwhile, on the side, I was starting my own first efforts at writing. Borrowing a few ideas from my father, I wrote a long story about discovering a prehistoric world inside the local mountains.

Another early effort involved a pack of wild dogs that were being rounded up evil men in a van. I was especially proud of the fact that, while I understood that the dogs couldn’t read the entire license plate on the van, I had the canine protagonist remember the last few digits, which seemed much more probable to me.

Such efforts led me to teaching English, and eventually to publishing manuals, articles, stories, and poems. In a very direct sense, speech therapy gave me my vocation.

But, just as importantly, speech therapy gave me my personal myth. It gave me a narrative of starting from behind, and then succeeding through persistence. At an early age, it taught me to endure and to keep trying, and to ignore the opinions of the skeptical as I worked towards my chosen goals. Perhaps, it even gave me an early orientation to goals.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t needed speech therapy. Would I be a political lefitst? Place the same value on endurance? Be a writer? I might have still been and done all these things, but not, I suspect, as strongly. If I had had things easier, then probably I would be a much milder, more innocent person than I am today, even if my general tendencies remained the same.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, childhood, Personal, speech therapy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Writing opinion pieces

July 7, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

To my bemusement, I realized recently that over a third of the articles I do in a month are opinion pieces. Back in 2004, when I first started full-time journalism, I wouldn’t have believed that was possible. I believed then that I had no talent for editorials, and the thought of doing one intimidated me so much that I barely knew how to begin.

My background as an academic and a technical writer had a lot to do with that belief. Ask me to summarize or quote accurately in an news story or interview, and I could draw on my experience writing academic papers. Ask me to write an accurate how-to, and I could depend on my experience writing manuals and tutorials. Even a review didn’t seem impossible, because, while it gave an opinion and was shaped by an opinion, the opinion was based on clear facts.

But a commentary on free software-related events? That left me much more exposed. I had only been involved in the community for a few years, and I was all too aware that dozens of people –maybe hundreds or thousands – had more experience than me. So why would anyone be interested in my opinion? I’d be shredded as soon as I opened my mouth.

Besides, years in a university English department had conditioned me to avoid giving a firm opinion whenever possible. I had got used to softening my opinions with words like “almost” or “seems” to lessen the possibility of an attack.

Fortunately, writing at Linux.com and hanging out on its IRC channel every day, I had some strong role models. The late Joe Barr was the master of the attack piece – of angry diatribes full of sarcasm and humor, the kind that is read less for insight than for entertainment, like a review of a play by Dorothy Parker (“And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself.”). By contrast, Robin “roblimo” Miller, the senior editor could write editorials just as forceful, but milder in tone and more thoughtful.

These models were important to me, because, when I came to write my first opinion pieces, I had some idea of what I could manage. While I admired Joe Barr’s expression of anger, I knew there was no way that I could match it for more than a sentence or two. I would have to assume a persona that was mostly foreign to me, and would feel foreign – maybe dishonest – to me.

By contrast, my academic background made the thoughtful editorial seem a more attainable goal. While writing academic papers, I had discovered I had a knack for getting to the core of a matter and stripping away irrelevancies. I knew how to anticipate opposing views, and disarm them by answering them before anyone else could make them. I knew that, even if I didn’t always respect opposing views, reporting them fairly made me appear to do, and that the effort improved my own argument. I might still shoot off the occasional one-liner caked in sarcasm, but, most of the time, I had a better chance of managing a thoughtful tone rather than an outraged and witty one.

What I didn’t anticipate was how my style would add to my voice. My model for style was George Orwell, with clarity and simplicity my main goals. In particular, I got into the habit of ruthlessly deleting all the qualifiers that academia had taught me to use to soften my opinions. Add a tone that is partly a reflection of my own speech-therapy influenced conversation and partly the influence of Orwell’s very English tone, and the result is that I come across as more forceful than I initially realized.

This combination of habits and tone meant that, as I ventured into writing opinion pieces, I had a more distinctive result than I realized at first. Not everyone liked it, of course: to this day, I still have critics who claim that my ability to look at all sides of a discussion mean that I will write anything, even for shock value (not true; although I do sometimes write to explore the possibility of an idea). Others find my tone patronizing (usually when they disagree with me). At times, too, I have been called disloyal to free software, or worse.

I can see where these views originate, so I don’t feel much need to argue against them, except to say that they have as much to do with readers’ expectations as anything I actually do.

At any rate, over the years, I have grown much more accustomed to hostile responses than I was when I started writing opinion pieces. If people disagree with me (or with what they think I am saying), they are at least reading me, which means that editors will pay for my opinions.

As for myself, I’m content to express an opinion that I either hold or am considering. So long as I can do one of these two things as thoroughly as possible, writing an opinion piece has long ago lost its terror to me. I sometimes need half a draft to know just what my opinion on a subject happens to be, but opinion pieces have long since settled into being a familiar part of my repertoire.

At times, I can even imagine that I have a talent for them. When Carla Schroder tweeted, “Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flame wars,” I couldn’t have been more satisfied. That is exactly what an opinion piece should be and do, and someone, at least, was saying that I was succeeding in doing exactly what I was trying to do.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, commentaries, editorials, journalism, opinion pieces, Personal, Uncategorized, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Dissecting “O Canada”

June 29, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
-Robert Stanley Weir and others

Some of my favorite pieces of literary criticism are Robert Graves’ line by line readings of famous poems. Often, Graves proves to his satisfaction, as well as mine, that the poem under scrutiny is not a masterpiece, but poorly thought out and incompetently rendered. The same can be said of Canada’s national anthem, “O Canada!” – which is hardly a surprise, because few if any national anthems are meant to do anything more than rouse a moment or two of cheap sentiment in those who happen to live in the country.

You know right from the start that Canada’s anthem is in trouble, because it starts with a vocative sentence. This is trouble because the vocative is so rarely used today that few people except Latin scholars understand that the first sentence is addressed directly towards Canada. So far as most people understand the sentence, they usually think it starts with a sigh, as though the speaker’s emotions about Canada are so strong that they can’t resist a wordless exclamation — an interpretation that hardly seems justified by what follows.

Not that there is much meaning to destroy. The song is addressing the country in the abstract – a mawkish approach, but one that, in a spirit of generosity, I have to admit is too common a poetic convention to reject. But what do the singers say to this great abstraction? It tells Canada to command loyalty from all those who are born there – and I think I have to be forgiven for wondering just how the singers’ pious wish will affect the matter in any way whatsoever. You might as well tell the waves that it’s fine with you that they continue hitting the beaches.

Then there’s the exclamation point at the end of the line – the first of four in ten lines. This is another unpromising sign, since the over-use of exclamation points is always a sure of sign that the speaker is trying to whip up some excitement while saying something unoriginal or dull.

And sure enough, the next line is a redundancy with another exclamation mark added in the hopes of adding some dignity to the sentiment. The only reason, of course, for the redundancy of “home and native” is that the writer of the words didn’t know what else to add that fitted the music.

But it gets worse as the song continues. What, I wonder, is “true patriot love?” How is it different from false patriot love (perhaps that of those who come “from far and wide” below)? More filler, followed by the unnecessary sexism of “in all thy sons command.” At least twice in my life time, feminists have tried to change the line to something like “in every child command,” only to be met by outrage, as though the English words had not been changed several times, and several different unofficial versions exist.

Struggling on, I suppose we have to bear “with glowing hearts.” After all, we are in the realm of patriotic doggerel, where the participles fly thick and fast, streaming and gleaming and beaming. For some reason, “ing” at the end of enough words lulls us into a sort of drowsy acceptance of whatever else follows. And I have to say that, after “glowing,” I am not surprised to see the line end with “thee,” an archaicism completely out of keeping with the rest of the poem and useful only in efforts to elevate a trite idea. Basically, the line is saying, “We’re proud to see you develop as a nation,” only much less clearly.

As for “True North,” I suppose that is supposed to mean “faithful,” and to refer to Canada’s position as a former colony that is still on good terms with the mother country (It almost assuredly doesn’t mean that Canada is the location of True North for navigators). But “North,” alone, leaves Canada defined entirely by geography – an all too common occurrence that makes the place sound about as exciting as a mound of three month old snow on the curb.

And don’t get me started on “strong and free.” The last time that Canada could defend its own borders was in World War Two. Very likely, that was the only time. The history of the country can be neatly summarized as, “Era of French Domination, Era of English Domination, Era of American Domination.” To say the least, it’s incongruous for a satellite country to be describing itself as either “strong” or “free.”

Next up is one of the more recent bits of editing, “from far and wide.” Most likely, it was added to acknowledge the number of immigrants in the last few decades. But how do you reconcile this line with “home and native land?” If you’re born in the place, you don’t come from “far and wide,” and if you do come “from far and wide,” then Canada isn’t your “native” land.

Even more importantly, how do you “stand on guard” “from far and wide?” It sounds as physically impossible as some of the awkward poses of female super heroes on the covers of comic books. Anyway, as I said, Canada has rarely been able to defend itself, never mind against whom (perhaps the Americans buying up our corporations?).

Even to the composer, the jumble of thought is too much. Another vocative and another “thee” are thrown in, with God and another mention of freedom added to the mix as well, all in the impossible hope that an elevated mess can be mistaken for something meaningful.

Unfortunately, this mishmash and all the efforts to play on listeners’ emotions don’t lead anywhere, so the ending is problematic, All that can be done is to repeat what has already been said. That’s not a bad trick if you have something rousing to say, but here it falls flat. That’s probably why, any time you ever hear “O Canada” there is always an uneasy silence and an almost audible shuffling of feet: there’s nothing is nothing to indicate that the mercifully brief ordeal is over.

Someone – I forget who – once said that more Canadians of my age knew the words to the opening of The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Hour than knew the words to “O Canada.” That was mainly a reference to the number of changes that have been made to the anthem in our lifetimes. It may have referred, too, to the fact that, to many Canadians, overt displays of patriotism are embarrassing.

But I think that it also has something to do with the fact that the national anthem is rarely comprehensible for more than two or three words at a time. It is difficult to remember words you don’t understand – just try memorizing a dozen lines in a language you don’t understand if you don’t believe me.

You don’t expect original or deep thought in an anthem. But is basic literacy too much to ask? At least “The Maple Leaf Forever,” for all that it ignores the Quebecois and First Nations, makes literal sense. But Canada’s anthem, I’m ashamed to say, is almost entirely nonsensical and border-line illiterate. It only really serves its purpose when the music is played without the words. With the words, it’s either confusing or embarrassing.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Canada, comedy, humor, national anthem, O Canada, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

The foundations of skepticism

June 20, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

I am not a Christian. Nor am I follower of any other religion, or even a theist. For years, I have wavered somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. But I thought I had made my peace with being a non-believer in a culture whose origins were Christian, making myself tolerably familiar with the Bible and the history and philosophy of belief throughout European history.

Then, some years ago, I was blind-sided by a statement of the obvious.

Although I hadn’t been Christian since puberty, I had always thought that the most recent parts of the Bible had a historical background. Probably things hadn’t happened quite as described in the New Testament, but I assumed that the descriptions were roughly true. After all, the New Testament accounts mentioned historical figures like Pontius Pilatius and Herod Antipater.

So didn’t it follow that a historical Jesus had existed? Of course, he probably bore about the same relation to the stories as the historical King Arthur bore to the writings of Thomas Malory, but after you discarded the religion doctrine and traditions like the sacrificed god, there would be a core of truth.

Then, I read a book called The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty. The book is poorly written, and has the obsessiveness that marks a crank, but it introduced me to the idea that the whole of Christianity was a neo-Platonic myth, most likely originating among the Jewish population of Alexandria that had started being taken literally.

I learned, too, that there were reasons to question external references to Christianity like those in Josephus, and that reputable references to Christianity did not occur until well into the second century of the common era. Even some of the references to the modern story of Christ in the later books of the New Testament were metrically suspect.

These ideas are not universally accepted. But the fact that they can be reasonably held at all shows how shaky the conventional views actually are. More importantly, they give reasons for some aspects of Christianity that I had never heard adequately explained, such as the neo-Platonism on the gospel of John, and some of the references to the Christ figure that seem strangely vague if they are supposed to be about a man who had lived. Although not proved, the ideas were at least plausible.

To my surprise, I found myself reacting as though I’d been tackled by someone I hadn’t seen. I suspect that belief in a historic Jesus is the last refuge of an agnostic or atheist who used to be a Christian, a minimal adjustment of their thought that allows them some continuity with their past and cultural history. Even in our disbelief, we cling to a sense that the stories of Christianity must have some degree of reliability. But, suddenly, even that minimum belief seemed questionable.

I realized, too, that I was angry. I’d been lied to, which always makes me self-righteously indignant, told false certainties were established fact. The fact that, on reflection, I realized that the liars had probably lied to themselves first did not make me any less angry.

If my reaction could be summarized in three words, those three words would have been: How dare they?

But the closer you look, the more dubious the founding legends of Judaeo-Christianity become. Despite the record keeping of the Egyptians, no evidence of anything remotely resembling the Exodus has ever been found. What evidence exists points to the Ancient Hebrews being offshoots of the Canaanites – locals rather than invaders. Similarly, no reference exists in any of the surrounding cultures of the empire of Saul, David, and Solomon. The few references to the kingdoms of ancient Israel that have been found suggest that, at best, for most of its history it was a satellite kingdom of the surrounding superpowers, a fact that should have been obvious from one look at a map.

Yet I remember seeing maps of Solomon’s empire when I was growing up, and other maps showing how the twelve tribes settled Palestine (in fact, look up Judea, and you can still find this map on Wikipedia). The maps, that are supposed to value accuracy, are works of fantasy, charting as certainties facts that are questionable and unsupported by the archaeological record. In fact, the more archeology that is done, the more the Biblical accounts look like fiction embellished with a few sprinkles of fact for verisimilitude.

Was anyone surprised when the James Ossuary, allegedly the container for the bones of Jesus’ brother, proved suspect? I wasn’t. It was exactly the same as every other effort to reconcile fact with the Bible: unproved, the product of wishful thinking at best, and of outright fraud at worst.

And when I consider that European culture is built on such foundations – well, don’t come trying to convert me is all that I can say. Because if you try, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.

Posted in agnosticism, atheism, Bruce Byfield, Earle Doherty, Josephus, Personal, skepticism, The Bible, The Jesus Puzzle, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Prints and painting in Northwest Coast art

June 16, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

Paintings have never been a large part of modern Northwest Coast Art. Since the 1960s, artists have preferred to release limited edition prints instead. Recently, though, this trend has shown signs of changing.

Ever since the 1960s, limited prints have been far more common than paintings. The reason is simple economics: A limited print costs the buyer anywhere from half to one-tenth the price of a painting, which pleases buyers not interested in an investment. If a run of a hundred can be sold, the artist makes much more than they would from a painting – enough, with luck, to allow them to earn a living from their art.

As a result, limited prints have long been the norm in Northwest Coast Art, despite the forgeries that have been periodically discovered. By contrast, artists interested in painting have often found selling their work to galleries difficult. A few exceptions exist, such as Robert Davidson in the last decade, but they are exceptions because of their fame.

A better indication of the status of paintings in Northwest Coast art is the fact that even an artist as accomplished as Lyle Wilson could only manage a show consisting entirely of paintings this year – and at least two-thirds of the pieces were completed decades ago and had never sold. Meanwhile, an artist’s first limited print is still seen as an important step in their career.

However, the days when prints could be counted on to fund an artist’s career are rapidly coming to an end. Hundreds are entering a market that once sustained dozens, thanks in part to the relative cheapness of producing a print from a computer compared to traditional silk screening.

Perhaps as a result, the average price of a print has declined or remained static, with many prints available for well under a hundred dollars unless the artist is well-known. Moreover, where, thirty-five years ago, so-called limited prints could have a release of five or six hundred copies, now releases of a hundred, or fifty, or even twenty have become common, partly to reduce forgery and partly to ensure that artists are not left with a large inventory of unsellable prints.

At the same time, Northwest Coast artists are more closely connected to other schools of art than they have been at any time in the last sixty years. Artists like Dean and Shawn Hunt have succeeded to some extent in selling canvases outside the usual Northwest Coast markets, and new artists – an increasing number of whom have attended art school – are becoming more interested in painting as well. In fact, I know several young artists who began working on canvas and only learned carving and metalwork later.

Whether on wood, paper, or canvas, painting has suddenly become semi-respectable. The Douglas Reynolds Gallery has been showing an increasing number of high-end paintings over the last couple years. Similarly, Lyle Wilson may have had to go to the suburb of Maple Ridge rather than downtown Vancouver to mount his recent Paint show, but the point is he managed to have the exhibit. And, as I write, I have just returned from the Lattimer Gallery’s opening reception for “medium: Painting on Canvas,” an exhibit of over fifteen canvases by both new and leading artists.

Slowly, painting is becoming acceptable in Northwest Coast art. It still has a ways to go – according to Peter Lattimer, for many of the artists in his exhibit, working on canvas was a new and not wholly comfortable experience. But the change is coming, all the same.

Most likely, painting will not replace limited prints. A handful of top artists are still doing well with limited prints, and will probably continue to do so for years. However, a day might come within the next decade when most limited prints are viewed as tourist wares and no longer as fine art.

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, art buying, art exhibits, art galleries, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, indian art, Lattimer Gallery, limited edition prints, Lyle Wilson, Northwest Coast Art, painting, Personal, Robert Davidson, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

On Her Diamond Jubilee

June 13, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

“And the pageantry, the panoply, the sanctified decay —
But I knew the hour was coming that would sweep it all away.
Now time has me in a corner, and I’m moth-eared from the fray,
But Her Majesty is reigning still today.”
-Leon Rosselson, “On Her Silver Jubilee”

Science fiction fans joke that they are disappointed that the future has yet to produce flying cars. But my disappointment lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that the society I expected to see when I was middle-aged is almost as distant as when I was coming of age – a fact that the recent Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II reinforces all too sharply.

The mood of the late 1970s was so different from today’s that I can barely remember it. Probably, anyone born after that time can’t conceive of it at all. But for a naïve, idealistic teenager like me, it seemed a time of infinite possibilities and constant progress.

Consider: Prosperity in North America was at an all-time high. So was income and social mobility. In recent memory, activism had helped to end the Vietnam War and to force Richard Nixon’s resignation. Based on the previous decade, it seemed self-evident that ethnic minorities were about to win their rights, and so were women and gays and lesbians. Probably, Canada would be a republic, without a monarch to remind us of a now non-functional past. Sure, problems like pollution and poverty remained, but once we focused on them a bit more, they would be solved.

In other words, we were still in the era in which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. could write a book called The End of History and not be ridiculed. The problems that had haunted humanity for centuries were about to be solved, and all that would remain was the question of what to do afterwards – colonize the stars, most likely, or maybe begin a cultural Renaissance.

Ever since, each year has added to the progressive disillusion. Instead of the end of history, we got the Counter-Reformation of the reactionaries, who proved to be better organized and more tenacious than the rest of us could imagine. Year by year, living standards declined. We got Ronald Reagan in the United States, and a denial of the lessons that Vietnam should have taught. In Canada, we got Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, who between them swept away any idea that politics could be about anything except pragmatism and the cold-blooded survival of career politicians. The promising beginnings for cause after cause turned out to be end points that were fiercely and – all too often — unsuccessfully defended.

Oh, not everything was reason for gloom. In Canada, abortion rights remained in legal limbo, permitting access in theory despite constant efforts to chip away at them in practice. Same sex marriage became legal. The Internet and cameras in mobile devices made organizing and calling authorities to account easy. But against the losses and the constant wallowing in the same old arguments, these gains mattered for little. If the losses didn’t outweight the gains, we believed that they did. We stopped believing that social progress was possible, although many of us kept on fighting or wistfully believing.

Against this background, the Diamond Jubilee is only a tawdry reminder of what hasn’t happened in recent decades. The occasion is not only a celebration of mediocrity, but also a celebration of how things have failed to change. For me, the fact that Leon Rosselson’s song remains as applicable today as when it was written in 1977 only adds to the irony. Seeing the media’s continuing attention to the non-story of someone whom Rosselson describes as “so commonplace a woman in her fuddy-duddy hat” makes me want to mourn, not celebrate. Do we really have nothing more to show for the last thirty-five years?

To all appearances, we don’t.

Science fiction readers have been known to cry, “Give us our flying cars!” But as I tried to avoid the coverage of the Diamond Jublilee the other week, what I wanted to do was to plead for a reason to believe in social progress – and then to go and find a quiet corner in which to mourn the unlikelihood of any answer.

Posted in "On Her Silver Jubilee", Bruce Byfield, Diamond Jubilee, Leon Rosselson, Personal, social progress, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Developing effective slide shows

June 7, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

(The following article was published in August 2006 in the IT Manager’s Journal. Since this site is no longer active, I am reprinting the article here with a few minor modifications to give it a more permanent home. If you find the article useful, you can republish it under a Creative Commons Attribution – No Derivatives license.)

For many, returning to classes means returning to slide shows. Once used mainly in business, today slide showsare equally important in education. Students use them in portfolios to share their mastery of a subject, and many consider them a basic requirement for class presentations. Yet, despite the ubiquitousness of slide shows, few people use them well. Here are some tips to help you improve your presentation skills.

Some doubt that slide shows can ever be used effectively. Among them are communications expert Edward Tufte, who satirically compares them to a May Day rally in the Soviet Union, and Peter Norvig, who highlights their shortcomings with the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. These criticisms are overly severe, but they emphasize the point that if you want to use slide shows effectively, you have to understand their limitations as carriers of information and the restrictions they place on design, and make them a supplement to your presentations rather than an end in themselves.

As their name suggests, slide shows were inspired by 35mm slides. They also owe something to overhead transparencies. However, like spreadsheets, slide shows are a product of the personal computer. The first slide show software was MORE, a Macintosh program for outlining released in the early 1980s. It was followed in 1987 by Microsoft PowerPoint, whose pre-installation on most new computers helped to spread the popularity of slide shows until, by the end of the 1990s, standing up to talk to a group without showing one became a guaranteed way of being noticed.

With the rise of free software, tools like KPresenter (now Stage) and OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice Impress became available. While these lag behind PowerPoint in support for sound and some advanced features, they are adequate tools for the vast majority of slide shows.

When to use slide shows
The most important point to remember about a slide shows is that it is a medium with serious limitations. With no more than 50 words per screen, by itself a slide cannot easily communicate complex information. Even more seriously, slides are designed for one-way communication from a single presenter to a group, and do not encourage conversations or questions. This one-way flow of information is perfect for a standalone demo at a trade fair, but not for a forum in which you want to encourage interaction.

With work, you can reduce these tendencies, although you will always be straining against them. However, before you choose to use a slide show (assuming that you have a choice), you should ask yourself:

  • Is one of your goals class participation?
  • Will members of the class require individual instruction?
  • Is an appreciation of language necessary for the subject?
  • Is your information complex or abstract?

If you answer “yes”  to any of these questions, then you should consider either not using a slide show or making it only part of your presentation.

Choosing and organizing content
The worst thing you can do when developing a slide show is to transfer all your notes to slides. Doing so may beconvenient for those who miss your talk — although less so than you might think  even the most detailed slide shows omit too much to stand by themselves. However, it almost guarantees a dull presentation.

Instead, resist the natural tendencies of the medium by delaying developing the slide show as long as possible.

Start by outlining your presentation in another program, and developing a detailed series of notes. Before opening Impress or KPresenter, go through your notes and mark:

  • Key words or concepts that need definitions or that might be misspelled.
  • Any material that might need illustrating through a still picture, animation, movie, or sound clip. You may be able to find usable content at Classroom Clipart or the Open Clip Art Library.
  • Points where you might want to display a quiz, discussion questions, or other interactive material.

By adding these markers to your lesson plan, you’ll know when you need a slide. If you’re using OpenOffice.org Writer, you can save time by formatting these markers in a Heading 1 style, then selecting File ->  Send -> Outline to Presentation to open Impress with a series of files automatically defined for you.

Another way to decide how to use a slide show is to imagine what you would do if you had no projector but could give your audience handouts or draw diagrams on a whiteboard. Anything that you would put in a handout or draw on the whiteboard can go into your presentation. Anything else should not.

The result of either of these methods is a slide show that lacks continuity — but, unless you are designing a looping demo, you don’t need any. The purpose of the slide show is not to be complete in itself, but to support what you say.

Designing a slide show
A slide is a very limited space. The fact that it is designed to be viewed at a distance makes it even more so. For this reason, the simpler you keep the design, the more effective it is likely to be. Also, if you resolve to keep the design simple, you are less likely to waste time on the chrome — impressive effects such as getting bullet points to doppler into sight in time to music — instead of on content.

You can find backgrounds for slides with a quick search, but you can also design your own using the master slide view (available in Impress from View -> Master Slide -> Slide Master). Whether you download or design, choose the basic color scheme for contrast: you’ll want a dark background for light text, or the other way around. At the most, you’ll want two fonts: one for the title and subtitle, and another for bullet points. To keep them readable, the smallest font you use should be about 22 points.

Simplicity also applies to slide transitions. Choose one and stick with it, unless you plan a change for dramatic effect.

Similarly, when designing individual slides, remember that:

  • Keeping your bullet points to a single line will help you to resist the temptation of reading them.
  • Slides only have space for 5-7 bullet points or 1-2 pictures. If a slide contains both bullet points and pictures, then halve these totals.
  • The more complex a diagram, the larger it should be. Many diagrams work best on a separate slide.
  • To keep the slide size readable, use another slide rather than squeezing more material on to one slide.

As you edit, your goals should be simplicity and readability. If you find your slides getting complex and cluttered,or requiring smaller text, then you need to reconsider what you are doing. In some cases, you may find the material simply doesn’t fit comfortably on a slide, and needs to be a handout or a drawing on the white board.

Delivering a slide show
You have two related problems while giving a slide show: Keeping yourself from reading from the screen, and keeping your audience from reading the screen when its members should be paying attention to you.

If you create your slide show as suggested here, both these problems should be minimized. However, you can reduce them even further if you:

  • Reduce your nervousness by arriving and setting up before the class starts, and carrying a backup presentation plan in case of mechanical failures. The less nervous you are, the less likely you are to let the limits of the medium control the presentation.
  • Know your material well enough that you only occasionally need to refer to your notes or slides.
  • Continually position yourself (from the class’s perspective) to the left of the screen you are using for the slide show. Since English reads left to right, their eyes are more likely to move toward you. If you are using a lectern, position it in that spot, if possible. You do not need to stay in that position, but when you start to refer to a slide, you should move to that position, and keep coming back to it as you continue to discuss the slide. With any luck, you will draw at least some students’ attention toward you and what you are saying, and away from the slide.
  • Move around as you deliver your presentation in order to distract the audience from looking at the screen. In fact, you can signal changes of topic by changing your position.
  • Get somebody else to change slides, or be well-enough rehearsed that you can set the slide show to advance automatically. The less you interact with the slide show, the less likely you are to start reading slides.

With these hints, you should have as good a chance as anyone of controlling your slide shows, rather than being controlled by them.

Conclusion
When desktop publishing programs became available in the 1980s, easy access to advanced design features created a mountain of documents that had been tweaked into unreadability by inexpert users. In the same way, the rise of slide show programs in the mid-1990s has been responsible for millions of presentations that bored their audiences into insensibility. In some circles, the inexpert use of slide shows has become so commonplace that people have been known to cheer when presenters announced that they were not going to deliver a slide show.

Now that their novelty has long worn off, there is less excuse for inexpert use of slide shows. Use them sparingly, and with an understanding of their limitations, and you can get slide shows working for you, rather than against you — and keep your audience engaged rather than stupefied.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, education, Edward Tufte, Impress, Kpresenter, Personal, Peter Norvig, PowerPoint, presentations, slide shows, speeches, talks, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ivan Adams: Raven Pendant

June 4, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

When I travel to Terrace every April, I spend three days submerged in art. Not only is the Freda Diesing School’s graduation and year end exhibit my official excuse for the trip, but I meet other artists and view their works in progress. This year, one of those artists was Ivan Adams, a Haida carver doing some unique work in argillite.

Ivan Adams is the father of Mitch Adams, a middle-aged artist from whom I’ve bought half a dozen pieces in the last three years. Last year, I met Ivan over Sunday brunch, and several times Mitch has mentioned his father as an artist, but until this year, I had never seen any of his work.

This year, Mitch drove me up to his parent’s house, and we sat in their kitchen while his father showed what he was working on. The three or four pieces I saw were literally like nothing I had ever seen before.

They were not in the argillite style of the nineteenth century, nor were they the inlaid and embellished pieces that most modern argillite carvers favor. As Mitch said, Ivan’s work is a little reminiscent of some Inuit work, but the resemblance is mostly in the scenes of everyday life he favors, rather than the carving style.

What Ivan Adams is doing is a naturalistic, detailed style all his own. One piece is a bear with silver teeth rearing on two legs while a much small hunter attacks with a spear; the base comes apart so you can position each figure separately. Another is a legendary strong man straddling a bull sea-lion and tearing it apart with his bare hands, with the exposed muscle suggested by artfully positioned catlinite (reddish brown argillite). A smaller piece is an eagle, so ungainly that it suggests an archeopteryx. All the pieces I saw were obviously mature pieces, done by an artist with a strongly developed style of his own.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford one of Ivan Adams’ larger pieces. However, he also had a raven pendant about the size and thickness of my thumb, which I was pleased to take home with me as consolation.

I suspect the pendant was a left over piece of argillite whose shape suggested its subject. But, like Adams’ larger pieces,what makes the piece standout is the attention to detail. The shape of the beak and how the upper and lower beak fit together are absolutely accurate. Adams has even included the striations that make every raven’s beak as individual as human finger prints, and suggested the soft tissue that connects the lower beak to the body – even though that part of the carving is not seen when the pendant is hanging from a chain. Similarly, the off-white of the inlaid eyes is a close approximation of the natural color of some raven’s eyes.

Yet as if that were not enough, on the head and neck, Adams has indicated individual feathers. Most of these feathers are aligned in rows, but only roughly, with some out of alignment and skewed from the rest, and most of them not quite the same shape. On the top the head, too, the feathers grown smaller as they approach the beak. I have no idea whether Adams has observed live ravens or worked from pictures in a book or on the Internet, but the only way that the pendant does not closely reflect a living raven is that the argillite lacks the blue oil-like highlights of actual feathers.

Ivan Adams is not well-known, and you won’t find his work in any Vancouver or Victoria galleries – at least, not yet. But anyone who takes the pains he obviously does is an artist worth paying attention to. Perhaps one day I will be able to afford one of his larger pieces, but meanwhile the pendant is a very satisfactory consolation.

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, Haida art, indian art, Ivan Adams, Northwest Coast Art, northwestcoast art, Personal, Terrace, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Eagle and crows

May 31, 2012 by Bruce Byfield

I live near the greenbelt surrounding Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Mountain campus. As a result, I see more wildlife than most suburbanites in my daily routine.

The neighborhood is full of coyotes who have learned not to cross the roads against the traffic flow, and red-tailed hawks who perch on lamp posts, waiting endlessly for road-kill. Every year or two, a mountain lion or bear swims across the inlet and causes a panic, and the mountain used to support a pair of ravens (and possibly still does). And all of this is in addition to the usual squirrels, song birds and seagulls that you can find anywhere in the urban sprawl.

However, by far the most dramatic manifestation of living on the border between the city and the wilderness is when a bald eagle comes hunting in my townhouse complex, and the crows counter-attack in defense of their nests.

It usually happens in late June or July, when this years’ offspring are just leaving the nest. The first sign that a predator is in the area is the suddenly silence outside. If I go to the window, all the smaller birds are flying within ten meters of the ground, darting into the thicker, lower branches of the trees.

From the directions they are coming from, I usually have no trouble locating the eagle, sitting on some high perch, always looking larger than seems possible, and with the mad gleam of a single-minded predator in its eye. Even though eagles rarely attack humans, it’s a sight that’s as frightening as it is magnificent.

The crows take part in the general exodus. But, as soon as they have found shelter – or perhaps checked that their fledglings are safe – they start calling to each other.

Apart from being louder and more alarmed, their calls sound no different than usual to me. Yet the calls obviously mean something to the crows, because, after a few minutes, they rise to confront the eagle, like Spitfire pilots during the Battle of Britain.

The crows, of course, lack the talons and beaks of the eagle, and are fighting well above their weight. However, they fight as a team – and that makes all the difference.

The crows attack from all sides, never staying still, flying at the eagle but always veering away at the last moment. The eagle no sooner focuses attention on one or two crows than they have moved out of the way, taking temporary shelter in the lower, thicker branches that the eagle has trouble squeezing between. Meanwhile, more crows are dive-bombing it from another direction, and the eagle has to whirl about to keep an eye on them. No sooner has it done so than more crows have moved in from yet another side. There are always dozens of crows, so they have no trouble keeping up their attacks indefinitely.

Usually, though, they don’t have to. Within moments, the eagle has been reduced from predator to fugitive. Abandoning its efforts to attack, it looks for a refuge in the trees, never finding one, since crows can maneuver anywhere it can. Within twenty minutes, it is crashing from tree to tree, trying to escape. Meanwhile, behind it, crows keep rising to meet it, then returning to shelter for a temporary rest while other crows take up the fight.

Once, when walking up to the corner store, I saw one of these attacks about twenty meters above me. From the way its feathers were plastered tight against its body, I could tell that the eagle was not only bewildered, but actually terrified as it was driven from shelter after shelter, never getting enough of a respite to counter-attack.

I half-wondered if the eagle might be so confused that it would attack me, or if the crows in their anger would see me as another intruder and deal with me the same way, but neither of these things happened. Instead, the eagle continued careening from tree to tree, disappearing into the distance while from every tree around me, crows were calling in anger. I tried not to think of Hitchcock’s The Birds, and continued on my errand as the fight moved gradually further away.

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, crows, eagle, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, wildlife | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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