God, after the last few blog entries I needed a laugh, and Presidential Origami did it for me. But perhaps it’s just gallows humour after all…
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Dark Reflections
Johann Hari has another powerful piece of writing – this time about a series of documentaries – that does nothing to dispel my pessimism. Kasim Abid’s Life After the Fall in particular makes it easy to despair.Leave a comment
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Dumbing Down Nature
I’ve always found Natural History a fascinating subject. And I used to look forward to natural history programmes on the Beeb. The zenith of such programmes was of course anything that had the magic name of David Attenborough associated with it.
Alas, the BBC seems now to be determined to plunge to the nadir with programmes such as Ocean, which started last night amid much trumpeting. Sample: “[the series] seeks to provide a better understanding of the state of our oceans today, their role in the past, present and future and their significance in global terms”.
Dear lord, but it was dire. The science was dumbed down practically to oblivion, being shouldered out of the way by lots of material designed to show that the cast and crew were having an awfully big adventure. Science for the “me, me, me!” generation… I note that on that web page showcasing the cast is a quote from explorer Paul Rose: “We are here to understand the Earth’s oceans and put them on a human scale”. Perhaps it’s just me, but that quote seems to make no sense whatsoever. Still, I see that I wasn’t the only person who gets irritated by this dumbing down of science, this review by Sam Wollaston pretty much sums up the programme as the pile of tosh it was.
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The Big Necessity
Another book for the reading list: "The Big Necessity" by Rose George. Johann Hari explains why its author should feel flushed with success. Hopefully her consciousness-raising is not just a flash in the pan…Leave a comment
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Swinburne’s Turtle
Richard Swinburne is the Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. He apparently sees the Anthropic Principle as a convincing argument from design for the existence of God.Fortunately, Tom Rees is on hand to point out the flaw in the good professor’s argument. Far from being "an enormously powerful argument for the existence of God" as Professor Swinburne asserts, it seems to be on the level of there being turtles all the way down…Leave a comment
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The Roots of Language
An interesting article in today’s Guardian about Daniel Everett’s encounters with the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe with a unique language. Sent as a missionary to convert the tribe to Christianity, he ended up not only rejecting his faith, losing his marriage, but also calling into question the Chomskyan orthodoxy of a universal grammar being the cornerstone of all language. Fascinating.Leave a comment
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Plus Ça Change
And of course amidst all the euphoria over the Obama victory comes the depressing news that Californians have voted in favour of legalised discrimination against gay people. Proposition 8 looks as though it has passed. A sad day for many ordinary people in California.Leave a comment
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The End of an Error
As usual, the Guardian’s Steve Bell sums it up pretty well. Trouble is, the toxic after-effects of the Bush administration are likely to have a long half-life. As President-Elect Obama (what a stirring phrase that is – and not just to Americans) said in part:The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.It’s that recognition of the collective noun – people – that marks Obama’s key strength for me. The Republicans sought to divide America (and the world) into us and them, the real and the faux/foe. It’s a great relief to me that America has chosen wisely. I’m reminded of the ending of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America:The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
Bye now.
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you: More Life.
The Great Work Begins.Leave a comment
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Save Us
I’m sorry, but I don’t really think that we have to be "saved" from gay marriage. Only from the delusions of misguided people such as these.Leave a comment
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Unfathomably Foul
I agree with Ophelia. I simply cannot understand people such as this.2 responses to “Unfathomably Foul”
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Mark Steyn (I think in the introduction to his book "America Alone") wrote:>>This book isn’t an
argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more
will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced
with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the
funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was
impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn
widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive,
we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral
pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow
your custom. And then we will follow ours.”India today is
better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think
that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you
really believe that.<< -
Robert, of course I don’t believe that… Moral Relativism is a false doctrine. I can understand that an Australian Aborigine might find a Witchety grub delicious, but that I would feel somewhat squeamish about trying it. However, that is not the same as saying that I can understand a Somalian is morally correct in his/her lights in practising female circumcision, whilst I would find it morally reprehensible. Unlike Mad Mel and others of her ilk, I don’t conflate liberalism with relativism… Stephen Law covers this argument very well in his book The War for Children’s Minds.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery Revisited
Last month I mentioned that I was trying out the latest release of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and that I’d run into a couple of bugs. Subsequent to that, I’ve been in communication with the WLPG team trying to sort out the bug whereby WLPG doesn’t seem to be tracking changes to IPTC/XMP keyword metadata.
I had documented what I’d seen and sent it off to Michael Palermeti, a Program Manager on the WLPG team for investigation. He reported back that the developers could not find anything untoward with the test files and data that I’d provided. They were unable to reproduce the failure to track metadata changes. This struck me as being very odd, since I was clearly seeing the behaviour on two systems at home (my desktop and laptop PCs). So I went back to do more testing. And I think I’ve found out what’s going on.
It is, as I suspected, associated with the fact that I’m using hierarchical keywords. A hierarchical keyword means that, for example, my keyword trees is actually the leaf node of a hierarchy:
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes/natural landscapes/vegetation/trees
What’s going on is that when I assign a keyword to an image, I also explicitly assign the parent keywords to the image. So when trees is added as a keyword to an image, I’m also explicitly adding the additional strings:
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes/natural landscapes/vegetation
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes/natural landscapes
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes
Objects/built environment/And there’s the problem: WLPG doesn’t seem to register these six instances of hierarchical keywords (trees, vegetation, natural landscapes, landscapes, settlements and landscapes, built environment) properly when they are assigned at the same time as a group. Worse, WLPG will not respond to subsequent deletions or additions to any keywords on the image. It’s almost as though a repetition of a part of a keyword hierarchy has the effect of locking the file as far as WLPG is concerned.
When I change the method of assigning keywords to simply assigning only the full string once, then for the most part, WLPG appears to be happy. It will correctly register the keyword as a tag, and also track subsequent changes to the keywords.
However, there is one crucial set of circumstances where WLPG still does not work correctly. That is where I assign keywords that share part of the same hierarchy to an image.
Let’s take an example. I have a number of images with the keyword natural landscapes assigned (I.e. I have the hierarchical string: Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes/natural landscapes assigned to the images). Subsequently, I want to refine the metadata of some of these images by also assigning the keyword trees to them. So I go ahead and assign trees – in other words I’m adding an additional keyword string:
Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/landscapes/natural landscapes/vegetation/trees to the selected images.
The problem is that WLPG does not register this change – it continues to display only the natural landscapes tag associated with these images. Because the trees keyword is actually part of the same hierarchy as natural landscapes, WLPG fails to work properly and add this additional keyword string as an additional tag.
What I actually have to do is explicitly delete the natural landscapes keyword from these images before I add the trees keyword to the images. This also has the effect of never being able (in WLPG) of having both the natural landscapes and trees tags associated with the same image because they are part of the same hierarchy. This strikes me as being somewhat of a limitation… In fact, I would say that it’s a bug, since now I cannot have certain combination of keywords associated with my files and have them tagged correctly in WLPG. Take house, castle, and dining room. They all share parent keywords in common in my hierarchy, so within WLPG I cannot tag images in such a way that will distinguish between a dining room in a castle and a dining room in a house. I suspect that this all goes back to the design decision that appears to have been made for WLPG that selecting multiple tags is an OR function and not an AND function. In my opinion, that was a very bad decision, but that’s another story…
Anyway, to sum up, I’ve now found out that WLPG cannot cope with multiple instances of hierarchical keywords that share the same parents. I hope that it can be fixed in future versions.
One response to “Windows Live Photo Gallery Revisited”
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[…] 4 December 2008: here’s the blog entry where I track down this issue of hierarchical keywords causing a problem in […]
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Wakeup Call
Today I noticed a number of blogs referring to Wassup 2008. I had no idea what on earth they meant until I watched the original advert followed by the current version here. Simply brilliant. An American version of Grosz.Leave a comment
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Taking Pride in Ignorance – Part II
Following hot on the heels of Tracy – here’s Sarah Palin demonstrating once again that she hasn’t a clue, and is proud of it. Scary stuff.2 responses to “Taking Pride in Ignorance – Part II”
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Except that, like just about every Palin outrage I’ve seen so far, its another urban myth. The funding was not for general genetic research, but for specific agro-business projects, which had been rejected through the normal science funding processes. What was being complained about was that the funding had been slipped back in through "earmarks", where a financial proposal is put into the middle of a totally unrelated bill, in the hope that it will get passed without scrutiny (and usually does because senators bribe each other with approval of each other’s earmarks).If ignorance worries you, be concerned that the other VP candidate, who was supposed to bring experience and knowledge to the ticket, was reported as having great command of the facts during the debate. It turns out that, where Palin would at least admit when she didn’t know something, Biden would simply make something up out of whole cloth (some 14 major points were made, which varied in fantasy level or mendacity). It is worrying that those reporting had so little command of the facts (or willingness to report against their preference) that they missed all of those. But then the election would have been a more palatable experience if perhaps half the reporting effort wasted on bogus stories about banning books, parentage of grandchildren, or the purchase of tanning beds, had been spent on the other three candidates.
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Except that, Robert, I don’t accept your marking this as another urban myth. I’m sorry, but if you think that Palin was subtle in her condemnation of research into olive fruit flies rather than a "hur hur" nudge nudge wink wink folksy invitation to laugh at scientism, then you are not the person that I thought you were. Palin, on all the evidence that I’ve seen, is appalling.
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X-Rays and Brazilians
Dangers lurk in the most surprising areas. Perhaps a razor would be safer. I simply recall the outings to the shoe-shop and the xray machine in the corner…Leave a comment
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Rudolph
One of the current crop of web sites that gives me guilty pleasure is Not Always Right – a web site devoted to the dark side of customer service. Very often, I find myself shuddering at how people treat people. But every now and then comes an example of how humanity, even at its less than attractive side, can bring a smile of schadenfreude to the jaded soul…Leave a comment
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The Atheist Bus
So Ariane Sherine had an idea to put an advertising slogan onto London buses. A slogan that I could well stand behind:"There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life"Simple enough, worthy enough, and almost certainly correct. Of course, it didn’t take long for the damning with faint praise to begin. And as a direct result of that barf-making guff from Mr. Barrow, I have contributed to the campaign. Thank you, Mr. Barrow. I see that the campaign is currently far beyond the original target of 5,500 pounds and now stands (at the time of writing) at over 31,000 pounds. Good show, people.Leave a comment
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