Dave O’Reilly’s Blog

This morning I received a polite but definite letter from amazon telling me to stop selling this app because it violates there terms of service. Therefore, I have removed the app from sale on the app store.

Obviously this is very frustrating for me, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I have a couple of other apps in development, and I’ll blog about them when they’re ready.

Not a good start to the day!

I’m delighted to announce that my first iPhone app is now (finally!) available in the iTunes app store. It’s called ‘How Much Is It On Amazon?’ and it’s used to search for and buy items on amazon. It’s free, and you can download it in the iTunes app store.

Please try it out and if you like it, leave a review on iTunes or add a comment to this post. Thanks!

	100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You didn’t know Author: John D. Barrow Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.
Mathematics can tell us things about the world that can’t be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining little book answers one hundred essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty questions, clarifies the conundrums, and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears, to sports, Shakespeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, One Hundred Essential Questions of Existence Answered! has all the answers!

This book was lighter than I thought it was going to be, consisting of 100 approximately 2 page essays on mathematical curiosities. There are a few interesting tidbits in it but overall it was a bit light for me.

	The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn Author: Diane Ravitch Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.
The impulse in the 1960s and ‘70s to achieve fairness and a balanced perspective in our nation’s textbooks and standardized exams was undeniably necessary and commendable. Then how could it have gone so terribly wrong? Acclaimed education historian Diane Ravitch answers this question in her informative and alarming book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Author of 7 books, Ravitch served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993. Her expertise and her 30-year commitment to education lend authority and urgency to this important book, which describes in copious detail how pressure groups from the political right and left have wrested control of the language and content of textbooks and standardized exams, often at the expense of the truth (in the case of history), of literary quality (in the case of literature), and of education in general. Like most people involved in education, Ravitch did not realize “that educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive.” In this clear-eyed critique, she is an unapologetic challenger of the ridiculous and damaging extremes to which bias guidelines and sensitivity training have been taken by the federal government, the states, and textbook publishers. In a multi-page sampling of rejected test passages, we discover that “in the new meaning of bias, it its considered biased to acknowledge that lack of sight is a disability,” that children who live in urban areas cannot understand passages about the country, that the Aesop fable about a vain (female) fox and a flattering (male) crow promotes gender bias. As outrageous as many of the examples are, they do not appear particularly dangerous. However, as the illustrations of abridgment, expurgation, and bowdlerization mount, the reader begins to understand that our educational system is indeed facing a monumental crisis of distortion and censorship. Ravitich ends her book with three suggestions of how to counter this disturbing tendency. Sadly, however, in the face of the overwhelming tide of misinformation that has already been entrenched in the system, her suggestions provide cold comfort. –Silvana Tropea

Clearly the author feels very passionately that children’s books should not be censored and on that point I agree with her whole heartedly. I have done quite a bit of reading about the way fundamentalist christian groups in the US try to make sure that evolution is not taught in public schools, but I had not realised that the debate extended to all school books, so this book was a bit of an eye opener in that regard.

She puts forward her point well and backs it up with huge amounts of research into the so-called “bias and sensitivity guidelines”, which are really censorship rules, that are used in the various states around the US. Towards the end of the book she also makes some very good recommendations as to how the problem can be solved.

It’s worth a read, especially if you live in the US and have children of school going age.

	Riddley Walker Author: Russell Hoban Rating:
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A brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction, “Riddley Walker”–first published in 1980–is set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), where humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state, represented by a language created especially by Hoban for the book.

I’m not a huge fan of fiction, but I must say that I really really enjoyed this book. The setting is a post apocalyptic world with iron age levels of technology. All historical knowledge is passed down by word of mouth in the form of songs, stories and punch and judy style puppet shows. The story is written in the voice of Riddley Walker, and is therefore not in English as we would know it, but rather it is the author’s vision of how English as a language would have moved on over time; words that we would recognise have changed meaning and taken on a more phonetic spelling.

I can’t recommend this highly enough; read it. It’s hard work, but well worth it.

On an aside, a production of this book was done by the Red Kettle Theatre Company in Waterford, and a couple of little clips are available on their website, here.