on 2002/03/07 12.13, Ezra Steinberg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Pat:
>
> This probably has been mentioned in the past, but I'm wondering what the
> exceptions, small though they might be, are that still haunt y'all Down Under
> ...
>
> Ezra
Dear Ezra,
Overall, metrication in Australia worked very well, but there were
significant pockets of non-metrication or poor-metrication that are still
hanging around to haunt us. These are the areas that, I think, still require
support with metrication:
textiles, who are still suffering from soft conversions made nearly thirty
years ago. Many (most?) textile workers still have a inch mindset that is
muddled by mindsets in centimetres for the cloth and millimetres for the
machinery.
shoe sizes, which are still measured in barley corn lengths as they have
been since the time of Magna Carta in 1215.
primary teachers, who, in the absence of sufficient funding for training,
and in the absence of any clearly stated metric goals, adopted the cgs
system and used it in parallel with yards for cloth, feet and inches for
children's height, and inches to do page layouts on computer screens. It is
odd that in the area where metrication education is most important, we did
one of the the worst jobs of metrication. Primary school teachers were not
helped by the textile industry's soft conversions or the computer companies
(largely from the USA) who set their defaults of their word processing
software in inches and fractions of inches.
mothers, cooks, and housekeepers, who still have to operate with dual
mindsets. Ovens do not change their dials overnight. Recipes do not convert
readily, especially when the pudding has been made the same way by mother,
grandmother, and great-grandmother. Babies have to be reported in pounds for
comparative purposes with grandma's babies. And on the matter of length,
these women simply do not make enough measures to gain experience quickly; a
carpenter might make several hundred measurements in a day but a housewife
might make one only once or twice in a month.
journalists (print, radio, and TV), and especially sports journalists seem
to be coming from a position of innumeracy and their fear of being shown up
as innumerate makes them overly conservative on anything to do with numbers.
The problem with journalists is obvious because everything they do is in the
public domain, but I fear that this issue is much larger in a hidden manner
where innumeracy is not revealed.
scientists, who are often unreconstructed jargon junkies, will stick to the
terms that make them feel different (and therefore special) from the rest of
us. Light years, knots, barns, and microns will be with us for a while yet
if our scientists have anything to do with it.
A side issue to all of this is the matter of gender in metrication. In
Australia the traditional men's crafts (such as plumbing and carpentry) were
provided with funding for adequate training, while the traditional women's
crafts (nursing, teaching, and textiles) were not.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
CAMS - Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
- United States Metric Association
ASM - Accredited Speaking Member
- National Speakers Association of Australia
Member, International Federation for Professional Speakers
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