Dave’s Archives

All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS.

OASIS purportedly stands for "Online Access to Student Information Service" . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn't seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I'm still not sure which is sillier - the full title, the abbreviation (a transparent backronym), or the slogan bestowed upon us when it first launched: "One site to rule them all".

It's bigger than Jesus!

The centrepiece of OASIS is the OCC (Official Communication Channel), through which students receive official correspondence from the University. Replacing physical mail with electronic mail is commendable, but OCC has two small drawbacks. One is that you can't choose to receive OCC messages via email, or even to receive email notifications. You must remember to log in to OASIS. The other is best illustrated in the following pie chart, representing all the messages (now archived) I've received:

In the past 27 months, I've received 21 useful messages: about 0.18 per week. I realise that at some level the University is obliged to send me the other messages as well, but that's not the point. Logging into OASIS isn't hard, but you quickly forget because it's usually such a fruitless exercise. According to the official policy, one "performance indicator" for the OCC is: "The percentage of students with active OASIS accounts that access their official correspondence at least once per week." They're not advertising this metric, of course.

It's not until a library book is recalled (whether you're the original borrower or the recaller) that you appreciate the true splendour of the OCC. I simply didn't know about mine until after fines had already started accumulating, and the person who'd recalled the book probably wasn't too happy about it either. With email, I'd have returned the book the same day.

Not to be entirely defeated, however, I created a script on my laptop that automatically logs into OASIS for me at 11:30 am each day and forwards all new OCC messages to my email account. The Curtin bureaucracy hasn't quite mastered that idea yet.

I used to think that left-vs-right was an ideological battle that consumed American thinking far more than Australian thinking. However, having indulged in glimpses of Andrew Bolt's blog and his adversaries at Pure Poison, I'm not sure that we're really any better. Theoretically, "left" and "right" define a spectrum of economic policy: left for socialism, right for capitalism. Somehow these have become nouns of the form "The Left" and "The Right", which are about categorising people. If one is "from" The Left or The Right, one is expected to conform to particular stereotypes. Increasingly, these stereotypes have less to do with economic beliefs and more to do with dogmas that span the whole spectrum of political discourse, and even personality characteristics such as anger and dishonesty.

The terms are almost vacuous, and their use says more about the speaker than anything else. They're born of the same mentality that produces xenophobia and racism. People are placed into groups so that the group can be criticised as one monolithic entity. In extreme cases, the group is made out to be a shadowy, hierarchical organisation, often an extension of a political party.

You are of course expected to take sides - to identify yourself as being a leftist/progressive or rightie/conservative. If you don't want to label yourself, the choice will be made for you. If you've been called a "leftist" on occasion (as I have), you might tend to subconsciously include yourself in that group whenever someone else makes a nebulous stab at "The Left". Thus, having taken such accusations personally, you recoil at them. You may never have deliberately chosen such a label for yourself, and the person making the criticism may not even know of your existence, and yet animosity arises. Such is the insidiousness of politics. Unlike race, there is at least the possibility of choice, but the choice between two simplistic labels brushes aside an enormous spectrum of complex issues.

Racism, however, gets us to the issue of the moment - Andrew Bolt's apparent discovery that agents of the forces of darkness are seeking to discredit him, by attempting to post racist comments on his blog. The implicitly-accused suggest that Bolt is making the whole thing up. Bolt's readership has almost unanimously condemned The Left for this apparent act of treachery, while over at Pure Poison the rebels were flinging it right back at The Right. Pure Poison accuses Bolt's readership of a general tendancy towards racism, while Bolt cryptically refers to the "New Racism of the Left" (possibly trying to coin a new vacuous catchphrase).

It seems to be the height of wit and cunning to take a criticism directed at your group (e.g. racism) and send it back at the other group. There doesn't need to be any supporting argument or evidence. It doesn't even really matter what the criticism is. Your cohort will gleefully pat you on the back for having demonstrated the "hypocrisy" of your opponents. It's all imaginary hypocrisy, but then truth is whatever is said by one of your own. Hypocrisy is the ultimate point-scoring system, which is why so much effort goes into inventing it. It's really just a more sophisticated form of "I know you are, but what am I?"

I thought for a moment about making a tearful confession to Bolt, just to see what would happen, but I'd probably be drowned out in the torrent of pre-existing outrage. (Besides, Bolt seems to write a dozen or more blog entries every day, and probably doesn't really care all that much.)

My approach to the whole thing is this: establish your own beliefs, ignore any attempts to label you, and let others express their beliefs freely without labelling them. It should be possible to debate issues related to economics, society, religion, environmentalism, etc. without resorting to vague and bizarre generalisations of The Left or The Right.

Carrying on from my last research-related rant, my other problem of late lies in the writing process.

The framework is supposed to assist the detection of defects in software, in a very round-about fashion. Why is this important? Well, hands up who hasn't lost work as a result of software screwing up. Some have died. Many people have experimented with more direct ways to assist defect detection, with some success, but as a result there are now many disjointed explanations of what works and why. Intuitively there should only be one explanation, taking into account everyone's accumulated experience on the subject, but nobody (as far as I know) has really sat down to work out what it might be.

That's not to say that what I'm doing is especially hard. If nobody else is doing it, it's only because so far they've been busy getting us all to this point - our current level of understanding - not because it takes anything special to go beyond it.

Nevertheless, I've been revising and rethinking this damn theoretical framework for over two years now, on and off. The first vague thoughts coalesced in late 2006, but it was a long time before I worked out what it was actually for. That didn't stop me writing about it, however (because that's what you do). I've written a lot and drawn a lot, but there hasn't been a single cohesive strain of thought. It has been more like an evolving organism. Like DNA, I have many different segments of writing dating from different periods, each adapted to different circumstances. I use various methods of flagging these as being "non-current", but I dare not throw them out in case there are still important truths buried therein.

The first step in writing is often the "brain dump", where you pour out all your thoughts into a monologue. However, I find that I can't really do a good monologue when I already have chunks of writing - the result of previous brain dumps - that need to be knitted together somehow. It's hard to revise your thinking on something that you haven't thought out completely to begin with, and then do so again, and again, and again. If you're as disorganised as I am, entropy catches up with you.

When asked, I tell everyone that I'm "getting there", which translates to "things are happening but I'm making no commitments".

It appears that, in the coming weeks, most of us will be receiving $900 from The Man, with which we must do our patriotic duty as consumers and... well, consume. I suppose we should all be buying Australian goods and services as much as possible, though that line always sounds a little parochial to me. It's a global crisis, after all.

However, it's nice to have a Senate that isn't just a rubber stamp for the Government's every whim. The Greens managed to wrangle a few improvements to the package without appearing to play games, which is a neat trick in our consummately adversarial political system. On the other hand, Senator Nick Xenophon's brinkmanship over funding for the Murray-Darling probably isn't how the democratic process is supposed to work. When interviewed on Insiders, he reassured everyone that he would indeed have scuttled the whole thing had he not gotten his way. Malcolm Turnbull still isn't having any of it, of course, but I just can't get fired up over arguments concerning tax cuts vs. handouts, and he looks like he was just fishing around for some arbitrary way to differentiate Liberal policy from Labor policy.

For my own part, I am considering various options for disposing of $900. I'm so unused to spending that kind of money that it might take me a while to work out how to do it. Upgrading my computer and acquiring saddle bags for my bike could make a substantial dent. I could, of course, blow the whole lot on chocolate. For $900 I could get 300 250g blocks, amounting to slightly more than my (current) body weight. Hurrah for capitalism.

The Federal Government's proposed mandatory Internet filtering scheme has been battered and bruised from all corners of the technical community. Yet Senator Stephen Conroy valiantly battles on. Last year I wrote to the Senator to express my views, and also to the Greens and to my local member, Steve Irons. Conroy eventually replied with a stock letter that amounted to little more than a press release.

Conroy has consistently refused to explain exactly what the filter would actually block (principally child pornography, but also other "unwanted" material), how technical barriers will be overcome, and how the results of the pilot will be assessed. I shall briefly list some other important absurdities for your amusement:

• nobody stumbles across child pornography by accident (the main premise of the scheme) - you have to be looking for it;
• nobody knows how to construct a filter that will defeat well-known and widely-available countermeasures;
• filtering in this case would be done based on a list of banned sites, which is not open to public review but which can be obtained illicitly anyway [pdf];
• the very fact that a site is filtered prevents anyone from (legitimately) determining whether it should be filtered; and of course
• filtering  is known to have an enormous impact on network speeds (the more comprehensive the filter, the greater the impact).

I may yet send another letter, but what good it would do I'm not sure.

I now suspect that Conroy (or at least the Labor Party in general) knows all this. They may have actually figured it out some time ago, but decided to fight on to save face. They may actually be relying on the Greens and the Coalition to vote down the scheme in the Senate, so that there doesn't have to be a public backflip. Doubtless the Greens would oblige, and the Coalition looks like it will as well. Conroy certainly isn't reaching out for their support, and he probably won't make much noise when the legislation fails. However, it would be amusing at some level if it passed, because then we'd truly have a fiasco - Conroy would eventually be forced to publicly back down and the concept of Internet filtering would be sunk.

One of the chapters of my much-delayed thesis describes (or rather will describe) a theoretical framework, which is academic-speak for "a way of understanding stuff" in a given field. In my case, stuff = software inspections, and my way of understanding them is a mixture of abstractions of abstractions of abstractions and some slightly crazy maths, just to give it that extra bit of abstractedness that seemed to be lacking.

It's very easy when engaged in abstract theorising to forget what it is you're actually modelling. All those boxes and lines look positively elegant on a whiteboard, but when you come to describe what the concepts represent and how someone would actually use it, things frequently go a bit pear-shaped. The problem, as far as I've been able to tell, is the limited short-term memory available for all this mental tinkering. What you need is to keep the concrete and the abstract in your head simultaneously, but this is easier said than done (especially if one's head is full of concrete to begin with). When the abstract gets very abstract and there's lots of it, the real-world stuff slips quietly out of your consciousness without telling you.

Sometimes it's only a small thing that gets you. Sometimes you realise that it all mostly makes sense, if only this box was called something else. Then there are times when you finish your sketch with a dramatic flourish, try to find some way of describing the point of the whole thing, and shortly after sit back in an embarrassing silence.

My latest accomplishment, or perhaps crime against reason, is the introduction of integrals into my slightly crazy maths (already liberally strewn with capital sigmas). An integral, for the uninitiated, looks a bit like an S, but rather pronounced "dear god, no". You can think of it as the sum of an infinite number of infinitely small things, which of course is impossible. However, it does allow my theoretical framework to abstract... no, nevermind.

The fires burning in Victoria are now considered worse than those of Ash Wednesday (16 February 1983). I don't have any particular personal connection to it, but it seems remiss to leave this event unmarked.

Meanwhile, fires are also burning in New South Wales, and the floods continue unabated in Queensland. Perth isn't such a bad place to be, it would seem.