The annual day of mystery and mild trepidation approaches, when things are not quite as they appear. A lot of effort seems to go into it among the technical community. I'll be scouring the contents of my RSS reader throughout the day looking for my fix. Or at least I would I thought it was wise to setup an RSS reader on my laptop at uni, which I do not. However, hopefully there will be a few goings-on to keep me amused. Hopefully I'll instigate some of them.
Entries from March 2009
Conroy and Bolt on filtering
The ABC's Q&A programme spent about 30 minutes last night pondering Senator Conroy's mandatory Internet filtering plan... well, idea, because it's increasingly clear that "plan" is too strong a word. Conroy was, frankly, an embarrassment. To be honest, most of the questions put to him were not especially articulate, but Conroy made a mockery of himself. What disturbs me is that he seems to be fully cognisant of the reality of public opposition, the technical barriers and even the dangers of encroaching on political freedoms, and yet at the same time he has no inkling that it means anything. Sure, ACMA may have blacklisted a dentist's website, among a number of other worrying examples, but somehow that's perfectly alright and acceptable simply because Conroy is able to explain how it happened (something about the Russian mafia, apparently). Forgive me if the idea of a secret blacklist doesn't fill me with confidence. If said blacklist hadn't been leaked recently, such errors would never come to light, and so there would be no pressure to correct them.
Andrew Bolt's remarks on the filter were mostly directed at the Internet libertarian strawman. The argument - not terribly innovative - lays down a few of the worst examples of criminal behaviour and suggests that you can't allow free access to everything. Possibly true, and utterly beside the point. Mandatory Internet filtering is and should be opposed on the grounds that there just isn't a workable mechanism, by which I mean one that is effective while being compatible with basic democratic principles. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what your filtering criteria are. Computers aren't smart enough, humans aren't honest enough and the Internet is just too damn big.
Comments Off Tags: Andrew Bolt, Internet filtering, Stephen Conroy
Quality news
How's this for a misleading headline from the ABC: "China may have to bail us out: Rudd". The user comments below the article howl in derision at the injustice of selling out the country to those funny Mandarin-speakers. No, people, Rudd wants China to bail out the International Monetary Fund, not Australia. The ABC's article is essentially just a snippet of Rudd's rhetoric, and fails to explain up front what the actual proposal is: China is to get greater voting rights at IMF in return for more money. See - it's not that hard. (The idea is that the current arrangement reflects an outdated post-WW2 world, and also that the IMF needs more money to address the global financial crisis.)
I do love the ABC, but sloppiness like this doesn't inspire confidence in the overall quality of its news reporting.
Comments Off Tags: ABC, China, Kevin Rudd
Freeway riding
Another Freeway Bike Hike comes and goes. Team Exermacise was down to three people this year, due to a combination of injury, other commitments, and general slacking off.
It's a nice ride - the fastest 30km (or 10km, or 60km) you're likely to do on a bike, at least in Perth. However, I'm now sitting at home about to set off on an 18km ride to uni - 18km of at least 75km that I ride in the course of a normal week - and pondering what makes the freeway bike hike stand out*. Possibly it's just the socialising. The freeway actually makes it easy to socialise while riding - it's much wider and everyone's moving in the same direction. It's much easier to strike up a conversation when you're side-by-side and you don't have to worry about pedestrians, cars or oncoming bikes.
Everyone's favourite health insurer was in on the sponsorship gig, had plastered advertising all along the route. Also along the route could be seen tortured souls, presumably running on pure caffeine, whose official task seemed to consist entirely of clapping at the cyclists. There were a lot of cyclists. One person towards the end simply stood on the road with his arm pointed at the freeway off ramp leading to Joondalup - possibly qualifying as a form of torture.
However, upon passing beneath the hallowed inflatable finishing gate, we were blasted with festive music and numerous people distributing free orange Powerade**. It's got electrolytes! I stuck to my cache of water, grapes and garlic bread.
** This brought back vaguely nostalgic memories of the exit from the central train station in Naples some years ago, except instead of Powerade I was being offered mobile phones.
* Possibly I should also be getting to uni and doing some actual work rather than just blogging.
Comments Off Tags: cycling
I jinxed the weather
Last Friday I declared to those sitting around me at lunch that Summer was over. It usually is over by mid-March, and (for a time) temperatures seemed to drop in a firm and unambiguous manner.
And now, suddenly, the BoM is forecasting a run of at least four 35-36° days in a row. Grumble, grumble...
Comments Off Tags: weather
The Zim desktop wiki
I've discovered that Zim is a great little brainstorming tool, for me at least. While I occasionally "think in images", my brain usually works on words and symbols. A wiki - especially one that sports a LaTeX equation editor - seems to be a powerful way to assist a text-based brainstorming session. Being a desktop application (rather than a web application), Zim is also very simple to set up and use.
I spent today and yesterday using it to construct some arcane maths involving matrix multiplication. Said maths mostly turned out to be wrong, of course, but that's all part of the process.
Continuity
The bony part of my nose met with the fridge door in an uncomfortable deceleration this afternoon, leaving a nasty cut. This occurred less than a second - literally - after having explained to some friends that I no longer felt sore as a result of rock climbing. Lesson learnt.
Comments Off Tags: hurt
Theoretical frameworks, part 3
The first and second instalments of this saga discussed the thinking and writing processes. However, I also need to fess up to reality and do some measuring.
A theoretical framework is not a theory. The point of a theoretical framework is to frame theories - to provide all the concepts and variables that a theory might then make predictions about. (If I were a physicist these might be things like light and mass). You can test whether a theory is right or wrong by comparing its predictions to reality. You can't do that for theoretical frameworks, because there are no predictions, only concepts and variables. The best you can do is determine whether those concepts and variables are useful. This really means you have to demonstrate some sort of use.
And so it falls to me to prove that there's a point to all my cogitations, and to do so I need data. In fact, I need quite complex data, and in deference to approaching deadlines and my somewhat fatigued brain, I need someone else's quite complex data.
The truth is - I'm probably not going to get it; at least, not all of it. Ideally, I need data on:
- the length of time programmers take to assimilate specific pieces of knowledge about a piece of software;
- the specific types of knowledge required to assimilate other specific types of knowledge;
- the probability that programmers will succeed in understanding something, including the probability that they find a defect;
- the probability that a given software defect will be judged sufficiently important to correct;
- the precise consequences, in terms of subsequent defect removal efforts, of leaving a defect uncorrected;
- the cost to the end user of a given software defect;
- the propensity of programmers to find higher-cost defects; and
- the total number of defects present in a piece of software in the first place.
I also need each of these broken down according to some classification scheme for knowledge and software defects. I also need not just ranges of values but entire probability distributions. Such is the pain of a theoretical framework that attempts to connect rudimentary cognitive psychology to economics via software engineering.
With luck, I may be able to stitch together enough different sources of data to create a usable data set. I hope to demonstrate usefulness by using this data to make recommendations about how best to find defects in software.
Comments Off Tags: maths, science, software, statistics
Iran, Pakistan and the nuclear threat
The world's major powers have expressed great consternation over the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies have found no evidence that Iran has any intention of arming itself with nukes, let alone that it has an active nuclear weapons program, but the issue seems to have its own momentum. I'm no expert on geopolitics, but I can't bring myself to imagine that Iran would actually want to nuke anyone, even if it could. In general, I'm sure there are people sufficiently insane or cold-blooded to press the button, given the opportunity. For instance, I don't think Osama bin Laden or likeminded individuals would show a great deal of restraint. However, for all its faults, I find it very hard to place Iran in that category.
(Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's possibly mistranslated bluster over the end of Israel is really not all that convincing, in my opinion, and it only ever seems to be him doing the blustering. He's an elected politician, after all, and he's always struck me as a spin doctor looking to for a political reaction than a man who passionately believes what he's saying.)
The real consequence of allowing Iran to create nuclear weapons, I think, is that Iran would become a more powerful player on the world stage, perhaps resulting in an arms race. This may not be desirable (depending on who you talk to), but it's hardly catastrophic. And that's assuming that the apparently baseless speculation over its nuclear ambitions is borne out.
Meanwhile, over the border, Pakistan already has operational nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Moreover, the current government seems to be fighting for its existence against the Taliban, who I certainly would not put above the use (or at least reckless distribution) of nukes. This is a group that rules by AK47 and is violently opposed to education for girls, having already destroyed a large numbers of schools. They make the Iranian regime look like a clique of humanists.
I'll happily defer to the consensus of the world's varied diplomats, foreign affairs advisors and miscellaneous geopolitical experts. However, on the face of it I have to wonder whether we have our priorities straight.
Comments Off Tags: Iran, nuclear weapons, Pakistan, Taliban
The arrogance
I took a good opportunity today to feel smug and superior on my bike. My regular "scenic route" to uni takes me down a bike path right next to the Kwinana Freeway. With a slight headwind and managing 25-27km/h, I was overtaking the peak hour traffic for the whole 6-7km distance.
Normally I can only feel smug and superior for the first kilometre or so, until after a lane merge where the traffic usually picks up. Long may the congestion continue! Hahaaa! That's me laughing at the misfortune of others. Here, let me do it again: Hahaaa!
Comments Off Tags: cycling