Dave’s Archives

I do respect fire drills. Honestly, I do. However, when the alarm started sounding at around 11:30 this morning I happened to be naked, wet and soapy, as a result (fortunately) of being in the shower. I was fairly certain it was a drill because I'd seen another drill earlier in the morning for the building next to us.

I actually managed to finish up and get dressed just as the fire warden began hammering on the door. I inquired what one is supposed to do in such situations. He dismissed me and said simply that he didn't care whether I was naked and wet. He just wanted me outside in the muster area with everyone else. And it's true - this individual (who happens to be one of our senior lecturers) really wouldn't care. However, I suspect I'm not be alone in feeling that if I'm going to be running outside dressed in nothing but a towel and shampoo suds, it had better damn well be a real emergency.

Costello is quitting politics, Wilson Tuckey isn't quitting politics, Peter Dutton (the shadow health minister) has had politics quit on him. Turnbull is the voice of (relative) sanity in the Liberal Party, but not many - either in the Party or in the wider population - seem inclined to listen to it.

Some seem to be in the market for a new messiah in Joe Hockey or Tony Abbott, to save them from the horror of endorsing an emissions trading scheme and thus actually doing something constructive for humanity. Perish the thought that the Liberal leadership should be driving at such things. Better bulldoze them aside and continue squabbling over interest rates before anything useful happens. I'm not convinved that Hockey would be any more popular or politically savvy than Turnbull, and Abbott I think would be a disaster.

On a somewhat different track, Howard isn't giving up the ideological game either. On motives for victory in Afghanistan, from an ABC article:

What we've got to ask ourselves is, what is the consequence of failure in Afghanistan? And that would be an enormous blow to American prestige, it would greatly embolden the terrorist cause.

This is predictable Howard rhetoric, and it gives some insight into his mindset. He actually does see American "prestige" as a commodity worth fighting for. Not freedom, democracy, security or any other desirable facet of society, but image, and not even the image of the country of which he was the second-longest serving prime minister. This is a war, not a beauty contest. There are real people dying out there - how many innocent lives is one country's "prestige" worth?

I think there is probably a grain of truth in the idea that a withdrawal from Afghanistan could be used in Al Qaeda propaganda, but an "enormous blow"? Since Obama came to office, the world hasn't seen America in quite the same slight belligerent light. Of course, Obama hasn't actually done that much yet (a rather premature Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding), but even so he has helped redefine America's image. I think that people throughout the world are probably far less inclined now to view the US as a conquering power. Consequently, there is less propaganda value in a US defeat as there would be if the hawks were still running things.

I actually happen to agree that, on balance, the Afghan War is an important one to win, but my argument has more to do with the prospect of the Taliban condemning society (especially women) to live in the dark ages. Yes, it's certainly true that Western military might cannot solve all the world's problems, and in many situations can be a problem in itself. However, it would be encouraging if we could solve just this one, to help Afghan society back from the precipice.

The problem with that argument, from Howard's general nationalistic-conservative point of view, is that it's not our society hovering above the precipice. To argue this case might be to admit that human rights and civil liberties are worth fighting for. If we start saying things like that, where does it end?

The hardliners of the Liberal Party might ask themselves why the election is worth winning. For the prestige of the Party?

In my persuit of software engineering data, I've recently been poring over a 2002 report to the US Government on the annual costs of software  defects. The report is entitled "The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing". Ultimately, it estimates that software defects cost the US economy $59.5 billion every year.

Modelling such economic impacts is an incredibly complex task, and I haven't read most of the report's 309 pages (because much of it isn't immediately relevant to my work). However, since trying to use some of the report's data for my own purposes, certain things have been bothering me.

For instance, the following (taken from the report):

This table summarises the consequences to users of software defects (where "users" are companies in the automotive and aerospace industries).

Strictly speaking, it shouldn't even be a table. The right-most column serves no purpose, and what remains is a collection of disparate pieces of information. There is nothing inherently "tabular" about the data being presented. Admittedly, for someone skimming through the document, the data is much easier to spot in a table form than as plain text.

The last number piqued my curiosity, and my frustration (since I need to use it). What kind of person considers a $4 million loss to be the result of a "minor" error? This seems to be well in excess of the cost of a "major" error. If we multiply it by the average number of minor errors for each company (70.2) we arrive at the ludicrous figure of $282 million. For minor errors. Per company. Each year.

If the $4 million figure is really the total cost of minor errors - which would place it more within the bounds of plausibility - why does it say "Costs per bug"?

The report includes a similar table for the financial services sector. There, the cost per minor error is apparently a mere $3,292.90, less than a thousandth of that in the automotive and aerospace industries. However, there the cost of major errors is similarly much lower, and still fails to exceed the cost of minor errors. Apparently.

What's more, the report seems to be very casual about its use of the words "bug" and "error", and uses them interchangeably (as you can see in the above table). The term "bug" is roughly equivalent to "defect". "Error" has a somewhat different meaning in software testing. Different definitions for these terms abound, but the report provides no definitions of its own (that I've found, anyway). This may be a moot point, because none of these terms accurately describe what the numbers are actually referring to - "failures".

A failure is the event in which the software does something it isn't supposed to do, or fails to do something it should. A defect, bug or fault is generally the underlying imperfection in the software that causes a failure. The distinction is important, because a single defect can result in an ongoing sequence of failures. The cost of a defect is the cost of all failures attributable to that defect, put together, as well as any costs associated with finding and removing it.

The casual use of the terms "bug" and "error" extends to the survey instrument - the questionnaire through which data was obtained - and this is where the real trouble lies. Here, potential respondants are asked about bugs, errors and failures with no suggestion of any difference in the meanings of those terms. It is not clear what interpretation a respondant would have taken. Failures are more visible than defects, but if you use a piece of buggy software for long enough, you will take note of the defects so that you can avoid them.

I'm not sure what effect this has on the final estimate given by the report, and I'm not suggesting that the $59.5 billion figure is substantially inaccurate. However, it worries me that such a comprehensive report on software testing is not more rigorous in its terminology and more careful in its data collection.

An "official communication" from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn't might be placed on "conditional status", the message warned.

A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of this new requirement. Particularly, the fact that previous colloquiums have been published online introduced some interesting possibilities:

• a randomly-generated talk;
• a discussion of some inventively embarrassing new kind of pseudo-science/quackery; or
• the recitation of a poem.

In the end I yielded, and on the day (August 25) I gave a reasonably serious and possibly even somewhat comprehensible talk on a controlled experiment I'd conducted on defect detection in software inspections.

A while afterwards, I received in the mail a certificate of participation, certifying that I had indeed given the talk I had given. It felt a little awkward. Giving a 15 minute talk isn't something I'd have thought deserving of a certificate. It might be useful for proving that I've done it, since it now appears to be a course requirement, but a simple note would have sufficed.

Interestingly, I later received another certificate, identical except that my thesis title had been substituted for the actual title of my talk. In essence, I now have a piece of paper, signed personally by the Dean of Engineering, certifying that I've given a talk that never happened.

The story of the end of Christian Rossiter has been in the news recently, and serves as another hook into the euthanasia debate. Euthanasia is one of those controversial subjects where the politics seems stubbornly opposed to what people generally regard as sensible.

I'm not unreservedly committed to the right to die. I consider myself a humanist, and as such I regard human life as being as close to sacred as anything can possibly be. However, on balance, in situations where there is no hope and where appropriate couselling is provided and informed consent given, the arguments against the right to die seem rather unconvincing.

One thing that does bother me, in this particular situation, is the following quote from Christian's lawyer (given in the ABC article above): "Death I suspect comes as quite a relief for Christian."

Those are rather poorly chosen words. For Christian, death cannot possibly provide relief, or indeed any emotion or physical sensation (unless there's an afterlife*). Death is the option chosen when relief is unattainable. Relief may be felt by those close to the individual, on account of the end of the suffering, but that's not quite the same thing.

This is not a happy ending, but merely an ending that could have been worse.

* This ought to be a somewhat redundant qualification. Clearly anything could happen if we suppose the existence of some hitherto unobserved and inexplicable magic.

I have a hypothesis on politics - a somewhat unfortunate hypothesis given its implications. Roughly speaking, it's this: the workability of democracy diminishes with large populations. I'm not talking about the logistics of holding elections, but about the ability of society to engage in meaningful debate.

My reasoning goes like this. Insofar as I can tell, in any given (relatively democratic) country, the media tends to focus predominantly on the national politics of that country. At the same time, there are of course a variety of political parties and interest groups seeking to alter public perception for their own ends. We can think of this in two parts:

1. the effort expended on politically-charged adverts, campaigns, editorials, etc.; and
2. the resulting effects on the public mindset.

Due to mass media (TV, radio and the Internet), a fixed amount of "effort" will probably yield the same result, independent of the population size. That is, the effectiveness of a single TV ad will not diminish simply because more people are viewing it.

However, countries with larger populations will naturally have a higher talent pool from which to draw people to promote particular causes. Thus, more effort will be expended on political advertising, campaigns, editorials, etc., and so the effect on the public mindset will be greater. (I also assume that the proportion of people employed to promote particular causes is independent of population size.)

Now, we might naïvely assume that all this political advertising "balances out", since there's always an array of competing interests. I say this is naïve, because all efforts to promote political causes have one thing in common - one thing that can't easily be balanced out: deception. I'm not only talking about outright lies (though it does come to that with tedious regularity), but also errors of omission, logical fallacies, appeals to emotion and any other psychological tricks used to blunt your critical thinking. They're not even necessarily deliberate.

Without wanting to generalise, there are certainly a subset of PR people, political strategists and so on who do seem to hold an "ends justifies the means" view. These are the people who really feed the political machine, who take things out of context, invent strawmen, engage in character assassination, and generally pollute the political debate with outrageous propaganda. The larger the population, the more of these people there will be, and so the louder, better organised, more pervasive and more inventive the disinformation.

The effect of disinformation is to disconnect public perception from reality. At at sufficient level this would cripple democracy, because democracy relies on the people having at least some understanding of government policy and its consequences.

I can't comment too much on India - the world's largest democracy - because I honestly know very little about it.

I don't claim much expertise on American politics either, but I suspect the US is suffering this affliction. To me, American politics now seems to languish in a state of heated anachronism. The political machine instantly suffocates any sign of meaningful debate with ignorant fear and rage. You're still perfectly able to exercise your rights to free speech and free expression, but it's not going to achieve anything. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to climb above the fray, the media sometimes treats political debate more like a sporting match than a tool of democracy. I'm sure there is an element of this in every democratic country, but in the US it seems to be boiling over.

It might pay to consider this if we intend to move towards a World Federation, as science fiction often proposes, and which appeals to me intuitively. Of course, a "One World Government" is the nightmare-fantasy shared by so many conspiracy theorists. However, the danger is not that the government will have too much control, but that even with our rights fully protected, democracy will nevertheless be pummelled to oblivion by global armies of political strategists and PR hacks.

Just a thought.

I have regrettably discovered that my old faithful source of technology news (which I haven't paid much attention to in recent years) is engaging in one of those enlightening let's-all-laugh-at-the-scientists climate change denialism campaigns.

This article in The Register caught my attention today, and made me despair a little. Andrew Orlowski reports light-heartedly on a freedom of information (FoI) crusade by Steve McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit website and who is frequently cited, quite falsely, as having discredited the hockey stick graph (the one showing global temperatures over the last 1000 years with a dramatic spike at the end). McIntyre is actually an academic, which at least sets him aside from the likes of Viscount Monckton and other more political protagonists, but he certainly isn't a climate scientist.

The issue at stake is the availability of raw temperature data, as opposed to the aggregated, processed datasets put together by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), of which Phil Jones is the director. This Nature blog post sheds more light on the nature of the dispute between McIntyre and Jones; more than you will be exposed to by reading The Register's article at any rate.

McIntyre, unlike his hangers-on, seems to define his objective very precisely: the free availability of the raw temperature data. To this end, McIntyre appears to have encouraged (or possibly orchestrated) a barrage of FoI requests to Jones, who Orlowski describes as an "activist-scientist" (a term I would consider quite an insult).

Orlowski's article appears to have been informed by little more than a perusal of McIntyre's blog. He must have left his journalistic scepticism in his other trousers.

First, Orlowski claims that the CRU has "lost or destroyed all the original data". This is both factually incorrect and highly misleading, even if you accept McIntyre's version of events. The CRU says it faced storage constraints in the 1980s, meaning that some of the older original data could not be preserved. This is hardly implausible - scientists still face storage issues today, and will still face them decades from now, McIntyre's personal incredulity notwithstanding. Furthermore, the CRU doesn't own the original data, and says that due to agreements with those who do, it cannot release what raw data it does have.

Besides - and this is what I find most astonishing - Orlowski himself notes two things:

1. McIntyre already has the raw data. This apparently occurred through some sort of FTP security lapse at the CRU, which was then fixed in what McIntyre describes - in excruciating detail, as if the tanks were rolling into Washington DC - as an "unprecedented data purge".
2. McIntyre "doesn't expect any significant surprises after analysing" it.

That would seem to indicate that, through all the bluster, there is actually not even the pretence here that anything is wrong with the IPCC's climate projections. It's presented (by both Orlowski and McIntyre) in a fashion that suggests some sort of cover-up or conspiracy, and so that's what some readers will doubtless believe. In fact, such an allegation has been downplayed by the one person apparently best placed to make it.

The free availability of data is, I believe, a worthy cause - let's not make light of that. According to the Nature blog post, Jones wants this as well. However, McIntyre's own blog makes his FoI campaign look more like a vindictive assault than a fight for principles. Orlowski's article looks more like an Andrew Bolt post than an attempt at journalism.

The Linux boot up message of the moment:

/ has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced.

This would place the manufacturing date of the computer in question at around 1872 or earlier; a century before the UNIX epoch (the official Dawn of Time for UNIX-based computers) and at least 86 years prior to the invention of the microchip.

One of Amnesty International's media releases reports on a survey of Australians' knowledge and opinions on asylum seekers. However, the point of the media release is clearly to highlight some of the facts themselves, not just the extent to which people are aware of them. This seems reasonable, given that:

The opinion poll also showed that a large majority of Australians have major misconceptions regarding the percentage of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. On average, Australians believe that about 60 per cent of asylum seekers come to Australia by boat. More than a third of Australians believe that over 80 per cent of asylum seekers arrive by boat. In fact, only 3.4 per cent of people who sought asylum in Australia in 2008 arrived by boat - the other 96.6 per cent arrived by plane.

This is a fairly important statistic. However, this article is utterly devoid of citations, and as a researcher this annoys the hell out of me. Amnesty is a kind of lobbying organisation. As such it has an interest in altering opinions, and so it shouldn't always expect people to take it at face value.

The other thing that troubles me is the discussion of processing costs (it costs more to process asylum seekers on Christmas Island than on the mainland). Why would Amnesty even care about asylum seeker processing costs? It's hardly an issue on which human rights hinge. I'd venture that it cares only because it's another means of altering opinions. It certainly wouldn't be reporting processing costs if they were less on Christmas Island.

(This reminded me of the nuclear power debate. Greenpeace has argued that the nuclear power is unwise because the economics don't stack up. This is actually quite dishonest, in my opinion, even if it's entirely accurate. It's hard to imagine that Greenpeace cares about the economics argument against nuclear power for its own sake. Coming from an authority on economics, such an argument may be taken seriously. The same argument coming from Greenpeace just looks like someone trying to push our buttons.)

In general I don't wish to denigrate Amnesty. The lobbying it does is directed at a genuinely worthy cause, unlike that conducted by a large number of other lobbyists. However, worthy causes are almost always served by open discussion, and this includes the ability to verify the facts and statistics for oneself.

There is of course much discussion of the statistics in the media. For instance, Crikey has a list of statistics on asylum seekers with numerous but not terribly good references. I eventually managed to (more-or-less) confirm that only 179 out of 4750 asylum seekers arrived by boat in 2008. This report gives the 179 figure on page 4, while a media release on the Immigation Minister's website mentions the 4750 figure. That comes out at roughly the same percentage (3.8%) as quoted by Amnesty.

The processing costs, I'm guessing, came from a 2007 report for Oxfam. The report states:

The latest figures given to a budget estimates hearing on 22 May 2006 suggest that it cost $1,830 per detainee per day to keep someone on Christmas Island compared to $238 per detainee per day at Villawood in Sydney.

So why am I interested in asylum seeker processing costs? I'm not; not directly, anyway. I consider it to be an argument that largely misses the point -  mechanisms intended to discourage unauthorised boat arrivals incur a human cost, not just a financial one. However, from the financial cost I note that not even selfish motives would justify a hardline position on unauthorised boat arrivals. What, then, are the hardliners actually arguing about? If both altruism and self-interest suggest the same course of action, what kind of corrupt mode of thinking can possibly raise an objection?

It's inexcusable that we should make asylum seekers the object of such irrational concern. By definition, these are people who possess the least political power of anyone in the world. However, as a direct result, their suffering also carries the least political risk; not that you'd know it from listening to some of the myopic reactionary logic floating around over the last few years.

It seems that ideology can thrive where beliefs are not merely simplistic or unsupported, but where they are demonstrably false.

Oh... I see. Well, same to you with extraneous attachments. Nevertheless, after a short and somewhat unintentional break, I'm now ready to inflict myself upon you once more, hapless reader.

I shall commence by drawing your attention to the fine specimen that is federal MP Wilson Tuckey. (A fine specimen of what shall be left unspecified for now.) Nobody really takes Wilson Tuckey seriously on anything, not even his own party, but the simple fact that he's been elected (and continues to be re-elected) suggests that he does actually represent someone. This is rather a pity, in the general scheme of things.

Recently, of course, Tuckey has been piping up over the leadership of the Liberal Party, and Malcolm Turnbull's unsuitability for the role. I can't speak for anyone else, but the standing of the Liberal Party in my mind would be improved to a vastly greater extent by the removal of Tuckey than by the removal of Turnbull. Though Tuckey's replacement would have to represent the same constituency, surely he or she couldn't be quite so much of a callous, disreputable fruitcake.

By contrast, any replacement for Turnbull could easily be a lot worse. I find Turnbull to be a fairly un-objectionable leader, despite his poor polling. He's a much easier person to listen to than Kevin Rudd. He does come off as a little smug at times, and perhaps a little politically inexperienced, but I can happily live with such minor inconveniences if it means we won't be subjected to the Moral Crusades of Opposition Leader and Alternate Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The objectionable aspect of the Liberal Party is not (for the moment) its leader, but its policies and ideology. And people like Tuckey.