Appropriately, I will clean this post up later. Just notes for now. Links to come as well - check nocleanfeed.com/learn.html
- Mandatory internet filtering is expensive, complicated and doesn’t protect children from danger. It is an incredibly bad policy for the purposes of protecting children because it makes parents think that a risk is eliminated or reduced when it in fact is neither (any filter is circumventable by anyone, including children, but especially a one that is not customised but instead applied to every ISP)
- Mandatory filtering affects anyone using the internet for any purpose. Legitimate material will certainly be blocked. Speeds will be slower. Both of these things come about because of the technical infeasibility of the plan, which is basically a government bureaucracy being expected to monitor and police the entire internet.
- People who use the internet to express themselves - ie. most people - will be at risk from the filter. We know from the leaked blacklist that 100% completely legitimate sites - diving instructors websites! are blocked. Educational sites - eg. talking about drug abuse - will be blocked. We shouldn’t even know that because the list will be kept secret! The only people who will determine what is blocked are the bureaucrats in charge.
- Nobody is able to prove that there is an epidemic of poor parenting in Australia that is leading to children being overwhelmed with improper content. Considering the scale and scope of this change, why has there been no study into the scale and scope of the problem it claims to fix?
- Following on from this, we have to be careful what we are talking about when we talk about prohibited content. Common-or-garden variety porn is extremely easy to find on the internet. It’s also quite easy to block from a search that isn’t directed towards it - Google and other search engines have an effective “safe search” facility. Actual illegal content - child porn, for example, is understandably more difficult to find because it takes place “underground” mostly via file-sharing networks. While it is comparatively easy for someone to “stumble” across normal porn (in the same way a child can overhear a lewd conversation at a bus stop), it is quite difficult to find a genuine criminal/predator organisation online, for obvious reasons.
The following points from the govt specifically are wrong:
- “only pedophiles and child abusers are worried about the filter.” This is obviously ridiculous. In fact, given the filter is an expensive waste of time, it would actually make life easier for online predators if it takes money and time away from law enforcement and parent education.
- “The trial was a success” - the trial was a ridiculously limited unrealistic exercise that in no way approximates the complexity and scope of filtering the entire internet on a real time basis.
- “other countries use similar filtering systems”. No industrialised democracy uses mandatory ISP-based filtering universally. Other options for protecting kids - for example free filters distributed directly to parents - are already available. But the best approach, like with drugs, sex, and any number of other things - is always education.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
REQUIRED LISTENING: Vince Guaraldi Trio, “Linus and Lucy”
I was listening to this and I wondered why it was so familar yet not quite what I was expecting.
Then I figured out I was used to hearing the Wynton Marsalis’ septet play this on the very wonderful Joe Cool’s Blues (which also includes pieces by Ellis Marsalis’ trio).
True story: When I was in high-school I worked at a Newsagent in a shopping mall. Across from the mall was an independent music store. Mostly they met the market and carried pop and rock but they had a fair jazz section. I would wander over in my break and browse the racks. They had Joe Cool’s Blues in that rack for ages and I was always keen but it was super expensive, on the order of $30+ for one 12-track CD back when I was earning around $6 or $7 an hour (NB for American readers, your concept of “minimum wage” does not apply here). Eventually I bought it, mostly for the cover of Wynton playing while Snoopy dances and Ellis watches on. And you know what? It’s awesome, but more than that, everyone likes it.
No clean feed!
Robert DeNiro on Sesame Street
DeNiro: Look at me, I’m a cabbage. Good source of riboflavin!
Elmo: Wow! That’s the best imaginary cabbage Elmo’s ever seen!
An Amazon fulfillment warehouse in the UK.
Digital doesn’t eliminate the physical, it just moves it elsewhere. (Via Mail Online)
A Blob Walks Out of a Clock Tower in Brisbane
Brisbane continues to convolute its identity, with yet another infuriatingly conservative and unimaginative design.
Urgh. The mark is horrible. Wait. Is it a mark or a logotype? Anyway.
Also, what’s with the tagline? “Australia’s new world city”. What’s a “new world city”? What’s a “world city”? Is that different to a city world?
And new world city implies there was an old world city. Is that Sydney or Melbourne or somewhere else?
Hang on. Maybe they mean Australia’s / new world / city. But how does that work? I thought the New World was the Americas. But there’s already two Brisbanes there (1, 2).
It’s very confusing.
“Like all great religious texts, the Ikea catalog inspires both microscopic devotion to detail and telescopic contemplation of a well-ordered universe.”
Jeffre Jackson makes a welcome return to Pink Air.
Street Computing Workshop 2009
Papers from the Street Computing Workshop at OZCHI this year.
“I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to try and figure out the myriad of ways that Facebook may or may not want to use my information.”
Danny Sullivan: Now Is It Facebook’s Microsoft Moment?
‘Scuse me while I go and dig around in my privacy settings. Again.
Nicolas Nova on Don Norman's "design research" article
Just go read it. (previously)
from pgf plots
direct from Excel 2004 for mac
matching pgf plots with Excel
new Excel chart
Yesterday on the Twitter Sam Clifford said:
Dear academics of the world: Excel graphs look like shit.
Which is true enough, for the charts that come out of Excel if you just press the “make chart” button.
I said, in reply to Sam:
Default excel graphs do. A bit of effort playing with them makes them more pretty and more readable
But Sam was skeptical. I asked him for an example of pretty charts that he liked and he offered examples from PGFPlots, and suggested this one (pdf) in particular. Using PGFPlots requires that you use LaTeX which also, almost, requires that you are have an engineering or computer science background. (I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX; it kicks arse. I would recommend it if you are a geek. Otherwise, no.)
As you can see, it’s possible to come pretty close to the example PGFPlot chart in Excel.
Briefly, I changed the background colour and bar colours, fiddling with the line widths to make them less chunky in Excel. I changed the I changed the scale of the Y-axis and set the major unit to be 2E+7. I also set the upper limit of the chart to be 7.9E+7 so that the upper unit would not display. I changed the font to the quite lovely Constantia because I like the lower-case numbers (which are not strictly correct for charting, but they are pretty) but I could have found a .ttf of Computer Modern if I really wanted. I adjusted the spacing between the bars from the default of being smushed up against each other to having a bit of space.
I couldn’t find a way to fix the ugly scientific notation that Excel put on the Y-axis scale.
It’s not hard to fix the chart in Excel but it does take a bit of time. But it is also quicker than learning LaTeX.
Dear Self,
Just a quick note to say that having an awesome idea is not the same as executing an awesome idea. Ideas are basically free while execution takes time which is scarce.
Therefore, finish executing that one awesome idea.
Yours in internal monologue,
Self
PS: Pick up some milk on the way home.
