Matchbo A Go Go

Bruce Eckel's post, and Ruby/Python dialogue

2005-12-20T20:04:00.000-08:00

Firstly, I'd like to say that I would like to see more positive dialogue between Python and Ruby users and developers (This isn't just because I would like to see Ruby steal some smart Python people via a process of assimilation). The Ruby community is usually well known for its open-mindedness and general niceness, I don't understand why some members have a dislike of Python (I personally prefer Ruby, but Python would be my 2nd favorite language). I don't think superficial Python critics ( e.g. "significant whitespace, wtf? must be a bad language") are representative of the Ruby community as a whole (I hope not), and similarly I don't think superficial Ruby critics ("influenced by *Perl*, wtf? must be a bad language") are representative of the Python community. In this spirit I should probably take Bruce Eckel's recent hyper-enthusiasts post as a welcome sign that more and more prominent programmers are taking notice of Ruby (and Rails, of course), and ignore the labels and generalisations he applies to Ruby and Ruby users.

However I do take some issue with Bruce Eckel's post (My point is similar to the one David H. Hansson makes in his post, but he makes it in a more outspoken style). Eckel's main criticism of Bruce Tate's book is that he dismisses languages without taking the effort to learn them. In Bruce Eckel's post, and especially in his previous post some years ago, which I clearly remember (the rest of the post was quite similar to the quotes that remain in on ruby-talk IIRC), Eckel seems to criticise and dismiss Ruby without showing that he has taken the time to learn it. First time round, this was the paragraph that I remember most strongly:

For some reason, the creator of the language saw Python and decided to do a clone, and people who had never used Python thought it was a good idea. Harsh, maybe, but that's my impression: if you've used Python at all, you wouldn't give Ruby a second glance.

This time it seems to be along the lines of "there are influeces from Perl, ergo it must be a bad language". So the problem to me is that he comes across as the pot calling the kettle black.
The fact that he criticises different parts of Ruby this time around, without acknowledging that he criticised Ruby before, and that some of these previous criticisms were somewhat rash and unfounded, is a secondary issue, which I think we would all be willing to overlook if he wrote a second post, critiquing Ruby from the perspective of an example script he's written, or some evidence that he's taken the time to learn Ruby and to try to think in the language, something he should be quite good at doing :-) Of course, if he suddenly got excited about Ruby and decided to write "Thinking in Ruby", that would be fantastic. Stranger things have happened ;-)

Will the "long tail" start wagging the dog?

2005-12-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

The title of this post questions whether long tail style information dissemination techniques, such as Google searching, blogs, and wikipedia, may start influencing opinions (of at least the net savvy), more than mainstream media, whose influence seems to have been on a steady rise since the invention of the television. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, has some interesting things to say about these new technologies and approaches to information dissemination, which rely on the fault tolerance of our brains toward information sources (i.e. we look at multiple sources in the course of making an opinion, if one is a bit wrong or inaccurate, that is OK), in The Probabilistic Age.The main issue in my opinion is getting an accurate view of a topic or issue. The problem with blogs and google searches and wikipedia is that some of the information may be biased or inaccurate. The advantage of these new forms of information dissemination is that we can sample multiple times from this sea of information to get a broad view of the facts, and our fault tolerant brains can weed out most inaccuracies and bias. The problem with mainstream media is that it usually conforms to one or two simplistic viewpoints. It is less likely to be factually inaccurate, but it is still usually biased. The problem is that with the mainstream media (I'm mainly thinking newspaper, I can't really talk about television as I don't have one) the biases all reinforce one another, for example if we always read the one newspaper, we may read five articles on one topic which all agree with one another, therefore we think that opinion is the truth. We get less diversity in opinion, due to editorial pressures, and less diversity amongst the people giving us these opinions, compared to say blogs or the results of a google search. The advantage of the diversity search results and blogs is that we have more opinions to choose from, and the biases tend to cancel each other out (we get an averaging effect).

As an example, imagine we are interested in a topic such as "What are the facts regarding the Schappelle Corby case? (this will only be familiar to people from Australia, sorry). By reading blogs and searching the web, we are exposed to say five articles which express variations on three main viewpoints

"She is innocent, the drugs were planted on her, this is so terrible!!!!!"
"I think she is innocent, Indonesia sometimes seems corrupt, however we don't have much information"
"She had 4.1kg of marijuana in her boogie board bag, in a specially designed plastic bag that was cut to fit the outer bag. She allowed officials to search her bag, but got upset and refused when they asked to look inside the compartment holding the drugs. Her brother was in prison at the time she was arrested, and has previous drug convictions. Make up your own mind."

Of these five articles, one is excellently written, two are well written, and two articles are poorly written. We are still much better off, however, than if we are exposed to five articles which are all reasonably well writted, but with some of the immediacy and frankness edited out, and all conforming to minor variations of only one of the three viewpoints (say maybe "She is innocent, the drugs were planted on her, this is so terrible!!!!!", because it is believed that this is what their audience wants to hear). If this mainstream media viewpoint is not accurate or only contains part of the information required for us to make up our mind, then by relying on mainstream media we can get a distorted view of reality.

Of course, what I have discussed here is only part of what Chris discusses in The Probabilistic Age, and The Long Tail, which discusses some similar issues. A further article worth looking at is Web 2.0, by the inimitable Paul Graham, especially the section on Democracy which talks about the damping effects of editors (getting rid of the extremes of good and bad writing), and the Common Thread section which insinuates that this new style of information dissemination (Google searching, blogs, Wikipedia) is nothing more than using the web in the way it was meant to be used.

Thesis finished

2005-12-18T22:29:00.000-08:00

The final version of my thesis "Retaliation and Reconciliation Conventions in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma" has now been passed and submitted to the University library for posterity. If you want a copy of it (of course you do), here it is.

New Computer

2004-07-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to finish my thesis ASAP. I've bought a 2nd hand computer and stuck it in my room, it has the advantage of not being connected to the internet :) I've been working from home. The benefits of working from home weren't visible immediately, as I had to buy the computer first, I had to install the software I needed, we had relatives staying who stayed in my room, I had to set up my room so that it was an effective work environment. But now probably for the first time I find that I'm exceeding the expectations I'm setting for myself, getting ahead rather than falling behind. We'll see if I can keep it up.

Bringing the Game into Disrepute

2004-04-28T19:15:00.000-07:00

Who really is bringing the game (AFL) into disrepute? Brisbane, by being the greatest team of the past decade or two, winning three premierships in a row, and commiting a few administrative errors like handing some paperwork in one working day late, then getting fined a huge $260,000, or $10,000 per administritive crime/oversight?

Brisbane, by choosing their own sponsor, Pepsi, rather than the AFL sponsor the AFL would like them to support, Coke, risking huge fines, accusations of bringing the game into disrepute, and threats of being docked premiership points? Would Geelong take a similar stance over Toyota vs. Ford ground advertising in Geelong, where Ford is such a huge part of the city's economy and the club's culture and (presumably) finances, if they had the contractual power to do so?

The $260,000 fines are supposed to be totally unrelated to the fiery sponsorship showdown. Do we believe this?

Here's some quotes on the Brisbane-AFL dispute and fines from Brisbane's coach, Lethal Leigh Matthews, who tends to tell it as he sees it:

"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"

"It's a bit like being transported for stealing a loaf of bread"

Here's a humerous article that deals with this issue:

Dancing with Lions while skirting real issues

and some quotes:

<satire>
"An outraged Demetriou [AFL chief] has discovered Bowers [Brisbane CEO] once picked the phone up in his left hand - $10,000. He placed his pen back on the desk without replacing the cap - $10,000. After re-entering the office, Bowers forgot to bless himself when kneeling in front of a mural of AFL chairman Ron Evans. That's a biggie - $20,000. "

"Whatever Demetriou misses, AFL general manager, football operations, Adrian Anderson, has under control. ...
He has logged one fine. During a recent board meeting one Lions director burped after sipping a particularly frisky can of Pepsi. Make that another $10,000."
</satire>

Greens are Extremists

2004-04-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

From Howard courts Victorian voters :

Mr Howard said the Greens were extremists and "out of touch with mainstream suburban opinion".

The best way to maintain a balance was to "fight the extremes,"

I know a lot of people who voted Green at the last election. I don't consider them extremists. I find this offensive.

Top 100 boks (sort of)

2004-04-12T03:28:00.000-07:00

A list of 100 books
(I got this from ZucchiniBikini who got it from Chickafinty).

I think I'm supposed to start with a top 5 books on this list, but as there's nothing really on this list that I read and liked that everybody else wont have read and liked, instead you can have my idiosyncratic, top of my head, top 5 books I've read recently list instead (3 of my books are non-fiction, but as I'm cheating anyway...):

Babel-17, by Samuel Delany. Inspiration for the Ruby Programming Language, a fascinating science fiction novel exploring the influence, and especially the potential influence, of the language we use on the way we think and act.
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. Loved this as a kid, especially after I heard Richard Dawkins give a talk in Melbourne where he described religion as a virus of the mind. Only read it cover to cover recently, although it has influenced my opinions since my first forays into it way back then. This book is a virus of the mind, that is highly infectious if you let your brain anywhere near it ;-)
Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas Schelling. Thomas Schelling is my favourite Game Theorist/Social Scientist/Economist. Everything he writes is incredibly clear and to the point, so that you cannot help but be enlightened by it (In my opinion, of course). Was writing about Tipping Points, in this book, only about
20 years before Malcolm Gladwell rose to fame with his "new idea" book The Tipping Point. Describes a very interesting critical mass model of the "dying seminar" which I think is relevant to all sorts of recurring group activities that people try to organise, including Meetups, such as my Latham For PM. I've given a little talk to people at uni on this "dying seminar" topic, I also discussed it with technodummy at last month's weblog meetup. Maybe I'll write about it in this blog one of these days. Anyway, lots of interesting stuff here, lots of food for thought.
Darwin Among The Machines, by George Dyson. In a nutshell, looks at the idea that the evolution of machines has many analogies to the evolution of humans and animals. The central figure in the book is Samuel Butler, a contemporary of Darwin living in New Zealand, who seems amazingly prescient in some of his predictions. About the highest density of interesting ideas per page that I've ever seen in a book, and has a large and eclectic bibliography.
The Lord of The Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. I haven't actually read this book recently, but seeing the extended version of The Two Towers on DVD (the DVD versions have been much better than the cut down versions they played in the cinemas, IMHO), and then watching The Return of The King (which I thought was amazing), I feel like I have. It also helps that I spent an afternoon at the Lord of the Rings Exhibition at Wellington Museum when I was in New Zealand a year ago, and that I read the book (and The Hobbit) 5 times in primary school, first in grade 3 (I read The Hobbit in grade 2). This was the book of my childhood, and partially because of this, it wasn't until early teens that I weaned myself off fantasy, in favour of more adult books.

Now for the Top 100 list. I feel quite ashamed, as I've only read 28 of these books, (I have 61 of them in my personal library, but I thought, from a quick glance at the books, that this number would be higher also). The main reason for my lowly score of 28 is definitely that I don't finish enough of the books I start reading, for the rest I'll blame it on the fact that there's not a huge overlap in our reading tastes, beyond the obvious classics.

(books I've read are bold, books I own are italics. books I own and have read are bold italic)

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blighton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philantrhopists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Kestrel

2004-04-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

I'd ordered The Kestrel (by Lloyd Alexander) from the US at Readings bookstore, when I went there today it had arrived. Years ago I read this book and loved it, and whilst I couldn't remember the title, bits of the book stuck in my head like superglue. I think, if I was to sum up (and simplify) what I like about the book, I would say: it is morally ambiguous. This may be similar to why I like (and Suelette doesn't so much) Dashiell Hammett. I especially love the dedication:

For those who know that they are only human but who try not to be any less.

That sounds like my philosophy of life.

Other great morally ambiguous books:

The Glass Key

The Maltese Falcon

Red Harvest

(all by Dashiell Hammett)

If you want to find out more about what "The Kestrel" is about, read the Amazon reviews. (OK, I partly did that to show that everybody gave the book 5 stars -- not everybody has heard of the book, but those who've read it seemed to like it)

How grammatically sound are you?

2004-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

I just did this grammar test How grammatically sound are you? that I found on blogdex. It seemed quite tricky, but not pedantically so. This is how I went:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

These are all the possible outcomes: All possible results.

But what I want to know is what score I got, and which questions I got wrong. Interesting quiz, annoying that they don't give you the answers at the end.

April Fools!

2004-04-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

Seeing as it was that time of the year yesterday, some April Fools hoaxes...

This google one is quite funny, if you read through it all. A fair few computer related in-jokes though. http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

This was also released on April 1, but I think it's real (I've signed up for it anyway, for when / if it comes out):
https://gmail.google.com/

Here is an older one from a previous April Fools day about their search technology "pigeonrank": http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

This one is also moderately funny (and moderately painful), but again, computer related in-jokes abound. Similarly to the google joke, a fair bit of work would have gone into it.
Dating Design Patterns book review *Update* -- it's been pointed out that this is a real book, not a hoax. I think this only makes it even funnier.

Here is a list of the top 100 April Fools hoaxes, including one by Dick Smith, seemingly towing an Antarctic iceberg into Sydney Harbour. Apparently he'd been going on about it being a good idea.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/aprilfool2.html

Here's a funny one about a Web standards protest march:
http://hownow.brownpau.com/misc/m4west.html

Finally heres a list of most of the web based April Fools hoaxes this year (and last):
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/04/01/internet.shtml

Read this and weep

2004-03-31T22:08:00.000-08:00

Read this and weep: Abuse of Government Power.

some introductory context:

We all need to reflect seriously on what's going on. Not in anger and not in partisanship, but in keeping with our responsibilities as Senators and with an abiding respect for the fundamental values of our democracy.

Richard Clarke did something extraordinary when he testified before the 9-11 Commission last week. He didn't try to escape blame, as so many routinely do. Instead, he accepted his share of responsibility and offered his perceptions about what happened in the months and years leading up to September 11.

now some of the juicy bits:

The retaliation from those around the President has been fierce. Mr. Clarke's personal motives have been questioned and his honesty challenged. He has even been accused, right here on the Senate floor, of perjury. Not one shred of proof was given, but that wasn't the point. The point was to have the perjury accusation on television and in the newspapers. The point was to damage Mr. Clarke in any way possible.

this is all so juicy I had to quote it all:

When Senator McCain ran for President, the Bush campaign smeared him and his family with vicious, false attacks. When Max Cleland ran for reelection to this Senate, his patriotism was attacked. He was accused of not caring about protecting our nation -- a man who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, accused of being indifferent to America's national security. That was such an ugly lie, it's still hard to fathom almost two years later.

There are some things that simply ought not be done – even in politics. Too many people around the President seem not to understand that, and that line has been crossed. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told the truth about the Administration's misleading claims about Iraq, Niger, and uranium, the people around the President didn't respond with facts. Instead, they publicly disclosed that Ambassador Wilson's wife was a deep-cover CIA agent. In doing so, they undermined America's national security and put politics first. They also may well have put the lives of Ambassador Wilson's wife, and her sources, in danger.

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that the White House was thinking about an Iraq War in its first weeks in office, his former colleagues in the Bush Administration ridiculed him from morning to night, and even subjected him to a fruitless federal investigation.

When Larry Lindsay, one of President Bush's former top economic advisors, and General Eric Shinseki, the former Army Chief of Staff, spoke honestly about the amount of money and the number of troops the war would demand, they learned the hard way that the White House doesn't tolerate candor.

This is not "politics as usual." In nearly all of these cases, it's not Democrats who are being attacked.

Senator McCain and Secretary O'Neill are prominent Republicans, and Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay, Joe Wilson, and Eric Shinseki all worked for Republican Administrations.

The common denominator is that these government officials said things the White House didn't want said.

I don't think our Australian government is as dodgy as this. But when John Howard recently accused Latham of misleading Parliament and the public over the circumstances of his decision a Labor government would withdraw troops from Iraq by Christmas, I thought:

"Is this an old pot calling the shiny new kitchenware black?"

(Despite Howard talking about strengthening defamation laws, I'm still allowed to think, aren't I?)

Does anybody remember Tampa? What about the children that were being thrown overboard, very close to election time? Do we think John Howard didn't know the contrary evidence, despite the fact that the contrary evidence and opinions were given to senior people in his party well before the election (if I recall correctly)?

What about the constantly repeated, assured claims that there were weapons of mass destruction? Do we believe they were 100% genuinely believed opinions based on rational analysis from the available intelligence?

These are all questions, I'm not trying to tell anybody what they should think. I just think: read up on these topics, look at what Bush's government has done, and criticisms of what it has done, especially around the time of the Iraq war. Decide who you believe more, the critics (Clarke, Wilson, O'Neill) or the senior government figures (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, etc.).

Then do the same for Howard's government. Read up on what happened, say with Tampa and then Iraq and maybe the Ethanol affair, getting both sides of the story. Then decide who you believe more, the critics or the senior govenment figures (Howard, Downer, etc.).

That's all I ask.

Summary of March 9 LathamForPM Meetup

2004-03-29T10:17:00.000-08:00

This is a short summary of the discussions at the first "Latham for PM" or "Howard's End" meetup, which took place on Tuesday 9 March 2004 at "The Lounge", on Swanston Street in the City. It was supposed to be at "Sahara", but that venue was closed due to a parent teacher night.

Present: 10 people

Topics:

Free Trade Agreement:

there is a balance of good and bad
there are some economic benefits
clause change in PBS may have bad ramifications
Intellectual Property law changes may have bad ramifications
don't want to end up like California, Mexico and Canada under NAFTA where government is sued by corporations for lost profit when they tighten environmental laws.
don't know all the details, the devil is in the details.
there was a robust discussion, with one person strongly for the FTA, a couple strongly against, and the rest undecided but with reservations. I hope that is an accurate assessment?

Role of Media in Elections

Howard Dean: who he is, what can be learnt from his online campaign.
- some people read "Howard Dean is not a Soap Bar" which I'd printed out
Role of internet in Australian election
- some were skeptical that the internet would be important
- I thought the internet would allow people to "route around" biased big media, making people more informed.
- point was raised that the internet can make people's opinions more rather than less polarised, as people only need read articles that reinforce their biased opinions.
Discussion about big media selling us what they want us to hear
- "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky mentioned. Update: I now have a copy of this book.

Honesty in Politics

some people read through "Repairing Politics" by Mark Latham, which talks about the importance of rebuilding public trust in politics and politicians.
talked about the role of lobbyists, and the distorting effect money can have on politics.
came up with idea: website listing promises made by political parties before the election.
- the idea is that before the election you sign up to support a party in that election, based on the list of promises they have made. The promises may be broken down into core and non-core? Part of signing up is to pledge that if 1 core promise is broken, or 2 non-core promises, then you will vote for the opposite major party in the next election. The idea is that this would be an incentive for politicians to keep their promises, and the process of deciding which promises have been kept or broken before the next election would also remind people how honest the party in power has been, therefore how much they can trust their current promises.

Allegations of whether John Howard is racist.

mention was made of whether John Howard was opposed to apartheid sanctions in the 80's and therefore maybe implicitly supported it. Read the bottom of link or link for more details.
mention was made of whether John Howard was opposed to Asian immigration in the 80's. Here is an article which clearly shows this viewpoint link, here are some more which back up the details: link, link, link.
I said I would check up on sources, see above.

How does our voting system work?

does it matter whether you vote directly for a major party or whether you only distribute preferences to it?
- answer: in the lower house, almost certainly not. They both mean almost always the same thing.

If you have any comments or corrections please click on the "Comment" link and say your piece.

ABC website readability

2004-03-15T04:05:00.000-08:00

I've just sent this email to the ABC, I wonder what their response will be. If you haven't seen the
AM or PM web pages, have a look, the text is REALLY small.

Hi,

I'm just writing to let you know that whilst I am often drawn to articles on
the AM http://www.abc.net.au/am/ and PM http://www.abc.net.au/pm/ websites,
I very rarely read them all the way through because the font size is far too
small and trying to read gives me a headache. Take for example:

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2004/s1066436.htm

which I was just trying to read. Why is the main story text so much smaller
than the other text on the page? The other text is clearly legible, and easy on
the eye. The main article text is barely readable unless one squints. I am a 27
year old male with good eyesight and no glasses. I hate to think how my father
or grandmother (who might also be target audience) would cope. Almost all news
agencies these days are pretty good at producing clearly readable web articles,
look at anything from http://www.theage.com.au as a good example of news web
page design. How many people are going to read your articles if they need to
squint to do so, and so much other content is available that is easy on the
eyes?

I had a look in your CSS file "/am/css/rcaff.css" and found the following
section: {~ lines 313-315}

DIV.storytext {
CLEAR: both; PADDING-RIGHT: 12px; PADDING-LEFT: 12px; FONT-SIZE: x-small;
//^^^^^^^
PADDING-BOTTOM: 12px; COLOR: #000000; PADDING-TOP: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif
}

You are setting the text size for the article to "x-small", which would explain
why it's unreadable. Is this intentional? After changing this line to be:
... FONT-SIZE: small; ...

viola, the web page becomes readable. If you want people with non-superhuman
eyesight to be able to read your articles, I would recommend against using
"x-small" font size.

I would welcome any response, even justification for keeping your web
pages with smaller font sizes than almost anywhere else on the web.

I've attached an updated CSS file which makes the change described above.

Thankyou for your consideration,

Matt

Will they tell me to get lost? Will they listen? Only time will tell. In the mean time,
I'm using Ctrl-= in Firefox to magnify their articles, but only when I can be bothered.

Dogster.com and Upcoming.org

2004-03-08T18:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of interesting links:
Dogster.com and our NQR dog Harry's website (not working at the moment, not a good endorsement for dogster)

Upcoming.org -- for events in your local city.

link -- for Upcoming events in Melbourne.

Queryster.com -- a pretty cool looking (meta|multi) search engine. It's annoying though that I can't get it to default to Google - other search engines are only useful on the rare occasion that Google doesn't give me what I want ;-)

A short post on Retaliation

2004-02-17T01:36:00.000-08:00

This will just be a short post on retaliation. My masters thesis deals with cooperation in game theory, what does this have to do with retaliation. Think sustainable cooperation is about always turning the ther cheek? Think again. Cooperation without retaliation in iterated prisoner's dilemma type games is a recipe for low utility, as it is so easily exploited. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, or tit-for-tat, however, also works poorly unless both agents have full and accurate knowledge about what the other agent is doing. In the presence of noise, it leads to Israel-Palestine or Northern Ireland style constant retaliation. What is needed are recoverable retaliation strategies, which retaliate for a short period of time over percieved wrongdoings, but then are capable of returning agents to mutual cooperation.

I've been having trouble finding evidence of the results I'm finding in my simulations/analysis in the real world, but then I just borrowed Peacemaking amongst Primates after following a link from slashdot on Animal Social Complexity
and it talks about exactly the stuff I've been dealing with. It talks about tolerance, in a similar way as I have. It talks about reconciliation, meaning a similar thing to my recoverable retaliation strategies. And it talks about "Good" Agression, and agression as a "Das sogenannte Bose" or so-called evil, in the same way as I concluded that retaliation was an essential part of sustaining cooperation, even in simulations with some amount of partner selection and reputation, where one might have thought these other factors might have mitigated the need for retaliation. In fact allowing retaliation would have over complicated the reputation system I'd developed, so I ditched the reputation system :-)

Anyway the main point is that I've found some real world ammunition to support some of the claims in my thesis in the field of game theory and software agents, from the unlikely field of primatology. But I think I'm quite used to finding interesting connections to all sorts of research now, working in the very fertile (IMO) area of agents and game theory.

Repairing Politics

2004-02-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

I posted this to a mailing-list (OnLineOpinions), but I thought others might be interested so I've reposted it here:

I was just reading Mark Latham's article Repairing Politics

I thought it was excellent, and have selected a few choice 'sound grabs' that I
especially liked:

"There's no question that Australians have a low opinion of politics and
politicians."

"To be frank, Australians in their twenties now look at organised politics as a
redundant activity for people who like going to lots of meetings."

These quotes set the scene of our current opinion of politics. They are
followed by:

"We should use the potential of the Internet to deepen and enhance the public
debate."

Next comes a welcome criticism of television driven politics. Can you tell I
don't own a TV?

"The loss of public trust in politics has also coincided with the rise of
television as the dominant medium for political debate."

"In the age of television, politicians and the media have created a vicious
cycle."

Finally Latham launches into a discussion of how the internet (amongst other
things) can help solve these problems:

"Our great hope for the future is the Internet."

"Whereas TV has fostered a shallow and adversarial debate, the Internet relies
on a deeper dialogue and flow of information."

"Seven-second grabs and repetitious messages are redundant on the Net."

"The new information technologies have an important role to play. Internet chat
rooms and online ballots should be a regular part of the political process."

I would just like to say that if Mark Latham (or anybody else for that matter)
really believes this stuff they should check out http://lathamforpm.meetup.com
What I am trying to start up is a Howard Dean or Wesley Clark style internet
support campaign for Mark Latham.

Matt Pattison

Proposal for article on Internet Politics in Australia

2004-02-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a pitch I wrote for a hypothetical article about Mark Latham and internet campaigning, for a "Writing for Readers" course I'm currently attending. It's especially hypothetical because there isn't really a Mark Latham internet campaign at the moment. I gave the pitch to an Age journalist and a lady from the Bulletin, and they both seemed to like it, especially the Bulletin lady. So if there ever is a Mark Latham internet campaign, I'm sure the media will be interested in it. Here's the pitch:

Dear James and Kathy,

I have an interesting pitch for a story you might like to run. It is about a new way of political campaigning using the internet, which has revolutionised political campaigning in the US, which people are trying to bring to Australia to help Mark Latham win the upcoming election. The 3 new parts of this campaign, which to my knowledge have never been tried in Australia, are
(a) the website meetup.com, where regular people can organise over the internet to meet up in real life about topics that interest them
(b) weblogs, or personal news websites where candidates and supporters have unprecedented control to tell their own stories by 'routing around' the traditional media
(c) online donations, whereby candidates can raise large amounts of money (>40 million for Howard Dean in the US primaries), largely by collecting lots of small donations of $100 and under over the internet, rather than relying on the traditional $2000 per head fundraising dinners.

The story could be told in 800-1000 words, and might be a good accompaniment to the many articles on Mark Latham currently being written. It might also be interesting because presents a fresh angle, and deals with the topical issue of the growing influence of the internet changing our everyday lives.

Again for anyone who wasn't reading properly, this is a *hypothetical* article pitch. A grassroots internet campaign supporting mark Latham does not, as far as I know exist (I'm trying to help start one though with lathamforpm.meetup.com)

On Clark, Dean and Kerry

2004-02-09T02:17:00.000-08:00

Here are a few interesting articles I just read about Clark and Dean (this post
is a lightly edited and expanded version of an email I recently wrote, to a
fellow Australian who is also interested in the upcoming US election).

I don't know if Clark's campaign has any traction with the US media, or much
traction with voters in the primaries, and whether any of this is going to
change for the better, but I still think he would be good, and don't know why
he's being ignored.

This explains the main reason I think Clark is the best choice, by a Cornell
Physics Professor:

http://magazine.14850.com/0402/whywesleyclark.html

here's an excerpt:

In making their decision, Democratic voters should keep in mind the following facts: In the 13 presidential elections since World War II (excluding the 2000 election, where the actual winner is still a matter of debate),

* The incumbent won six of the nine races in which a president sought a second term.
* Democrats who were generally perceived as liberal won 3 presidential elections, and lost 6. Democrats perceived as middle-of-the-road won 4 elections and lost 1.
* Democratic candidates from southern states won 4 times and lost once; those from mid-western and eastern states won once and lost 6 times. (The 1948 Truman victory is not included, since Missouri is both southern and mid-western.)
* No Democrat ever won the presidency without winning at least 5 southern states.
* Polls consistently show that the American people have more confidence in Republicans to manage our national security
* Since 1948, the fraction of voters declaring themselves Democratic has declined from about 50% to about 30%. The Republican fraction has stayed constant at about 30%.

These historical data portend a grim 2004 race for Democrats. To win, the Democratic candidate will need everything going for him (alas, there are no longer any "her" possibilities this year). The ideal candidate will have southern roots, have strong national security credentials, and will not be generally perceived as a "standard democratic liberal". He will have to draw votes from outside of the basic Democratic base, and must win back those Democrats who are concerned with the dangers of a post 9/11 world.

After reading this re-read the mountains of press about Kerry being the most
electable candidate, and how people support Kerry because he has the best
chance of beating George Bush. Chance is intimately related to probability and
statistics. How many people who talk favourably about Kerry's chances of
beating Bush have taken into account the statistics in the previous article.

Also, with all the opinion polls showing Kerry beating Bush, how many people
have acknowledged:

(a) Bush hasn't started campaining.
(b) Opinion polls are often a very poor indication of what voters will write
on their voting card.
(c) There is no prize for winning the most votes. Labor has often done this
in Australia and lost, Kerry could easily follow in Gore's footsteps and
win the most votes but lose the election, by not winning them in the right
spots.

Here's an interesting article about use of open source software by the Clark
campaign, including comments by an ex-Redhat employee:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/business/7904826.htm

Finally, there's been a few threads on the Clark weblogs about joining the
Clark and Dean campaigns where possible, to avoid Kerry/Edwards. This is
something I think would be very cool.

here is an active thread on this on Dean's weblog:

http://forums-new.deanforamerica.com/index.php?showtopic=9360&st=0

and here is the letter which started most of the discussion:

http://campaign.forclark.com/story/2004/1/30/145835/661

If you're interested in creative use of the internet in politics, Dave Winer has an interesting blogpost:

Howard Dean is not a Soap Bar

He deals thoughtfully with the problem of mass-media bias, (I consider it to be more a case of media ignorance and incompetence at their job) and how to 'route around' this. I think however that we're a way away from candidates being able to 'route around' television, newspapers, radio and mainstream websites to win an election - how many marginal voters use weblogs as a primary source of political information?

If you're interested in grassroots and internet based political campaigning in Australia, I'm still surprised why more people haven't signed up for htpp://lathamforpm.meetup.com . Is it because us Australian bloggers all love John Howard so much? Is it because we're politically apathetic? Or is it just that I've been crap at getting the message out?

This post has been pretty much all over the shop, but I hope it is still of interest to people interested in grassroots politics and the internet.

Co-opetition

2004-02-03T01:33:00.000-08:00

I just got myself a copy of Co-opetition from the remainder bin at Borders, and have been having a bit of a read. Co-opetition was coined by Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell, who noted that in the computer industry "You have to compete and cooperate at the same time. Examples of this are setting standards and creating interoperable devices and software. You don't always have to cooperate, if your the biggest kid in the sandpit, but if you're a smaller or non-dominant competitor especially, you may have to do quite a lot of cooperating to stay alive. I'd already considered writing today about co-opetition in the computer industry, which is not very well understood by many industry commentators IMHO. The specific example I wanted to talk about was Apple's strategy with the iPod, after reading Show Time! (in Business Week, Asian edition, February 2, 2004).

People are quick to talk about the business genius of Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, because they are so phenomenally rich, and especially in Bill's case because his company is so dominant in such a large market. I'm not putting Steve Job in Bill's league for business acumen, but I do think his story is fascinating, in that he has been so creative, in so many areas, from (allegedly) garage blue boxes (phone phreaking equiptment), to Apple ][e's to Macintoshs which commercialised the amazing R&D work being done at Xerox Parc at that time with mouse driven windowing systems, to convincing the CEO of Pepsi to become CEO of his company ("Do you want to sell fizzy drinks for the rest of your life, or do you want to be a part of the future?"), to his highly innovative NeXT Computer, Inc. which developed the NeXTSTEP OS, which OS X is based on, to founding Pixar, to returning to Apple & returning it profitibility and focus, to OS X, a snazzy commercial operating system based on some core open source components, to now iPods and iTunes and revolutionizing digital music. Phew, that was a long sentence, but Steve jobs has a long list of achievements. And whilst he isn't in Bill Gates' financial league, he isn't poor either, at approx. US$12 billion net worth.

But here's the issue, which I think Microsoft bloggers have already partially covered: Steve Jobs knows how to innovate, and built brand recognition, reputation and the elusive 'coolness', but does he know how to survive in the big bad mass market, not just in high priced niches? This is the important question to ask now that Jobs has gone cross platform with iPod and iTunes. In the mass market interoperability is king, which is a form of co-opetition in that you're competing with other companies in the same market, but you are cooperating by making your devices completely interoperable, so that the consumer has the freedom of choice, and can avoid lock-in, and hardware manufacturers further up the supply chain can provide the same standardised components to all competitors. Steve Jobs is promoting his own music format, called AAC, whilst most people use MP3 and Microsoft is pushing heavily their WMA evil format :)

My prediction: Steve Jobs is very smart but the iPod will likely become a niche product like Macs are, because he doesn't seem to or doesn't want to understand that most people want low prices and interoperability, and interoperability is also very important for many of the companies he will be dealing with. If Apple wants to not support WMA on their iPods initially that's fine, but they'd better make sure more and more companies use their format quickly, not just HP with their iPod clone, otherwise regular Joe consumers are going to avoid iPods and iTunes so they don't get locked in to a minority format. And in the longer term, Apple should support WMA on the iPod if that is what consumers want. Intolerant strategies which try to lock-in customers or lock-out opponents can work well in the short term, but in the long run tolerant strategies like openness, free choice and interoperability usually win out. Therefore in my opinion, if Appple want to suddenly have a mainstream, dominant in its sector product like the iPod, and not get annihalated by Microsoft and the big Taiwanese computer component manufacturers, he should heed Ray Noorda's advice and follow the co-opetitive path of interoperability. Eventually. Hopefully in the meantime he can stymie as much as he can the evil WMA format with it's highly restrictive evil DRM capabilities and give the big finger to Bill Gates while his at it.

That dirty word: Politics

2004-02-02T01:36:00.000-08:00

I seem to be getting far too worked up lately about political issues, some of them not even in my own country. I've decided that rather than boring my family and friends to death with long rants about this sort of stuff, I'd just put it on my weblog. If it works for thousands of other boring political bloggers, why can't it work for me. My two main political concerns are that the US can rid itself of a dangerous and extremist political regime which likes to invade other countries even if the rest of the world thinks they're wrong in doing so, and that Australia can rid itself of an (IMO) divisive and "racism engouraging" government which (1) plays fast and loose with the truth and (2) supports the US government's dangerous and extremist ideology and actions.

I also think that Mark Latham has some great ideas, which should appeal to thoughtful people across the political spectrum, and breathes a big breath of fresh air into an otherwise moribund Australian politics. I don't just want a change in government to turf out Howard because I don't like him. I respect Peter Costello as a man of conscience and a great manager of Australia's finances, like Latham he is socially progressive and fiscally conservative. In a battle of say Costello vs. Beazley, I would vote Liberal, but as this is both unluckily and luckily the case (respectively), I am wholeheartedly behind Latham. I have actually started a meetup trying to create grassroots support for Latham amongst Australia's technologically literate called lathamforpm, in the same way that I believe Howard Dean and Wesley Clark have revolutionized political campaining in the US. A few people have signed up, but I would really like it if a few more would do so before the next meetups (Feb. 10, and then especially March 10). Yes that's you if your reading this, and you care about the future of our country.

On to the US, I think that Clark is the real deal, and I'm not sure why other people can't see it. I think the media have scrutinised Dean and Clark incessantly, and unfairly, whilst I think that John Kerry has got off very lightly, going from no-hoper with no media attention to supposed rightful heir to the presidential throne and the widely accepted 'most electable' candidate, still with no critical media attention, especially to the important claim that he is most electable. Why? Is it because he's a north-eastern liberal and north-eastern liberals usually do so well in US presidential elections? Is it because he has so much personality and charisma like say JFK or Bill Clinton? Or is it because he has the common touch and a humble background like say Jimmy Carter? And for all the pundits who make out that Clark is crap because he beat John Edwards in New Hampshire, but not by enough, and talk about the race as if Kerry, Dean and Edwards are the only candidates left - how long has Clark been campaining for? And how long have Kerry and Edwards been at it? What did the general population think about them at a similar stage in their campaigns? I think Clark has done an excellent job to get where he is, in the short time he's been at it. I'd like to see some of the pundits have a go at stepping inside of Clark's shoes, and maybe while they're at it they could try toppling a dictactor *with* the support of the rest of the world, and saving 1.5 million lives in the process.

But that's enough for now, my intention was to let off steam, not to build up a head of it.

A pretty cool Science Fiction writer: Roger Zelazny

2003-09-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

I'm just starting out in this weblogging caper, I'll try not to say anything too annoying or self-indulgent. The topic of tonight's entry will be science fiction authors. I haven't read much good science fiction. I think I discovered William Gibson and science fiction (which I had previously assiduously avoided) around the same time I discovered Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and detective fiction (ditto), back in first year uni IIRC. I've read just about everything by Gibson (bar Difference Engine and Pattern Recognition, and non-Burning Chrome stories), and various other so-called SF masters, but I don't think I've read anything since with the same impact as Neuromancer ("The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"), the stories in Burning Chrome, or Count Zero (probably my favourite Gibson novel). I've read Snow Crash, and liked the first half, started Cryptonomicon and got bored, read some Phillip K. Dick and was impressed but not blown away. The only science fiction that has really excited me in the intervening years is Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, Samuel Delany's Nova and everything I've read by Roger Zelazny.

Maybe I don't hang around in the right circles but I've never really heard anyone go on about how great Zelazny is. Despite the fact he won bucketloads of awards, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't even know who he is. Anyway, the list of his stuff I've read and liked goes: The Dream Master (based on a Nebula winning novella), This Immortal (Hugo), Lord of Light (Hugo), Nine Princes of Amber (sounds silly but actually quite good) and now The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth (Nebula short Story), a collection of short stories, which I'm really getting into. If people know other science fiction authors with as many good books as Zelazny, or even with one book at the quality and enjoyment level of say Lord of Light or This Immortal, I'd like to know about them.