Would an opposition party that modernised service to members win elections as opposed to governments losing them?

Do any of these sound familiar from your previous experience with Australian elections?

“[Insert political party name] infighting really killed their election chances.”

“[Insert political party name] really underestimated how unpopular [insert policy name] would be.”

“[Insert party leader name] totally mis-gauged their approach to the electorate in the campaign.”

“[Insert political party name] was definitely seen to be ‘on the nose’ by the electorate.”

Then there are the more generic comments:

“Large slabs of the electorate seemed to be turned off by politicians of all stripes in this election.”

“The general dissatisfaction can be measured by the way that [insert new party name] came from nowhere to pick up [insert percentage] of the primary vote.”

“Turnout was only [insert percentage] once you take into account the numbers of voters who are fined for not voting and people voting informally.”

It is well known that oppositions do not win elections and that governments lose them so you’d think that political commentators might talk about something else aside from the importance of the opposition leader and his/her policies but they do not seem to – at least in the mainstream press.

Political parties are there to deliver a framework for government and win an election but the point that is too often missed is that requires far more than personalities and policies.

Here are some voter statements that you’ll hear less about in the press:

“[Insert political party] failed to contact me once in the last 3 years except for a leaflet shoved under my door 3 weeks before the election.”

“[Insert political party name] in the leaflet referred to ten policy areas of which I actually only care about one.  Beyond my postcode they know nothing about how I personally think and what matters to me as an individual.”

“[Insert political party] requires me to take time out of my busy schedule to attend boring meetings to ‘participate’ in the political process and then when pre-selection comes around parachutes in some candidate blessed by head office anyway.  There is no easy mechanism like online voting that enables me to participate in decisions made by parties.”

“None of my friends are actively involved in politics.”

“Political parties now consist of small numbers of people who are primarily concerned with their own egos and enriching themselves from the public purse either directly or indirectly by having the ability to influence appointments to public sector roles.”

If much of the above rings true for you and you accept that political parties do not win elections, governments lose them, then what exactly are political parties doing well?

The public certainly seems to have the view that parties don’t do much well at all.

Political party membership numbers have plummeted in the last 50 years in major parties in Australia (by 90%) but this should not be surprising given that they still operate like nineteenth century institutions.

Would anyone still bank these days with a bank that closed after lunch and had no online account access?

Even looking at party election fundraising, Australian law mandates that we vote and then the Australian Electoral Commision pays each of the major parties $2.31 for each primary vote. And the rest of funding comes from a few committed individuals and unions and businesses that want access to those in power if they need it.

And if you are already in the senior ranks of a party you probably even prefer small membership numbers – it is easier to do factional deals with a small number of party members than a larger number.

That might explain why interesting experiments like Senator Online (a non-policy party where you tell your senator how to vote on legislation you have an interest in via Smartphone app) are happening outside the major parties.

So the next time you hear an election post-mortem commenting on how the policies or politicians ‘won’ or ‘lost’ that particular election spare a thought for the institutional framework that plays an equally important role in determining the outcome – the parties.

And if you’re like me you can dream that one day one of the major parties will start treating their customers (i.e. voters) like any other twenty-first century organisation would.

Left your front door unlocked?

10 steps for everyone to secure your email and online accounts

How much of your own life is now online?

For most people it’s a high proportion: your banking details, access to your pension and online share trading account, your social life via Facebook and other social media, your subscriptions to paid and unpaid news sites, loyalty schemes about your buying and flying habits, your online shopping via Ebay and other online retailers and payment systems like Paypal, your business and personal communications via your email account, your company’s digital assets via your work login, your social security details and other government revenue collection and licensing systems – even that blog that nobody knows about.

And just like someone walking into your house and walking out with all your valuables, the ability for someone to walk in and take over your life primarily rests on a single key, your password (but with way more value stored online than in your house).

Many security people reading this would claim this is an over-simplification (even though this article is not written for security experts).

Surely, they’d say there’s two keys the thieves/casual hackers/spooks need: your username and your password. And your password may be different on different sites.

But security experts are not most people. For most people their username is often their email address, and their password is often the same across different sites, or the same with small variations, for instance rotation patterns on keyboards or a common password with date-related variations.

More often than not people use the same passwords across different elements of their life (i.e. once you walk in the door you have access to every room in the house) and there are even easily available lists of common passwords that the population at large uses. And your email account is posted online somewhere (your corporate email address is usually guessable just by looking at the convention your company uses for other email addresses posted on your firm’s website), and from one email account you can often get to others.  And even where your passwords are different, with access to just your email account your passwords can be reset on other sites at will by a hacker.

If you place value on access to all these different components of your life and you wouldn’t hand your house keys and address to a stranger in the street then you need to take responsibility for your passwords being safe – it’s not that you need to be paranoid, it’s just that you need to not be stupid.

Here’s some must-dos in descending order of importance.

1. Use a password management application

On both your smartphone and computer with a strong password. Why? If you don’t do this you are going to end up re-using passwords and even where you don’t share, wasting time retrying and resetting passwords. I have over 240 passwords stored in my password management app – there’s just no other way to handle it unless you have a photographic memory. If you don’t have a password management app you are re-using passwords (see below). The password management app will encrypt all the passwords so if your device is stolen they are all unreadable – do not use an Excel spreadsheet or the like.

 2. Do not reuse passwords

The alphabetical list of major websites hacked is long and getting longer every day from Last.FM to LinkedIn just to mention a couple in the ‘L’s. And these are major players who are able to afford good security people and who maybe even adopt good password management strategies like not storing passwords in plain text. However many of the sites you regularly access can’t afford good security and do not adopt good practices. If you re-use passwords people who’ve hacked those sites (and other hackers who access the online databases of hacked passwords from sites) have both your email address and your password and then can use that information to reset passwords on other sites you use.

3. Change your passwords for services that you use regularly (at least once a year)

Even with the best will in the world you may reveal key passwords (for example by using a friend’s computer that is infected with a keylogger virus). If you are lucky however, by the time the information gets around to being used you may have changed your password.

4. Do not pick up your email insecurely

Huh? Given that access to your email account is often the key to resetting your  passwords (the hacker can reset the password have the reset link sent back to your email account that he/she has hacked) it is important that you do not allow other people into it.

The problem here is that as life gets more mobile it is easier and easier to hack into people’s email accounts. Why? Because when you pick up email over the airwaves, for example via your smartphone or via your laptop over a WiFi computer in an airport or coffee shop, you might be using an insecure protocol to do it like POP3 (I know this is jargon but bear with me) and not an encrypted connnection.

On WiFi networks it’s possible to monitor all traffic going over the network whether or not it is intended for your computer and it is really simple to see what your email address is and what your password is, you just need to download a simple traffic snooping package and then look for the password which is helpfully labelled as such.

I’m not giving away anything here – the bad guys already know this stuff and an infinitely patient computer is probably snooping 24×7 at your local airport as we speak – and in certain countries is probably installed by the government as part of the airport infrastructure.

If your computer never goes anywhere but is wired into a router at home do you have WiFi at home as well? Better make sure your home WiFi is secure or you could be vulnerable to the same problem there – although it is less likely unless you live in high density housing. Even though your computer may be directly connected to the router the traffic will still be broadcast over your home WiFi network.

Take a look at the mail settings on your smartphone and laptop and see whether the SSL setting is checked (or have a friend do it who knows something about email). SSL encrypts the connection end-to-end so the snooper cannot see your password.

If your ISP or corporate network doesn’t support secure mail you have a big problem – you literally should be with another ISP and/or your corporate IT department is clueless.

Note that access to your email can just be physical access to your device. If your smartphone/tablet is stolen or lost and you think it might be easily unlockable then someone can both access your email and even reset your passwords where or confirm banking transactions where a confirmation SMS code is required. In such circumstances you should change your email password as fast as possible or have your network admin temporarily disable the email account ASAP.

Install an antivirus product but it won’t be 100% effective

5. Install a good antivirus product

You can have the best passwords in the world and a good password management application, but if the bad guys are looking over your shoulder as you enter credentials into your online banking website this is all for nothing. Software exists (and is readily available) to do just this: to record both your screen and your keystrokes. And many of the emails you receive on a daily basis either with attachments (many of which you will never see because they are filtered out by your corporate network or ISP) will be designed to fool you into installing this software or send you to a web address where there is malware planted to download and install automatically on your machine if it is not patched.

6. Make sure you are up to date with patches

If you’ve just turned on a computer or a smartphone that’s been sitting in a shop or your cupboard for 6 months make sure it’s updated before you start using it.

And it’s not just the operating system, commonly used applications like Flash or Acrobat should all be updated. One of the most common routes to get malware onto a machine is old Java installations – make sure the newest version is installed or remove it.

7. If your computer has been infected with a virus you really should have it reinstalled from scratch

Once your machine is infected with a virus many security experts would say it is insecure even when it has been supposedly ‘cleaned’ with antivirus software.

They’ve got a point. You should have real reservations about the security of machines that have been infected even though like everyone I’ve ‘cleaned’ a machine and continued using it because of lack of time or lack of suitable backups to restore from (some of which could reinstall the virus with the backup). A lot of the time malware will  have multiple payloads. Just because some of them have been found that doesn’t mean all of them have. A smart virus writer might even play to this tendency by putting some straw man malware on your computer that can be cleaned so you think you’ve cleaned it all.

Some of the viruses out there have been become extremely sophisticated, encrypting themselves in memory, creating randomly sized files, loading before the operating system (rootkit viruses) and even storing themselves at the end of your hard disk in empty space but without creating an entry in the file system so that the virus scanners do not even have a file to scan.

You’ve got to assume too that expert virus writers will probably test their viruses against the major security vendor’s software.

8. Be suspicious

Robbery not allowed

If you get an email saying your Paypal account has been suspended (“click this link”) or you get an email from one of your friends promising hitherto unknown clips from the Boston bombing (and your friend aint the type to wallow in that sort of stuff) don’t fall for it. Studies of antivirus software suggest that detection rates might  be as low as 25% of viruses (we just have to hope the most common 25%) so they are definitely not infallible.  Exercise common sense when opening mail or going to links sent to you, or installing downloadable free/cracked versions of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (the war might well start before the game does). High demand items are all excellent ways to get your malware onto lots of machines.

9. Do backups

As the saying goes you don’t need to do them if you don’t mind losing your data.

10. I’ve got a Mac / sick dog do I really have to take steps 1 through 9?

No, the tips above may not be appropriate  to you. If  you’re the sort of person who leaves your front door unlocked when you go out of the house and a sign on it saying ‘help yourself’ the steps above are definitely overkill. However if you wouldn’t be comfortable leaving your house like that then don’t leave yourself open to online theft either.

There is some protection in running an obscure operating system but Apple doesn’t fit that criteria – you need to move to something way more obscure.

1. One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex? looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

The double nature of vampirism as both disease and sexuality metaphor ties it in with diseases  associated in the popular consciousness with initimate sexual contact. In the  last couple of decades AIDs diagnoses peaked in 1991/1992 and AIDs deaths in 1994  in the US. Looking at more major English language vampire films  there were 36 in the 80s and 53 in the 90s.  Many  major AIDs public health awareness campaigns, some of which may now seem a  little over the top, began in many countries in the late  80s.  

HIV, hepatitis and herpes  

HIV, and hepatitis are both bloodborne diseases with many similarites. Heptatitis mutates during viral replication, making it  difficult for the body’s immune system to combat it. This allows the virus to
establish and maintain persistent infection, which can go undiagnosed until  severe liver problems emerge possibly 20 to 30 years later.

Hepatitis C was identified around 1989 (for which no vaccine is yet possible) and the first vaccines for  Hepatitis B were being tested in the 80s.   1982 also saw  awareness of herpes  peak with Time magazine running a lurid cover  story “Herpes: The New Scarlet Letter” and it’s estimated that around 18% of the US population  is HSV-2  infected (the type associated more often with genital herpes) although many  are asymptomatic.

TB and the plague

One of the likely reasons for the rise and rise  of the vampire genre  are the close parallels with the fear of these various diseases in the  popular consciousness (albeit with a time lag by the time a book or film is  written and produced). Even going right back to Victorian times  tuberculosis struck with people having little knowledge of the cause and  victims gradually wasted away, fitting in well with the vampire myth and the  plague was also associated with the activities of vampires.

Vampires as medicalized horror

As well as appealing to our more prurient interests,  vampire movies are horror movies after all, despite the rich vein of satire  they’ve provided for comedians like Mel Brooks and Eddie Murphy.

The disease of the blood relationship is explicitly  picked up by vampire/zombie crossover films like I Am Legend (2007), 28 Days Later (2002)  and it’s 2008 sequel 28 Weeks Later and  other zombie/vampire type meldings, and you can also see explicit  medicalization of vampirism in the tremendously successful box office  hit Blade  (1998),  Underworld (2003), Ultraviolet (2006)  and Daybreakers (2009).

 Even back in 1992 in Coppola’s Dracula you see the  blood transfusions being given to Lucy and in Near Dark a vampire  is cured by transfusions.   

Invulnerability, viruses and puncture wounds

Arguably for most people viruses  are something that we do not understand on a mechanical level, and that we  know often can’t be medically treated, making the the viral nature of  vampirism both vaguely plausible and more frightening.  

About 10% of  the population are also needle-phobic (‘trypanophobic‘)  and interestingly it is more common in men than in women  which might  help account for the ability of the genre to genuinely scare. There are both  genetic explanations for fear of punctures (in the past puncture  wounds were often fatal because of the prevalence of infection and no  antibiotics) as well as more psychological explantions (the skin for men  being a barrier to the self and it’s breach being shocking and unsettling).

Perhaps in  a reaction in some of the more recent caring/sharing thoughtful  vampire figures expressed in Rice’s or Meyer’s novels some more recent  films have made vampires back into Nosferatu-style other-world  beings again, for example 30 Days of Night (2007)  where they act more like wild animals and have Alien-like double rows of  teeth, and  Rise (2007)with  Lucy Liu is also much blacker.   

Don’t turn your back: the vampire genre gets off the floor just
when you think the audience can’t take any more

In  100 years time the  vampire genre may even be regarded as one of the C20th’s most enduring  cultural outputs).  Expect more in this ‘vein’: vampire hospital,  vampire rock band (Oh wait that’s already been done), vampire psychiatrist, vampire  children, vampire football league, vampire western. This genre has a lot  of life in it yet.

It will be interesting to see  which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or  TV series. Place your bets below.

1. One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex? looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

Vampires selling unsafe sex?

What is it that has driven the increased interest in the vampire  genre over the last twenty years? An English university  professor I talked to even said she was seeing a lot of thesis ideas based  around the vampire genre, and there is even an online journal of vampire studies.

One obvious answer: s-e-x.

Getting around Victorian prudishness

The 1897 Bram Stoker novel that  started it all (in terms of contemporary Western culture’s obsession with  vampirism) came out during the age of repressed Victorian sexuality yet was  able to allude to issues that couldn’t be discussed except in fiction. Winona  Ryder as Mina, the heroine engaged to Jonathan Harker, is cast in Coppola’s 1992 film  as virginal compared to the more abandoned Lucy and  marriage will bring all those issues of sex and death (in those days  intimately linked by problems during childbirth) to the fore.

Mina drinks Count Dracula’s blood from his breast. Jonathan  Harker in turn is trapped by sexual abandonment with the vampire sisters in  the Count’s castle, and we watch Dracula sexually ravage Lucy as a  beast.    

Vampires in the swinging 60′s to 80′s

The sexual revolution in the ’60s  saw 32 vampire films made and in the ’70s this doubled to 61 films. A  number of the Hammer films were  particularly sexualized such as the 1960s ‘Brides of Dracula’ set at a girl’s  boarding school. 

More recently than the Hammer  films, adult sexuality and vampires has been explored in the mid 80s in the  R-rated The Hunger with  David Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie (Bowie’s always been a little ahead  of his time, beating Coppola by 9 years).

In The Hunger there  is also a very clear link between vampirism and the prevention of aging  and yet another love triangle. A nice touch that the female vampire in the  film negates men’s dominance and is stronger than they  are.  The sexuality angle is particularly emphasized in the  more recent post 2000 films and series like True Blood.

The term ‘vamp’, often traced  right back  to Theodora Bara in ‘A Fool There Was’ in 1915, is in  fact the sultry vampire seductress who preys on upright men. A  particular appeal of the genre is the way that it reflects the common  experience that sometimes personal relationships can  be  categorised as ‘predatory’ (or where one partner of any gender seems to  experience a transfer of  ‘energy’ from the other) if you chat to your  local relationship/family counsellor.

Titillation and the horror movie director

Sexuality is also a hugely  important part of the horror moviemaking toolkit as it is standardly used  just before a scary scene to disarm the audience.

We’re happy to let down our  guard that ‘this is only a movie’ when we’re being voyeurs and can  therefore be set up for the monster jumping out of the shadows.

Vampire movies with their  sexualized overtones are therefore much less forced than all those horror  movie scenes where you gratuitously insert two teenagers making out before  the big fright scene.    

Sexual risk for adolescents and vampires

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Twilight and The Lost Boys (1987)  all play to the promise and risks of sex for adolescents – in  The Lost Boys the  single mother of the two teenage boys even invites the head of the vampire  clan over to the house for a date.

The teenager interest in vampires  fits well with what they perhaps hear from contemporary parents: don’t do  drugs, don’t have sex, don’t get drunk because horrendous things will happen  to you that will ruin the rest of your lives. And, by the way as a friend of  mine says, just study as though the rest of your interests are  dead!    

Watching my youngest (Gen Y)  sister over Christmas sitting on the balcony smoking to general family  disapproval and reading Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy  series, you wonder whether the vampire genre is the Gen Y version of  rebellion. Forget about black leather jackets, I’m carrying a copy  of  Twilight; I’m  bad-bad-bad.

Virginity

Virginity is an important issue for Stephanie Meyer.  Bella  Swan (the ‘beautiful bird’!)  is able to experiment with sexuality and  desire for a long time (3 movies!) but without having to actually go through  with it. Perhaps it even remains better than it is in reality. The  penetration metaphor of biting or for that matter of ‘staking’ a female  vampire is hardly a coincidence. Just in case you’ve missed the  reference  Twilight  even gives you the forbidden apple from the garden of Eden on the  book’s cover: a nice melding of the religious and sexuality themes.

In the  Twilight series we  spend inordinate amounts of time waiting to see if Edward the vampire and  Bella will have sex (because when that happens he fears he  cannot  control himself). No question that there is a very thinly  veiled message here: ‘young  men can lose control when it comes to sex‘ (but hell maybe  with 57% of rapes occuring from  dates this is fair enough).

Love triangles

And to heighten the sexual tension why not throw in a Bram Stoker-like love triangle? This is somewhat  ponderously recreated in the  Twilight movies  in a series of set pieces e.g. Bella’s departure from school on  Jacob’s motorcycle or the somewhat unlikely scene in the tent  in Eclipse towards  the end (as a girl friend of mine says male characters  in the  Twilight series are even more unlikely than vampires themselves: men who talk  about their feelings). The Vampire Diaries also  uses the adolescent vampire love triangle device, and was  written 10 years before Twilight in 1993.

There’s no gay symbolism here – move along now

Vampirism perhaps also provides a ‘safe’ exploration of gay  issues for heterosexual men. The  vampire as a male creature can ‘father’ a child and it  has been noted that there exists a rich vein of gay references as a result  as  when Dracula notes of Jonathan in Coppola’s film “this man belongs to me”  (two years before  the  publication of Dracula in 1897 Oscar Wilde stood trial for  sodomy).    More recently True Blood looks  more explicitly at homosexuality via the character of Lafayette and  perhaps the personal anguish of Eric about the death of his ‘maker’  Godric.

It will be interesting to see  which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or  TV series. Place your bets below.

However that’s not to say that other elements of the climate change picture aren’t probable.

For example it could well be the case that:-

• By 2050 we will probably see significant climate changes in certain parts of the world and more extreme weather events
• International cooperation to cut carbon emissions as envisaged at Kyoto has been a dismal failure
• What originally looked like the necessity to reform our fossil fuel carbon economy due to peak oil has been increasingly undermined by the availability of cheap natural gas undercutting solar and wind
• Government unwillingness to seriously tackle climate change is a reflection of an electorate which doesn’t appreciate the seriousness of the situation or the value of a precautionary approach when outcomes are unpredictable
• Obscure feedback loops could accelerate some of the changes so that we are at the boundaries of the worst warming estimates rather than the mid range estimates
• Climate change will spill over into geo-political conflict, significant economic damage, and even create new disease vectors
• Geo-engineering with methods like ocean or atmospheric seeding is highly risky and unproven when it comes to a last ditch attempt to make up for the failure of multilaterial action

All in all some very bleak scenarios – but at this stage not a certain outcome.

However there are three incontrovertible facts that those working in climate change policy know, and don’t often discuss, which are just as bleak and completely certain:

1. If you fail to convince the public of the seriousness of climate change (so nothing is done) and the worst estimates prove true then your life’s work will have been a failure.
2. If you do convince the public of the seriousness of climate change (and something is done to fix it) then everyone will say you over-dramatized the problem.
3. If you fail to convince the public of the seriousness of climate change (so nothing is done) and the negative consequences turn out to be more trivial than expected (we are after all talking about predicting the future 38+ years hence) like the population growth alarmists of the 70s or the nuclear winter predictors of the Reagan era you will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

With these global and personal implications who would want to work in climate change?

The next time you meet someone who works in this area remember that they live each day with a sense of impending doom and even worse that as per 1, 2, and 3 this sense of doom is entirely justified. They probably should have taken the red pill.

And that’s one climate change model which is always going to be rock solid.