Stilgherrian » paranoia

Do we really care about our kids?

Stilgherrian — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:35:48 +0000

Despite all the rhetoric about “protecting our children” and “children are the future”, our governments seem determined to prevent them preparing for the real future. Take NSW schools minister Verity Firth…

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald tells us the NSW government will receive $285M for new laptops — which will then be blocked from accessing social media and most everything else.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth [pictured], said the Government would prevent access to the social networking sites, and other sites, even when the laptops were used at home.

“We don’t want these kids to be using these computers for the not-so-wholesome things that can be on the net. And they won’t be able to because essentially the whole server is coming through the Department of Education.”

So kids will be prevented from using their computers to connect with and understand their peers and the real world because of this continuing paranoia about unspecified “not-so-wholesome things” and parents being too lazy to supervise their own children.

Maybe Ms Firth needs to read Mark Pesce’s Those Wacky Kids, or watch the video. As Pesce quite rightly points out, if the classroom is the only part of these kids’ lives which isn’t hyperconnected, then the classroom will be seen as irrelevant.

Rupert Murdoch is right to say we have a 19th Century education system. Our Minister seems intent on keeping it that way.

A 16-year-old at last week’s forum on Internet censorship said she’d prepared one assignment at home but couldn’t present it at school because all the source material was blocked.

“I have been surfing the web for most of my school life, at school and home, with filters and without, and I have never accidentally stumbled upon pornographic material,” she said.

“We want education, not restriction.”

In another “generous” move…

“[Students] can take it home, back to school, and then after four years, when they leave school, they can take their computer away with them.”

Wow. Already kids tend to be given cheap, underpowered equipment “suitable for students”, as if their research and assignment-preparation was somehow less demanding, their time of less value. I’d be amazed if the laptops actually survive all four years in a kid’s backpack. But if they do, by then they’ll be a year past end of life and way behind current standards.

This isn’t a generous offer, it’s a government either too lazy to collect and recycle the old computers, or too clueless to realise how fast computing changes.

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No Stilgherrian Live Alpha tonight

Stilgherrian — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:16:19 +0000

I won’t be doing an episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha tonight, but within 48 hours I’ll let you know when episodes 6, 7 and 8 will be on.

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Episode 4 tonight

Stilgherrian — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:16:11 +0000

Yes, episode 4 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will happen at 9.30pm tonight Sydney time. Will it be as disturbing as last week’s? There’s only one way to find out… well two, actually, ‘cos you could just ask someone. That shows how silly that stock advertising phrase really is.

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Links for 27 April 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:44:07 +0000

I’ve decided to have another go at publishing the links I find online. So, thanks to del.icio.us and some mild semi-automation, here’s today’s batch.

The Newseum: The interactive museum of news, including "today's front pages" for 500+ world newspapers.
TV Fugly Awards: An "alternative" to Australia's Logie awards for TV.
Eurovision Song Contest - Belgrade 2008: Official website of the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Bugle | Times Online: Weekly news satire audio podcast from the UK.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Richard Hofstadter's article from Harper's Magazine, November 1964. Paranoia Politics isn't new.
Twitter Rulez! (via Todd Langowski) | Newick: An apt sign spotted in workplace.
Plugger: Australian Business News: A customisable aggregator for Australian business news.
Secondary DNS Service: An inexpensive service which provides secondary domain name servers.
The seriously inconvenient truth on drugs | the Daily Mail: UK Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexander puts a cogent case for the decriminalisation of recreational drugs.
A second summer of love: 20th anniversary of acid house: The Guardian's retrospective on the acid house Summer of Love of 1988.
The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008: A 20-page report on the state of the open source software world in Australia. A freely downloadable PDF and is redistributable under a Creative Commons BY-ND license.

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Garfield minus Garfield

Stilgherrian — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:38:03 +0000

As an antidote to the intense conversations across the weekend, try Garfield minus Garfield. “Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?” (Thanks, Garth.)

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Weekend reading revisited

Stilgherrian — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:04:56 +0000

Some things I found on the weekend which you might like. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, which reminded me that for all the religious hype over Unix/Linux it really is just a kludge. (Hat-tip of the geekiest kind to Alastair Rankine.) A NY Times article How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children? Answer: not particularly. A fine Wired story about Titan Salvage, the smart, brave and somewhat scary guys who salvage ships. And Possums Pollytics’ wonderful response to an attack by The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan.

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Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish

Stilgherrian — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:16:34 +0000

This is blog post number 801. It’s time for something special. Time for an extended essay encapsulating several trains of thought which I’ve been following for some time.

We are the 801,
We are the central shaft
And thus throughout two years
We’ve crossed the ocean in our little craft (Row! Row! Row!)
Now we’re on the telephone,
Making final arrangements (Ding! Ding!)
We are the 801, we are the central shaft

So sang Brian Eno in the song The True Wheel from his 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Eno says he wrote the lyrics while visiting New York:

I went to stay with this girl called Randi and fell asleep after taking some mescaline and had this dream where this group of girls were singing to this group of sailors who had just come into port. And they were singing ‘We are The 801 / We are the Central Shaft’ — and I woke up absolutely jubilant because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.

Yes, apparently in the 1970s a musician wrote a song while under the influence of hallucinogens. Who’d have thought.

Society generally frowns upon people who make important decisions while under the influence. (By an odd coincidence, Hugh MacLeod posted some vaguely-related thoughts only yesterday, in dying young is overrated, revisited.) However the more I look, the more I worry that we’re governed as if our societies were hallucinating. And even worse, it’s as if they’ve forgotten how to remember the lessons of the past.

I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

I reckon our societies aren’t just hallucinating. They’re suffering paranoid schizophrenia.

Instead of acting upon real data collected from the real world, we construct paranoid fantasies and then respond to those.

Our tabloid media report every threat, adding every scary adjective they can find, to convince us the world is a threatening place. Our politicians often like this, because frightened people will suspend rational thought and Demand That Something Be Done. Apparently politicians have even been known to help this process along by creating new threats for us to be afraid of.

The Howard government’s NetAlert campaign over-emphasised the potential risk to children online.

The claim in the NetAlert advertising campaign that over half of 11–15 year olds who chat online are contacted by strangers does not appear in the government commissioned research.

In fact, only 14% of the research participants said their mix of chat partners included people they hadn’t met. Even before NetAlert, three-quarters of parents had already discussed online dangers with their kids.
Massive energies are spent in the War on Terror (an abstract noun!) even though, as I’ve pointed out before, you’re far more likely to drown in your own bathtub.
Headlines constantly scream about Wild teen crime waves, even though children are safer than ever before.
Dr Mohamed Haneef.
Adam Curtis’ powerful documentary The Power of Nightmares explains how a vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world has been used by American Neo-Conservatives and Islamic Radical movements alike. The entire film is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Our continual state of hallucinatory paranoia is made worse by a lack of long-term memory. Societies try things, and sometimes they don’t work — but that doesn’t seem to stop us trying them again.

Investors pour millions into Web 2.0 businesses they don’t really understand, even though the lessons of the first dot-com bubble were obvious.
The War on (Some) Drugs continues operating in a prohibition mentality, even though that’s been shown to fail so many times before. I can thoroughly recommend Richard Davenport-Hines’ book The Pursuit of Oblivion: a social history of drugs for gaining an understanding, and this BBC interview might be worth a listen.
When we designed mainframe computers, we learned that security was something that needed to be part of the original design, not grafted on as a “feature” afterwards. Then we connected PCs to the Internet, with fundamentally insecure operating systems like Windows and the original MacOS, and were surprised when they got hacked. We’ve started connecting “smart phones” to the grid, with fundamentally insecure operating systems, and we’re surprised when mobile phone viruses appear. And now we’re about to connect TVs to the Internet too.

Yes, I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

So what can we do about it?

Well, I’m a big fan of Science. All that Age of Enlightenment stuff. Reason. Logic. Joined-up thinking. We should demand it of our leaders (political, cultural, religious), employers, employees and ourselves.

It’s heartening to see that Chairman Rudd is all for evidence-based policy development.

I’m a Labor moderniser. Always have been, always will be and what that’s on about is good evidence-based policy in terms of producing the best outcomes for this nation, carving out its future in a pretty uncertain century where things fundamentally are changing.

It’ll be interesting to see how PM Rudd handles situations where the evidence runs counter to Labor’s political imperative — particularly when compromise is needed to get legislation through the still-hostile Senate.

There’s a lot we can do as individuals to help kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

Learn how to see though the tricks. I J Good’s paper A Classification of Fallacious Arguments and Interpretations provides a formal list of dodgy tricks, but Wikipedia’s articles on fallacy and propaganda techniques provide a great start. The classic book How To Lie with Statistics and the newer How to Lie with Maps are also great reads.
Turn off the crap. Rid your life of the tabloid media, including shock-horror newspapers and TV programs.
Demand to see the evidence. If someone claims some fact or statistic, don’t take it at face value. Use The Power of the Internet to check it out.
Spread the word. If you spot misinformation or faulty reasoning, tell your friends, family and colleagues. Make your coffee-break conversation more useful than whingeing about the boss or prattling on about lame TV programs.

This all reads like a manifesto, I know, and perhaps it is. Reason and logic are supposedly what makes us humans so special. And yet when it comes to managing our greatest creations, our own societies, we discard those skills and give in to the Hallucinating Goldfish.

It’s time to Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

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Human relationships in GoogleAds

Stilgherrian — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 02:28:05 +0000

Ah, there’s a lovely microcosm of human relationships represented in this pairing of GoogleAds. What’s makes it even more curious is that I found it on a web page which shows us a graphic about the global people smuggling trade.

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Why do Businesses Lie?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:49:43 +0000

Why do people even bother with lame excuses like “I didn’t receive the invoice” or “The cheque was mailed yesterday”? Wouldn’t telling the truth help build a stronger relationship? Or do they actually think people believe this stuff?

Prussia.Net serves small business clients, including a start-up which recently asked us to build them an inexpensive website. Now they’re late paying up and we’re getting all the usual excuses (see below).

Now maybe they’re genuine. But I reckon there’s a simple explanation: cash is tight and they need time to pay.

I prefer to build trusting long-term relationships with clients — as opposed to ripping them off for short-term gain. Hey, it’s easier to keep an existing client on-side rather than forever finding new victims. So I prefer the truth.

If a client comes to me honestly and says, “Hey cash is tight this month,” I’m more than likely to say “Not a problem, let’s leave it for a few weeks.”

Then we can all get on with something else, like running our businesses.

But a series of what appear to be lame excuses only wastes time and builds suspicion. If I think someone’s lying, they won’t get the benefit of the doubt in future. And the price of any project will factor in the expected delay in payment.

So what do you think? Does this sound like a genuine screw-up? Has your business received even better excuses for late payment? Please comment below.

Fibs or Not?

Here’s how it’s unfolded so far:

We emailed the invoice.
Once it was overdue, we emailed them a reminder with the subject “OVERDUE ACCOUNT”.
A week later, we emailed them again, “SECOND REMINDER: OVERDUE ACCOUNT”.
They emailed us to say they hadn’t received the original invoice, but that the account would be paid “forthwith”.

I’m not sure if they meant half past forthwith or Tuesday the 16th of Forthwith — but at this point I’m suspicious. They got the second reminder, but not the other two emails. Apparently.

A week later, we still hadn’t received payment, so we sent them our usual “SUSPENSION NOTICE”, warning them that Internet hosting could be suspended if they didn’t bring their account up to date.
This time, the guy we’re talking with says his business partner was paying it by direct deposit into our bank account.
No payment appeared, so we emailed them again.
This time, the response is that the cheque was mailed on Tuesday.

Well, that was three days ago, and even Sydney’s postal service isn’t that bad.

To recap, so far we’ve had:

“Sorry, I didn’t get the invoice.”
“Oh, my business partner was doing that.”
“The cheque is in the mail.”

Wager anyone?

I’m now putting my money on “Sorry, we posted it to the wrong address.” Either that or the cheque arrives but bounces, and we’re told “Sorry, some cheques from clients haven’t cleared yet.” Wager, anyone?

And no, I’m not going to name the client. Yet.