Conroy Wants Australia to be a Nanny State

In case you don't keep up with the news, there are two major Internet-related issues being considered in Australia right now. The first is the National Broadband Network (which I'm not going to talk about here) and the second is mandatory national Internet filter that Senator Stephen Conroy wants to introduce.

So what are people saying about the filter?

It's Not Going to Work

Nina Funnell, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (and quoting Kathryn Small), makes a very good point'. She says the proposed filter will not be censoring the Internet, it'll be censoring the people who don't know much about the Internet (i.e. the people who won't know how circumvent the filter):
Small says anyone with a vested interest who knows enough about software design will be able to circumvent the system. "The real problem is Conroy will create a two-tiered system [with] a massive disparity between the 'haves' and 'have nots' of computer literacy."

The irony is that it is children and young people who will be most likely to get around the blocks.

Children are more computer-savvy and literate than any other generation, precisely because they have grown up with computers. This was demonstrated in 2007 when a 16-year-old, Tom Wood, took just 30 minutes to crack the Government's super-filter that cost a whopping $84 million to develop.

What a shame the Government hasn't learnt from that embarrassing bungle.

Funnell's whole article is really good, by the way, and I suggest you read it.

It's Politics, Not Child Protection

Another good article to read is Stilgherrian's 'Evidence-based policy? Not on this filter!' on the ABC's The Drum Unleashed website:
Politicians use the term "evidence-based" quite differently from police detectives or scientists.

Senator Stephen Conroy provided a glorious example earlier in the week when announcing that Australia will indeed get mandatory ISP-level internet filtering some time in...well, maybe in 2011.

For politicians, "evidence" isn't something to be gathered with forensic precision and preserved through a documented chain of custody. Nor it is something to be compiled transparently, justified through meticulous research and refined in the purifying fire of peer review.

No. For politicians, "evidence" is something to be plucked from wherever it can be found and sprinkled to justify a previously-chosen policy like so much magic fairy dust.

The Rudd government's internet censorship proposal is not about protecting the children. It's about politics.

If the plan were really about protecting the children, and if it were really evidence-based, the government would have first have figured out what risks children actually face - online and everywhere else. They'd then figure out the best methods of countering those risks. Then they'd figure out the most cost-effective ways of implementing those solutions.

If we did that, we'd probably find that the risks are the very same ones that child protection experts keep banging on about. Bullying by their peers. Abuse from within their own homes and families. Poverty and its associated health risks. Obesity.

But this is politics, not child protection.

Google & Kirby Weigh In

Finally, two more opinions worth reading are:

What Next?


Well, Conroy has released a discussion paper on the topic so, hopefully, people will submit in response to that excellent, well reasoned reasons for not using the filter (of which there are many). Ideally, our policymakers will then look at those arguments, realize the filter is useless (indeed, it's a case of minimal effect for maximal cost), and will stop wasting our time and money on it. More likely, though, they will forge ahead for a while longer. That's politics for you.

And if, despite all reasonable counterarguments, the filter does get implemented then two things will happen. The first is the broader "epic fail" of not, for example, making any difference to the sharing of child pornography. The second is the creation of whole new industry devoted to providing filter-circumvention services to people living in Australia. Certainly the latter is a service I'd pay for and I'm sure many others will as well.

So, basically, we'll be back to where we are now...though with a few key differences:

  • ISP costs will be higher (to pay for the filter)

  • Internet connection costs for most of us will be a little higher (to pay for getting around the filter)

  • Some third party service providers will be a little richer (for providing filter circumvention services)

  • The Internet will be slower (since we'll be going through a filter and, most likely, a proxy)

  • The country will be about $40 billion poorer (to pay for the filter)


All so a bunch of politicians and self-appointed keepers-of-our-morals feel better about themselves and all the "good work" that they're doing to "PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!".

Further Reading

Average Cats

Most of you probably know that I love LOLcats and everything else on the Cheezburger Network.

What you might not know is that, in response to the LOLxyz meme, there is the brilliant AverageCats:

AverageCats is a site that has pictures of cats.

Pictures of cats on the internet are not very new or exciting things. In fact, seeing cats on the internet is an incredibly average occurrence. They practically live here.

As you may have noticed, nearly all cat pictures include captions. And these captions usually personify the cat in some way or another.

What the internet fails to realize is that most cats do not think like people. They think like cats. AverageCats seeks to remedy this misinformation by providing a helpful, pictorial primer on cats.

AverageCats uses the accepted lolcat style to explain simple truths about cats. Any humor that arises from these pictures is coincidental.

So what is an AverageCat picture like? It’s like this:

Or like this:

:)

Check out the site make sure you read the text below the pictures as well.

Switching to Gmail Becomes Easier

Long-time readers of this blog will know that, just over a year ago, I moved all of my e-mail to Gmail. I wrote about this in some detail in these three blog posts:

I absolutely love Gmail and making this shift is one of the best technology, usability, and productivity decisions I’ve made so far.

However, switching to Gmail wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do – particularly since most of my e-mail was stored locally on my laptop (in Thunderbird) and the rest was distributed across various e-mail accounts. (You can read more about this in the blog posts listed above.)

Things have changed since then and, as announced today on the Gmail Blog, importing contacts and e-mails from other online e-mail accounts into Gmail has just become a lot easier because the whole process has been automated. This won’t help you if all your e-mails are stored locally in Outlook or Thunderbird, of course, but it will make it easier to switch from services like Yahoo! and Window Live Mail.

If you’re still using one of those services, I suggest you try Gmail for a while to see how you like it. Indeed, one of the new import features is that you can have your e-mails forwarded to Gmail from your other accounts for 30 days while you try Gmail out. I’m confident that many of you will like it so much that you will want to switch over permanently.

Two Web Milestones for Me

I can now officially say that I have been blogging for two years because on 24 April 2007 I published my first post on this blog. Woo hoo!

On the other hand, today I went and deleted my old GeoCities website because Yahoo! is closing that service down by the end of the year. Here is what the home page of that site used to look like:

Ye Olde Homepage

I created this site on the free GeoCities web hosting service back in 1999 when I graduated from LUMS and realized that I would no longer be able to host my personal site on the LUMS ACM Chapter’s Student Sever (which, by the way, I was the administrator of). I’d had a site on the Student Server since 1997.

Want to Take a Look?

You can see archived copies of my very oldest websites thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

Make sure you check out my Ameel’s Page o’ Links page from February 1997. Yep, that’s what the web was like back then. I still maintain that page, by the way, except it’s now called Ye Olde Page o’ Links :)

A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane

1997 was also when I became head of TeamWeb, the group of students responsible for maintaining the official LUMS website. There were many first for me in that year: my first job interview, my first professional website management job, my first website re-design project, and the first time I installed and started administering a UNIX server. Good times.

The late 90s, meanwhile, was a time of change with regards to how websites were designed and laid out. For example, when I started managing the LUMS website, the web design ethos was textured backgrounds and not too much colour. By the time I left, however, it was fill colours and information categorized into tables. Ah, the good old days of the web.

Back to the Topic

I stopped maintaining my GeoCities site when Nadia and I got the insanityWORKS.org domain in 2004. And now my old site – which was a very important part of my life on the web – is gone for good. Well, except that it’s still archived in the WayBack Machine.

But still, the shutting down of GeoCities will mark the end of the free website hosting era that began with sites like Angelfire and Geocities. These days, of course, the free web hosting sites of choice are blogging sites like Blogger and WordPress.org in conjunction with media hosting sites like Flickr and YouTube. Times change, eh?

Leaving GeoCities behind, though, I now move into my third year of blogging, my fifth year of running insanityWORKS.org, my thirteenth year on the Internet, and my twenty-fifth year of using computers.

How time flies.

Skeptical Resources

My previous blog post was the story of how I set off on my skeptical journey. Here are some resources to help you along yours:

These are some organizations whose websites you should explore:

Here are some good blogs to read:

There are many, many more out there and they’re very easy to find.

You need to listen to the following podcasts:

Also check out Hunting Humbug, Skepticality, and the Pseudo Scientists.

The following are excellent resources on critical thinking and logical fallacies:

Here are some excellent general resources on skepticism:

These are a few good YouTube channels to subscribe to:

Here are some magazines worth subscribing to:

And, finally, here are a list of books worth reading (all but one as suggested by Dunning in Here be Dragons):

If you can think of any other resources that are worth adding to this list, please let me know. Thanks.

How I Became a Skeptic

I knew from an early age that I was going to be some sort of scientist. Inspired in the mid 80s by Carl Sagan and his television show Cosmos – and with both a genuine interest and an aptitude for the field – I went and studied physics and chemistry in both my O’ and A’ Levels. Around the same time I was also introduced to computers, starting with the Apple IIe in 1984 and an IBM Portable PC soon after. So when it came time to go to college I basically had to pick an area of science – pure or otherwise – that I wanted to pursue further. In the end, computer sciences won out over my second choice of electronic engineering.

My first foray into skepticism, meanwhile, came with the advent of the Internet to Pakistan in the mid 90s. I spent countless hours researching and then debunking myths, urban legends, conspiracy theories, phishing scams, and all the other crap that found its way – and still finds its way – into our inboxes. Indeed, during this time, the fast-growing Urban Legend Reference Pages on snopes.com became one of my favourite and most-quoted websites.

Outside of my life on the Internet, however, I wasn’t skeptical at all: I was religious; I believed in ghosts; I was a proponent of homeopathy and energy healing; I was all for the ‘scientific’ healing techniques of acupuncture, acupressure, and reflexology; and I was quite happy to believe in all the ‘ancient’ treatments, cures, and healing methodologies advocated by ‘experts’ or ‘healers’. I didn’t know back then that ‘experts’ and ‘healers’ meant people who had a vested interest – financial or emotional – in promoting that type of healing.

That said, there were a few things I was skeptical about and these included astrology; transcendental meditation type stuff; pyramid schemes that sold healing pills and devices; and blanket claims like “these are things that large pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know about” – all of which neither made sense nor were supported by any evidence.

Why Did I Believe in all that Other Crap?

I think the main reason I was so gullible was simply because I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that there were exciting ideas on the fringe of established and tested science that would one day become real and widely-accepted science if only someone would take the time to investigate them properly. I didn’t know at the time that scientists had done exactly that before rejecting almost all of those ideas as crap.

I was also operating under a very dangerous assumption: I didn’t think I was particularly gullible. In fact, the reason I supported things like homeopathy and Reiki was because I had actually seen them work. What had happened was that, back in the mid 90s, my family was looking after my grandmother who had Alzheimer’s disease. We were treating her with real medicine but also, as an experiment, with homeopathic medicine.

Now the way homeopathy works in complex disease situations is that the ‘doctor’ tries out different ‘medicines’ and combinations of medicines till he finds the most suitable combination for treating and, eventually, curing the underlying problem. As a result, the medication keeps changing in order to treat and cure whatever needs to be treated and cured at the time. I understand now the brilliance of this treatment-with-no-end setup but, at the time, all I saw was that my grandmother’s illness varied from week to week and that the doctor gave her different medicines to treat her as she progressed through it. It was because the manifestation of her disease changed every week that I thought it was the homeopathic medication that had caused that change. I know now, of course, that was a case of false cause or a situation in which I confused correlation with causation. That is, just because my grandmother’s homeopathic medicines and mental state changed every week, didn’t mean that one was caused – at all – by the other. Nor did I realize that it was the medicines that were being changed as a result of her existing mental state...and not the other way round.

My point is that, as far as I knew, homeopathic medicine was science because I could see the treatment working (or not working) in front of my own eyes. In other words, this was a case of observational selection or confirmation bias on my part. Further, the doctor was a great authority figure and all the homeopathic medication that we bought was from a large, multinational company – that too, a German one – so naturally I saw it as real, proper, established medical science.

What I didn’t know at that time, however, was what homeopathy actually was. Had I known that the underlying concepts behind it were water memory, increasing the potency of medication via dilution, and the idea of like-cures-like, I would probably have laughed. Instead, all I saw were medicines that had dosages just like other, real medicines did and so I didn’t even bother to question how it all worked and, importantly, whether it worked at all. [For more, download the Skeptic’s Guide to Homeopathy pamphlet (88kB PDF file) from the Australian Skeptics]

In other words, I expected a result – as you would of any real medication – and so I saw one. The sad fact is that, thanks to the confirmation bias that I was operating under, I’m pretty sure I would have seen a ‘result’ regardless of what happened or how my grandmother’s disease progressed over the years that we were looking after her.

This pattern of confusing correlation with causation and seeing results because I expected to see results continued over the next few years. During those years I picked up some new bits of quackery and dropped others. I wasn’t particularly passionate about or really even interested in ‘alternative medicine’ but I did easily accept that there might be something in it and that it might be worth investigating further.

Things Change

My ideas about pseudoscience, quackery, woo, and religion all began to change over the last year or so. This happened for a number of reasons that, funnily enough, started with three fantastic courses that I took during my MBA:

Consumer Behaviour was the MBA-equivalent of Carl Sagan’s fantastic book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was all about consumer psychology and influence and it taught me about human perception, cognition, and decision-making. In it we covered topics such as subliminal influence and Pavlovian conditioning, creating and changing people’s attitudes, how people are influenced (both consciously and unconsciously) by their environment, how culture plays a role in consumer behaviour, and what the ethical concerns around influencing people are. It was awesome.

Brand Management took that a step further and taught me how loyalty to brands, concepts, and ideas works in the real world. I learnt how brands are created, constructed, maintained, and killed and, as promised by our professor, I have never seen brands or the world of marketing the same way since.

Finally, Leadership taught me how to take a long, hard, honest look at myself and it gave me the capacity to analyze and then, assuming I wanted to do so, change what I saw.

Enter the Skeptical Movement

Around the time I was taking those courses, I really got into blogging and listening to podcasts. My primary areas of interest were technology and science (including astronomy) so, as you would expect, I eventually came across Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog. In June 2008, Plait linked to Brian Dunning’s excellent video on critical thinking called Here Be Dragons. That video blew me away and I spent the next few weeks listening to all the episodes of Dunning’s brilliant Skeptoid podcast.

Then, from July onwards, Australia’s Channel 7 broadcast a show called The One: The Search for Australia’s Most Gifted Psychic (which you can find on YouTube) and it featured as one of its judges Richard Saunders, Vice President of Australian Skeptics. With all that I’d learnt during my MBA and my interest in film and television – because of which I know how TV shows are made, edited, and marketed – I had a pretty good idea of what was going behind the scenes in this show. So when, despite all the show’s obvious biases, the psychics proved themselves to be incredibly poor performers under even minimally reasonable scientific conditions things started to fall into place a little quicker than they had before. (There’s nothing like the power of television, huh? Funnily enough, I doubt the producers of The One expected it to have a de-converting effect on even one of its viewers!)

After some basic research into logical fallacies and cognitive biases – with Skeptoid episodes 73 and 74 as my starting point – I spent the next couple of months going over my entire life and analyzing everything I’d ever believed in, assumed to be trued, presumed to be true, or simply not thought about all that much. I remember having discussions with my wife during which I would try to come up with non-pseudoscientific explanations for whatever had been happening and finding that, as expected, the pseudoscientific explanation seemed incredibly unlikely and, in most cases, quite silly. Oh, and there were many, many more cases in which I had confused correlation and causation.

I also started listening to two awesome podcasts: the New England Skeptical Society’s Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU) and the Australian Skeptic’s The Skeptic Zone. Meanwhile, I started subscribing to The Skeptic magazine and, as suggested in Here be Dragons, bought and read Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World. I also read and watched all I could about James Randi – who I’d always known about but had never really looked into – and the James Randi Education Foundation. All this research was, of course, supplemented by reading lots of skeptical blogs (there will be a whole list of them in a subsequent blog post).

With all that going on in my life and in my head, it wasn’t long before the deal was sealed and I could safely say that I was a proper Skeptic (complete with a capital ‘S’ and the letter ‘k’).

Since then I have started to see the world through a completely different filter – a clear one this time – and boy is there a lot of crap out there. Just knowing a handful of logical fallacies, for example, has helped me unravel stupid arguments, see through cheap tricks (particularly marketing-related ones), and call people out when they’ve needed to be called out (even in unrelated situations).

I’ve also started to learn a lot more about science, skepticism, argumentation techniques, cognitive biases, and all the other things that help perpetuate and sustain quackery and pseudoscience throughout the world and across the generations.

Overall, my life has changed dramatically and the world now makes much more sense. I am also much happier and much more settled than I have ever been before.

So What Next?

Where I’ll go from here, I’m not sure. I know I have a lot more learning to do and, in the near term, I intend to attend the next Skeptics Cafe with the Victorian Skeptics. I’m also going through the list of things in the book What Do I Do Next: 105 Ways to Promote Skeptical Activism (edited by Daniel Loxton) to see where that can lead.

I have started to talk to other people about skepticism and why it makes so much sense but that’s going slowly. I’ll ramp it up once I’m more confident about my abilities to counter pseudoscience in real time as opposed to via e-mail and after a round of detailed Internet-based research!

In the meantime, I’ll start being much more skeptically active on my blog. (I’ve even created a new category called ‘Skepticism’ for doing just that.) The first step in that direction was writing this blog post. The next step will be listing a whole bunch of skeptical resources that are really useful regardless of whether you’re already into skepticism or are just starting down that path. I might go ahead and make that into a separate page on my blog as well.

Whatever happens, though, I’ll keep you updated.

Why is Science Important?

Why is science important?

Physics teacher and film-maker Alom Shaha decided to ask a whole bunch of scientists and educators that question, the answers to which he compiled on the ‘Why is Science Important?’ website that he had created for this purpose.

He then put all those answers – including, of course, his own – into an awesome video that is now available online:


Why is Science Important? from Alom Shaha on Vimeo.

Enjoy :)

[Via the Bad Astronomer]

Public Webcams: More Melbourne Cams

After writing about all those public webcams, I thought I'd look around for other Australian feeds and, sure enough, there are plenty more out there:

Also, I found a few other webcam lists that are worth checking out:

And finally, if you really want to geek out, NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor (STS 126) is currently delivering equipment to the International Space Station (details here) and you can watch everything they're doing live on NASA TV :)

Public Webcams

I love public webcams that show you what's going on in the rest of the world in realtime. And while there are plenty of practical applications for such video streams -- like checking surfing conditions on remote beaches, keeping an eye on traffic, or general security and surveillance -- I particularly love the ones that are there either for tourism and marketing purposes or simply there for the heck of it. For example, I love the new Shiba Inu Puppy Cam that's been making the rounds of the websphere recently.

There are lots of public camera feeds (or streams, whatever you want to call them) availble on the Internet and one of the best places to find them is via the EarthCam website. Otherwise just search Google for, say, "live webcams" (remembering to ignore the adult ones) or download something like Webcam Saver that shows you a whole bunch of streams from around the world as your computer's screen saver (though this software is trialware so you have to pay for it if you want to keep on using it). If you want more specific user-created streams, check out Ustream.Tv and maybe Justin.tv as well.

Australian Webcams

There are a number of Australian webcams too, and though the live Melbourne skyline camera is currently inoperative, you can see awesome time lapse montages of the city -- showing an hour's worth of photos taken over the previous hour -- on OMNIConnect's Melbourne Webcam page.

For more practical stuff, you have the Port of Melbourne cameras that show you shipping traffic from the Shipping Management Centre in Melbourne and surf conditions from the Port Lonsdale Lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. You can also view the latest traffic conditions within Melbourne on the CityLink website: click on the 'CityLink Webcam' link at the bottom of the right column of the CityLink home page or view all the video streams on this page (which refreshes every ten seconds but doesn't have any labels on the photos).

Good stuff.

UPDATE: I wrote about some more webcams in a follow-up post.

This Sucks

This sucks.

Issues with Windows Live Writer

First, the awesome Windows Live Writer -- which I'd recently upgraded to the even more awesome Windows Live Writer Beta -- no longer works with my blogs. Every time I add a post using WLW, all the HTML angle brackets get stripped from the code so you get a lot of junk.

For example, if I was to post the following line of text using WLW:
Hello World! Google.com

What would appear on the blog would be:
pHello World! a href="http://google.com"Google.com/a/p

Which, in HTML, would have read:
<p>Hello World! <a href="http://google.com>Google.com</a></p>

So take the HTML version and strip off all the angle brackets that actually make the HTML tags what they are and you get what actually gets posted to the blog.

No one's quite sure why this is happening (though some people have found temporary workarounds) or whether it's a WLW, WordPress, or other technology (e.g. PHP) issue. However the issue itself has been documented on the Microsoft support forums. Here's hoping they find a fix soon because I much prefer WLW to writing blogs posts using WordPress's blog post writing interface.

Issues with WordPress and/or Fantastico

Second, while researching the WLW issue, I upgraded all three of the blogs hosted on the insanityworks.org domain to WordPress version 2.6.3. I do all my blogging platform upgrades through the Fantastico script library system that my web host provides for this purpose and I've never had issues in the past. This time, however, while both Nadia's blog and this blog got upgraded just fine, something went wrong as I was upgrading my professional blog so that's now out of commission. I've contacted my web host's support people for help and they're restoring it to its previous version but this does mean that my ACME blog will be down for at least a couple of days. Which sucks.

Full Episodes of 'Heroes' on Yahoo!7

The third season of the excellent NBC TV series Heroes started last week in Australia. And, in an incredibly awesome move on their part, you can now watch full episodes of the show on Yahoo!7 :)  Woo hoo!

Now if only Channel Nine would let you watch full episodes of The Mentalist on nineMSN and Channel Ten would let you watch full episodes of House on ten.com.au. Oh well. Some day...(hopefully soon).

James Nachtwey's story

In 2007, photographer James Nachtwey won the TED Prize which awarded him $100,000 and "one wish to change the world". His wish was:

I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.

On 3 October, Nachtwey's story will break -- both online and around the world. Melburnians can view his story at Federation Square while the rest of you should check the TED Prize Event Location page to see if it's being shown at your location (it's on in 16 countries). If not, you can always view it online:

For more:

Umar Saif & Distributed Web Caching in Pakistan

One of my seniors from undergrad alma mater, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is working on a project that implements a distributed web caching system in order to increase download speeds in developing countries.

Mason Inman explains in an article in the MIT Technology Review:
Internet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.

Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.

Sounds like a good system (the article goes into detail about how it works) and here's hoping it's a great success.

Photos in the Cloud: Picasa Web Albums

So, after trying out both Flickr and Picasa, I decided to go with Picasa Web Albums for my photos-in-the-cloud solution. Yes, that is yet another bit of my life that I am entrusting to Google. And, yes, I'm fine with that.

Why did I go with Picasa? Because Flickr, though really awesome, only lets me make three albums (or 'Sets') in its free version while Picasa lets me make as many as I want.

I do have a 1GB web space limit with Picasa but that's more than enough for my purposes. Heck, I'm using only 22MB at this time! And once I get a digital camera, take lots more photos, and find that I need more space -- though that won't be for a while because I don't take that many photos -- I can always buy some from Google. Quite cheaply, too. And it'll be shared with my Gmail space, which is awesome. My videos, meanwhile, will go on YouTube so I'm good there as well. And my audio is on SkyDrive so that's not an issue either.

Of course, I could have gone with something like SmugMug, which has no limits on web space or number of albums, and I could have installed an open source photo gallery on insanityWORKS.org, which can then be fully customized, but I didn't. That's because I quite like Picasa's web implementation (it's easy to use and I love it's geo-tagging capabilities) and I really like the Picasa 2 software that you install locally (both its photo organization abilities and its easy-to-use image editing features).

So, behold: my Public Gallery on Picasa Web Albums.