In a nutshell, TBS is about (un)predictability, uncertainty and knowledge. Karen and the kids bought me the second edition of TBS for Fathers’ Day. It’s the one with a lengthy postscript essay, which I thought was arguably the best part of the book. I was happy to read in the postscript (p. 333) that the author appreciates my rather slow reading of his book.

Uncertainty, TBS explains, is predominantly an epistemic problem, one that is subjective and one that the social sciences ought not model with conventional Gaussian methods. The propensity for Nobel prize-winning economists to wield bell curves is the target of much of Taleb’s disdain. Black Swans are those rare, unpredictable events that mathematics has no business in attempting to predict (i.e., because they’re unpredictable. Duh!).

Taleb contends that the concepts of probability and randomness as they are taught in universities by bow tie wearing academics, and used by all manner of practitioners are wholly unsuitable for application in most non-physical domains, like economics, policy and risk management. These are typically domains which are dominated by, often cumulative, human action. Sometimes, Taleb explains, these systems can be more appropriately modelled with power laws or fractal mathematics, which can render Black Swans grey; but these models are not intended to provide the concreteness of the more commonplace methods with which we’re familiar. More often, these systems ought not be modelled at all, particularly not with sophisticated mathematics or equations taken from physics text books, as they are Black Swan prone, and impermeable to these approaches.

With uncertainty’s epistemic roots, Taleb spends some time discussing some important aspects of knowledge. Knowledge is biased both in terms of its distribution and its verification. Consider the Thanksgiving turkey: it is fed day after day, given a place to roost (is that what turkeys do?) and generally cared for, until one day, chop! The turkey couldn’t have suspected this was coming. It’s an event lying totally outside its experience. A Black Swan. The butcher, on the other hand, knew what was coming all along. Not a Black Swan. There is an imbalance of knowledge here, highlighting the subjective nature of uncertainty. We don’t need to look far to find examples of this kind of uncertainty, and massively consequential historical events that illustrate the disproportionate impact that Black Swans have.

Knowledge is also governed by the confirmation bias: no matter how many pieces of evidence are collected in support of some theory or idea, only one piece of negative evidence is required to refute it. This is the basis for the Popperian notion of falsification, which is itself fundamental to the way science proceeds.

A related idea is that of silent knowledge, cheekily termed the “Casanova problem” by Taleb. This reflects the observation that we only remember confirmatory instances, the successes, and rarely the failures. Just think about startup companies. Look at Company A. They’re so successful because they did X, Y and Z, so we should do the same. Of course, there may be a graveyard full of companies that did X, Y and Z, too. The silent evidence. Likewise, Casanova didn’t live to tell his tale because he was particularly clever or immunised against misfortune; rather, probability tells us that a small number of playboy types from that era would survive their ordeals and thus feel indestructible, and perhaps go on to write a book or two about their experiences. But we don’t hear about those other Casanovas, who weren’t quite so lucky. This problem tends to make us blind to the real course of history.

Taleb moves on to describe how social systems are currently modelled by social scientists, and it is here that he is especially scathing. Economics, particularly academic economics, is full of phonies, says Taleb. Run from anyone who tells you that Brownian motion or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can model human behaviour. Or, if you’re not the running type, put a mouse down the back of their shirt when they least expect it. These things don’t model true randomness or uncertainty; they model a very tame version of it. This is, he says, evidenced by the fact that our coffee cups don’t jump off our coffee tables. Yet, the equivalent of jumping coffee cups happens with relatively high frequency in social systems (e.g., stock market crashes).

Rather than find false safety in econometrics and other phony methods, writes Taleb, we should heed the advice of that intuitive economic philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. In Hayek’s view, it is impossible for a central planner to aggregate all the pieces of data required to make a meaningful forecast of the economy and to plan a priori. Rather, the interactions between the individual agents in the system, who each hold knowledge, often tacit knowledge, of their own, result in a coherent, self-organised system — what we might call society (though Lady Thatcher mightn’t call it such). One way of looking at this idea is that locals can integrate local knowledge in a way that a central planner never could. The difficulty in central planning has been met by economists with increasingly “scientific” methods, but this creeping scientism, as it was called by Hayek, is just making matters worse according to Taleb. It is the scandal of prediction. Medical empiricism, evidence-based medicine or clinical medicine, is perhaps the field to which economists should look for inspiration, rather than to physics. Physics, funnily enough, is for the physical world, where its methods and models apply, and where the Gaussian and related distributions are observable in reality. But its models are often inappropriate for the social world.

TBS presents an idea born of a rich body of existing literature, but perhaps nobody in the relevant fields has articulated their ideas as colourfully and passionately as Taleb. I will say that while his narrative is colourful, and while it’s generally comprehensible by the amateur reader (like me), I did find his rambling style a bit hard to digest at times; the book doesn’t flow as well as it could have. Taleb can also be rather self-indulgent at times. Nevertheless, this is one of those books that any thinking person should get a hold of and read. Gift it to someone as a late Christmas present. In fact, my dad scored a copy of it today (New Year’s Day, 2011) for “Christmas”, as my parents just arrived in Brisbane from Cairns. I’ve lent my own copy out to someone, and I hope she remembers to bring it with her next time she travels to Brisbane so that I might lend it to another interested reader.

Fast forward a few thousand years to the present day, where a not altogether dissimilar battle is taking place. Sure, it doesn’t involve child sacrifices or indiscriminate killing. At least not yet. But bad music has been aired, walls have fallen down, people have been burned, and some sections of the Australian twittering class consider that threats have been made, if not against their firstborns, then against their “rights”.

For those few who don’t know, Grog’s Gamut is a blog written by a public servant, which came to prominence during the 2010 federal election campaign. The author of the blog remained anonymous until recently. He strongly criticised the news media’s coverage of the campaign, as many others were doing, but also made some suggestions for how to improve the coverage. The ABC decided to heed Grog’s advice, leading some sections of the media to conclude that discovering and revealing the true identity of the public servant behind Grog’s Gamut was in the public interest. On Monday, September 27, 2010, James Massola, the Joshua of our little story, wrote in The Australian that the public servant behind Grog’s Gamut was one Greg Jericho. So began the new Battle of Jericho, otherwise known as Groggate.

With the ram’s horns blown, and the Grog’s Gamut persona crumbling around him, Jericho has been exposed. Defending him and the right to anonymity are the Twitterati, armed with their virtual vuvuzelas loaded with 140 character bursts of noise, which make a worse racket than ram’s horns.

What’s got everyone so hot under the collar? Why shouldn’t Jericho have been unmasked? It’s an interesting question, but as we shall see, not the most important one.

The title of Massola’s (controversial) article is “Controversial political blogger unmasked as a federal public servant“. Besides the fact that we already knew beforehand that the Grog’s Gamut blog was written by a public servant, one must ask, what makes Jericho controversial, and in whose eyes is there a controversy? There is little evidence, as far as I can see, that anyone other than The Australian found any controversy whatever in the fact that Grog’s Gamut was written by a public servant. In fact, one is hard pressed to find evidence that The Australian itself considered Grog’s Gamut to be controversial. The only two references to Grog’s Gamut in The Australian I can find prior to September 27 is the article, written by Amanda Meade, detailing the events leading to the ABC’s change in the way they covered the 2010 election, and another written by Massola pointing out the increasing relevance of Twitter and blogs. Both articles paint Grog’s Gamut in a neutral-tending-towards-positive light. Not a hint of controversy anywhere. Tellingly, Massola writes of blogs and tweets:

And as Grog’s post shows they are increasingly relevant, whatever the identity of the poster.

(Emphasis mine.) This glaring absence of any prior mention of controversy in relation to Grog’s Gamut hints at mischief on the part of James Massola and The Australian. This post hoc rationalisation of the decision to out Jericho on the basis of public interest is a cloak weaved of the finest sanctimony, designed to obscure the newspaper’s real reason (if one can call it a reason) for revealing Jericho’s name: opportunism. There are at least two casualties of this decision, and they are Greg Jericho and journalism.

If it wasn’t The Australian who initially labelled the Grog’s Gamut blog controversial, was it the public? Jericho made no attempt to hide the fact that he was a public servant. Yet, I do not recall any public outcry in regards to his employment in that role when his blog gained a little bit of fame. Further, when Massola blew Grog’s cover, nothing of consequence occurred insofar as the original story: that the author of the Grog’s Gamut blog was a public servant by the name of Greg Jericho. On the contrary, the great bulk of discussion was and still is whether The Australian newspaper had done the right thing by outing Jericho. Thus, regardless of whether you’re on the side that says Jericho was fair game or the side that says his desire to remain anonymous ought to have been respected, the fact of the matter is that The Australian created the news rather than reported it (for, as we will see, the outing of Jericho was inconsequential, except, perhaps, to Jericho himself, who may now be considering some significant life changes).

Consider that, like Joshua and his priests who marched around the ancient city for six days before striking on the seventh day, Massola and The Australian had known Grog’s true identity for months prior to publishing it. Why?

Consider also that the consequence (or lack thereof) of Massola’s story would have been the same if Grog had turned out to be, not Greg Jericho, but a public servant by the name of Bill Bloggs or Jane Jones. There was nothing to gain in putting a real name to an anonymous blogger in this case, unless the blogger turned out to be Kevin Rudd, or someone similar. Then you’ve got a news story. It seems, therefore, that Massola and the self-ordained high priests of the Church of the Public Interest in fact acted in their own interest.

So, while the issue of anonymity on the interwebs is an interesting one, arguably the more serious issue is whether our major news outlets are able to recognise what constitutes news and what does not, and importantly, whether in reporting a non-newsworthy item, they inadvertently or purposefully become the news story.

Although the main subject of this article is not the issue of anonymity, let’s examine it briefly. Unlike the view expressed by Annabel Crabb, that in her ideal world disclosure of identity would be a rebuttable presumption (that seems like a dubious use of the term, but we know what she’s getting at), in my perfect world people would play the ball and not the person. That is, it would not matter who is saying something, but what matters is what is said. Anonymity is one of the cornerstones of peer review in many fields of science, for example, and some widely read news publications such as The Economist still observe the practice of publishing without by-lines. A strong argument does not resort to ad hominem attacks. Paul Graham’s article on “How to disagree” is an excellent resource to point your friends and enemies to, should you want to suggest to them that their argumentative skills are in need of some improvement. Note, however, that the sort of pseudonymity employed by Grog’s Gamut does not prevent ad hominem attacks. Although it prevented ad hominem arguments against Greg Jericho, whilst this pseudonymity lasted anyway, it did not prevent ad hominem attacks against Grog’s Gamut, an online identity built up over the lifetime of that blog. For instance, it’s still possible to level attacks of the “well, Grog would say that, because based on his/her previous posts he’s/she’s a raging lefty” kind. (Aside: It’s interesting to note how many of the attacks against The Economist focus on the their practice of writer anonymity, rather than on its content. Take this quote from American author Michael Lewis, for example: The magazine [sic] is written by young people pretending to be old people. If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.)

We may identify, then, several distinct reasons a person may want to unmask an anonymous blogger:

I just want to know who it is, dammit!

I want to find out in case the blogger has a (real) conflict of interest, in which case I will report it.

I want to find out who it is so I can demonstrate my unmatched investigative skills or the scale of my professional network, thereby drawing attention to myself.

I want to know so I can launch into an ad hominem attack on them, or cause them some other sort of grief.

Annabel Crabb’s desire would seem to fall into the first category. The Australian‘s and Massola’s stated reasons are in the second, though, as I have argued, probably align with third. Clearly, the hullabaloo on Twitter shows that some people would argue their reasons are encroaching upon the fourth. I have not seen enough evidence to give support to the claim that The Australian‘s motivations fall into the fourth category.

Nevertheless, many are choosing to interpret The Australian‘s actions as a threat against bloggers, and anonymous ones critical of The Australian in particular: “look what we did to Jericho; watch it, or we’ll take your firstborn.”

Will I continue to read The Australian? Of course, because some sections of the paper are worth reading. I don’t always agree with the editorials, but many of them take a considered and principled view in my opinion (probably the ones written by Paul Kelly; I don’t know for sure, because I don’t really care about the by-lines). It’s not all bad (despite what some people might think). And, in any case, The Australian happened to be in a position to break the “story”, but there’s nothing to say that another news outlet wouldn’t have broken the story if they were in possession of the same information. As mentioned above, the ABC‘s Annabel Crabb seems to think that what The Australian did was kosher, so presumably she would have reported Grog’s true identity if she had known it. Would I recommend the The Australian to others as a credible primary news source? Not on current form, and certainly not in isolation. However, I’m seriously contemplating Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s advice of just not reading the news, period. I’ll let you know how that one goes.

Note: This post is late. Very late. Hopefully it’s still relevant to somebody.

There are two very different types of startup: one kind that evolves naturally, and one kind that’s called into being to “commercialize” a scientific discovery. Most computer/software startups are now the first type, and most pharmaceutical startups the second. When I talk about startups in this essay, I mean type I startups. There is no difficulty making type II startups spread: all you have to do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as straightforward as building a new airport. Type II startups neither require nor produce startup culture. But that means having type II startups won’t get you type I startups. Philadelphia is a case in point: lots of type II startups, but hardly any type I.

Incidentally, Google may appear to be an instance of a type II startup, but it wasn’t. Google is not pagerank commercialized. They could have used another algorithm and everything would have turned out the same. What made Google Google is that they cared about doing search well at a critical point in the evolution of the web.

In this footnote alone there is a sizeable nugget of wisdom for any government or other innovation funding body outside of the Valley that cares to listen. Whether you see it as a good thing or a bad thing, it’s clear there is no startup culture in this country. I’d guess that a disproportionate number of ventures in Australia fall into Graham’s type II category: commercialising the results of academic research with no startup culture required and none produced. Notwithstanding the regulatory risk that often accompanies startups formed around a scientific breakthrough (think biotech and pharmaceuticals), the VCs that fund these sorts of ventures would typically shoulder less financial risk than their type I-loving Valley counterparts; there’s a surer trajectory for type II ventures because there are fewer unknowns. Another way of saying this is that series A funding for type II ventures (probably the most common kind of startup in Australia) is more like a series B or C round in the Valley.

The last part of the footnote above is perhaps most important. I hope that governments here don’t think that by allocating tax-payer funded block grants to pseudo-commercial technology “incubators” with an academic bent that a Google will pop out the other end. It could happen, but not by design. What these “investments” are more likely to produce is a steady trickle of good science resulting in the occasional type II startup. If that’s what’s intended, it’s all good, but let’s be clear about it! The creation of a Google by this means would be due more to luck than careful planning, and our current funding models certainly won’t trigger a self-sustaining chain reaction of startups.

@order_item = OrderItem.new(:hi => "hem", :ho => "hum")
@order_item.save!

@order_item = order.order_items.create(:hi => "hem", :ho => "hum")

@order_item = OrderItem.some_custom_creation_method(:hi => "hem", :ho => "hum")

The Problem

When you’re writing your spec (up front, of course!), you don’t want to presume too much about how the implementation will unfold. So, do you stub the create method on the model class? But what if we implement using the new/save combo (as above)? Or, what if we create the model instance through an association?

My Solution

My first pass solution to this problem is the following, based on Matthew Heidemann’s association stubbing technique:

module Spec
  module Mocks
    module Methods
      def stub_creators!(association_name, klass, stubs = {}, valid = true)
        target_mock = Spec::Mocks::Mock.new(klass, {:save => valid, :valid? => valid}.merge!(stubs))
        target_mock.stub!(:save!).and_return do
          target_mock.save
          valid || raise(ActiveRecord::RecordNotSaved)
        end
        klass.stub!(:new).and_return(target_mock)
        klass.stub!(:create).and_return do
          target_mock.save
          target_mock
        end
        klass.stub!(:create!).and_return do
          target_mock.save!
          target_mock
        end
        mock_association = Spec::Mocks::Mock.new(association_name.to_s)
        mock_association.stub!(:create).and_return do
          target_mock.save
          target_mock
        end
        mock_association.stub!(:create!).and_return do
          target_mock.save!
          target_mock
        end
        mock_association.stub!(:build).and_return(target_mock)
        self.stub!(association_name).and_return(mock_association)
        target_mock
      end
    end
  end
end

What this is doing

The thinking here is that, when I write my spec, I don’t want to be concerned with whether the implementation takes the create, new/save, build/save, or other route. In my spec I just want to know that at some point the controller asked for a model instance to be created and saved. The above code, which I put in spec_helper.rb, allows my specs to do just that. Essentially, I stub save so that it returns true or false, depending upon the optional valid parameter, and the other creation stubs derive from that: save!, create, create! on the target association class and the association itself. I also stub out new and build for convenience. This code ensures that save is always called, even though we’ve stubbed out create etc. Now if I need to check that a controller action has caused a model instance to be created, I need only ever check that save is called.

An example

In my specs I call stub_creators! on an instance of the association owner (in our example, the association owner is Order), passing it the name of the association I want to stub (order_items), the model class of the association target (OrderItem), optional stubs for instances of the association target, and whether or not we want the returned model instance to be valid (defaults to true). With this in place, I can do this:

describe OrdersController do
  before(:each)
    @current_user = mock_model(User, :login => "me", :logged_in? => true)
    @order = @current_user.stub_creators!(:order_items, Order)
  end

  it "should create a new order_item" do
    @order.should_receive(:save).and_return(true)
    post 'create'
  end
end

And it doesn’t matter which route the implementation takes to create that model instance. As long as save is called at some point, I know the controller has triggered the creation of the instance somehow.

Thoughts

Now, while this seems to work for me, I don’t really know whether this is kosher. Is it a sensible approach to take? I haven’t tested this extensively; as I said, it’s a first pass. Also, there’s bound to be stuff missing from my solution (for example, it doesn’t handle find_or_create_by_). Can a similar approach be taken to the various ways to delete an object, too? I shall continue to experiment.

Anyway, here’s how I got nokogiri to install under Snow Leopard without resorting to macports or fink:

sudo gem install nokogiri -- --with-xml2-include=/usr/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=/usr/lib --with-xslt-dir=/usr

What’s weird is that, unless I’m mistaken, those paths are exactly where nokogiri should be looking for the relevant libxml2 files in the first place! I’m still to find out whether it all works as it’s supposed to. But installation is the first step! Let me know if it works for you.

However, there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do: booking a shared resource, such as a meeting room or a car park. Today, we figured out how to do it, and, in hindsight, it should have been obvious.

To book a shared resource, create a calendar event in iCal as you normally would, making sure the event is created in your Exchange calendar as opposed to your personal (local) one. Then, in the invitees field, add the resource you wish to book. Start typing the name of the resource, and if your Exchange integration is working correctly (and your IT people have set up the resources in Exchange correctly), it should find the resource just as if you were adding a person as an invitee. Once you’ve added the resource, you should see a link that says “Available meeting times…”. Click it. This will show you when the resource is available and when it’s booked, as well as the availability of any other people you’ve added to the invitees field. Once you’ve done that, you’re good to go! Microsoft Outlook users will see that the resource has been booked (if they’ve added the resource as a Shared Calendar to their Outlook console).

The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot until the “decision altitude” call, when the Handling Non-Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Landing Pilot, unless the latter calls “go-around”, in which case the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, continues Handling and the Non-Handling Landing Pilot continues non-handling until the next call of “land” or “go-around”, as appropriate.

In view of the recent confusion over these rules, it was deemed necessary to restate them clearly.

– British Airways memorandum, quoted in Pilot Magazine, December 1996 (and in The Pragmatic Programmer, which is where I read it).

Note that we’re experiencing a few difficulties with our Citemine production server environment, which means slow page loads from time to time. And it’s clearly lacking polish, but hopefully it serves its purpose as a proof-of-concept so that you can get a feel for what it’s all about. But please do read the paper. I’ve been told it’s a fun read.

One thing from that story that caught my attention was this:

She (Rachel Nolan) said people living near train lines or stations would not be able to tap into the free internet service because it would be “firewalled”.

That would have to be one pretty intelligent firewall! Here are some actual possibilities to guard against free-loaders. One not so attractive way to do it would be to set a limit on daily downloads. The theory is that there’s only so much you could download on the longest possible trip on the QR network in south-east Queensland (say, Gold Coast to Nambour, or something like that). The other more attractive solution, in my opinion, would be to tie usage to go cards. Your internet session starts when you swipe on at the beginning of your journey, and it finishes when you swipe off. There’d be some kind of web-based login procedure like you get at hotels and elsewhere, where you enter your go card number to gain access; or regular users could have the option of registering the MAC address of their wireless card with QR/Translink to skip the login procedure. Given that it still takes ages for a credit card top up to find its way onto my go card, I don’t hold out much hope for QR/Translink being able to implement this particular solution within the already very optimistic time frame of early 2010. But I do think it’s a reasonable long term solution. It might even help Translink in their quest to move more commuters over to the go card from paper tickets.

So what does this mean? It means that right now Twitter is hot. People are talking about it, and that’s the best that Biz Stone and company could hope for. The big question for Twitter is how to convert all the talk into more users, and ultimately revenue. If they do manage to do this, it would be nice to know how they did it!

Heard this song on the radio a while ago and couldn’t track it down. But today I caught it on ABC Local Radio, would you believe.

National benefit versus private benefit… Hey, that’s what capitalism is designed to do, is to guarantee that there is no contradiction.

The line got a delayed laugh, because it took the audience a few moments to realise that was all Professor Ullman had to say on the topic, and that he’d moved on to the next topic. People laughed, but he was serious, and more right than many would be willing to accept.

Fair Trade is really a movement consisting of a number of principal organisations: Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), World Fair Trade Organization, Network of European Worldshops and European Fair Trade Association. While Fair Trade refers to the overall movement, Fairtrade refers to the certification given by FLO. In the rest of this article, I refer to Fairtrade, because when you’re in the supermarket shopping for coffee, that’s the label you will see. One of the defining features of Fairtrade is that it guarantees the coffee grower (or whatever the product happens to be; we’ll just be dealing with coffee in this article) a predetermined minimum price for his/her coffee.

You can look at Fairtrade as being just like free trade, except that the coffee being sold has been sprinkled with a range of “socially responsible enhancements”. As mentioned, chief among these enhancements is the knowledge that the farmer who grows the coffee beans that end up in your mug gets at least an agreed minimum price for the coffee, and his/her farm workers are similarly guaranteed a minimum wage. The idea is that the consumer is paying a premium for a superior product, because the coffee has been produced in a way that yields greater benefits for the farmers who grow the coffee. So, in this respect, the price of Fairtrade coffee is set by supply and demand, just like non Fairtrade coffee. There is an ethical dilemma here, however. An important criticism of Fairtrade, and one that I believe is completely valid, is that Fairtrade artificially inflates the price of coffee, encouraging more people to grow coffee, thereby increasing supply and, in the long run, placing downward pressure on coffee prices (non-Fairtrade coffee). This, of course, results in farmers receiving less and less for the coffee they grow. The ethical dilemma is that Fairtrade coffee is marketed as being socially responsible and fair, but the question must be asked “fair to whom?” Certainly not to the farmer who sees the price of his coffee going down because all his mates have decided to try to get a piece of the action. The already oversupplied coffee market becomes even further oversupplied. Consumers with a social conscience, I believe, ought to think twice about Fairtrade – it might not be as fair or as socially responsible as you think. Besides, I wonder just how many consumers of Fairtrade coffee take the time to find out what this minimum wage is, and what this minimum wage could buy in the given farmer’s country.

Rainforest Alliance has different goals to that of Fairtrade. Its mission is to

…conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior.

Rainforest Alliance certification means that goods (coffee in our case) are produced in an environmentally sustainable fashion, in adherence to the Sustainable Agriculture Network standards. These standards set down criteria relating to water pollution, erosion, environmental and human health, wildlife habitat protection, waste, water efficiency, farm management and working conditions. An important distinction from Fairtrade is that there is no artificial minimum price set for the product. As such, there is no artificial incentive introduced for more farmers to produce coffee, and therefore no distortion of production levels and prices. For these reasons, I’d be more comfortable buying Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee than Fairtrade Certified coffee. Rainforest Alliance certification is gaining momentum, with some big corporations, no doubt trying to improve their image, serving up or packaging up Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee. These include McDonald’s and Kraft.

Of course, there are other kinds of certification as well, including UTZ and various organic certifications. There’s also direct trade, whereby a coffee roaster or boutique coffee shop establishes a relationship directly with a coffee grower. This allows the buyer to select a grower who meets their own set of ethical criteria. Because the buyer knows first hand how the coffee is produced, there is no formal certification required. See the Cooperative Coffees site for a good explanation of the most common kinds of certifications.

Meanwhile, back at the Kuranda Coffee Republic, Mike just serves cups of great coffee, which are each works of art and feats of engineering, with an ample helping of banter. His differentiation is that he sells only direct to people, spurning lucrative approaches by corporations. I guess you could call this extreme direct trade, so his coffee requires no further certification. It’s not about capitalism or not capitalism, he claims. It’s that he wants all of the beans he grows to be served with a “Hello, how’s it going” and a “Thanks for coming.” Sell to corporations, he argues, and you can’t be guaranteed that the shop assistant or barista will respect the beans and the experience. And here’s a tip: engage Mike in good conversation, say thanks for your coffee, and for your next cup he might just give you the discount he reserves for locals. Even at the standard price of $3 for a large cup, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better value coffee anywhere in Far North Queensland, or all of Queensland for that matter. Will I be going back to the Kuranda Coffee Republic next time I’m in Cairns? You bet.

We’re going to get the chance to see their new house for ourselves when we visit them in the near future. It will be Xander’s first flight. If it’s anything like his first train trip, he’ll have a ball. Just hope we can avoid the Dengue fever epidemic when we get there.

In my last article, I mentioned a little cafe in Mount Glorious called the Elm Haus. Well yesterday Karen and I made a special trip up the mountain to try their Devonshire tea, having left Xander with his grandparents. We’re delighted to say that it was well worth it.

This armour is just one of the many curiosities on display at the Elm Haus

The Devonshire tea

There's nothing like a good Devonshire tea

It was a wet, overcast day. But it made for a great drive up to Mount Glorious, which was shrouded in clouds. The atmosphere created by the fog as we drove through the rainforest was worth the trip alone. The Elm Haus Cafe was very inviting to the sodden traveller, and provided us with a homely lunchtime meal. We plan to revisit for Devonshire Tea sometime.

The ReCaptcha guys need to invent an algorithm that gives an estimate of the likelihood that a human could actually decipher a word, and then only present those above a certain threshold. That’s a different problem to the one of having a machine actually decipher the text, and I reckon it’s probably an easier one. The ReCaptcha above is just plain silly.

Another thing I’ve done is fully widgetize my blog. So everything that used to be hand-coded into the various PHP files that make up my theme is now a widget (Twitter feed, Google Analytics and so on). This makes everything much easier to maintain, and change, if I feel like it.

In related news, AJ has made the switch to WordPress from Blosxom. I’m pretty sure he won’t look back. I’ve been using WordPress since mid-2005, and I reckon WordPress is getting better with every release (2.7 in particular is a pretty big step in the right direction, IMHO). It’s very well supported, has a large user community, and it just works. Fantastic.

Update 29 Dec, 2008: I’m now using a variant of Chris Harrison‘s threaded comment styling. He’s written a tutorial on how to style your comments.

I’ve previously documented my thinking on issues of surveillance, though I hadn’t specifically considered the situation where a member of the public films a police operation or an operation conducted by some other state agency. I think what I wrote in that article holds for this case, too. If anything, I’d expressly encourage this sort of surveillance. We still live in a free democracy, don’t we?

Herman’s Hermits – No milk today

(AAP)

Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve already iterated through several “alpha” versions and expect to have a public beta ready by the end of February. Stay tuned for an explanation of what the service actually does.

I certainly had a laugh, but one does have to wonder whether the Liberals might have found a better use of their limited funds…

Nah!

Yet, for all that, his election in and of itself has given hope to millions of his fellow countrymen and women, and perhaps billions of people around the world who happen to share his skin colour. One gets the feeling that it is the kind of hope accompanied by equal parts relief and outright joy, particularly for those who have lived long enough to witness some of the various events in US history that each contributed to the moment of Barack Obama’s victory speech. What’s sad is that it has taken so long for this day to come. What’s sad is that the colour of someone’s skin still matters. History, too, is sure to remember him primarily as America’s first black president, regardless of what he achieves or fails to achieve over the next four or eight years.

Whether you agree with his politics or not (or, if like me, you feel there was so little depth to the presidential campaigns of both the major parties that it is nearly impossible to tell what policies will be pursued), you must admire Obama’s terrific achievement. To overcome McCain and Palin so definitively is an enormous feat; but to have first defeated the machine called Hillary and Bill Clinton is, when you think about it, incredible.

Living in a small country across the Pacific Ocean as I do, with any luck I will not be chastised for confessing that, perhaps more than anything, I look forward to being wowed by Barack Obama’s indisputably sublime oratory skills. A president with a command of the English language: how novel. Our very own prime minister might take a leaf out of the President-elect’s book, and infuse some inspiring words into his rather mundane speeches.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Updated especially for Clinton:

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported