Categories
Eco-philo-pol

A Climate Change Reality Check?

Anyone who’s interested in the climate change debate (and I’m still of the opinion that there is a debate [update: this was clearly a bonkers statement since the basic science of climate change was settled decades ago; the debate is on what action to take and how to implement that action, as it’s not going well]) should read this two-part paper published in the World Economics Journal at the end of last year. It’s a critical analysis of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a document that has arguably done more than any other (save, perhaps for the various IPCC papers) to convince governments of the need to act on global warming. The first part covers the science (written by several climate change experts), and the second covers the economics. Readers of this weblog might be particularly interested in the following excerpt from the critique:

Section 3 is concerned with fundamental issues of scientific conduct and procedure that the Review fails to consider. Professional contributions to the climate change debate very largely take the form of published peer-reviewed articles and studies. It is widely assumed, in particular by governments and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the peer review process provides a guarantee of quality and objectivity. This is not so. We note that the process as applied to climate science has tolerated gross failures in due disclosure and archiving, and that peer review is both too inbred and insufficiently thorough to serve any audit purpose, which we believe is now essential for science studies that are to be used to drive trillion-dollar policies.

I think this observation about peer-review processes in the climate science community probably holds true for many, if not most, scientific communities. I’ve certainly seen evidence of inbreeding and insufficient thoroughness within the small subset of the computer science community with which I’m involved. And, from my (still fairly limited) experience, due disclosure barely gets a look-in. For instance, the frequency with which authors are asked whether they’ve disclosed all their funding sources and correctly cited all their sources is very low in my (still fairly limited) experience.

Categories
Random observations

Scoble writing about Fox News

Yesterday I noticed that Scoble had posted an article about Fox News and the Anna Nicole Smith saga at around the same time as I had. It turns out that he actually scooped me by 15 minutes, and here I was thinking I was original! D’oh!

Categories
Random observations

New York, NY

I’ve just returned from New York, where I was attending the PerCom 2007 conference in White Plains. The conference was okay. Some interesting papers on using RFID to do some clever things (one that I remember in particular was about using the weaknesses of RFID to do intrusion detection). This year, there were a few HCI type papers accepted, one of which was about interacting with wall-sized video panels. The PerWare and CoMoRea workshops ended with some fairly lively discussions, which is a sign for continued interest in those workshops. My presentations at CoMoRea went well, though I was totally out of it by the end of the second presentation due to a cold or flu which I picked up from somewhere and which I’m still recovering from. Next year’s PerCom will be held in Hong Kong.

I had the weekends on either side of the conference to explore Manhattan. It was the first time I’d visited New York, so there was a lot I wanted to do. My first notable experience of New York was the freezing cold temperatures and the snow. I happened to arrive on the day that a severe snow storm blanketed large parts of the north eastern United States to the extent that JFK, La Guardia and Newark were shut down. When my plane landed at JFK, they’d already grounded most other flights. I ended up sitting around the baggage carousel at JFK with my fellow passengers for more than an hour because – get this – the luggage bay doors had frozen shut. Then, once I’d retrieved my suitcase, I found myself waiting outside in -2° Celsius temperatures for another hour because there was a severe shortage of taxis. Presumably there was a shortage of cabs because outgoing flights had been grounded, which meant there were no passengers being dropped off by cabs, which meant there were no cabs to convey passengers from my flight. Eventually, it was my turn to jump into a cab, and boy, was I in for a wild ride…

As we drove along an expressway (probably Van Wyck) from JFK towards Manhattan, I noticed there were traffic accidents and bogged vehicles everywhere. The snow and sleet were causing absolute chaos on the roads. Little did I realise that the cab I was in was about to get sideways, too. We were driving along, and all of a sudden, the cab fishtailed and slid across three lanes of expressway towards the centre barrier. Unbelievably, at that moment, there were no cars to the left of us, so we avoided an accident on that count, but there was still the centre barrier to deal with. Somehow, at the last moment, the cab driver managed to straighten the vehicle, and narrowly avoided colliding with the barrier. I’m still not quite sure how he managed to pull it off without even grazing the barrier; I was sure that physics dictated the front left headlight would get smashed, but it was like the cab turned on a pivot at the last second, rather than doing a normal arc turn. At this point the driver said: “Whoah! Do you have your seatbelt on?” I put my seatbelt on as soon as I sat down in the cab!

All the way to my hotel on Central Park South, I was trying to put some life back into my poor frozen fingers by holding them in front of the heater in the back seat. I was glad to finally arrive at the hotel (after our little incident, the driver stayed below 50km/h for the rest of the trip, so it took a while) and retire to my nice warm room.

The next day (Saturday, March 17), I strolled (or rather, trudged) through Central Park, taking a round-a-bout trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gallery has a number of Vermeers, Rembrandts and Rubens, so it kept me amused for the rest of the day. Saturday was St Patricks day, and New York has a famous St Pat’s day parade, which I watched a fair bit of. Apparently it’s quite rare for the parade to take place on snow covered streets. As I was walking from 5th Avenue back towards my hotel after I’d watched the parade pass, a massive chunk of ice fell from some skyscraper into the street a few feet away from me with an almighty crash. All I can say is I’m glad nobody was underneath it (I’m especially glad I wasn’t underneath it), because that person would not have lived to see another St Patrick’s day. For the rest of the day I was looking up at the sky, watching for falling blocks of ice.

Snow balls in Central Park

On Sunday, I checked out Bloomingdales and then walked to the UN building, which was closed to visitors, and then over to the Rockefeller Center and Times Square. I ended up going to the “Top of the Rock” (that is, the top of the Rockefeller Center), which had an amazing view of Manhattan and surrounding regions. After spending a bit of time browsing various shops, including the Sony shop at the bottom of the Sony Building, I headed back to the hotel to pick up my suitcase and laptop, then hauled everything 21 blocks to Grand Central Station where I caught the train to White Plains.

Upon returning to Manhattan the following Saturday, I went, with a new friend, Matthias, whom I met at the conference, to Battery Park to get a view of the Statue of Liberty. We walked along the Hudson to the World Financial Center and Ground Zero, the World Trade Center site. It’s unbelievable to think that there used to be two massive towers standing at this site, and although construction on some new buildings seems to be getting underway, there’s still a sadness hanging about the place, and I got a kind of eerie feeling while looking over the site. Matthias needed to fly back to Germany that day, so at 3pm or so, we started to head back to my hotel, where Matthias had left his bags for a few hours.

The next day I took a boat cruise around Manhattan Island, which was very worthwhile. There were some awesome views of the Manhattan skyline and the various bridges connecting Manhattan with New Jersey and Long Island. The guide was a fountain of knowledge about New York. Then I caught a 3 o’clock showing of the Broadway musical The Producers, which was hilarious.

On Monday, I took the subway downtown to Wall Street to photograph the New York Stock Exchange and some other buildings. Trinity Church, between Trinity Place and Broadway at Wall Street, is a beautiful building in the neo-Gothic style (at least, I’d say it’s neo-Gothic from what little I know about architecture). Then I headed back uptown to the Museum of Modern Art, to while away the final hours of my New York trip. I’m not the hugest fan of most kinds of modern art. I dig many of Cézanne’s paintings and a lot of Picasso’s work, but I fail to appreciate anything as abstract as a Pollock or a Mondrian. I was hoping that seeing some of the paintings by Pollock, Mondrian and company up close would give me a new perspective; but, alas, they still didn’t do anything for me. Nevertheless, it was well worth the $20 entrance fee.

One of the highlights of a trip to New York is the food, from the street vendors to the delis to the upmarket restaurants. My modest travel budget didn’t allow me to try any cuisine from the last category, but I did sample the sidewalk fare. One subtly interesting fact is that a large proportion of the street vendors use halal meat, while some of the others are kosher. This was good news for me, as I still refrain from eating pork. In Australia, you might, if you’re lucky, find chicken-based hotdogs at Woolworths or Coles; but from what I hear, they’re a pretty poor substitute for the real thing. Meanwhile, New Yorkers seem to devour these halal hotdogs by the truck-load. I ate at a few different burger joints (Burger Heaven was great), and dined at a few delis. I also tried the Italian restaurant across the street from where I was staying for my second weekend in New York: good food, good wine, good service.

I had a good time in New York. I was a bit wasted during the second half of the trip due to the stupid ailment I picked up, but other than that it was a blast. Really glad to be back home though!

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Fox News Channel

Watching Fox News Channel is highly entertaining. After having watched quite a lot of it recently, I can’t say that it’s as biased as I once thought, though it still clearly does have a leaning toward the conservative side of politics. But, that’s probably okay since some of the other channels have a clear leaning toward “progressive” side of politics. However, I’m fascinated by the weight Fox News Channel gives to some stories.

For the past weeks, the intrigue surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith has been given an extraordinary amount of air-time. I can see why: it’s highly interesting stuff. Who’s the father of her baby (there are at least three possibilities, though another one surfaced in the last day or so)? How did she die? Was it murder, and if so, whodunnit?

Competing for air-time are the annual Spring Break and the Democrat bill to pull the troops out of Iraq by the end of August 2008. Among the questions being asked by Bill O’Reilly and co are why are young women doing all sorts of lewd things these days for what seems like barely any compensation? In particular, they ask why women will do pretty much anything for the Girls Gone Wild film crew in return for a t-shirt. Probably alcohol (and other stuff) has a bit to do with it, but it surely can’t be the sole explanation for the phenomenon. Again, an interesting story, but hardly worth the major air-time it’s getting. I wonder how it’s affecting Fox’s ratings?

The story about the House Democrats Bill is both interesting and fairly covered by Fox in my opinion. There’ve been numerous guests on a number of different shows debating the merits of the Bill. Personally, I’m not sure whether politicians in the House of Representatives ought to trying to dictate military strategy. Furthermore, while I’ve never really followed the progress of previous US Bills so closely, the level of pork barrelling that was required to get this Bill passed by the House seemed unbelievable to me. Democrat representatives have inserted subsidies for everything from shellfish to shrimp to peanuts and spinach, to the tune of $21 billion. How a Bill called “U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Health and Iraq Accountability Act” can have anything to do with any of that stuff is beyond me. Even some of the Democrat sympathisers on Fox News were understandably struggling to justify these inclusions.

While I haven’t seen an actual news story on the incredible events at the Cricket World Cup on Fox News, the ticker at the bottom of the screen does show breaking news related to the murder of Bob Woolmer. So Fox News in the US is not completely oblivious to the world of cricket. Anyway, I can’t believe what’s going on in the Windies. Cricket, it seems, still has major, major problems to solve.

Categories
Innovation

Ricky, harping on about Web 2.0… again

After I wrote a post about Web 2.0 not being here yet, Ben wrote a piece on the subject, arguing that the cool new things that are happening on the Web these days warrant a version increment. I left a comment on that post in which, as unlikely as it sounds, I drew an analogy between the Web and turkey basters. Now I think I have a much better metaphor for the evolution of the Web than product version numbers.

Historians, both the professional and casual kinds, refer to the various stages of human history with names such as “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age”, “Industrial Age” and so on. These names reflect the progress of humankind as they evolved from using crude stone implements to refined materials to machinery. The space in which humankind has always lived, Earth, provides the raw resources, which, as time passed, humans learned to refine and compose to make more useful things. But historians do not feel compelled to refer to Earth by a new name (Earth 2.0) simply because one of its inhabitant species got a bit clever and started manipulating the raw materials available to them in new and interesting ways.

The Web is an abstract space analogous to the Earth. It contains resources – protocols, scripting languages, hypertext and so forth – which may be refined and composed to create novel things. The first stage of human existence within the Web was the “Hypertext Age”. URLs, Hypertext and the accompanying Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were the raw materials of the Web in its infancy. These raw materials were provided by the almighty Creator (Tim Berners-Lee). The next stage of the Web was the “Dynamic Age”, whereby CGI, servlets and so on injected some modicum of motion to the creations of the Web’s inhabitants, just like the invention of the steam engine triggered a comprehensive mechanisation of industry. We now find ourselves squarely in the “Social Age” of the Web, in which humankind has fashioned some extraordinarily powerful tools within the Web and the physical world to fulfill their innate desire to socialise. The “Social Age” of the Web was brought about by the serendipitous co-occurrence of a generation of people who desire social connectivity on a new level, a range of technologies such as camera phones and iPods and cheap digital storage, and clever ways of putting together existing Web technologies (think Ajax). What circumstances will arise to give humankind the push into the next age of the Web? What will the next age of the Web look like? What experiences will be had during that age?

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the world to take up this metaphor for the history of humankind’s existence in the Web. The “Social Age” of the Web is not as snappy and catchy as “Web 2.0”. But maybe we’ll tire of incrementing version numbers by Web 11.0!

Categories
Innovation

Schulze & Webb: Awesome

Before I go any further with this post, I want to thank Ben for imploring the readers of his blog to check out this presentation from some guys called Schulze & Webb. These days, you get pointers to so much stuff out there on the web, a lot of it interesting, but a lot of it only so-so. Then, occasionally, you’ll come across a gem, which truly was worth reading, and the presentation by Schulze & Webb, for me at least, is one of those gems. A word of advice if you do decide to read it, though: if you’re going to read it, read it right through as there’s a lot of good stuff in it.

I can relate to the presentation, titled The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, and its authors, Schulze & Webb, on a number of different levels. For starters, they use the example of football, specifically that magical goal Argentina scored against Serbia and Montenegro in the 2006 World Cup, to illustrate the concept that the means or the experience is more important to most people than the end result. In scoring that beautiful goal, Argentina strung together 24 passes before Cambiasso struck the ball into the back of the net. Football fans all over the world appreciate that goal because of the lead up to it, not the goal itself. This is also one of the reasons why football lovers can tolerate nil-all draws, and indeed why it can be truthfully said that some nil-all draws are more enjoyable than games in which five goals are scored: there’s so much more to the game than the goals. But football is only the most obvious example. The same can be said of other sports from cricket (the innings-long battle between batsman and bowler, rather than the fall of the wicket) to tennis (the rallies, rather than the rally-ending shot). Anyway, using football to illustrate a neat concept is a sure way to get me on side!

Their presentation also resonates with my recently written “About” page. They both speak of thresholds, boundaries and tipping points. They both talk about figuring out how to develop new things that harmonise with human experience and the human cognitive model (I love their bumptunes hack for the Powerbook; I wonder if the MacBook Pro has an accelerometer?).

Several months before submitting my Ph.D. thesis, I made the decision that I wanted to refocus my subsequent pervasive computing research more towards the user, or at the very least, to ensure that if I was going to be developing middleware to support pervasive computing applications, I would lobby hard to have some time and resources set aside to build decent, cool applications to exercise that middleware. It turns out I didn’t have to lobby that hard! But the point I’m trying to make here is that the Schulze & Webb presentation has provided a timely reminder of why I made that decision to think more about the user in the work that I do: it’s because in the research space I work in, that’s where the rubber hits the road. You can build middleware, context management systems and so forth, but in the end, it’s all in support of what the user wants to do, and it’s a fun challenge figuring out neat applications that people actually want to use because they’re a joy to use.

The challenge in my particular line of work is this: how do you create applications for emergency and disaster prediction, response and recovery which are “fun” to use? How do you design an application for the emergency services sector which creates an experience as pleasurable as watching Argentina’s second goal against Serbia & Montenegro in the World Cup? Is it even appropriate to create fun applications for an industry that, by definition, regularly deals with human tragedy? I hope the answer to the third question is a resounding “yes” if the applications help to save more lives than would otherwise be the case. Perhaps the word I’m looking for isn’t “fun” but “rewarding”. An application that makes its user feel rewarded for using it is a successful application because, presumably, the user will want to continue using it. An emergency worker feels rewarded if they are saving lives and making snap decisions that turn out to be good ones. Therefore, I think a good reformulation of my goal while I remain part of the SAFE project at NICTA is this: to develop rewarding applications (and supporting infrastructure) for the emergency services sector. This isn’t far off my official job description, but what it does is bring into sharp focus the importance of considering the users’ experiences as they interact with the application and system.

Thank you Ben. Thank you Schulze & Webb.

Categories
Innovation

Against academic hermits

In writing about the misconceptions of collaboration, I hadn’t expected that anyone would interpret my article as arguing against any kind of grouping of researchers, but it’s come to my attention that at least one reader has interpreted it that way, and a re-reading of my post tells me that’s a fair enough interpretation of what was written. I’m happy to take the blame for this, as my writing can be kind of loose at times. On the other hand, I’ve received some e-mails that indicate some of my other readers knew exactly what I was trying to get at, as they’d experienced some of the things I was talking about. Nevertheless, I’d like to clarify that I’m all for research teams! I hadn’t considered that research teams of the sort one might find within a single research organisation can be classified as a collaborative arrangement. To me, such a grouping is something more than a collaboration. Rather naively, I had not even thought about the possibility that academics can still get away with working in complete isolation, so I was somewhat stupidly relying on the reader to make some assumptions about what was written. When I spoke of loosely coupled interactions, I meant between two or more groups of academics at different institutions rather than between individual academics. When I said History is littered with hundreds of examples where this is the case, and very few in which close collaboration between teams of researchers yielded a scientific breakthrough I was talking about interactions between multiple teams rather than intra-team dynamics. What I’m arguing against are top-down directions that mandate collaboration between research teams from different organisations with little or no forethought. There’s pressure to form these kinds of collaborations because they attract funding either directly, or indirectly whereby they are used as a kind of metric that can be counted to attract future funding.

It has also occurred to me that if the article is read in a certain way, it could be seen as demeaning Australian CRCs. While I do believe it is getting harder for researchers who work in CRCs (and other government funded institutions) to focus on fundamental research, I certainly am not asking for the end of CRCs! Good grief! A certain CRC with which I have had the privilege to be associated will probably always be one of the best, coolest, most awesome places I will ever have worked at, and that’s precisely because of the people who worked there and the creative buzz one felt when interacting with those great people.

I think Kerry actually pin-pointed exactly the point I was trying to make:

Yes, but would not a formal collaboration of the correct range of skills in the one lab with a common goal have found it sooner?

The key point is “the one lab”. This is exactly right. But again, as soon as a cohesive unit is formed, to me it ceases to be what I think of as collaboration, and I think this is where Kerry and I were getting our wires crossed. When a research team is formed within a lab, the unit is no longer the researcher: it’s the research team. When collaboration does happen in this context, it is not between individual researchers but between entire research teams. And the fact that the researchers have gathered in the one lab indicates that they’ve all been drawn there of their own accord. It’s a bottom-up process, not a command-and-control one. Furthermore, collaboration between one research team and another one will happen of its own accord where the majority of individuals involved see the benefit. There’s no need for other (politically motivated) incentives.

For what it’s worth, I personally can’t even imagine being some kind of academic hermit working in isolation. I need to be part of a team so I can feed off the vibes and ideas of my co-workers. Hell, I’ve never even written a paper on my own (barring my thesis)! I hope that takes care of any misunderstandings. But knowing my luck, I’ve just dug a deeper hole! Perhaps you’ll be better off reading Kerry’s concise clarification.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Difference between social media and old media

In listing a few of the differences between new (social) media and old media, Scoble writes

The media above can’t be changed. A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.

I wonder if he’s read Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Categories
Devonshire tea review

Room with Roses

The day before Valentine’s Day, Karen and I decided to have Devonshire Tea at Room with Roses in the heritage listed Brisbane Arcade. One of the main facets of dining at Room with Roses is the old world atmosphere. The tables, chairs and other décor all create the illusion that you’ve been transported back to the eighteen hundreds. There are roses on every table, and several nooks where you can escape the modern world.

Although they don’t do a set Devonshire Tea, their scones are delicious, if not traditional Devonshire scones. And they’re big! They had a thin layer of raspberries, and they melted in your mouth. Room with Roses provided a good approximation of clotted cream (might just have been Paul’s dollop cream, but it was much better than is often served with scones in this country), and some very nice rasperry jam. They served some kind of leaf tea in a dainty little pot that had a very old Commonwealth Bank insignia on it. Strictly speaking, the cups were for coffee rather than tea, but I suppose it’s hard to provide bone china tea cups in a popular restaurant. Karen enjoyed her hot chocolate also. The other diners seemed to be thoroughly enjoying their lunches, too.

The only slightly disappointing thing is the noise from the kitchen. However, our table was very close to the kitchen while the majority of tables are a good distance away. Given the kind of atmosphere that Room with Roses is trying to create (and for the most part it succeeds), it would be a nice touch if orders were taken at your table rather than having to go to the counter to order. The little number sign you have to take back to your table to display for the staff spoils the effect created by the surroundings ever so slightly.

Our Devonshire Tea cost $20.20 (two scones with jam and cream, an English breakfast tea and a hot chocolate). A booking is recommended.

Categories
Random observations

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC

After a week of using the MacBook Pro that NICTA bought me (strictly for work purposes, of course), I gotta say, I love it! The MacBook Pro will be replacing my Windows desktop at work, and it’s also for taking back and forth between home and work and for taking to conferences etc. I’ve been working on a publishing and reviewing system, and up until now, although it’s NICTA’s IP, it was all being done on my own Linux box at home – not the optimal state of affairs. The sub-optimal nature of this arrangement was made crystal clear when my Linux box started to fail (it’s quite old). So, I asked for a laptop such that I could work on the SAFE project stuff at work as well the publishing and reviewing stuff at home. Somewhat to my surprise, NICTA duly obliged. At least now if something goes wrong with the laptop, all the code is on a NICTA machine and hopefully I won’t be culpable. Of course, it’s much easier to lose a laptop or to have it stolen than a desktop…

The loser out of all this is Linux. I bought a Dell to replace my home machine, and it’s got Windows Media Centre (with free upgrade to Vista) and Office on it. Karen and I need at least one up to date copy of Office between us. The Dell machine is very nice, but I’m a bit disappointed that I seem to have settled into using Windows at home, a day I thought would never come. I’m not a fan of dual booting – I’m generally too lazy for that kind of thing. To my chagrin, in my current job I really do need to use Office products quite frequently, and I’ve never been happy with any of the Open Source Office replacements. I’m still thinking this is only a temporary backward step, and that sooner or later I’ll be back on Linux, or I could even run Mac OS X on the Dell; now there’s an idea!

But one must give Microsoft credit where credit is due. My MacBook Pro has MS Office for the Mac installed on it and I’m using Entourage for mail. So far Entourage has left me with mostly positive impressions. I like it a lot. The Project Centre inside Entourage makes it easier to implement GTD, and it’s generally nicer to use than Outlook, and in my view it’s even nicer than Thunderbird. I haven’t tried Apple Mail, but my feeling is that those Mac users who don’t have a militant aversion to Microsoft products use Entourage in preference to Mail, iCal etc. I only wish that you could customise some of the properties of the mail folders in Entourage, like telling it to display a count of all the messages in the folder rather than just the unread ones. This is one useful feature that Outlook has which other mail clients don’t seem to support. I’ve been using this feature on my PC at work to help me implement my GTD system, and it works very well.

Oh, and here are my favourite Mac ads:

Actually all the ads are great.