'Til All Are One

This has been mak­ing the rounds lately and is an abso­lute gem:

Teach­ers’ hefty salar­ies are driv­ing up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in per­spect­ive and pay them for what they do — babysit! We can get that for min­imum wage. That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly plan­ning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min off for lunch and plan­ning that equals 6 ¹⁄₂ hours). Each par­ent should pay $19.50 a day for these teach­ers to baby-​​sit their chil­dren. Now how many stu­dents do they teach in a day… maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

How­ever, remem­ber they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any hol­i­days. LET’S SEE.… That’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My cal­cu­lator needs new bat­ter­ies.) What about those spe­cial edu­ca­tion teach­ers and the ones with Master’s degrees or higher duties? Well, we could pay them min­imum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour (but we shouldn’t get car­ried away). That would be $8 X 6 ¹⁄₂ hours X 30 chil­dren X 180 days = $280,800 per year. Wait a minute — there’s some­thing wrong here! There sure is!

The aver­age teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/​30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per stu­dent — a very inex­pens­ive baby-​​sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; re-​​post this to show appre­ci­ation for all educators.

I don’t think the dol­lar val­ues are for Aus­tralia — our min­imum wage is higher than $3.00. The point should be obvi­ous non­ethe­less: we ser­i­ously under­value the people who are respons­ible for edu­cat­ing our children.

This is the most clever thing I have seen in a long time. The equa­tion is simple:

There’s an image of the final res­ult over here.

Attrib­utes include:

• costs just $US 5 to produce
• amaz­ingly simple to create
• com­pletely solar powered: no need for fuel
• no green­house gas emis­sions in usage (can pre­vent two tonnes of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions per fam­ily per year)

As an advoc­ate of appro­pri­ate tech­no­logy, I find this inven­tion to be very excit­ing. The abil­ity to eas­ily cre­ate clean drink­ing water and cook food can in one fell swoop elim­in­ate many of the prob­lems and points of con­flict in the devel­op­ing world.

Of course, real­ity is much more com­plex than that, but I am hope­ful. One thing that remains to be seen is whether this idea actu­ally takes off. I’ve seen a num­ber of good ideas fail to take hold, often due to inter­fer­ence or lack of interest from polit­ical or cor­por­ate entit­ies. The bane of these low-​​tech solu­tions is the per­ceived lack of any profit motive. Com­pan­ies find it dif­fi­cult to make any money off it, but they can make a killing from selling their Machine That Goes Ping at $999.99 a pop (of which, only $5 will go towards pro­du­cing and improv­ing the product, and the rest goes to mar­ket­ing and legal).

So the Pope is com­ing to Sydney, and the New South Wales Gov­ern­ment is scram­bling to pro­tect him. What bet­ter way to shield an abso­lute mon­arch than with des­potic legislation?

We can bitch and whine about it. We can blatantly flout these laws and hand out free con­doms, as some are plan­ning.

Or we could stop and think about it. If only we could identify the oppor­tun­ity here.

Here’s my sug­ges­tion: make badges/​buttons — lots of them. Print on them, in big bold let­ters, “ANNOYING”. Noth­ing more. The aim isn’t to offend, it’s to pass­ively protest stu­pid laws and cel­eb­rate our freedoms.

Now, get people to sell the badges. Have volun­teers spread all over the city selling them. Also make deals with shops to have them avail­able next to the till.

Recog­nise this idea? It’s no dif­fer­ent from what’s done on Daf­fodil Day or Red Nose Day. Have the pro­ceeds go towards assist­ing AIDS vic­tims. I would sug­gest AIDS orphans. Make sure the group it goes to is cred­ible and sec­u­lar. It’s heart­break­ing how many so-​​called ‘char­it­ies’ are just cyn­ical mis­sion­ary Inquis­i­tions in drag.

I con­sider this to be a win for all. Cit­izens get to peace­fully protest, World Youth Day isn’t dis­rup­ted, and the chil­dren get some help. Would the gov­ern­ment dare to stop this? Would they halt a funds-​​raising oper­a­tion for dis­ad­vant­aged chil­dren? I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.

I’d actu­ally be sur­prised if this is an ori­ginal idea. I haven’t had time to pay much atten­tion to the mat­ter, so I’d expect that someone is already work­ing on some­thing similar.

(fully expect­ing the oblig­at­ory “why is this on Planet xxx???” whinging from people who don’t under­stand the point of a Planet and who like to oppress those whom they dis­agree with)

LotD:  Happy, Healthy Har­old — Behind The Puppet

I am still try­ing to under­stand the bene­fit to local res­id­ents of host­ing APEC in Sydney. Sydney­siders have been effect­ively told that they won’t be wel­come in their own city for over a week — so thought­fully exten­ded by two days by our good friend George W. Bush (God bless his soul!).

What have we got in return? With the CBD stran­gu­lated and trans­port crippled, there are cer­tainly no eco­nomic bene­fits. In fact, The NSW Busi­ness Cham­ber of Com­merce estim­ates a loss to the NSW eco­nomy of between $300 mil­lion and $1 billion.

For ordin­ary work­ers, we got just one measly day off, in return for over a week of incon­veni­ence. I don’t under­stand how people of priv­ilege such as John Howard and Jeff Ken­nett can refer to ordin­ary Aus­trali­ans in such dis­par­aging (and ironic) terms as ‘the Chardon­nay set’. As far as I am (and evid­ently much of Sydney is) con­cerned, there is no bene­fit from this exer­cise, either in the short– or longer– terms. And no, I don’t count ‘inter­na­tional prestige’ or any such wank­i­ness as a real benefit.

Has it been worth it, to bend over back­wards for someone so stu­pid that even other world lead­ers laugh at him?

Can some­body please prove me wrong? All I see at the moment is a giant white ele­phant (par­tic­u­larly given the secur­ity blun­ders), but surely there must be more to it than that.

By the way, has any­body else noticed that the offi­cial APEC 2007 Web site does not work prop­erly in Fire­fox? Prob­ably because their ‘exclus­ive tech­no­logy part­ner’ (read: government-​​authorised mono­pol­ist) is our good friend, Microsoft. What else would you expect from a mob that rules the words ‘Linux’ and ‘Unix’ to be ‘inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage’? I have tested this myself, and it does appear to be delib­er­ate: you can’t even fool it with simple alter­a­tions like adding spaces or dashes between the letters.

LotD:  Chinese stock mar­ket regrets switch­ing to Win­dows Vista

George Orwell’s clas­sic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many per­spect­ives on human beha­viour and soci­ety. One of these is how people can be led and manip­u­lated through the con­trol of inform­a­tion. In the story, the Seven Com­mand­ments formed a de facto con­sti­tu­tion for the Anim­al­istic soci­ety. Since only a hand­ful of anim­als could read, the rest were depend­ent upon what they were told was writ­ten. Gradu­ally, the writ­ing was cun­ningly altered to the bene­fit of the pigs above all other anim­als, and the popu­lace was taught to not trust their recol­lec­tions of what was writ­ten in the past.

What made this sub­ver­sion pos­sible was the inab­il­ity of most anim­als to read. The two anim­als that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do any­thing about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read inform­a­tion is an import­ant corner­stone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increas­ingly defined by elec­tronic records, there needs to be a way for inde­pend­ent view­ing and audit­ing. Paper is eas­ily read, but com­puter files require soft­ware to decypher them. Ima­gine if you needed spe­cial (and expens­ive) glasses just to read the let­ter that you your­self wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of dis­cus­sion in the press regard­ing the Open­Doc­u­ment and the so-​​called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this report­ing thus far has been on the polit­ical and tech­nical facets. This is slowly chan­ging, as the import­ance of long-​​term data pre­ser­va­tion and free­dom of inform­a­tion become appar­ent to ordin­ary folk.

The BBC has pub­lished a report on the prob­lem, and dis­cusses how the UK National Archives are attempt­ing to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-​​sighted approach, rely­ing on vir­tu­al­isa­tion of older oper­at­ing sys­tems and applic­a­tions, through a dir­ect part­ner­ship with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/​viewers (not to men­tion the oper­at­ing sys­tem and soft­ware per­form­ing the vir­tu­al­isa­tion itself) remain closed in source and spe­cific­a­tion, and one must deal with a cum­ber­some vir­tual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guar­an­tee that files can be read hun­dreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper doc­u­ments such as the his­toric Magna Carta? How does this part­ner­ship bene­fit me, an ordin­ary cit­izen who might wish to view ten– (or even two-​​) year-​​old pub­lic doc­u­ments that are only avail­able in a pro­pri­et­ary elec­tronic format?

It’s both sad and frus­trat­ing to see that his­tory is yet again repeat­ing itself. Whilst the con­tents of the Domes­day Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after com­ple­tion, the digital BBC Domes­day Pro­ject was rendered vir­tu­ally unread­able a mere 16 years later.

Thank­fully, there are efforts to cre­ate an infra­struc­ture for long-​​term pre­ser­va­tion and man­age­ment of digital doc­u­ments. To start with, there are open formats such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF. The Aus­tralian National Archives have long been sup­port­ers of Open­Doc­u­ment, to the extent that they are stand­ard­ising upon it. Put­ting their money where their mouths are, they are build­ing a com­pletely open source (GPL, no less) data man­ag­ment sys­tem that any­body can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux​.conf​.au about this tech­no­logy, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK coun­ter­parts seem to have for­got­ten that access to data is not just a priv­ilege for those able to make exclus­ive agree­ments with pur­vey­ors of lock-​​in tech­no­lo­gies, the Aus­tralian National Archives have been striv­ing to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… bet­ter? Let’s pre­vent this sub­ver­sion from happening.

LotD:  Mex­ican ‘world’s richest person’

There appears to be much con­fu­sion amongst the press and the gen­eral popu­lace regard­ing the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject, which I blogged about earlier. This art­icle in the Mur­doch press, for example, has stim­u­lated some of these mis­con­cep­tions. They stem from the false assump­tion that the OLPC is a com­put­ing pro­ject. “Don’t these kids deserve food, water, cloth­ing and shel­ter first?”, some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple com­put­ing pro­ject. It is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject, or more broadly, a devel­op­ment pro­ject. The com­puter is merely the tool to enable edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity. How can one learn when a text­book costs more than an aver­age weekly wage? Ima­gine if you could inter­act with your text­book, in the form of games and exer­cises. Ima­gine if you could learn to write your own soft­ware for this device, and dis­trib­ute it to help oth­ers in your com­munity. You can cre­ate your own art­works, write your own novel or make your own music. Wire­less mesh net­work­ing allows the dis­tri­bu­tion of data between com­puters, and even the shar­ing of one Inter­net con­nec­tion across a vil­liage. For many house­holds, the key­board lights will be the only form of arti­fi­cial light­ing. The pos­sib­il­it­ies are effect­ively limitless.

The point that I am try­ing to make is that it is not the com­puter that is import­ant, it is what you can do with it that truly mat­ters. The com­puter is an ena­bler, a tool that allows people to ulti­mately cre­ate their own live­li­hoods and futures. There’s no point in keep­ing people depend­ent on handouts. Let’s encour­age them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel dis­cus­sion for NSW ICT for the forth­com­ing state elec­tion. Pia made some good ana­lysis of the event. In sum­mary, the rep­res­ent­at­ive for the Lib­eral Party was com­pletely and utterly use­less when the ques­tion turned to open stand­ards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Lib­eral) would seem­ingly delib­er­ately con­fuse open stand­ards and open source when ques­tioned about them. The key when ques­tion­ing such people is to not men­tion open stand­ards and open source together. Force them to address the issues sep­ar­ately, or they will con­flate the two. The City of Munich was dis­par­agingly referred to sev­eral times as an extreme case. What dis­turbs me is that there was spe­cific­ally strong emphasis on NSW as a pro­curer and con­sumer of ICT, rather than as a pro­du­cer. So while pro­jects like the OLPC can pro­mote local edu­ca­tion and industry, the NSW gov­ern­ment wants to keep us depend­ent upon for­eign providers.

There was enough at LCA to be excited about to give you heart pal­pit­a­tions. If I was forced to single out one thing, it would have to be the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject (OLPC).

One of my primary interests has been the inter­ac­tions between people and tech­no­logy, and I have long felt that there has been scant atten­tion payed to how this oper­ates in devel­op­ing coun­tries. Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment is a vital goal, and an import­ant part of this ongo­ing pro­cess is the use of appro­pri­ate tech­no­logy. This can range from bare hands and rudi­ment­ary tools to com­plex com­pu­ta­tional and engin­eer­ing infra­struc­ture. The key is to select what is most applic­able in a given situation.

So-​​called ‘developed’ regions of the world might be able to accom­mod­ate expens­ive, dis­pos­able and inef­fi­cient tech­no­lo­gies and meth­od­o­lo­gies. This has guided policy, R&D, pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­bu­tion and use within this part of the world. The play­ing field is entirely dif­fer­ent in devel­op­ing regions, and so solu­tions need to be craf­ted with their needs in mind.

You can’t expect to suc­cess­fully shoe­horn a solu­tion designed for Sydney onto Mogadishu, or even onto Man­in­grida. To date, how­ever, most approaches try to do just that. This only works to an extent, if at all. In many cases it would be bet­ter to rethink things from the ground-​​up to come up with some­thing more appro­pri­ate. This doesn’t mean that you’re throw­ing out the baby with the bathwa­ter. Suc­cess­ful designs often base them­selves upon exist­ing policies, tech­no­lo­gies and ideas, and then pro­ceed to modify or redesign parts to fit their goals. The OLPC is a prime example of such an endeavour.

Whether it is suc­cess­ful or not is another mat­ter. That remains up to the gov­ern­ments which pur­chase and dis­trib­ute them, and the com­munit­ies which accept them. The greatest chal­lenge of the OLPC isn’t tech­nical, it’s socio-​​political.

What do you do when you’re in the city and need to kill some time? Watch­ing a film soun­ded like a fair option to me. The cine­matic mas­ter­piece (!), ‘Epic Movie’, caught my eye. I wasn’t expect­ing much from it at all, so I placed myself into Low Expect­a­tions Mode™, grit­ted my teeth, and went in. It went accord­ing to plan, with the LEM buf­fer­ing me some­what from almost-​​certain disappointment.

One thing struck me, how­ever. I was sit­ting through the clos­ing cred­its, and I noticed an attri­bu­tion to a char­ac­ter named ‘Steve Irwin’. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t remem­ber a Steve Irwin char­ac­ter. The clos­ing cred­its were punc­tu­ated by short video clips, each fol­lowed by a change in music as the stand­ard cred­its scrolling returned. A minute later, the screen flickered for a split-​​second, the cred­its returned, and the music sud­denly changed. Did they cut some­thing out? At the end, there was still no sign of Steve.

Was the Steve Irwin scene removed some­where between the film stu­dio and Hoyts? It could not have been done by the stu­dio — the cut was far too ama­teur­ish for that (although I might be giv­ing them too much credit, given the mediocre qual­ity of the film). While I under­stand that Steve Irwin died not too long ago, in my opin­ion that is no excuse for any­one to tell me what I can and can­not watch. The cinema prob­ably cal­cu­lated that the risk of pub­lic back­lash from main­tain­ing the scene would be greater than the oppos­i­tion to cen­sor­ship. If so, they were prob­ably right. That still doesn’t change the fact that I paid money to view a title that has been rendered incom­plete at the (likely per­ceived) behest of extremists.

Cen­sor­ship has its place in soci­ety, but this is going too far. Within reason, a free and open flow of inform­a­tion is the hall­mark of a healthy demo­cracy. Of course, the per­cep­tions of what exactly ‘reason’ is is debat­able, and that’s what lies at the heart of such debates. I prefer to err on the side of open­ness, in the same vein as ‘inno­cent until proven guilty’. I don’t like being told what to think, and what I can view. If I wanted that, I’d be using Win­dows Vista with all of its Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment nonsense.

There’s always the chance that I’m com­pletely off the mark with my accus­a­tions. I’d appre­ci­ate it if someone could verify/​dispel my claims.

The pen­guins are on the march in India. It’s won­der­ful to see the states of Ker­ala and Tamil Nadu tak­ing their future devel­op­ment ser­i­ously by adopt­ing free soft­ware on a wide scale. My par­ents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their fam­il­ies still live there. Some of them have been involved quite con­sid­er­ably in edu­ca­tional and com­put­ing pro­jects, which have unfor­tu­nately been based around Win­dows. This doesn’t help any­one in the long term (apart from the vendors con­trolling the lock-​​in), so it is ter­rific to see them work­ing towards some autonomy and freedom.

P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a cen­tury old. Howzat?!

Update: On the con­verse, we have abso­lutely appalling con­duct in the so-​​called ‘developed’ world. How can a demo­cracy func­tion when the mech­an­isms of gov­ern­ment are hid­den behind pro­pri­et­ary data con­structs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to pub­lic inform­a­tion over to cor­por­a­tions that have zero account­ab­il­ity to the popu­lace? Even their so-​​called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.

This is quite disturbing:

A 2006 Gal­lup sur­vey of Amer­ican pub­lic opin­ion found that “many Amer­ic­ans har­bour strong bias against U.S. Muslims”.

• 22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour.
• 34% believe U.S. Muslims sup­port al-​​Qaeda.
• Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.
• 39% advoc­ate that U.S. Muslims should carry spe­cial ID

The fact that such a large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion har­bours resent­ment against Muslims may explain much of America’s aggress­ive Middle East policy from Israel to Iraq. It’s a lot easier to play with the lives of mil­lions of people if you don’t think of them as civ­il­ised human beings, but ter­ror­ist supporters.

This appears to be con­sist­ent with other stud­ies:

The Media and Soci­ety Research Group of Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity con­duc­ted a sur­vey in Novem­ber of Amer­ic­ans with respect to their atti­tudes towards Muslims. Nearly half (44%) of respond­ents favoured restrict­ing the civil rights of Muslims in some way.

Such atti­tudes often stem from ignor­ance. It is exceed­ingly easy to dehu­man­ise a race/​religion/​culture if you know noth­ing about them:

A sur­vey com­mis­sioned and pub­lished by National Geo­graphic shows that a large major­ity of young Amer­ic­ans between the age of 18–24 are geo­graph­ic­ally illiterate.

Less than 15% of the sub­jects could loc­ate Iraq or Israel on a map. Only 17% could loc­ate Afgh­anistan, even though the sur­vey was car­ried out after the war. 11% could not loc­ate the U.S. on a map.

Now, I am not post­ing this to pick on Amer­ic­ans. In fact, I feel that at least to some extent these res­ults also apply to Aus­tralia and other West­ern coun­tries (e.g. the UK). We like to think of ourselves as ‘enlightened’ soci­et­ies, yet the ignor­ance many people appear to exhibit is astound­ing. There is much in the way of mis­in­form­a­tion and FUD being spread around, inten­tional and oth­er­wise. The solu­tion, I feel, is edu­ca­tion. For instance, I bet that the aver­age Aus­tralian knows very little about Islam: its beliefs, its his­tory and the cul­tures sur­round­ing it. It is all to easy to judge people and events by our own val­ues, the prin­ciples by which we were raised. People need to under­stand that what may look like ‘com­mon sense’ to them is in fact a cul­tural con­struct, and that other cul­tures may see things dif­fer­ently. This diversity is what makes the world inter­est­ing, and this abund­ance of dif­fer­ent views is what has pro­pelled human devel­op­ment since the very beginning.

Those who like to argue that Islam is a back­wards reli­gion or that its people cel­eb­rate an ana­chron­istic cul­ture ought to invest­ig­ate the 1001 Inven­tions Web site:

A unique UK based edu­ca­tional pro­ject that reveals the rich her­it­age that the Muslim com­munity share with other com­munit­ies in the UK and Europe.

1001 Inven­tions is a non-​​religious and non-​​political pro­ject seek­ing to allow the pos­it­ive aspects of pro­gress in sci­ence and tech­no­logy to act as a bridge in under­stand­ing the inter­de­pend­ence of com­munit­ies through­out human history.

Pia has very elo­quently indic­ated the divide between reli­gion and cul­ture, and in doing so I feel she has demon­strated how truly close many world reli­gions are in their core beliefs and values.