etbe - Russell Coker

Links April 2011

Sebastian Thrun gave an interesting TED talk about the Google driverless car project and explains how his main aim is to avoid all the needless road deaths that are due to human error [1]. Finally a good use for the Google street-view type data!

AnnMarie Thomas gave an interesting short TED talk about using play-dough to make circuits [2]. There are two recipies for play-dough, the one made with salt conducts well and the one made with sugar conducts poorly. That allows making wires with salty dough and insulators with the sugar dough.

John Robb has published an interesting article about a Chinese fake revolutionary group that is triggering a backlash from Chinese security forces [3]. Even if this isn’t accurate it seems like a good way to make people hate their local security forces and thus demand political change.

Chris Rock made an interesting observation, we aren’t making “progress” on racial issues, white people are getting less crazy [4].

Red Hill has an interesting article about 486 motherboards with fake cache chips that were sold in the 90’s [5]. One thing I disagree with is that they blame the customers for seeking low prices. When a white-box PC cost $2000 (which is $3000 in today’s money) it made sense to try and get the cheapest option possible. Now that major department stores sell name-brand laptops for $400 it really makes sense to buy name-brand quality rather than white-box rubbish.

IHollaBack.org is an interesting project to combat street harassment of women [6].

Psychology Today has an interesting article by Joe Navarro (former FBI counter-intelligence agent and author) about the serious implications of attempting to detect lies [7]. His main point is that most people over-estimate their ability to detect lies and because the legal system believes such claims from law enforcement officers many innocent people get found guilty – and criminals get away free!

Cory Doctorow wrote an informative article about the ways of persuading people to pay for content that can be obtained for free [8]. The main message seems to be that the big media companies are doing things the wrong way in everything that they do.

The news satire site CBS Breaking News has an interesting about page explaining their mission [9]. They stopped their automated disaster generator after the Japanese Tsunami, while I can understand them wanting to keep some good taste and be sympathetic to the plight of the Japanese people it seems that they have forgotten that there is always a disaster somewhere. The typical “bus plunge” is just as bad as the Tsunami to the people on the bus and their relatives!

Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Satoshi Kanazawa explaining how criminals don’t specialise, the psychological factors that make someone likely to commit one crime will make them likely to commit others, this makes it logical to collect DNA samples from all criminals [10]. Update: Satoshi seems to promote bad science and have bad attitudes towards minority groups, so I won’t link to any of his articles. Here is one of the many rebuttals to Satoshi articles [10B]. If Satoshi has a good point to make then I’m sure that someone else will make it and provide good supporting evidence.

Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Dave Niose about a landmark US legal case in 1948 where Vashti McCollum had to escalate to the Supreme Court to allow her children to receive secular education [11]. We need something like this in Australia now as the religious extremists are going too far in indoctrinating children.

Sam Richards gave a TED talk titled “A Radical Experiment in Empathy” which aims to teach Americans how to understand the way that people in the middle-east feel [12]. The comments suggest that his talk wasn’t successful. Of course the fact that “empathy” doesn’t have a clear definition in the English language doesn’t help, and the fact that most people don’t seem to interpret it in any way that corresponds to any dictionary and that most people seem unable to define what they mean by it makes things worse. At the moment I can’t think of any examples of successfully teaching empathy to unwilling people. The people who want to learn will do so eventually, you can have some good success in helping them to learn faster.

Kathryn Schulz gave an interesting TED talk about Being Wrong [13]. One interesting point that she makes concerns the way that people assume that people who disagree are ignorant, stupid, or evil instead of just having a different set of data or a different understanding of the same data. Of course it is possible for someone to be ignorant/stupid/evil AND have a different understanding.

Marcin Jakubowski gave an inspiring TED talk about his project to develop free blueprints that allow anyone to create all machines needed to sustain civilisation with minimal cost [14]. His Open Source Ecology project has a blog and a wiki with blueprints and files for CAD/CAM [15].

Dave Meslin gave an insightful TED talk about apathy in the political process [16]. Among other things he compares council notices that supposedly request citizen input with adverts for running shoes which encourage people to buy them. One thing he didn’t mention is the difference that technology can make, a short council advert with a QR code is probably a lot more useful than the current dense text-based adverts for today’s audience.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car.html
[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_thomas_squishy_circuits.html
[3] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html
[4] http://www.youtube.com/v/z_L7qoP17-w
[5] http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
[6] http://www.ihollaback.org/
[7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201010/detecting-lies-v-detecting-truth-serious-implications
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow
[9] http://cbsbreakingnews.com/about
[10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201008/does-it-make-sense-collect-dna-samples-misdemeanor-convict
[10B] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/snow-white-doesnt-live-here-anymore/200908/why-anti-feminism-is-illogical-unnecessary-evil-and-
[11] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201104/atheist-mom-goes-the-supreme-court-and-wins
[12] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html
[13] http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
[14] http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
[15] http://opensourceecology.org/
[16] http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html

Virgin Refunds Me $200

Virgin Mobile Excessive Billing

In my previous post about the Xperia X10 I mentioned being billed excessively for bandwidth use [1].

On Friday when I phoned Virgin I was repeatedly told that there was nothing that could be done about the bill. I demanded to be transferred to someone with authority to change my bill, I was told that wasn’t possible so I demanded to be transferred to a supervisor. As no supervisors were available at the time I had to be called back.

The “Supervisor”

Tonight I received a call from someone who’s employed to deal with disputed bills, after explaining the situation I was offered a discount of $150, that’s a 64% discount on the $234. I rejected that offer and explained that I only used 7% more data than was permitted in the month and only did so because of a previous phone call with a Virgin representative telling me that the billing period ended at the month end (which I couldn’t verify at the time because the Virgin CRM system was down [2]). Thus it doesn’t seem reasonable to charge me 7* the regular billing amount for the entire month.

I was asked what I thought would be a reasonable extra charge, I suggested 7.4% more than the $39 contract, IE an extra $3 – that wasn’t well received. Then I suggested that as the $49 “Smart Cap” plan would have covered the extra data use it could be reasonable for me to pay $49 for the month. The Virgin representative then offered me a $200 discount on the bill and I accepted that. So I got a 85.5% discount on the disputed amount, that’s not too bad, it’s enough to make this scam less profitable to Virgin (particularly when I publish information about it) and enough to make it not worth the effort of a TIO complaint.

That makes it a bill of $102.36 instead of the original $302.36. That is $29 for one month of the “Big Cap $29” for my wife, $39 for one month of the “Smart Cap $39” for me, $33.99 for Virgin excessive bandwidth charges (down from $233.99), and $0.37 “Account Charges” which is described as a “Payment Processing Fee” – presumably a fee for paying by credit card.

The Ethical Issue

To make it clear, I think that only a minority of mobile phone customers have an ability to track their bandwidth and understand their bill which equals mine. I also think that only a minority of customers are as willing as I am to argue with random people about such things. I am sure that employees of Virgin Mobile know this and they devised a billing plan to trap customers. I think that this doesn’t comply with the ethical standards that Richard Branson has advocated in several TV interviews that I have watched.

The Next Issue

Now the only remaining issue is that I signed up for an offer “3 Months Free ^ access fee on Topless, Smart & Easy caps with this phone. Save up to $267, just by buying online” which continued “Promo code: reggae Use this promo code & we’ll automatically credit your first 3 months’ access fees“, but so far they have not credited it. It’s a pity I didn’t realise this before and get it done in the same call.

Conclusion

I’m starting to regret not keeping my LG U990 Viewty with a pre-paid SIM from Lebara [3] or Amaysim [4]. Amaysim has a minimum pre-paid value of $10 which lasts for 90 days, and the SIM will then receive calls for 180 days after the credit has run out – this means $10 per 260 days (an average of $7.11 per year) if you just want to receive calls. Lebara has a period of 120 days before the number expires, so that means it costs $10 per 210 days or an average of $5.75 per year to receive calls only.

Telstra charges $150 for one year of mobile net access which allows 10G of data transfer [5]. So it seems that a good option would be an old phone and a new Android tablet. $150 per year ($12.50 per month) for mobile net access and something between $5.75 and $40 per year for phone access (depending on whether you want to make calls) gives enough savings over the cost of a post-paid plan to buy a decent tablet.

I think that the Android phone is definitely the best deal for my wife because she really only wants to carry one device, also she likes having longer conversations on the phone so the plan where she gets up to 450 minutes for $29 per month is a reasonable deal – particularly as calls to me are free and calls to her relatives will be free if they get Virgin phones (something that now seems doubtful given their over-billing).

I’m happy to carry multiple devices (my past record is having four mobile phones and getting a tailor-made coat to fit all the geek stuff I carried) so a phone and a tablet is a reasonable option for me. But the Xperia X10 will do the job for the next two years and I’ve got no great regrets.

On the up-side, Virgin did send me a couple of free movie tickets after their CRM stuff-up.

More about the Xperia X10

I’ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn’t allow replacing the kernel. I’m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for my wife and trying it out I bought one for myself. I knew about it’s problems in advance and wanted a relatively cheap phone with a large high resolution screen, and the Xperia X10 was the best match for my criteria.

Charging

There has been a recent trend towards using USB for charging devices. Sony provides a tiny wall-wart PSU which has a USB socket and a short (1m) USB cable that can be used to charge the phone from it’s PSU or from a PC. The size is really convenient, as the phone has a short battery life I’ll probably want to take the PSU to more places than I would for other phones I’ve owned.

The short USB cable saves weight and tangle when travelling, but can be inconvenient. I’m currently working on the phone while it’s plugged into my laptop, that works well and I can make calls while it’s connected. If the phone was connected to a USB port on a tower computer that was on the ground then the cable could be too short to make a call, if it was charging on a power point near the floor then I wouldn’t even be able to use the computer functionality let alone make calls without kneeling. My Viewty has a 175cm charging cable which alleviates these problems. I’ve got a 50cm USB extension cable that I use for charging my phone while I’m in bed – that is just long enough to allow me to check my email without getting out of bed!

The socket for connecting the USB cable is protected by a plastic lid that is connected by a strip of rubber. For a socket that will be used at least twice a day this isn’t a good mechanical design. The plastic slide on the LG U990 Viewty seems like a much better design.

As an aside it’s a pity that they aren’t designing cars with USB charging sockets built in. Some new cars have a socket for one USB flash drive to be attached to the radio, but really they need at least one USB charging port per seat. It would also be nice if they made power points with USB charging sockets built in, I’d buy a few of those if they made them.

Preserving the Battery

I’ve been running “Juice Defender” to reduce the battery use, at the moment it is claiming to have extended battery life by 69%. That combined with turning off things that aren’t needed (such as WiFi) has made the phone reasonably usable. I can survive more than 12 hours during which I use the phone a lot without charging it.

XperiaX10.net has an interesting review of replacement batteries [5]. I’m not going to buy them because the largest battery requires a replacement back case which prevents using an external case to prevent damage and the smaller one doesn’t provide enough of a benefit – and the design of the phone makes it difficult to change batteries so carrying a spare battery isn’t a good option.

Cursor Control Keys

The HP/Compaq iPaQs that I own from ~10 years ago have a single button that can be moved up/down/left/right to act as a cursor, it can also be pressed inwards to act as an ENTER key (or whatever the application might want for a fifth function). Having some sort of hardware cursor control is really handy, I often end up deleting several characters when I want to replace one because getting the cursor onto the desired character is too difficult.

Adding more hardware keys would require making the phone bigger, but that would be fine by me. As described in my previous post about phone cameras I’d like to have a phone that’s thicker to have a better camera with a greater focal distance for a larger lens [2].

Core Phone Functionality

I really miss having separate green and red buttons for making/answering calls and for rejecting/ending calls.

A really common operation is to call back the last person who called. To do this on my LG U990 Viewty I press the green button twice on my home screen which took less than a second. On the Xperia this involves selecting the phone icon from the home screen, then the “call log” icon, then the call that is desired, then the “Call user” line. That is four presses in different parts of the screen compared to pressing the same hardware button twice. I’m investigating dialer applets right now, the “Dialler One” applet has a good interface for calling people who have called or been called recently – but it still requires two presses on different parts of the screen. With my old Viewty I could call back the last person by feel without even looking at the phone!

In the last 6 years the standard functionality of phones has been to include multiple profiles for noises. My Viewty has profiles named “Normal”, “Silent”, “Vibrate only”, “Outdoor”, “Headset” (automatically selected when a headset is connected), and three “customised” ones. The Xperia has only one setting, and that is three icon presses away from the home screen. It does allow changing the volume by hardware switches on the side which includes going to vibrate-only and silent mode. While this is useful, it’s not the best way that two precious hardware keys could be used. It also doesn’t allow control over all the different notifications, I’d like to be able to activate a noise profile and have every application respond to it in an appropriate manner. This is a deficiency in Android 2.1 not in the phone itself.

In many ways this phone has the worst phone functionality of any mobile phone I’ve ever owned, I think that this is more the fault of the Android designers than Sony Ericsson.

Android Updates

Sony had previously claimed that they wouldn’t support Android later than 2.1. Now Sony has announced that they will support “Gingerbread” – Android 2.3 [3]. So one of the major complaints about the Xperia will soon be addressed.

Tethering

The build of Android that the Xperia runs at the moment doesn’t support Wifi tethering. I’m currently using with Easy Tether for USB tethering [4]. It’s not free software and requires it’s own code to run as root on your Linux system that is being tethered (which is easily locked down with SE Linux), but it basically works. The down-side with Easy Tether is that it proxies all the connections so you can’t run traceroute etc and in the free version you can’t use UDP.

K9 Mail

K9 Mail fixes some of the problems in the default Android email program that I described in my previous post. It allows selection of SSL with a default port of 993 for IMAPs. It uses mail.example.com as the mail server address for an email address of user@example.com (so I’ll add a “mail” CNAME to the domains I run). When I connected initially it told me that the SSL key was not signed by a CA and asked if I wanted to save it or reject it – this is the correct and desired functionality. It also correctly parses URLs from the email (or at least has fixed the bug that I discovered in the default email app).

One problem I’ve found with K9 is that it seems to timeout on large folders. This is probably partly the fault of Virgin Mobile being slow for IP access, but I wonder whether K9 doesn’t pipeline IMAP commands as Virgin can do bulk transfer at reasonable speeds (80KB/s) and it mainly fails on latency (900ms being typical). The result is that a folder with more than 500 messages that need to be copied to the phone will never get synchronised. When I started reading mail on my phone I had to move mail from some of the bigger folders into other folders to avoid timeouts. As an aside the amount of time I’ve saved by reading email on the go has already paid for the phone.

Mediascape

The Sony Mediascape software is used for categorising photos. One function of this is to assign names to photos, the names come from the contact list so if you photograph someone who you can’t phone then you need to add a contact list entry for them. This also means that you couldn’t conveniently add names to non-humans, I guess I could have added a contact list entry “Mr Crash Dump” for photos of system crash logs. But a bigger problem is that it decides what is a picture of a person, a picture of someone who is not centered in the photo or a profile picture can be regarded as not a photo of a person and therefore not subject to being associated with a contact list. Finally when selecting a name for a picture it displays the entire contacts list in a small font instead of displaying favorites, I have the phone numbers of many clients in my contacts list who I will never photograph…

Mediascape just isn’t much good. If I feel the need to do something serious in this regard I’ll search the app store for something free that’s better.

Protection

For $15 each I bought one grey and one clear “Gel Case” from J2K. This case covers the sides and back of the phone with a firm rubber layer that will hopefully allow it to bounce rather than break. It also extends slightly higher than the screen which should stop the screen being scratched if the phone is left face-down on a hard surface on the vibrate setting.

One problem with the Gel Case is that by it’s design it has to cover the buttons on the sides, due to a design or manufacturing problem the clear case that my wife uses can press slightly on the shutter button which disables the three main buttons on the front. So when the menu or back button stops working she has to slightly move the Gel Case out from the side. I’m thinking of just cutting out a section of the Gel Case there, that will make it difficult to press the shutter button, but you can use the touch screen to take photos and there doesn’t seem to be any other use for the shutter button so this shouldn’t be a problem. The clear and grey cases have different designs, the grey one has a hole over the raised Sony logo which makes it fit a little better as well as not having the shutter problem, so it seems to be a later design – I don’t know whether all clear cases have the same problem but I recommend that someone who only has one Xperia X10 get the grey case just in case.

Web Browsing

I’m experimenting with using my own web proxy to compress the data sent to the phone. Unfortunately the Android settings for a web proxy only apply to the main web browser, not to all the other applications that use web services. Also the built-in web browser requires pressing the “settings” hardware button followed by at least two touch-screen presses to change between windows or close a window and it doesn’t seem to support making the short-press action be to open a link in a new window. So I will have to find another web browser to use.

Bandwidth Use

The “3G Watchdog” applet is really good for tracking the data transfer and optionally cutting off 3G access before the quota is exceeded. Unfortunately Virgin has already sent me a bill with $234 in extra charges for bandwidth use because I used 1.6G instead of my 1.5G quota. A Virgin representative had told me over the phone that the billing period would be based on the end of the month, so while every calendar month has had less than 1.5G used because I used more than average in the end of March and the start of April that counts as excess data in the 14th March to 13th April period.

I’m going to appeal this to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, I don’t think that it’s reasonable that I should be billed almost 7* the normal bill for exceeding the quota by 7.4% based on following the instructions of a Virgin employee. While I could have read the previous bill that they sent me to discover the end of billing period dates, I don’t think that I should be expected to distrust everything that a Virgin employee says. If they billed me an extra $20 then I’d just pay it, but $234 is unreasonable.

Conclusion

Since using the phone I’ve found significant benefits in web browsing and reading email with the major limitation being the small screen (relative to a Netbook or Laptop). So if I was to buy another phone I would probably consider a Dell Streak which seems to be the largest Android phone on the market at the moment.

Given the amount of use that I’ve got I would be happy to spend more money and therefore consider a more expensive phone. But I don’t regret the decision to save money by getting an Xperia X10.

Finally when a telco tries to stick me with a $234 excess charge it really detracts from the value of having a phone contract. If I end up having to pay that then it’s half the value of a smart-phone lost in one telco scam. This is enough to make a contract with Virgin a bad option, after this contract expires I may use VOIP and a pre-paid SIM from Telstra NextG if their network is still the best. Another possibility is to just use a small tablet and skip having a mobile phone, email and Jabber plus SMS from the people who lack net access will probably do.

Who is the Best Free Software Advocate?

TED is offering an audition for future TED.com talks in New York on the 24th of May [1]. It would be good if we could have someone advocate Free Software there. The audition is a 1 minute talk, the speakers who pass the audition may be offered full ~17 minute lecture slots at the next TED conference, and some of the minute long talks will be published on TED.com (which has many viewers).

Larry Lessig has previously given a TED talk about laws that strange creativity [2], while this is fairly typical of the type of talk that TED promotes (in terms of politics and presentation quality), a talk doesn’t have to be so well produced to make the grade. Firstly some TED talks seem to be accepted with a lower presentation quality due to the speaker having some special knowledge – a TED presentation doesn’t have to be so slick if the speaker is sufficiently famous or the talk is particularly interesting. Also there are TEDx events which are organised independently, have less international attention, and therefore less competition for speaking slots. Larry gave a more recent talk at the TEDxNYED event about re-examining the remix and lessons that people on the political left can learn from conservatives about remix legislation [3], this talk is much more informal and also unfortunately has a much lower recording quality. But as it’s published on TED.com it will still get a large audience.

Promoting Free Software to the TED audience (which includes many senior politicians and other VIPs) would be a major achievement. Even a TEDx talk that gets published on TED.com would get seen by a huge and important audience.

Who is capable of giving such a talk? Larry got a standing ovation for his TED talk so it seems most likely that he can give another TED talk without going through the public audition process, but it seems that he has other priorities at this time. Probably most people who have more than 10 years experience doing Free Software development and who have a reasonable amount of experience giving lectures at Free Software conferences could at least manage the TEDx quality and a good portion of the speakers from any of the major Linux conferences could potentially give a talk of TED quality if they spent enough time preparing it.

What methods of funding are available? There are probably very few people who would travel far to give a 1 minute talk, Mark Shuttleworth is one person who can afford to travel for such things and who could potentially give a great TED talk (his story is the sort of thing that seems popular with the TED audience). Would any of the Free Software organisations sponsor someone to give such an audition? I would support having Debian funds spent on travel for one of the better Debian advocates to travel to NY for the audition – I’m sure that there are many other Free Software things that can be done in NY to help justify the expense. Maybe this would be something that is suitable for corporate sponsorship.

Finally it seems like a good idea to create some very short talks anyway. It would probably be useful to have leaders of the Free Software community publish minute-long video talks about their favorite projects anyway. In some ways a short talk is a higher form of art than a long lecture, I think that the best talk I ever gave was my 5 minute lightning talk about installing SE Linux.

Update

TED now has a blog post with a FAQ about the talks [4]. Larry Lessig is the first example they cite of how to give a great TED talk!

Also you can submit a video without attending New York and there is no restriction on publishing the video elsehere. So if you want to make a great 1 minute video about something important you can just send it to TED and see what happens and then publish it on Youtube or one of the other video services too.

Links March 2011

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about Harper-Collins attempts to make self-destructing books [1]. They claim that a traditional book falls apart after being read 26 times (a claim that Cory disputes based on personal experience working at libraries) and want ebooks to be deleted after being borrowed so often. Really the copy-right fascists are jumping the shark here.

Socialogical Images has an interesting archive of adverts for supposed treatments for autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, asperger syndrome, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder [2]. The New York University Child Study Center conducted the campaign of fake ransom notes to describe a psychological difference as something that kidnaps a child. The possibility that parents should to some extent learn to adapt to their child’s nature rather than fixing them with medication is something that most people can’t seem to understand.

William Cronon has written an interesting analysis of the way “Conservative”, lobby groups work [3]. They are more organised than I expected.

The Reid Report has a good summary of some of the corporat issues related to the Japanese nuclear melt-down [4], apparently the company that runs the reactors decided to delay using sea-water in the hope that their investment could be salvaged and thus put everyone at increased risk. I think that this proves that reactors shouldn’t be privately owned.

Ian Lowe wrote a good summary of the reasons why Australia should not be using nuclear power when we believed that the Fukushima disaster was over [5]. But it turns out that the Fukushima problems were worse than we thought and the melt-down is getting worse.

Christopher Smart wrote a good analysis of Microsoft’s latest attempt to extort money from Linux users where they assert patent claims over Android [6]. He points out that .NET/Mono is a risk to Linux.

Major Keary wrote a positive review of “Snip Burn Solder Shred” which is a book about “Seriously geeky stuff to make with your kids” [7]. Sounds like a fun book.

The internal network of RSA has been cracked in some way that apparently weakens the security of SecureID, Bruce Schneier’s blog comments section has an interesting discussion of the possibilities [8]. I expect that it’s a fairly bad attack, if the attack was minor then surely the RSA people would have told us all the details.

Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about The Magic Washing Machine [9]. He describes how his family benefited when his mother first got a washing machine and how this resulted in better education as his mother had more time to get library books for her children. It seems that deploying more electric washing machines should be a priority for improving education and food supplies in third-world countries.

Paul Root Wolpe gave an interesting and disturbing TED talk about bio-engineering [10]. He catalogues the various engineered animals and talks about the potential for future developments.

Ron Rosenbaum wrote an interesting and insightful article for Slate about Maj. Harold Hering who’s military career ended after he asked how to determine whether a nuclear launch order is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president [11]. The question never received a good answer, this is a good reason for moving towards nuclear disarmament – and for Americans to vote for the sanest and most intelligent candidate in the presidential elections.

Eythor Bender gave an inspiring TED talk about human exoskeletons [12]. He had live demonstrations on stage of a soldier using an exo-skeleton to carry a heavy backpack and a woman who suffered a severe spinal-cord injury walking after being in a wheel-chair for 19 years.

Is Asperger Syndrome a Good Thing?

A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn’t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides – even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won’t just end there.

Positive Aspects of AS

The main positive aspect of AS is intense concentration on topics of Special Interest, if a Special Interest is something that is related to a high paying job (such as computer programming) then that’s a really good thing. Of course a Special Interest that isn’t related to well paid employment or for which most people get paid little and only a lucky few get paid really well (such as music) isn’t going to be a good thing by objective criteria.

It seems that most people on the Autism Spectrum have sensory advantages over Neuro-Typical people (NTs). Better vision and hearing are quite common. It’s good to be able to notice small and quiet things that most people miss, but that’s not a benefit that most people seem to particularly desire. The down-side is that loud sounds and bright lights are more unpleasant and it’s easy to be distracted by things that other people won’t notice.

The desire to give lectures has obvious benefits for any profession where giving lectures is a large part of the work, this is one reason why so many Aspies end up in academic careers. The down-side is that this is usually combined with a lack of ability to recognise when people aren’t interested in receiving a lecture.

Things can work out quite well for people on the Autism Spectrum who have a special interest that relates to a well paying career, who don’t have any problems that prevent them from getting and keeping a job.

Neutral Aspects of AS

On forums some Aspies report that they don’t want to have friends, presumably their needs for friendship are met by the interaction with other forum members. As far as I can determine they are happy like that. I’m sure that such people are a lot happier than people who want friends and don’t have any.

The incidence of asexuality among Aspies is apparently a lot higher than among the general population (something like 30% vs 1%). This isn’t a bad thing for those people (I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that asexuals are less happy than people with average sexual desire), but it is evidence to suggest that Aspies are not the next stage in human evolution.

Negative Aspects of AS

The DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS has as section C “The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning“, in the proposed changes for DSM-V it’s merged into “Autistic Disorder” with section D being “Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning” [1]. These seem like clear disadvantages, it doesn’t seem possible to be diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum without having some real disadvantage.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) seem to usually be correlated with Sensory Processing Disorder. Symptoms of SPD can include a lack of tolerance for noise, lights, certain types of clothing, dirt, and lots of other things as well as being physically clumsy. SPD is not in the diagnostic criteria for any ASD but it seems that most people on the Spectrum experience it to some degree and many regard it as the worst down-side of Autism.

Spiritual Aspects of AS

I’ve seen a claim that AS gives them some advantage over NTs in terms of spiritual development. When someone manages to prove that their God exists or whatever other supernatural belief they have is based on fact then I’ll consider this possibility.

I think it’s worth noting however that most religions seem to place some emphasis on humility, that seems to go against claiming that one’s neuro-type is genetically predisposed to being successful at religion.

Conclusion

There are many positive, neutral, and negative aspects of AS that I didn’t list, I only mentioned some of the more common ones. How the positive and negative aspects compare differs on an individual basis, some people seem to be better off by objective criteria. But it seems that the best outcome is to have a different life experience that isn’t objectively worse, which usually seems to involve a career in computers, science, engineering, or academia.

Really if we were better then the Neuro-Typical people (NTs) would envy us, and I haven’t seen much evidence of that. The NTs who do think that AS is a good thing seem to have little knowledge of AS.

[1] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=97

Some Postfix Scripts for dealing with Outbound Spamming

I’ve just written some small scripts to help me manage spam emergencies on a mail server. I’ve been doing this thing with a bit of manual effort for a while, but after having done it once from a phone I want to optimise it a bit to reduce painful typing.

My observation is that when a system I run is used as an outbound mail relay for spamming I will notice this reasonably quickly by the queues getting big. Some portion of mail that is queued is delayed due to general network issues and anti-spam measures that neither accept nor reject mail cause a typical spam message to be more likely to be queued than a typical non-spam message. So I look for accounts that send large amounts of mail.

The biggest mail server I run (and the only one to have an outbound spam problem) is configured to not allow users to fake their sender address (IE use an address from gmail.com or another server) unless they pay extra. So the spam I deal with tends to have a valid origin email address that I can use.

Queue Counting

The following command provides a sorted list of the accounts that have the most mail in the queue. This usually means a maximum of 2 or 3 spammers at the end of the list:

The following function declaration makes the command get-top-sender find the sender with the largest number of queue entries (which has been a spammer every time I’ve checked such things) and assign their email address to the environment variable $TOP_SENDER. It has to be a shell function so that the environment variable will be set in the context of the shell and available to child processes.

function get-top-sender() { TOP_SENDER_LINE=$(mailq|grep ^[A-F0-9]|cut -c 42-80|sort |uniq -c|sort -n|tail -1) ; export TOP_SENDER=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE|cut -f2 -d\ ) ; TOP_COUNT=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE|cut -f1 -d\ ); echo "Top Sender is $TOP_SENDER with $TOP_COUNT messages" ; }

Viewing the Queue

The following script uses the first parameter or the environment variable $TOP_SENDER to specify the user who’s mail should be read. In the normal course of events user email won’t be read by the sysadmin, but if we are to determine whether a slew of email is spam or not there’s no other way. So far I haven’t seen a large number of queued messages not be spam, but I expect it’ll happen eventually and the user will be happy that I checked it instead of locking their account and deleting all the queued mail. For readers who don’t do sysadmin work, this is why we always have entries in the Terms of Service about the possibility of your email being read to fix technical problems or to investigate possible breaches of the ToS from your end.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
mkdir -p ~/tmp/$$
cd ~/tmp/$$
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
TOP_SENDER="$1"
fi
if [ "$TOP_SENDER" = "" ]; then
echo "Specify the sender on the command-line or in \$TOP_SENDER"
exit 1
fi
for n in $(mailq|grep ^[A-F0-9].*$TOP_SENDER| cut -c 1-10) ; do
FILE=$(echo $n|sed -e "s/^$.$/\/var\/spool\/postfix\/deferred\/\1\/\1/" -e "s/ .*$//")
if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
postcat "$FILE" > $n
else
echo "File $FILE missing, probably active"
fi
done
less *
rm -rf ~/tmp/$$

Note that this needs to be done with a single less command so that I can terminate it by pressing q and easily go to the next file with “:n“. It does waste some server resources by running postcat on all queue files relating to the user in question, but that doesn’t matter, servers are supposed to be powerful enough to cope with some inefficiency in processing uncommon operations.

The Final Command

After that I have a script that connects by ssh to all outbound mail relays and deletes bad messages from the queues and then connects to the database server to lock the account that was used for sending the mail. I’m not publishing it because it’s specific to the servers I run.

So when NAGIOS reports that the queue is too large I have one script to find the most likely culprit, one script to view the queued email from that account, and a final script to lock the account and purge the spam.

I’ve also added a reminder of the command names to /etc/motd as I don’t want to be running ls and set on a phone to discover command names that I’ve forgotten.

Any suggestions for improvements to this will be welcome.

Effective Computers for Schools

Sam Varghese has written an article that is very skeptical of the educational value of the OLPC project [1].

Are Laptops Any Good for Schools?

Sam cites an article in the New York Times by Winnie Hu about schools removing laptop programs due to a lack of success [2]. Winnie’s article gives an example of a school shutting a program because of getting new teachers who lacked computer skills and some examples of schools which had issues with the repair cost. The solution to that would be computers that are more robust and easier to use – by all accounts the OLPC systems are solidly constructed and easy to use!

It is claimed that using laptops doesn’t increase test scores. Using only test scores to compare educational methods is a way to lose, probably any school which does nothing other than try to increase test scores is worth avoiding. One example from Winnie’s article is a report by Mr. Warschauer of “students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online“. What value can you place on having students develop books for poor children in other countries and debate Supreme Court cases? If this sort of program became popular then it would lead to the countries which do it becoming better places to live in future decades!

Mr. Warschauer also claims that “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful“. I would go further than that, I think that providing the educational environment that involves international charity work and analysis of important court cases would lead to students having the skills to become good engineers, designers, and artists who work for people like George Lucas and Steve Jobs. No matter what you might do the vast majority of children will not grow up to be like George Lucas and Steve Jobs, there is a very limited number of positions for such people. But those people employ a huge number of creative people who do interesting and enjoyable work for good pay.

I don’t think that Winnie’s article supports criticism of the OLPC project. I don’t think that Winnie’s article even contains sufficient evidence to match the headline.

Playing Games

Sam also cites an article about the misuse of school computers for playing games [3]. Of course there are ways of limiting access to games based on time etc. For a Linux system you could have a root cron job that runs chmod on /usr/games at various times, and preventing users from easily running programs that they install isn’t difficult.

Not that games are all bad, the flash-based games on www.physicsgames.net do teach kids some things about physics – although I admit that much of that could be learned by playing with balls, skate-boards, etc.

The Problem with the OLPC Project

I think that the policy change to make OLPC systems only available to disadvantaged children was a mistake. The “give one get one” program was a great idea, maybe not the most effective way of getting funding but good for getting developers. While the new Sugar on a Stick project to put the OLPC GUI on a bootable USB device [4] it doesn’t compare well to having dedicated hardware IMHO.

Minimal Use of Computers

I have previously written about the weight of school bags and how laptops can alleviate the risk of health problems related to carrying heavy text books [5]. Since that time ebook readers and tablets have become incredibly cheap. Ebook readers are really light and the recent tablets are also very light (particularly the smaller ones). It seems to me that every school should at least be moving towards every student having an ebook reader and to use ebooks for all books that are part of the curriculum.

At the moment there are a bunch of tablets on sale for about $150, that includes tablets that can access the Internet via Wifi or via 3G – and a cheap 3G plan costs less than $150 per annum. If tablets were used for some of the computer tasks related to schools then a lot of the difficulty of repairing hardware would be removed. Tablets don’t offer as many options for messing up the software configuration and if the hardware breaks it’s easy to transfer the data onto a new tablet from the cloud – with a maximum cost of $150 to replace the hardware.

Also a cloud-based computing model could permit students to access all the same data from school and home while using desktop computers at both locations.

Current Success

Natalie Craig wrote an interesting article for The Age about “The Lab” – a drop-in computer center for kids on the Autism Spectrum run by Dale Linegar and Stefan Schutt [6]. The fact that kids who have communication difficulties can find it easier to communicate electronically should be fairly obvious to everyone in the free software community, but the creation of an organisation to support such kids is noteworthy – I think that such centers should be funded by the government and run in every city.

Salman Khan gave an interesting TED talk about his project the Khan Academy [7] which is an online video-based teaching system that evolved from some Youtube videos he produced to tutor his cousins. Salman pointed out that his cousins said that they would rather watch his videos than have him teach them in person, it seems that they liked being able to pause and rewind the talk as well as avoiding the pressure of human interaction. The Khan Academy has videos in Adobe flash format, but conveniently they have download links so those of us who don’t have the Flash plugin can still view the content [8].

One of the interesting things about the Khan Academy is that in school use the videos are being assigned to kids as homework and the class time is used for teaching children to do worked examples – what has traditionally been homework.

So it seems that there are real examples of special-needs kids and average kids benefiting from different types of electronic learning.

Conclusion

I think that almost everything about the education system is broken. I also think that in many ways the education system has reached a local maximum, so there is no small way of improving things, and adding computers without making any of the significant changes needed to fix the big problems probably can’t do a lot of good. In spite of this computers can provide some real benefits and I expect that those benefits can be better than the benefits of other potential ways of spending the money (IE it’s worth the opportunity cost). I also have no doubt that almost anything can give a negative result if done badly enough, so I don’t interpret examples of computer use failing in a school as anything other than evidence of a failing school.

While the Khan Academy has some results that seem very positive I think that’s only the first step of what needs to be done. It also seems to be based around users who have good Internet access which often isn’t the case in places where the OLPC is being deployed. This implies that we need to get systems like the Khan Academy designed to operate in a disconnected manner, maybe with a remote server that’s not connected to the Internet. This should be possible if funding is available.

Sam suggested that there needs to be a scientific study of the effectiveness of the OLPC. I think that every project which involves significant amounts of public funding should be researched to ensure that it’s an effective use of resources. 400,000 laptops is going to cost something more than $40,000,000 so it seems reasonable to devote a few person-years of research to determine how effective they are and which of the possible ways of using an OLPC will give the best results.

I am confident that a good study of the effectiveness of the OLPC would demonstrate that it provides real educational benefits when correctly incorporated into an educational program. I also expect that such a study would show some significant differences in the effectiveness of various ways of using them. But we shouldn’t be relying on confidence, we need some test results.

Radiation Poisoning

There have been ongoing news reports about the nuclear power plant problems in Japan following the earth-quake and tidal-wave. The Wikipedia page about the Fukushima I nuclear accidents seems to have the best current summary of the situation [1].

I think it’s worth noting that Potassium Iodide can be ingested to reduce the incidence of thyroid damage in the event of radiation leaks (which apparently usually contain radioactive iodine). KI can be ingested immediately after exposure and there’s apparently little harm in taking it before a time of risk (it can be good to take it for a couple of days before exposure). So getting some KI right now might be a good idea for people who live in the vicinity. Apparently the Japanese government have issued iodine tablets to the people closest to the disaster, but it’s probably worth spreading the word to people who are further away.

Leigh Krietsch Boerner gave a good explanation of how Iodine significantly reduces the risk of thyroid cancer [2].

The Nuclear War Survival Skills site has a good description of how to make your own KI solution [3]. This probably isn’t a viable option for anyone in Japan unless they can raid a chemistry lab as mail-order of chemicals will surely be too slow. This is probably something that’s best considered for future plans for anyone who lives near a nuclear reactor.

It would be good if airport pharmacies sold packs of KI tablets for the benefit of travelers who don’t live near a reactor but who are visiting a country that has them. It’s something I’d like to buy before my next trip to Japan.

Climate Action Now Rally Melbourne 12th March

This morning I attended the Climate Action Now rally to support a pollution tax [1]. The event was well attended, my personal estimate of the number of people there was there there was definitely more than 3,000 people, and maybe as many as 8,000 or more.

I spoke to an employee of the APS who was on guard duty, he described the event as “big” and said that they don’t usually have events that are so well attended. He gave a personal estimate of 5,000 people. While he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the APS he was presumably more skillful at making such estimations than most people. I expect that he also gave a conservative estimate, so it could have been a lot more than that.

There were some people using comedy to make political points. Below is a picture of the carbon monster, what you can’t see is the man who was handing out coal BBQ fuel for people to feed the monster, children appeared to enjoy that! Also there were three people dressed as Gollum representing the Liberal party (the Australian conservative party), I was unable to get all three in one picture.

Some vegans had a banner supporting the VeganEasy.org site [2]. Being vegetarian can make a significant impact on human environmental impact including on the amount of electricity used (from coal or other sources).

Here are pictures taken looking East over the main part of the rally, looking North towards the building at 3 Treasury place from the other side of the road, looking South over the lawns where people who didn’t like being crowded gathered, and looking West over part of the main crowd. The picture looking South shows another view of the Carbon Monster and his accomplice with a sign “haven’t you had enough dear?“.

When I first arrived there were two main sections to the rally. They weren’t discrete (there was no empty space between them) but they acted separately because there was no PA system that could make enough noise to be heard in both sections. At one stage the West section was chanting while there were speeches in the East section. Below is a picture looking out over the West section as people had just turned to go home. This area was entirely packed when I first arrived.

The rally was really a family event. There were some grey-haired people wearing t-shirts explaining that they wanted to create a better world for their grand-children and there were also some young children. At the end of the event some children used cardboard signs as toboggans to slide down a steep grassy bank near the main rally area – recycling!!! I deliberately chose my photos to try and avoid including children, but even so you can see a few in the background of some of them.

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The Ethical Issue

The Next Issue

Conclusion

Charging

Preserving the Battery

Cursor Control Keys

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Update

Positive Aspects of AS

Neutral Aspects of AS

Negative Aspects of AS

Spiritual Aspects of AS

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The Problem with the OLPC Project

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Conclusion

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