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Election Tomorrow
On Saturday we will have a Victorian state election. As usual for state elections most people will vote on issues related to the federal government, the mainstream media has little coverage of state politics and people seem to vote on what they see on TV. Presumably that means we have a good chance of having a similar situation to the last Federal Election where the Labor and Liberal parties each won 72 seats in the lower house and Labor formed a coalition with the Greens MP and three independents.
The independent MPs didn’t give much explanation of the reasons for their choices. But it seems that a large motivating factor was the Greens success in the senate, as Labor was more willing to work with the Greens that meant that if a Liberal based coalition had won in the lower house there was a good chance of a Double Dissolution.
The Liberal party can’t make deals
In a world where sanity prevailed the result of this would be the Liberal party firstly adjusting their policies to appeal to Greens voters and secondly trying to make some deals with the Greens at a high level to allow the possibility of a Liberal/Green coalition government. While there are substantial policy conflicts between the Liberal and Green parties it does seem possible to get a coalition working if both sides accept that they won’t get everything that they want. Forming government and getting only some of your policy implemented seems like a better option than being in the opposition and getting almost none of your policy implemented. Also there is no reason why we couldn’t have a Liberal/Labor coalition government – in the next decade it seems unlikely that any election will deliver a result that doesn’t have Liberal + Labor comprising more than 50% of the seats in both houses.
But it seems that sanity doesn’t prevail. The Liberal party have put the Greens below Labor on their preferences for the upper house and on their How To Vote cards for the lower house [1]. This greatly increases the probability of Labor scoring an outright win. It also seems likely to drive a wedge against the conservative voters who want to conserve the environment.
The Sad State of the Liberal Party
Kevin Andrews (Liberal MP and former minister) wrote a strange and amusing diatribe titled “The ideological drive behind the Greens” [2]. Here is what I regard as the best part:
First, those who vote Green as their primary vote: “This is the Don’s Party group that used to be in the ALP in the ‘60s and ‘70s: young university students or graduates, frequently working or still studying in academia, no kids, often gay, arts and drama type degrees or architecture where they specialise is designing environmentally friendly suburbs, agnostic or atheist, often US or Canadian refugees from capitalism, but well paid in professional consulting or media jobs.â€
According to the CIA World Factbook [3] the median age of Australians is 37.5, the majority of the population were born in 1972 or later. The film Don's_Party was released in 1976 and was about the 1969 election. While Kevin Andrews was old enough to remember the 1969 election clearly the majority of the Australian population weren’t even born before that election and isn’t old enough to have watched the movie when it was in the cinemas. Kevin is making it quite clear that he and his party represent a time that is past. The rest of that paragraph is filled with strangeness that is a good sample of the rest of his article.
The sad thing is that he seems to think that this appeal to the minority of people who are old enough to remember the 1969 election, bigoted enough to appreciate the discrimination against homosexuals (which is a long standing Liberal policy), and politically clueless enough to support McCarthyist policies against alleged communists.
We need a decent and sane conservative party to represent the decent and sane Australian citizens who are politically conservative. I am beginning to doubt that the Liberal party could ever be reformed enough to become such a party.
Just over a month ago I bought a Wikireader [1] from Officeworks (an Australian chain of stores that sell all manner of office supplies). It cost only $99, thanks to Brianna for informing me about this [2]. When I purchased my Wikireader an Officeworks employee had to get one from the back office and told me that I was the first person to buy one. I suggested to him that when a product isn’t mentioned in their advertising and isn’t put on the shelves it’s unlikely to sell in quantity and that they shouldn’t rely on bloggers to promote what is possibly one of the most desirable products that they stock.
The Wikireader stores a copy of the text of the English language version of Wikipedia on a micro-SD card. They have a service whereby you can get two updates posted to you every year for $29, which would make it pretty close to free once postage and the cost of the micro-SD cards is taken into account. Also you can download new content. I have no immediate plans for updating my Wikireader as the content is more than good enough to answer idle questions while waiting for a bus but as it’s lacking external links due to no net access and images it can’t be used for serious Wiki reading IMHO.
Brianna has documented the process of updating a Wikireader to add more content [3], she added the Chinese version and discovered that inter-wiki links are preserved! I have no immediate plans to add extra content (I don’t know any other language well enough to read an encyclopaedia). Also an 8GB MicroSD card (which is the minimum requirement to use multiple languages) costs $35 and is a significant portion of the original purchase price.
In terms of functionality the device is pretty good. The screen is not back-lit, but if it was then the two AA batteries wouldn’t last anywhere near a year. The screen is not high resolution and the touch functionality isn’t particularly accurate or sensitive – but I guess that’s a necessary trade-off to get the $99 price. The Wikipedia content seems quite complete, so far the only page which I found to be missing was the bio of an Australian architect, I’m not sure if his page was removed from the Wikireader to save space or whether my device has a snapshot that predates the addition of the page.
The Wikipedia page about downloading the database is interesting [4], it’s 6GB of compressed data for the text of the English pages (not including history or talk pages) and for years they haven’t even tried to provide a dump of the images. So I guess that a Wikireader that displays pictures is out of the question.
The Wikireader has a parental filter, in my quick tests the only page that has been blocked is “Sexual Intercourse“, I could read all about safe-sex, infidelity, and lots of other related “adult” topics without being asked for a password. It also shows pages about “goatse” and other related things without asking for a password – NB if you don’t know what “goatse” is then you probably don’t want to learn, trust me that it’s something that most people won’t want their children to learn about. The filter is so bad that I think they shouldn’t include it, it will just give people false confidence. It’s OK to sell a cheap device that is designed to give a detailed description of goatse etc on request to anyone, but IMHO it’s not OK to sell such a device with a claim that it is “kid safe” and has “parental controls“. Note that holding down the History button will allow you to clear your history – this is useful if you have just verified that goatse isn’t blocked and you want to give the device to a young child.
There is a button to give a random page, I believe that this would be more useful if it had some metric to make it more often return pages that might be interesting. It could weight the randomness by the length of the page (usually a longer page is more interesting to more people and has more links to other pages) or by some other metric that indicates the potential popularity. Random links often get me pages about obscure country towns and other things that probably aren’t of interest to people who don’t live near them.
But overall this is a great product, $99 is not much to pay, and I recommend getting one!
Guy Deutscher wrote an interesting article for the New York Times about how language shapes how we think [1]. The example of people who have no language construct for self-sentered directions and how they describe things is particularly interesting.
TED published an interesting interview with Shaffi Mather – the founder of India’s first organised ambulance service (with differential pricing based on ability to pay) [2]. He also talks about founding schools in small towns and his BribeBusters.com company.
World Changing has an interesting article about a legislative change in California that allows car-sharing of personal vehicles [3]. The concept is that if you own a car that you don’t use most of the time (as is usually the case) then you can contract with a car-share company to share it to others when you don’t need it. This saves the car share company from the capital expense of owning cars and thus allows them to place cars in remote locations that wouldn’t otherwise be financially viable (IE the street in front of random people who sign up). The person who owns the car may get about $2 per hour for the time when it’s rented. The car owner gets to specify when the car may be available.
Charles Stross wrote an entertaining and informative rant about Steam-Punk [4]. He cites Michael Moorcock’s informative essay about Starship Troopers and other right-wing apologist themes in sci-fi [5] as well as China Mieville’s essay about politics and The Lord of the Rings [6].
Glenn Greenwald wrote an informative article about the New York Times defending torture by the US military [7]. I have unsubscrubed from the @Times mailout and will avoid citing NYT articles wherever possible. I sent the URL for Glenn’s article to the NYT feedback address but I don’t expect them to take any notice.
Fate Of the World is a new computer game that’s in beta where you have a simulation of the next 200 years of climate change [8]. It’s currently in beta for Windows only, they hope to have a Mac version in March and have no stated plans for Linux support.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for Locus about Sci-Fi fans and cosmopolitanism – taking the best option after consideration rather than doing what’s locally fashionable [9]. He uses the term “Martian” to refer to some of the viewpoints, but it seems to me that “Vulcan” would be more appropriate.
The Wall St Journal has an interesting article about people who manufacture drugs that aren’t yet illegal, every time one drug gets banned they market a new one [10]. This is yet another example of the “War on Drugs” doing more harm than good, instead of taking drugs which have well known effects (that can be treated by hospitals) people are taking weird new drugs and no-one knows what will happen to them.
Mieke Meijer in the Netherlands has invented a new product known as “newspaper wood” [11], it involves gluing paper together to create a form of chip-board that keeps the layers of paper distinct to give a result like wood grain. The World Changing commentary suggests that this could give a “heirloom quality” to objects made with it, while I’m dubious about that I think that the surface would be pleasing to look at in a kitchen or office environment.
Ze Frank gave an interesting TED talk about unusual social projects that he’s run on the Internet [12]. This includes an attempt to reconcile Red and Blue voters after the 2008 US presidential election, the creation of inspirational songs, and remixing the “Whip Somebody’s Ass” song. This is really worth watching!
The Chronicle Review has an interesting article by someone who is paid to complete academic assignments for other people [13]. The scope of cheating that is claimed is profound. Naturally we have to take claims by someone who admits acting unethically with a grain of salt, but if there is any truth to this then it’s a serious matter. I’m surprised that no-one has made a serious attempt to catch the customers of such people.
David Brin (the famous sci-fi author) gave an interesting short lecture about the future of humanity [14]. He promotes the Lifeboat Foundation (of which he is a director) and describes his concern about the Fermi Paradox.
Shimon Schocken gave an inspiring TED talk about his work rehabilitating juvenile prisoners through taking them mountain-bike riding [15]. This shows that anyone can do great things to help other people, he got this idea when riding past a prison, convinced the prison governor that it was a good idea and then started doing it.
Conrad Wolfram gave an insightful TED talk about math education [16]. His claim is that the entire mathematical education system is wrong in it’s focus on hand calculation, instead the aim should be to teach children how to use computers to solve problems – which is what is mostly done in the real world.
I’ve just been asked for advice on buying a digital camera. I’m not an expert on cameras but I have a good general knowledge of technology – and I’m sure that the readers of my blog will correct me rapidly if I make any serious mistakes. ;)
Types of Camera
The Wikipedia Page about Digital Cameras is worth reading [1].
Here are the types of camera that are useful as a stand-alone camera (IE not camera phones or industrial cameras):
- Digital SLR – large, very capable, and very expensive. They have detachable lenses and a prism to split the light between a viewfinder and the CCD that records the digital photo. Such a split provides much less benefit now that you can have an LCD display for the viewfinder. In Australia they seem to start at about $1500.
- Bridge Cameras – they are of a similar size and shape to a Digital SLR, but the lens is permanently attached and the price is a lot lower. Typically between $400 and $800.
- Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Cameras – they allow changing lenses like a DSLR but don’t have the prism for an optical viewfinder. This makes the optics simpler and cheaper. Andre Pang wrote a good review of one [2] – which sells for about $700.
- Compact cameras – small and cheap. Between $60 and $400 depending on features.
I suggest that people not start out a hobby of digital photography with a DSLR or other interchangeable lens camera. I think that it’s best to start out with simple gear that’s cheap – if you decide that digital photography is not your thing then you have wasted less money, and if you really get into it then you’ll be able to make a more informed choice about an expensive camera after getting some experience.
A spare cheap compact camera can be useful even if you own a more expensive camera. There are times when you don’t want the bulk of a DSLR or Bridge Camera and when you have a risk of theft or accidental damage such that you don’t want to take an expensive camera. People who are really serious about photography apparently take a camera everywhere, you could have a compact camera in your front pocket for fast pictures and a bulky camera in your backpack for when you have time to prepare a quality shot. So buying a cheap camera and then buying an expensive one a few months later would not be wasting money!
As the person who asked for advice has never owned a digital camera before I’ll focus on cheap compact cameras for the rest of this post.
Pixels and Lenses
Cameras are typically advertised with the resolution in Megapixels described in bold. Presumably most people search for the camera with the highest resolution. The first thing to beware of is cameras that don’t have hardware which is capable of taking a picture of the stated resolution, they use interpolation to generate a higher resolution image. There are probably some cameras with interpolation that are OK and provide a decent picture at a low price, but generally I recommend avoiding all cameras that do interpolation.
Optical zoom is a very important feature. Often pictures have to be cropped to remove unwanted background, if you zoom in appropriately you can avoid cropping and make better use of the available resolution. Beware of cameras that advertise things such as “advanced zoom“, anything that doesn’t exactly say “optical zoom” is using digital zoom – IE interpolation. I suggest not considering a compact camera unless it can do at least 4* optical zoom, with 5* or better being preferable.
The physical size of the lens is important. A bigger lens allows better pictures in adverse lighting and also allows a faster shutter speed to give better photos of moving objects and better photos when you are moving. Generally you can get a rough idea of the potential that a camera has by just glancing at the lens, if it’s the size of a lens in a mobile phone then the pictures won’t be that great. If it is on a telescopic mount and it’s wide then the result will be better. When buying a lens for a DSLR or other detachable lens camera you should be able to read specifications of the lens which indicate it’s size. For compact cameras the specifications of the lens are usually available from the vendor and often available from review sites but generally aren’t included in adverts by retailers. If you are comparing cameras in the store looking at them seems like the best option.
The ratio of the lens area to the number of pixels determines how much light is received by the sensors for each pixel. So when there are two cameras that are essentially identical apart from the number of megapixels the one with the highest number isn’t necessarily better in all situations. A 12MP camera might not give a better result than a 10MP camera, a monitor described as “Full HD” has a resolution of 1920*1080 which is 2MP. A 5MP camera is useful to allow cropping but if the aim is to display pictures on current monitors then anything much bigger than 5MP is probably wasted at this time and 10MP will provide pictures that can use the capabilities of monitors that are developed for a while.
Printing
Some printers that are affordable for home use might require something like a 7MP camera to print a picture at A4 or Letter size at the highest quality. Professional printing will probably require something even greater. But if your intended use of a digital camera doesn’t involve printing the pictures, or only rarely involves printing them at A4 or Letter size then you don’t need a high resolution for printing. I expect that there are some available printers that can use paper at sizes such as B3 which might require a 20MP camera for best quality. But if the aim of the printing is to put a picture on your wall (the most common case) then even if it’s not at the ideal resolution then probably no-one will notice the difference – you can’t see the pixels from a few meters away.
If the aim of the camera is to photograph professional artwork for the purpose of selling it on the Internet then a high resolution camera really isn’t desired. You want to offer pictures on the Internet which aren’t good enough to be usefully printed.
Video
The capabilities for recording video can vary significantly between different cameras in the same range. If you don’t care about video then that’s fine, but if video matters to you then you have to read the specs. It’s also worth considering digital video cameras, I have previously summarised the available digital video cameras – although I’m sure that there have been some new models since then [3]. A good (expensive) digital camera will have video functionality that compares well to most digital video cameras – but it will cost a lot more.
Choosing a Compact Camera
There are many compact cameras in the $100 to $150 price range. Ted’s has the Samsung Digimax ES65 for $99.95 which has 10MP and 5* optical zoom. This seems like a good deal. Practice with a cheap camera could easily allow you to make a better choice when buying a more expensive camera that saves you more than $100 so it seems unlikely that you will have any great regrets about buying a $100 camera.
Buying from the specs is a bad idea, I recommend testing a camera in the store before buying – every store that you want to buy from allows this. But don’t expect that quality pictures in the store means much, the people who run the camera stores usually set them up with good lighting so that pictures will tend to turn out well. The aim of an in-store test is not to discover what the camera does well, but to discover what (if anything) it does badly. Also it’s useful to test the ergonomics of the camera before buying, discover whether you would be happy to hold the camera for an hour.
It’s a good idea to ask the staff at a camera store for advice, but don’t rely on such advice. My experience is that they tend not to ask what the prospective customer plans to do with the camera and this significantly limits the quality of their recommendations.
Conclusion
Make your first digital camera a cheap compact camera that doesn’t cost much more than $100. Make sure it has at least 4* optical zoom with 5* being preferred. Don’t worry too much about the number of megapixels, anything more than 5 will do. Test the camera in the store to look for any obvious reasons that make it unsuitable for your use. If you want video then be prepared to pay a little more as the cheapest cameras have a low resolution for video.
Yesterday and today I attended Ruxcon – the leading technical security conference in Australia [1]. The first lecture I attended was “Breaking Linux Security Protections” by Andrew Griffiths. This included a good overview of many current issues with Linux security. One thing that was particularly noteworthy was his mention of SE Linux policy, he cited the policy for the FTP server as an example of policy that can be regarded as too lax but also noted the fact that to get SE Linux used the policies had to be more liberal than we might desire. There is probably scope for someone to give a good lecture about how we are forced to make uncomfortable choices between making security features stronger and making them more usable.
The next lecture I attended was “Breaking Virtualisation” by Endrazine. It makes me wonder how long it will be before someone cracks one of the major cloud hosting services such as EC2 – it’s not an appealing thought.
Billy Rios gave a really interesting lecture titled “Will it Blend?” about blended exploits. The idea is to try and find a few programs which do things that are slightly undesired (arguably not even bugs) but which when combined can result in totally cracking a system. One example was a way of tricking IE into loading a DLL from the desktop and a way of tricking Safari into saving arbitrary files to the desktop, combine them and you can push a DLL to a victim and make them load it. Learning about these things can really change the way you think about misbehaving programs!
Ben Nagy gave an interesting lecture about “Prospecting for Rootite“. His systematic way of finding test cases that cover a large portion of the code of a large application such as MS-Word seems quite effective. Once you have test cases that cover a lot of code then you can use fuzzing to find flaws.
Edward Farrell gave an informative lecture about “RFID Security“, I didn’t really learn that much though, he confirmed my suspicions that RFID implementations generally suck.
Mark Goudie gave a very informative lecture titled “We’ve been Hacked! What Went Wrong and Why“. Mark works for Verizon and often with the US Secret Service in investigating security breaches. He presented a lot of information that I have not seen before and made some good arguments in support of companies being more proactive in protecting their systems from attack.
Stephen Glass and Matt Robert gave a lecture titled “Security in Public Safety Radio Systems” which mainly focussed on digital radios used by the Australian police. It would be good if the police got people like them to test out new kit before ordering it in bulk, it seems that they will be using defective radios for a long time (it’s not easy or cheap to replace them once they are deployed).
Edward Farrell gave an interesting lecture titled “Hooray for Reading: The Kindle & You” about hacking the Kindle. Unfortunately they haven’t worked out how to get GUI code going on a hacked Kindle yet so there are some limitations as to what can be done.
I think that the most interesting lecture of the conference was “This Job Makes you Paranoid” by Alex Tilley of the Australian Federal Police. He gave some interesting anecdotes about real cases to illustrate his points and he advocated the police position really well. I’ve attended several lectures by employees of law enforcement agencies, but none of them demonstrated anywhere near the understanding of their audience that Alex did.
The last lecture I attended was “Virtualisation Security State of the Union” by David Jorn of Red Hat. He gave an interesting summary of some of the issues including mentioning how SE Linux is being used for confining KVM virtual machines.
Ruxcon was a great conference and I definitely recommend attending it. I have to note that even though there are police attending and lecturing it’s not entirely a white-hat affair. One thing that I hope they do next year is to get a bigger venue. The foyer was rather crowded and because it had a hard floor was really noisy between lectures. Space and carpet are two really important things when you have lots of people in one room!
My telco Three have just offered me a deal on getting a new phone a couple of months earlier than my contract was supposed to expire, presumably they have some competition and want to get me locked into another 2 year contract a couple of months before anyone else has the chance.
My current phone is a LG U990 Viewty [1] which I am reasonably happy with for the regular phone and camera functionality (apart from it being too slow to take a photo), it’s on a $29 per month plan. I also have a 3G modem which is on a $15 per month plan for 1G of data per month for a total cost of $44 per month. As new phones have advanced client functionality (ssh, IMAP, etc) and have Wifi support for providing net access to a laptop there seems to be less need to have a separate phone and modem. So I am considering getting a high-end phone to replace the phone and modem, so while I don’t want to pay a lot more than I currently pay, a $49 contract would be quite affordable and a $59 contract is something I can consider.
What I need is a system with a good ssh client implementation, a high resolution screen (800*480 or better), preferably a slide out keyboard and an option to use a Bluetooth keyboard.
The best option for the OS seems to be Android as it’s based on Linux, it’s moderately open, and it has a good range of applications. The Nokia N900 has been recommended based on features but a friend had a bad experience with a N900 that broke and didn’t get good warranty support. Also the N900 doesn’t have a digital compass (so can’t do augmented reality). While I’m primarily buying a phone for making phone calls, using the net, and being a ssh client I want to be able to do cool things like do Google searches on things that I photograph and have an annotated star map when I point my phone at the sky. Also as I’m not using Windows or Apple phones for obvious reasons that leaves Android phones as the only suitable phones that are on offer from my Telco.
I have checked some options for buying a grey-market phone, given that I need to get a more expensive phone contract to have the voice and data access I need the cost of buying a grey-market phone and having a no-phone contract would be unreasonable. So selecting a phone that’s on offer by Three/Vodaphone seems to be the best option. Moving to another telco would be inconvenient as I would have to convince the relatives that I call often to switch as well (I get free calls to other Three/Vodaphone customers).
I previously listed some phones that seemed good without regard as to where I could buy them [2] and some people wrote some really interesting and informative comments (thanks a lot!). But after considering all the options it seems that the costs of the various options force me to choose something that Three offers.
Currently the best option from Three for an Android phone seems to be the HTC Desire HD [3]. It has a 800*480 screen, an 8MP camera with face-detection and geo-tagging, wifi, an accelerometer, GPS, and a digital compass. It also runs Android 2.2 (the latest release). Generally it has everything I want apart from a slide-out keyboard. It seems that Bluetooth keyboards are about $100 each, so I could buy such a keyboard and have options of taking just the phone, the phone and keyboard, or phone and laptop depending on how much I can carry and what I expect to be doing.
Three Prices
The Desire HD is free on a $59 plan, or costs $15 per month on the $29 plan. So for $44 per month (the same as what I spend now) I can get a Desire HD! The down-side is that the $29 plan only allows 200MB of data per month and has an excess data fee of $0.50 per meg. My average usage has been about 300MB per month, I could reduce this a bit but I do occasionally have a month where I need a lot of data transfer. For an extra $8 per month I can get an additional 500MB of data transfer. That would give me a total cost of $52 per month for my phone, and I could get the same phone for my wife for $44 per month (I doubt that she would use the 200MB of data included). That would take a typical Three bill from $73 to $96.
I might just wait a few months. The Viewty and 3G modem combination is working reasonably well, presumably there will be some better deals if I wait a while. At least now after considering all the options I could find and determining that a Desire HD from Three is the best option for me I can now evaluate any new options by comparing them to that.
My SE Linux Play Machine is online again. It’s been online for the last month and much of the month before due to Xen issues. Nothing really tricky to solve, but I was busy with other things. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I’ve just read the Wikipedia page about Unparliamentary Language [1]. I recommend that everyone read it, if only for the amusement value, among other things it links to incidents where elected representatives acted in a way that would be expected of primary school children. The general concept of having rules about Unparliamentary Language is that MPs are permitted to say anything in Parliament without the risk of being sued or prosecuted, but certain things are inappropriate – the most common example is directly accusing another MP of lying. One of the main aims of rules against Unparliamentary Language is to prevent attacks on the honor of another member.
Having just witnessed a mailing list discussion go widely off track when a free software project was denigrated, it seems to me that we could do with some similar guidelines for mailing list discussions. The aim would be not to just prevent excessive attacks on the honor of other members but to also protect the honor of the free software projects. So for example one might recommend not using a particular program because of design decisions which seem dubious or a bad security history, but saying “it’s crap” would be considered to be inappropriate. Not that rejecting a program based on design decisions or a history of security flaws would be uncontroversial, but at least that gives objective issues to discuss so if there is a debate it will educate some of the lurkers.
Note that I’m not claiming to be better than other people in this regard, I’ve described software as crap on more than a few occasions. But I will try to avoid such things in future.
Finally does anyone have a good suggestion for a Free Software equivalent to the term “Unparliamentary Language”? It seems that to a large extent the support of certain ideas depends on having a catchy name and I can’t think of one.
The AEIOU Foundation
The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support and advocacy organisation for people on the Autism Spectrum, note that they clearly say Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on their About page, some of what they write would be less wrong if it was claimed to apply to only non-verbal Autistics or people claimed to be Low Functioning Autistic (LFA). But in regard to the Autism Spectrum they just don’t seem to know much about it, a lot of their web pages seem to be based on the assumption that anyone who is on the Spectrum will be lucky if they can ever live independently. However it seems that most people who can be diagnosed with an ASD have typical social skills by the standards of the IT industry and can get by without any special assistance. The entire site seems to be written about people on the Spectrum by people who know little of their experiences and contains hardly any information that matches what I’ve read from various people on the Spectrum (of course there are a wide range of experiences that differ greatly).
They have a link to “Autism Related Sites” which starts with “Autism Speaks” (the Wikipedia page about Autism Speaks is worth reading – note the section about immunisation research which has been repeatedly debunked and the section about legal action against a young autistic blogger). There are many good reasons why Autism Speaks is so widely hated among people on the Spectrum. I think that recommending Autism Speaks is a sign of willful ignorance of almost everything related to Autism.
In their page about describing Autism to NTs they say “Imagine if you suddenly woke up in a foreign country, did not speak the language and had no way of effectively communicating with the people around you“. I’ve been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by a psychologist who considers that to be the same as High Functioning Autism (HFA) and I’ve visited more than a few countries. I find the comparison of the Autistic experience to visiting another country to be so strange that I don’t even know where I would begin if I was to comment on where it went wrong.
Finally they have a scrolling bar listing their advertisers at the bottom of ever single page on their site. If someone was going to design a web site specifically to annoy people on the Spectrum then such a scrolling banner would be a good place to start.
Now they probably do some good things to help families with children on the Spectrum. But their ability to do good is really hindered by the lack of input from people on the spectrum, Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg (leader of the Vermont Chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) wrote an interesting post about AEIOU and noted that none of the people who run AEIOU are Autistic [2].
The Communication Shutdown
Someone got the idea that Neuro-Typical people (NTs) should try and understand what it’s like to be on the Spectrum – which is a reasonable idea. But they decided that the way to do so is to have them refrain from Internet based socialisation and not use Facebook and Twitter for one day. It seems to me that most people on the Spectrum primarily socialise via the Internet, so ceasing Internet based socialisation is likely to make their experience less like that of people on the Spectrum. I’m getting a mental image of a bunch of NTs deciding to go to a night-club for their Internet free evening and then imagining that they are somehow empathising with the experience of people who can never enjoy a night-club.
As an aside, a web site which has anything at all related to disabilities shouldn’t rely on Flash – the Communication Shutdown site totally fails in this regard.
No Stereotypes Here has an interesting analysis of this situation, among other things they comment on the irony of having someone ask them to stop using twitter as part of this campaign [3]. One thing that they suggest is for NTs to have a day without any communication at all.
Some Suggestions for People who Want to Understand
As a communication exercise, try going shopping without speaking, just use hand gestures. For bonus points try doing so in a foreign country where you don’t know the language so you need bidirectional non-verbal communication – with some luck you can complete a transaction without the shopkeeper realising that you are a foreigner. This won’t actually give you much of the Autistic experience, but it’s a good exercise in understanding how communication works.
Someone who wanted to know the down-side of being on the Spectrum could find a sports bar where most patrons support one team and then enter the bar while wearing a jersey indicating support for an opposing team. I don’t recommend doing this because it really wouldn’t be fun, but for a quick approximation of the experience it would probably work well.
It seems to me that paying $5 to a charity and then boasting about doing so on your Facebook page for a day is an easy thing to do. A harder task would be to spend a day reading about the experiences of the people in question and then giving $5 to a charity that is well regarded by the target group.
Another possible way of gaining some understanding would be to have a party where everyone brings their laptop and uses only electronic communication – no speaking at all. This is in fact fairly close to what some of the Geekier (possibly Autistic) members of the IT community do.
When I was walking past Southbank when I saw some Parkour being practiced. I watched for a while and spoke to the instructor after the informal lesson was finished. He’s a professional instructor with the Melbourne branch of the Australian Parkour Association [1] and he sometimes gives free advice to newbies that he meets on the street (in this case a group of 6 teenage boys).
From the web site it seems that the standard lesson fee is $15 for an indoor lesson or $10 for an outdoor lesson – with a $5 discount for members of the Australian Parkour Association [2], which is really cheap for a 2 hour lesson! APA membership costs $10 to join plus a $50 annual membership fee.
It’s worth reading the ParkourPedia information about the “spirit/philosophy” that is Parkour [3]. It’s interesting to note that there can be no official Parkour shows because if you do it for anyone else then it’s not Parkour – so much for all the Parkour videos on Youtube. Also another issue with the Youtube videos is that Parkour isn’t about doing the most dangerous things you can possibly survive in an urban environment, it can be practiced in country areas and isn’t supposed to be unreasonably dangerous.
The outdoor Parkour lessons start near the Arts center in the middle of Melbourne and presumably some of them go past Southbank as it has some interesting things to jump over. So it’s worth watching out for people jumping over various obstacles instead of walking around them. They may not be doing a Parkour show, but it’s in public and anyone can watch.
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