Health and Status Monitoring via Smart Phone

April 5, 2010 | etbe

Health Monitoring

Eric Topol gave an interesting TED talk about wireless medical monitoring devices [1]. The potential for helping diabetics and other people who need ongoing treatment is obvious as is the potential for helping pregnant women and other people who might suddenly need medical treatment at short notice.

One significant positive potential for this is integration with multiple services. For example Eric’s talk showed a graph of sleep levels on a mobile phone, the deep sleep (which is apparently the most restorative) was shown in sections that were significantly less than one hour in duration. I often receive SMS messages about network problems during the night, the vast majority of them aren’t that important and can be delayed without any problem. If my phone could determine that I was in deep sleep and delay sending me a NAGIOS report for up to 30 minutes then it would help me sleep while not making any significant impact on my work in repairing server problems – it’s not as if I would be immediately productive if woken from deep sleep anyway.

Status and Attention Monitoring

Eric Horvitz, Carl Kadie, Tim Paek, and David Hovel of Microsoft Research wrote an interesting paper titled “Models of Attention in Computing and Communication: From Principles to Applications” [2]. In that paper they describe various methods for tracking user attention and filtering messages so that the user won’t be needlessly distracted by unimportant messages when they are busy. The next logical step is to integrate that with a smart phone (maybe Android would be good for this) to screen calls, unknown callers could be automatically directed to voice-mail and known good callers could be given an automated prompt as to whether they think that their call is important enough to be worth the distraction.

It seems to me that combining health and status monitoring would be the sensible thing to do. If a bio-sensor array indicates that someone is more stressed than usual then decreasing their availability for phone calls would make sense. It would also be trivial to analyse calls and determine which callers are likely to cause stress and block their calls at inconvenient times.

What we Need

Of course there are lots of security implications in this. Having multiple networked devices tracking and collating information on health and all activity (including video-monitoring in the Microsoft model) has a lot of potential for malicious use. This is one of many reasons that we need to generally improve computer security.

We also need to have free software implementations of such things. We don’t want Microsoft to get a monopoly on status monitoring. Also it seems that smart Nike shoes that can work with the iPhone [3] are the leading mass-market implementation of health monitoring, everything related to health-care should be as open as possible. I’m happy for Nike to make their own special products, but we need to have them work with open systems and make the data available as widely as possible. There is the real potential for people to needlessly die if health data is not available in open formats! According to the Wikipedia page Nike has been shipping products using a proprietary 2.4GHz wireless network since 2006 [4], it would be a really good hardware project to devise a way of making compatible sensors and readers.

We also need some free software for monitoring the user status to avoid interrupting them.

Finally we need some software to integrate all the data. Canonical’s Desktop Experience team are doing some interesting work on managing desktop notifications that will be in Ubuntu Lucid [5], they appear to have some basic support for masking notifications based on priority. Please keep up the great work Canonical people, and please consider working on advanced status monitoring next!

Slavery vs Child Porn

April 4, 2010 | etbe

Slavery Still Exists!

We all like to think of slavery as a problem from the 19th century, but it still exists and is a significant problem! Kevin Bales gave an interesting TED talk about how to combat modern slavery [1]. Currently there are an estimated 27,000,000 slaves in the world, it’s a lot but it’s a smaller proportion of the world population in slavery than at any time in history. Also the price of slaves is lower than ever before, instead of being a capital asset a slave is a disposable item (this is really bad for the slaves).

The estimated average cost to liberate a slave is $US400, this involves rescuing them from slavery and teaching them the skills that they need to have a sustainable life – there’s no point rescuing them only to have them get captured again! Kevin notes that the US is still paying the price of the botched emancipation of 1865, so the liberation of slaves really needs to be done properly.

The estimated total cost to liberate all the slaves in the world is $US10.8 billion. Think about the trillions of dollars that have been spent on wars to supposedly liberate people, when a mere $US10.8 billion would liberate all slaves. That’s a fraction of the cost of the proposed National Broadband Network – which would you rather have, fast net access for cable TV services or a world without slavery?

Censorship of Child-Porn (and other things) vs Liberating Slaves

It is often claimed that child porn needs to be stopped to prevent there being economic incentives to molest children in other countries, to achieve this goal the Australian government wants to filter all net access to prevent access to child-porn, other prohibited porn, documentation about euthanasia, and the occasional dental practice (seriously, they just can’t get their filters right).

Methods that are proven to prevent children being molested should be given a much higher priority than censoring the Internet in the hope of removing economic incentives for child abuse.

It seems reasonable to assume that a significant portion of child-slaves are molested (because we know that slave owners are really bad people and there’s nothing to stop them from molesting children). Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that 1/4 of child slaves are molested. So that would give an average cost of $US1600 to free one child from sexual slavery and three other children from physically abusive environments.

Currently the Australian government plans to spend $44,000,000 in Internet censorship with the supposed aim of protecting the children. The fact that the majority of child-porn is believed to be transferred via protocols other than HTTP has not deterred the government from pushing forward a HTTP-only filter for censorship. Also the fact that anyone could use a VPN, tor, or other services to trivially bypass a HTTP filter has not deterred them.

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that $US400 equates to $500 Australian, the exchange rate is lower than that but it varies and it’s best to be conservative. Therefore the $44,000,000 the government wants to spent on censorship could be used to liberate 88,000 child slaves. If my estimates are correct that would save 22,000 children from being molested. In the unlikely event that slavers happen to be nice people who don’t do nasty things like molest children (which really isn’t credible) then freeing 88,000 children from slavery and all the physical abuse that it involves is still a really good thing!

If a plan to prevent child sexual abuse by liberating slaves fails to actually prevent any sexual abuse then at least you end up with some freed slaves (which is a really good thing). But if a plan to prevent child sexual abuse by censoring the Internet fails then all you end up with is slower Internet access and censorship of totally unrelated things that the government doesn’t like.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_slavery.html

Too Stupid to be a Bishop

April 3, 2010 | etbe

A Stupid Bisop breaks the Godwin Rule

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Catholic Bishop Anthony Fisher has just claimed that “GODLESSNESS and secularism led to Nazism, Stalinism, mass murder and abortion” [1]. This is a violation of the rule part of Godwin’s Law. We might not expect clerics to have enough general knowledge of society to know this rule, but it does seem reasonable to expect them to have enough empathy to understand why inappropriate Hitler analogies will just offend people and don’t advance their cause. But anyone in a position of leadership in a global organisation who is going to talk to the media should have enough intelligence to check historical references.

The Wikipedia article about “Positive Christianity” is worth reading, it includes references to Christian based race-hate in Nazi Germany as well as modern references [2]. There is also an interesting Wikipedia page about the Religious aspects of Nazism [3], there seems to be room for a lot of debate on the matter of how religion fit in to the Nazi regime – but it seems quite clear that it was not an atheist regime.

The Wikipedia page about the Rechskonkordat (the agreement between the Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church) is also worth reading [4].

Also I’m sure that the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet wasn’t the only Catholic despot.

Community Services and Moral Authority

Cardinal Pell was quoted in the same SMH article as saying “we find no community services sponsored by the atheists“, of course if he was to investigate who is contributing to the religious based community service organisations he would find plenty of atheists. I know I’m not the only atheist who donates to The Salvation Army [5] on occasion. I wonder how many religious people would be happy to donate to an explicitly atheist organisation, I suspect that the prevalence of religious charities is due to the fact that a religious charity can get money from both religious people and atheists while a charity that advocated atheism in any way would be limited to atheist donors. If I was to establish a community service charity I would seriously consider adding some religious element to help with fund raising – it’s just a matter of doing what’s necessary to achieve the main goal.

Even if it wasn’t for violating Godwin’s law and a total lack of any knowledge of history Anthony would still have failed. We all know the position of the Catholic Church on the sexual abuse of children. The Catholic policies are implemented in the same way in every country and as far as we can tell have been done so for all time. I believe that makes them unqualified to offer moral advice of any kind.

Criticising the “Secular World”

Peter Craven has written an article for The Age criticising the “secular world” [6]. He makes the extraordinary claim “the molesting clergy are like the brutal policemen and negligent doctors and corrupt politicians: they come with the territory because pennies have two sides“. The difference of course is that police, doctors, and politicians tend to get punished for doing the wrong thing – even when they do things that are far less serious. But the “molesting clergy” seem to be protected by all levels of the church hierarchy.

Peter makes some claims about the “secular world” as if there is a Borg collective of atheists and claims that there is an “incomprehension of Christian values“. I believe that the attitudes of atheists and the secular justice system correspond quite well with what most Christians would regard as “Christian values” – the problem is that the actions of the church leaders tend not to match that.

It’s All About Money

I would like to know why Christians almost never change church and never cease donating. Religious organisations are much like corporations, they seek new members and new revenue sources. If a significant number of Catholics were to pledge to not donate any money to their church for a year after every child sex abuse scandal then Catholic policies might change. Also if Catholics were to start changing to Christian denominations that do the right thing in regard to moral issues then the Catholic church would either change or eventually become irrelevant. If you keep paying people who do bad things then you are supporting them!

I suggest that any church member who cares about the moral issues of the day should vote with their checkbook. If their church fails to do the right thing then inside the donation envelope they should put a note saying “due to the immoral actions of the church I will donate to other charities“. I am not aware of any church that would expel members for such a protest, but I know that some smaller parishes have cash-flow problems and would rapidly escalate the issue through the management chain if even a few members were to protest in such a manner.

Why Comments?

March 30, 2010 | etbe

Russ Albery has described why he doesn’t support comments on his blog [1].

I respect his opinion and I’m not going to try and convince him to do otherwise. But I think it’s worth describing why I want comments on my blog and feel that they are worth having for many (possibly most) other blogs.

Types of Blog

The first thing to consider is the type of post on the blog. Some blogs are not well suited to comments. I have considered turning off comments on my documents blog [2] because it gets a small number of readers and is designed as reference material rather than something you might add to a public Planet feed or read every week as it has a small number of posts that are updated. So conversations in the blog comments are unlikely to happen. One thing that has made me keep comments open on my documents blog is the fact that I am using blog posts as the main reference pages for some of my projects and some people are using the comments facility for bug reports. I may make this the main bug reporting facility – I will delete the comments when I release a version of the software with the bugs fixed.

One particular corner case is a blog which has comments as a large part of it’s purpose. Some blogs have a regular “open thread” where anyone can comment about any topic, blogs which do such things have the owners act more like editors than writers. One example of this is the Making Light blog by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden [3] – who are both professional editors.

The next issue is the content of the post. If I was to create a separate blog for authoritative posts about SE Linux then there wouldn’t be much point in allowing comments, there are very few people who could correct me when I make a mistake and they would probably be just as happy to use email. When I write about issues where there is no provably correct answer (such as in this post) the input of random people on the net is more useful.

Another content issue is that of posts of a personal nature. Some people allow comments on most blog posts apart from when they announce some personal matter. I question the wisdom of blogging about any topic for which you would find comments intolerable, but if you are going to do so then turning off comments makes sense.

Finally there is the scale of the blog. If you don’t get enough readers to have a discussion in the comments then there is less benefit in having the facility turned on – the ratio of effort required to deal with spam to the benefit in comments isn’t good enough. In his FAQ about commenting [4] Russ claims that controlling spam “can take a tremendous amount of time or involve weird hoop-jumping required for commenters“. I have found the Block Spam by Math [5] WordPress plugin to be very effective in dealing with the spam, so for this blog it’s a clear benefit to allow comments. Since using that plugin my spam problem has decreased enough that I now allow comments on posts which are less than 1 year old – previously comments were closed after 90 days. The plugin is a little annoying but I changed the code to give an error message that describes the situation and prevents a comment from being lost so the readers don’t seem too unhappy.

The Purpose of Comments

Russ considers the purpose of comments to be “meaningfully addressed to the original post author or show intent to participate in a discussion“. That’s a reasonable opinion, but I believe that in most cases it’s best if comments are not addressed to the author of the post and are instead directed towards the general readers. I believe that participating in a discussion and helping random people who arrive as the result of a Google search are the main reasons for commenting. For my blog an average post will get viewed about 500 times a year and the popular posts get viewed more than 200 times per month, so when over the course of a year more than 1000 people read the comments on a post (which is probably common for one of my posts) then 99.9% of readers are not me and commentators might want to direct their comments accordingly. Of course a comment can be addressed at the blog author so the unknown audience can enjoy watching the discussion.

For some of my technical posts I don’t have time to respond to all comments. If I have developed a solution to a technical problem that is good enough I may not feel inclined to invest some extra work in developing an ideal solution. So when a reader suggests a better option I sometimes don’t test that out and therefore can’t respond to the comment. But the comment is still valuable to the 1000+ other people who read the comment section. So a commentator should not assume that I will always entirely read a comment on a technical matter.

Comment threads can end up being a little like mailing lists. I don’t think that general discussions really work well in comment threads and don’t aim for such things. But if a conversation starts then I think you might as well continue as long as it’s generally interesting.

Generally for most blogs I think that providing background information, supporting evidence, and occasionally evidence of errors is a major part of the purpose of blog comments. But entertainment is always welcome. I would be happy to see some poems in the comments section of technical posts, sometimes a Limerick or haiku could really help make a technical point.

Political blog posts can be a difficult area. Generally the people who feel inclined to write political blog posts or comment on them are not going to be convinced to entirely change course, but as there are many people who can’t seem to understand this fact a significant portion of the comments on political blog posts consist of different ways of saying “you’re wrong“. The solution to this is to moderate the comments aggressively, too many political blogs have comments sections that are all heat and no light. I’m happy for people to go off on tangents when commenting on my political posts or to suggest a compromise between my position and their preferred option. But my tolerance of comments that simply disagree is quite small. Generally I think that blogs which directly advocate a certain political position should have the comments moderated accordingly, people will read a site in the expectation of certain content and I believe that the comments should also meet that expectation to some degree. Comments on political posts can provide insights into different points of view and help discover compromise positions if moderated well.

How to provide Feedback

Russ advocates commenting to the blog author via email – it is now the only option he accepts. My observation is that the number of people who are prepared to comment via email (which generally involves giving away their identity) is vastly smaller than those who use Blog comment facilities. This means that you will miss some good comments. One of the most valuable commentators on my blog uses the name “Anonymous” and has not felt inclined to ever identify themself to me, I wouldn’t want to miss the input of that person and some of the other people who have useful things to say but who don’t want to identify themself. I have previously written about how not all opinions are equal and anonymous comments are given a lower weight [6]. That post inspired at least one blogger to configure their blog to refuse anonymous comments, it was not my intent to inspire such reactions (although they are logical actions based on a different opinion of the facts I presented). I believe that someone who is anonymous can gain authority by repeatedly producing quality work.

Another option is for people to write their own blog posts referencing the post in question. I don’t believe that my core reader base desires short posts so I won’t write a blog post unless I have something significant to say. I expect that many other people believe that the majority of their blog comments would not meet the level of quality that their readers expect from their posts (posts are expected to be more detailed and better researched than comments). As an aside forcing people to comment via blog posts will tend to increase your Technorati rating. :-#

A final option is for people to use services such as Twitter to provide short comments on posts. While Twitter is well designed for publishing short notes the problem with this is that it’s a different medium. There are many people who like reading and discussing blog posts but who don’t like Twitter and thus using a different service excludes them from the conversation.

For my blog I prefer comments for short responses and blog posts for the longer ones. If you write a blog post that references one of my posts then please enter a comment to inform me and the readers of my blog. Email is not preferred but anyone who wants to send me some is welcome to do so.

If this post inspires you to change your blog comment policy then please let me know. I would like to know whether I inspire people to allow or deny blog comments.

New Portslave release after 5 Years

March 30, 2010 | etbe

I’ve just uploaded Portslave version 2010.03.30 to Debian, it replaces version 2005.04.03.1. I considered waiting a few days to make the anniversary but I wanted to get the bugs fixed.

I had a bug report suggesting that Portslave should be removed from Debian because of being 5 years without a major release. It has been running well 24*7 on one of my servers for the last 5 years and hasn’t really needed a change. There were enough bugs to keep me busy for a few hours fixing things though.

The irony is that I started using dates as version numbers back when there were several forks of Portslave with different version numbering schemes. I wanted to show that my fork had the newer version and a recent date stamp was a good indication of that. But then when Portslave didn’t need an update for a while the version number showed it and people got the wrong idea.

The new project home page for Portslave is on my document blog [1].

[1] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/portslave/

Server Costs vs Virtual Server Costs

March 29, 2010 | etbe

The Claim

I have seen it claimed that renting a virtual server can be cheaper than paying for electricity on a server you own. So I’m going to analyse this with electricity costs from Melbourne, Australia and the costs of running virtual servers in the US and Europe as these are the options available to me.

The Costs

According to my last bill I’m paying 18.25 cents per kWh – that’s a domestic rate for electricity use and businesses pay different rates. For this post I’m interested in SOHO and hobbyist use so business rates aren’t relevant. I’ll assume that a year has 365.25 days as I really doubt that people will change their server arrangements to save some money on a leap year. A device that draws 1W of power if left on for 365.25 days will take 365.25*24/1000 = 8.766kWh which will cost 8.766*0.1825 = $1.5997950. I’ll round that off to $1.60 per Watt-year.

I’ve documented the power use of some systems that I own [1]. I’ll use the idle power use because most small servers spend so much time idling that the time that they spend doing something useful doesn’t affect the average power use. I think it’s safe to assume that someone who really wants to save money on a small server isn’t going to buy a new system so I’ll look at the older and cheaper systems. The lowest power use there is a Cobalt Qube, a 450MHz AMD K6 is really small, but at 20W when idling means a cost of only $32 per annum. My Thinkpad T41p is a powerful little system, a 1.7GHz Pentium-M with 1.5G of RAM, a 100G IDE disk and a Gig-E port should be quite useful as a server – which now that the screen is broken is a good use for it. That Thinkpad drew 23W at idle with the screen on last time I tested it which means an annual cost of $36.80 – or something a little less if I leave the screen turned off. A 1.8GHz Celeron with 3 IDE disks drew 58W when idling (but with the disks still spinning), let’s assume for the sake of discussion that a well configured system of that era would take 60W on average and cost $96 per annum.

So my cost for electricity would vary from as little as $36.80 to as much as $96 per year depending on the specs of the system I choose. That’s not considering the possibility of doing something crazy like ripping the IDE disk out of an old Thinkpad and using some spare USB flash devices for storage – I’ve been given enough USB flash devices to run a RAID array if I was really enthusiastic.

For virtual server hosting the cheapest I could find was Xen Europe charges E5 for a virtual server with 128M of RAM, 10G of storage and 1TB of data transfer [2], that is $AU7.38. The next best was Quantact who charges $US15 for a virtual server with 256M of RAM [3], that is $AU16.41.

Really for my own use if I was paying I might choose Linode [4] or Slicehost [5], they both charge $US20 ($AU21.89) for their cheapest virtual server which has 360M or 256M of RAM respectively. I’ve done a lot of things with Linode and Slicehost and had some good experiences, Xen Europe got some good reviews last time I checked but I haven’t used them.

The Conclusion

When comparing a Xen Europe virtual server at $88.56 per annum it might be slightly cheaper than running my old Celeron system – but would be more expensive than buying electricity for my old Thinkpad. If I needed more than 128M of RAM (which seems likely) then the next cheapest option is a 256M XenEurope server for $14.76 per month which is $177.12 per annum which makes my old computers look very appealing. If I needed more than a Gig of RAM then my old Thinkpad would be a clear winner, also if I needed good disk IO capacity (something that always seems poor in virtual servers) then a local server would win.

Virtual servers win when serious data transfer is needed. Even if you aren’t based in a country like Australia where data transfer quotas are small (see my previous post about why Internet access in Australia sucks [6]) you will probably find that any home Internet connection you can reasonably afford doesn’t allow the fast transfer of large quantities of data that you would desire from a server.

So I conclude that apart from strange and unusual corner cases it is cheaper in terms of ongoing expenses to run a small server in your own home than to rent a virtual server.

If you have to purchase a system to run as a server (let’s say $200 for something cheap) and assume hardware depreciation expenses (maybe another $200 every two years) then you might be able to save money. But this also seems like a corner case as the vast majority of people who have the skills to run such servers also have plenty of old hardware, they replace their main desktop systems periodically and often receive gifts of old hardware.

One final fact that is worth considering is that if your time has a monetary value and if you aren’t going to learn anything useful by running your own local server then using a managed virtual server such as those provided by Linode (who have a really good management console) then you will probably save enough time to make it worth the expense.

Autism vs Asperger Syndrome

March 28, 2010 | etbe

Diagnostic Changes for Autism Spectrum Disorders

Currently Asperger Syndrome (AS) is one of a group of conditions that are grouped into the category Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

The American Psychiatric Association plans to merge “Asperger’s Disorder” into “Autism Spectrum Disorder” [1] in version 5 of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Apparently a primary reason for the change is the difficulty in assessing people into the various categories (AS, Autism, and PDD-NOS) and some variation in diagnosis between regions.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (a leading researcher on Autism and Asperger Syndrome) wrote an insightful article about this for the New York Times [2]. He suggests that while genetic research about the causes of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) is in progress there should be no change. If it turns out that AS and Autism have the same genetic cause then that would be good evidence to combine them into a single diagnostic category. If however they turn out to have different genetic causes then they would need different categories and he suggests that changes should be delayed until this issue is resolved. Simon also raises the issue of the status of people who have already been diagnosed, this is one of the social issues relating to a change in diagnostic criteria.

Social Issues related to Diagnosis

Unlike some disorders listed in the DSM, many (possibly most) people with AS really care about such things. I think that a common reaction to being diagnosed with Aspergers is to make the study of ASDs a “Special Interest“, which therefore makes it impossible to ignore what the psychologists are doing in this regard.

The biggest problem with changing the diagnostic criteria in this regard is that AS has a good reputation. Some people even think that it’s generally a good thing and seem to imagine that every child who is diagnosed with it will end up working for Google! This means that parents will be less likely to reject a diagnosis and therefore will be more likely to try and create a good environment for their child and seek appropriate therapies (such as social skills training and occupational therapy). I expect that a child who is diagnosed as Autistic but who doesn’t obviously conform to the worst stereotypes will likely have their parents reject the diagnosis which will lead to a bad result for everyone concerned.

The contrary view in this issue is that people who are on the spectrum but who insist that they aren’t Autistic are prejudiced and they should embrace the Autism Spectrum label as a measure of solidarity [3], while that’s a reasonable point it’s not going to happen in the short term.

Also there is the issue of adult diagnosis of AS, there are lots of adults who could benefit from being diagnosed and obstacles to such diagnosis (such as associating it with a label that is not well accepted such as Autism) are not going to do any good for anyone.

Is Asperger Syndrome really that similar to Autism?

Roy Richard Grinker (Professor of Anthropology) wrote a positive article for the New York Times about the diagnostic changes [4]. He seems to think that because in some cases it is difficult to distinguish the difference between Autism and AS they should be in a single diagnostic criteria. Based on that logic you could say that no-one should be diagnosed with an ASD because there is never a clear dividing line between the Neuro-Typical and those who are on the spectrum! Some people are clearly on the spectrum, some clearly aren’t, and some are near the border.

Roy cites his daughter and Temple Grandin as examples of Autistic people who have greater ability to relate to animals than someone who is Neuro-Typical (NT). I don’t have any particular skills in terms of relating to animals. Animals have smaller brains than humans and have thoughts that are less complex and more related to short-term issues, this makes them easier to predict in some situations. I do have significantly better skills in figuring out how to operate machines than most NTs, and this doesn’t appear to be uncommon among Aspies. I’ve read some of the material that Temple Grandin has written and watched the video of her TED talk, and I get a strong impression that she isn’t like me. Even the Aspies who are the least successful in terms of their career (IE quite unlike Temple Grandin) often seem to be like me, I can understand the way they think and recognise that the problems they face are similar to mine but merely more severe.

It seems to me that there are significant personality differences between people who have an affinity for animals and those who have an affinity for machines, maths, and engineering.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discovered that Autism and AS had different genetic causes, and this might mean that someone could have both sets of genes. It is obvious that the dividing line between Autism and AS is not that clear. It also seems that part of the diagnosis as implemented by psychologists may be based on the ability to act like an NT and succeed by objective criteria – IE earn a good salary in the case of adults. One thing that Roy does get right is that he notes that among people diagnosed with AS and Autism there are both “high” and “low” functioning individuals.

One thing that Roy gets wrong is the implication that Autistic people can become Aspies. An adult who is assessed without background information on their childhood may get a different diagnosis. If someone was reassessed as an adult with the full facts about their childhood available then (barring DSM changes) the same diagnosis should be returned.

Conclusion

It appears that this DSM change is going through regardless of the opinion of the people who are affected. While there is a logical basis for giving more weight to researchers than to the research subjects (who are bound to be more biased) it seems that there are some things you can’t properly understand unless you live them. When a good portion of the research subjects feel compelled to share their experiences with anyone who will listen it is disappointing that so few of the researchers appear to be listening.

How to Choose a Free Software Mission

March 27, 2010 | etbe

Jane McGoningal gave an interesting TED talk about how Online Gaming can Make a Better World [1]. One of her points is that there is no unemployment in games such as World of Warcraft, there is always a “world saving” mission available to you which is just within reach of your skill level – and no-one is assigned a mission that they can’t possibly do. It seems to me that the free software development community has a similar issue, there are always “missions” available at all skill levels. Our challenge is to find ways to encourage people to accept the missions and to provide them appropriate levels of support to encourage them on their path to an “epic win“. Choosing a suitable mission is a particularly difficult problem as you often don’t know how difficult a task will be until you are more than half complete.

Jane makes points about humans being happier when working hard and a desire for “epic meaning“. She says that it’s a problem that gamers believe that they can change a virtual world but not the “real world“. If you change the “virtual world” of software development then that changes the “real-world“.

Jane cites Herodotus as reporting a kingdom that was gripped in a famine for 18 years where the king instituted a policy of playing games and eating on alternate days with the aim being that the games would distract people from their hunger. I’m sure that I’m not the only person who’s gone without food or water for a day because of being too busy coding…

She has a lot of other interesting points and I recommend that you read the Institute For The Future [2] web site for more background information.

Now my question is, how can we encourage programmers to start doing Free Software and Open Source development and achieving some Epic Wins? I don’t claim to have good answers and I would appreciate any suggestions. If you blog about this please leave a comment on this post to direct readers to your blog.

Hacker Spaces

March 26, 2010 | etbe

When in California last year I visited the NoiseBridge [1] Hackerspace. I was very impressed with what I saw, good equipment and very friendly people. The general concept of a “HackerSpace” is that it is an environment to support random creative projects. The first picture is a sign near the door which is clearly visible to anyone who is leaving, it encourages people to be “AWESOME” and “EXCELLENT” by cleaning up after themselves (and maybe others). I think that this demonstrates the core of what is needed to get such a community project going.

Generosity towards others was on display everywhere, there was some free fruit on a table as well as a bottle of Port for anyone to drink. Someone had written a note saying that it’s “not an insecure Port” (a computer security joke). Someone had created an artwork that resembled an advert which some idiots had mistaken for a terrorist bomb (the creature displaying the Impudent Finger).

The main (only?) phone in NoiseBridge is apparently a VOIP phone, it is located next to an old pay-phone along with some Magnetix and other toys that can be used by curious people of any age. Magnetix have had repeated safety problems that caused recalls so maybe such things are best placed in an 18+ environment.

When I visited about 10 people were working on electronics projects. There were a number of soldering irons in use and some serious test equipment (including a couple of CROs) was available. The people doing the soldering were eager to teach other people about their work. Other equipment that was available included some serious industrial sewing machines and some drill presses. A lot of that equipment is unreasonably expensive to buy for personal use and is also rather bulky to store, having it available in a central location is a great service for the community.

Finally Noisebridge has a lot of space. There are rooms that could be used for giving small lectures and couches in the central area for people to relax and have impromptu meetings. Of course they had wireless net access too.

Australian Hacker Spaces

Kylie Willison has written about the Adelaide Hackerspace which sounds promising [2].

The Connected Community Hackerspace is a new one in Melbourne [3]. It operates out of the homes of members so it’s not nearly as big as Noisebridge (which has a substantial property rented for 24*7 operation). I hope that we can get something running permanently in the Melbourne city area in the near future. The Noisebridge membership dues are $80 per month (or $40 for starving hackers). I would pay that for a comfortable chair in a convenient city location with net access surrounded by cool people!

Bose vs Bauhn/Aldi Noise Canceling Headphones

March 25, 2010 | etbe

Overview

The German supermarket chain Aldi has been running in Australia for 8 years now [1]. Their standard practice for a long time has been to offer regular special deals on a few items of consumer electronics every week, my chocolate fridge is one thing I bought from Aldi [2].

Today Aldi have started selling Noise Canceling Headphones [3]. These headphones are badged by Bauhn – but that name is apparently applied to random products from cheap manufacturers, it may be an Aldi name that is applied to stuff that they sell. The headphones cost $69AU which is really cheap. But the deal will probably end in less than a week when stock runs out.

Noise canceling headphones can be used in server rooms and other noisy environments. Every company that has a server room should buy a few sets. One of the features of noise-canceling is that it works best on low frequencies and on regular sounds – it specifically doesn’t block human voice well. In some noisy environments it will be easier to hear people talk if you wear such headphones!

Noise canceling headphones are also very useful to people who are on the autism spectrum and other people who get more annoyed by noise pollution than average people. I have been wearing my Bose headphones on public transport and when walking around in the city, this not only stops traffic noise but it also helps to avoid people thinking that I want to talk to them.

Features

The first picture shows me wearing the Bauhn NC headphones, it’s from the right to show the controls for the built-in MP3 player. I have not yet tested the MP3 functionality. It appears that as the controls are one power button, buttons for next/previous track, and for controlling the volume. This is fairly poor for MP3 functionality, ideally you would want to have a display to see a list of tracks, maybe have directories to store files, etc. I guess this could be a convenient feature on occasion, but you wouldn’t buy the headphones for the MP3 functionality.
The next two pictures show a comparison of the Bauhn headset with the Bose QC-15 headset that I bought last year [4].

The cases of the Bauhn and Bose devices are almost exactly the same size and of a very similar shape, the Bose case is tapered and indented and also has a finer weave on the cloth covering – it looks much nicer. Both devices come with an adapter for an airline socket and with a detachable cable. They also both have pouches attached to the inside of the case with velcro. But the Bauhn headphones come with an adapter for the 6.5mm TRS connector which could be convenient if you want to plug them in to a larger amplifier, the basic connector is 3.5mm in both cases. The Bauhn device uses a standard TRS connector at the headphone end while the Bose QC-15 use a special connector that matches the shape of the headset and which has a TRRS plug (to cater for the high/low volume switch), so it seems that a damaged Bauhn cable could be replaced cheaply while a replacement Bose cable would have to be purchased from Bose (presumably at great expense and delay). The Bauhn case also has a velcro attached pocket for storing business cards (or maybe a name tag or something).

The supplied cable for the Bauhn is described as being 5 feet long – which isn’t quite long enough to reach a tower PC that is sitting on the floor. The Bose has a cable that is about a foot longer (maybe 6 feet total), but due to the non-standard connector you can’t replace it. I presume that I could easily buy a 4 meter cable for the Bauhn headphones, but I could of course buy an extension cable to use with the Bose.

Bose advertise the QC-15 headphones as having 35 hours of battery life from a single AAA battery. Aldi advertise the Bauhn headset as having 5 hours of battery life when NC is turned on – and they use two AAA batteries. It’s widely regarded that rechargeable batteries don’t last as long as the batteries used for estimating the battery life (which presumably are the most expensive long-life batteries available). I’ve found a single rechargeable AAA battery to last well over 5 hours in my Bose headphones, so it seems that battery life is considerably worse for the Bauhn device.

One feature of the Bauhn device is that it can be used without any batteries for playing external music. The Bose headphones can’t be used at all without a battery. So while the Bauhn will use the batteries faster it will at least be usable when the batteries run out. But if you are buying headphones for the purpose of avoiding noise then the Bose headphones are simply better.

Comfort

The Bose headphones have significantly deeper ear wells than the Bauhn – about 23mm vs 18mm. If your ears stick out more than 18mm (as mine apparently do) then this is a good reason for choosing Bose.

The Bose headphones are a tighter fit, the spring that pushes the ear-pieces together is stronger. But they have better padding so this doesn’t cause me any discomfort. Also the Bose headphones have better passive noise reduction due to having a more snug fit around the ears. I’ve worn my Bose headphones on a flight from the US to Australia with hardly a break and they were quite comfortable – I would never want to do that with the Bauhn headphones.

Noise Reduction

I tested the Bose and Bauhn products against three noise scenarios, external music, an air-conditioner, and a car engine.

The Bose headphones made good reductions of the noise from the external music (Numb by Linkin Park) and the air-conditioner. The Bauhn headphones did little to stop Linkin Park and was not very effective against the air-conditioner noise. I think that this is largely due to the lack of passive noise reduction, the air-conditioner in question makes little vibration noise and the sound of rushing air is generally immune to active noise cancellation. Both headphones were very effective when in a car with the engine idling. The engine noise of vehicles seems to fall in an ideal frequency range for active cancellation.

Music Quality

When listening to Youtube music played on my Thinkpad I could not notice any quality difference between the two sets of headphones. I did notice that the Bose headphones seemed to have a greater response in the higher frequency range, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one set is better than the other. Maybe if I was listening to FLAC0 encoded music that I had personally ripped from a CD then I would notice a difference. But for most people the Bauhn music quality should be good enough.

Design Quality

The Bose product is solidly designed, while the Bauhn product appears cheap in every way. Opening the battery compartment on the Bauhn headphones is difficult and if you do it wrong you could easily break the lid off, I expect that every set of Bauhn headphones that is used by children will be broken in a small amount of time – but it should still be fully functional with a broken lid. The matt finish of the Bose headphones should hide minor scratches much better than the shiny Bauhn headphones. The Bauhn headphones also have lower quality plastic parts, it appears that the molds used were designed cheaply and without adequate care to prevent marking the final product.

The design flaws that affect usage of the Bauhn product are the shallow ear wells, the poor fit of the cushions around the ears (which is probably mostly due to a weak spring pressing the ear cups to the wearer’s head), and the battery compartment lid which is difficult to open and appears prone to breakage. The other flaws are all cosmetic.

I wonder whether the Bauhn product was made by one of the big name manufacturers who deliberately reduced the quality to avoid competing with their more expensive products. It seems that the major flaws could have been corrected at design time with almost no increase in manufacturing costs.

Recommendations

If you can afford the BoseÂ® QuietComfortÂ® 15 Acoustic Noise CancellingÂ® Headphones then they are really worth the extra expense, I have no regrets at all about spending about $320US (including tax) on my Bose QC-15. The Bauhn product is good for when you want something cheap, for example a set to be used in a server room, or for the use of children. I bought a Bauhn headset for a friend who is a pilot, he spent $1,100 on a noise-canceling headset for his plane but had never got around to buying one for recreational use – I expect that he will allow his children to use his new Bauhn headphones, if they get broken it’s only a $69 expense.

The second cheapest NC headphones I’ve seen on offer in Australia is Harvey Norman selling Phillips HN-110 Noise Canceling Headphones for $100AU [5].

Amazon sells Philips HN 110 Folding Noise-Canceling Headphones for $50US but doesn’t seem to ship them outside the US (at least not to Australia).

JB Hifi also has some NC headphones on sale in Australia [6], but they are more expensive at $219 for AKG and $319 for Sennheiser. Also the models they sell are on-ear which means that they will inherently have very little passive noise reduction – and will also annoy anyone who doesn’t like having their ears squashed.

If I was buying NC headphones for my own use and didn’t want to spend $300US then I would either buy the Philips HN 110 Folding Noise-Canceling Headphones from Amazon and get a friend in the US to post them to me or I would buy them from Harvey Norman.

But the Bauhn product is good if you want cheap headphones to stop engine noise and give reasonable quality when playing music.

etbe – Russell Coker

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