Journal de Jacques

Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.

Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and their own happiness with allowing the whiff of racism to float about their policies in order to secure the skeptical, largely non-aboriginal urban seats. But calling CLP policies racist is actually a lazy copout, because the NT Government was powerless to change the policies — the Act and welfare — that made the difference.

There’s slow, very slow, change going on. Say what you like about the Intervention, it acted as a political circuit-breaker. What was previously unspeakable became discussable. Essentially, NT politics was a meeting point of political continents: the NT’s Legislative Assembly, the Land Councils and the Senate in Canberra. The Intervention was the earthquake that came after years of building pressure.

While the policies of the 70s were well-intentioned, they failed. It’s as simple as that. The prior policies of assimilation gave us the Stolen Generations, but the policies of the 70s-2000s gave us the Wasted Generations.

About six months ago the NT Government hired a “Remote Services Coordinator” in Bob Beadman, a long-time observer and participant in aboriginal affairs in the NT. His first report has been published, and it makes for refreshingly blunt reading. Usually these sorts of public reports are written by invisible shinybums, couched in the most obtuse and polished bureaucratese possible. But that’s not for Bob: he lays out his own opinions without the usual “it could be argueds”, “some have observeds” and “in some quarters”:

I want to hammer one final point, before turning to what I am supposed to be doing.
The building of houses and roads and sewerage systems is the easy part of this development effort; the social reconstruction, the rebuilding of people, the restoration of their pride and self-worth is the far more difficult, and more important.

And bearing in mind the old adage that the single most important social welfare measure we can take is to provide a person with a job, Governments must be even more proactive on the social side of the infrastructure/social scales, else all of this will be for nothing.
…
If, again, Indigenous people sit under a tree and watch this frenetic effort by government agencies of every kind with increasing astonishment, we will have squandered another opportunity for social reconstruction. We are unlikely to get another one with all of the features available to us right now. … As noted anthropologist Peter Sutton recently said ‘the incentives for remaining outside modernity must be withdrawn’.

Up until about 3 years ago, this sort of remark got you blackballed in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne as a flat-out racist. It probably still does, actually. It’s the Tyrany of the Far-Aways, which I have complained about before. But now, for once, it’s coming from an insider.

The report talks about concrete policy in a fair amount of detail, and continues to be free-wheeling and anti-bureaucratic in tone. I found it to be very positive reading. Whether Beadman will actually achieve anything will depend on why he was hired. High-profile appointments are frequently bought either to shut up the press, or to provide political insulation for the Minister. It’s horrible, but true. Policy depends on the wishes of an influential Minister to make it actually occur and stick. Not being conversant with the internal workings of the NT ALP, I can’t say whether Malarndirri McCarthy has the clout to get anything over the several lines (NT Government, the Land Councils and Canberra) that aboriginal policy needs to cross in the NT.

An irrelevant whinge

Before I finish up, how about a quick whinge about the NT News? In particular, their sometime reporter, sometime editor Nigel Adlam. I don’t know if Nigel actually read the report past the introduction, in which was found this paragraph:

Already there are worrying signs that people are not taking up the available work. Shires, and Stores, for example, are unable to fill vacancies. Job Centres report that many job offers to unemployed are declined. We must start to see some ‘breaching’ of welfare recipients who decline work.

This tied into Beadman’s point that cultural change is as important as houses and roads if lasting improvements are to be achieved. But here’s how Nige wrote it up in the NT News:

Some Aboriginal people are refusing to take jobs offered to them, the public servant heading one of the Northern Territory’s main indigenous policies said.

Sure it’s a single anecdotal reference out of the entire 118-page report, but don’t let that distract you from only reading the introduction, Nigel. Good journalists don’t have the time for detail. Or the interest. Or the training.

OK, that’s unfair. Nigel read at least one page past the introduction to find this para:

For it is the natural tendency of Ministers and Departments to portray themselves in the best possible light, to promote the positives, rarely the negatives, so consequently Parliaments and the public alike develop a skewed picture because the broader truth has been suppressed.

He rephrases this slightly with a total lack of irony, given that his wife is the chief media advisor to the Chief Minister, Paul Henderson. I’ve known that Nige is an unreconstructed old ALP-left-style warhorse for ages now — for instance, during his tenure as editor every story about Terry Mills always had a negative headline and an unflattering photo — but that’s apparently forgivable in modern newsrooms.

But frankly I can’t trust him because he cannot be objective. If I was a journalist peddling shares in a company employing my wife I’d be rightly excoriated. Basically I don’t think he can be relied on to write objectively about NT politics while his household finances are directly connected to the success or failure of one side of politics. It doesn’t help that he’s happy to resort to lazy “find a controversial sentence” journalism rather than engaging with the meat, the substance of the report. Journalists love to look up to themselves as bold defenders of the public interest, but it’s total self-serving bullshit in most cases. If they’re defending the public interest, then the public interest better have something shallowly controversial to say before 4pm or it can go jump in a lake.

This essay by Zed Shaw resurfaced on Proggit today.

Shaw’s essay talks about mastery, as seen from the perspective of martial arts:

After reading books on martial arts history for years, and studying everything I can, I started to see a commonly understood pattern. Almost all people considered masters of their art finally come to such a deep knowledge that they can do more with less. Rather than a flurry of complicated leaping and jumping, the master will simply step to the side and make one calculated strike. Every story about old masters is the same in that, even though they were frail and near death, their knowledge and abilities were so deep and clear that their simplest motions had the greatest power. For a master, the pompous and flowery motions were just wastes of energy.

Some of that might go back to the philosophical underpinnings of many martial arts (particularly Taoism and Chan Buddhism); but a lot of it must come from experience. Eventually the thrill of learning and using a new technique or tool becomes tedious. You just want to get the job done with a minimum of fuss — or perhaps, to win the fight with a minimum of effort.

Meanwhile, in some corners of the programming community, the title “rockstar” has come to be applied to those seen as particularly capable at this or that technology. The rockstar archetype is completely unlike the martial arts master stereotype. Rockstars are disruptive, outrageous floutlaws who amaze with raw talent. Rockstars assault the senses with works of extreme intensity and (often) complexity. The watch-word of the stereotypical rockstar is excess — nothing is done in moderation. The cardinal value of a rockstar is flourish, brilliant improvisation and the ability to push out complex, intense work that inspires a deep and immediate emotional response.

Meanwhile, the stereotype of the wizened old martial arts master is very different. The master disrupts only the student’s thinking. He or she flows easily within society at large. They impress with understated, precise economy. Through a lifetime of effort, the master has learnt the very high cost of effort. Through mastery they have learned to ignore most of what they know. The master’s way to improvise is not to create the most complex thing they can manage (as the rockstar does), but rather, to select the simplest possible means to achieve the immediate ends.

Neither is, truly, a universally “best” archetype for programmers to model themselves after. We can borrow from both. Speaking for myself, perhaps the best fusion of rockstar and master is the jazz musician — jazz musos also have a quasi-taoist philosophy and the years of endless training to make that naturalistic-yet-ornate improv seem utterly simple. The jazz player is a rockstar who became a martial arts master. Perhaps we could aim to be noodlers and jammers, rather than hotel-room wreckers.

Some rough notes, before I forgot what I did.

mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" -elt database_name | sed 's/wp_/wp_{new blogs id}_/' > database_name.sql

–default-character-set is required because of MySQL’s unrestrained enthusiasm for fucking up encoding by assuming everything is encoded in utf8. Would it kill them to have mysqldump simply look up the encoding first? Apparently the answer is “yes”.

Speaking of which, you need to change the my.cnf file to default to utf8, and tell your webserver to serve utf8, AND tell PHP to default to utf8. Then the content will come across OK.

Zip the dumpfile, download, upload. Then play to the mysql line program.

mysql -u root -p target_database < database_name.sql

Be prepared for warts. In particular older installations of WordPress carry _category columns on some tables which will trip up the mysql insert. The solution is to drop those columns from the source database first.

You also need to update the URLs. For reasons inscrutable to mere mortals, WordPress Mu doesn’t store uploaded files in wp-content/uploads. Instead it changes that to wp-content/files. This serves no purpose, so far as I can tell, but it does force me to make updates to the database:

update wp_{newblogid}_posts set post_content = replace (post_content, '/wp-content/uploads/', '/wp-content/files/') where post_content like '%/uploads/%';

update wp_{newblogid}_posts set guid = replace (guid, '/wp-content/uploads/', '/wp-content/files/') where guid like '%/uploads/%';

Edit: commands used to move skepticlawyer.
# Change user ids and import

mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_postmeta | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.postmeta.sql
mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_posts | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.posts.sql
mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_term_relationships | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.term_relationships.sql
mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_term_taxonomy | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.term_taxonomy.sql
mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_terms | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.terms.sql
mysqldump --default-character-set="latin1" --skip-opt --insert-ignore -elt skepticlawyer wp_options | sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/' > sl.options.sql


Having just finished the final units I need to qualify for an undergraduate degree, the topic of examinations is still fresh in my mind. Generally these fall into two categories: open-book and closed-book; with two major categories of question: multiple-choice and short-answer.

The exact mix of open/closed and MC/SA will vary from professor to professor and course to course. It can also vary based on the nature of the field and the ratio of teaching staff to students. As a law student I faced a common theme of open-book short-answer exams. During an “intro to psych” unit, all exams were multiple choice — there were 600 students in the course and two lecturers.

But all of these formats have one thing in common: the exam questions are secrets.

Much of the efficacy of the exam is tied up with protecting the questions from disclosure. In a sense this is a bit like relying on a secret key for the efficiency of a cipher: as soon as the key is revealed, the cipher is no longer effective.

Why have a secrecy requirement? Consider the opposite case where the questions are simply reused every year. The problem is that the student can simply memorise “the” answers. This is generally considered unacceptable because the potential set of questions is always going to be too small to properly determine the student’s mastery of the subject.

What this reveals is that exams are basically an attempt at statistical sampling: some quasi-random subset of all possible questions is selected. The student’s performance on that subset is taken as a meaningful proxy of their overall mastery of the subject.

So far so good. But note that I said it’s a quasi-random subset. Why does that subset have to be created from scratch each year? Because of the secrecy-of-questions requirement.

But what if, instead of creating new questions each year, there was instead some portfolio of (say) 1,000 questions that is reused each year? The student is then examined on (say) 10 of these in the final exam.

At no point are the questions secret. Students may study and review them whenever and however they please. They simply will not know in advance which of the questions will be asked of them. Some set of questions will be randomly selected immediately before the exam papers are printed. It could even be made double-blind, with lecturers not knowing which questions will be asked.

I imagine that one of three things could happen:

1. Students could devise and memorise answers to all, or a large subset of, the questions. In which case, won’t they have had to learn the subject matter? Even the act of rote memorisation can lead to pre-conscious synthesis of key principles as a basis for future reasoning.
2. Students with prodigious memory or trained in mnemonic techniques will do better; but they do so already.
3. Some students will not be motivated and will simply fail under the new scheme. Again, no change.

Therefore I hypothesise that this approach – the “question portfolio” – would provide a better method of examination than the current approach.

Additional benefits:

• Questions are already linked with learning outcomes — students could be told what the link is.
• Students can precisely calibrate their current understanding by taking randomised tests when it suits them.
• Questions can receive much higher investment, as they will not be discarded each year.

Drawbacks:

• High initial cost of developing a large corpus of questions.
• Ongoing costs of “managing the portfolio” to reflect improvements, changes in subject etc.
• It’s unusual and may face resistance or bureaucratic inertia. For instance, it may not be compatible with university rules.

Of course this is all mere speculation on my part. I am not an expert in education; but with the greatest possible respect, neither are my professors.

At the very least, we could put this to the test. Develop a corpus of questions for (say) 20 subjects. Then, at the beginning of the semester, randomly select 10 of them to be taught with open questions, 10 of them to be taught to secret questions. Compare the average performance of those two sets with historical performances. That should give a fuzzy feel for whether it works better or not. I’m sure Andrew Leigh would know a better way to do it, but that’s my gut sense of how it might work.

Thoughts?

Recently I’ve opened a new account with Linode in anticipation of moving a server across to them. So far they’ve been pretty good. My current provider is Slicehost, who are also excellent and whose reliability has been utterly flawless — I have servers with ~500 days of uptime with them. I can recommend both services.

As a sort of quick test for Linode performance, I decided to run ab against the new server from my desktop here at home. I fire it up for the first run: 100 requests, 10 connections. It performs well. Next I jump to the next order of magnitude: 1000 requests, 100 connections. It times out.

In doing so it also kills off the SSH sessions I have logged into the Linode server.

After some experimentation, it becomes clear that the magic number of connections is 32. If I have 32 or more connections through ab, the connection locks up.

I opened a ticket with Linode and began trying to nut it out. I checked the iptables settings, the nginx settings, various kernel TCP/IP settings. All to no avail.

Today I tried out the 1000/100 test from another server I control and voila, it works fine. So it turns out that the limit on connections wasn’t at Linode’s end, it was at my ISP (iinet). They must have introduced this recently as I recall performing similar “sanity test” benchmarks on remote servers before.

Anyhow. The moral of the story is: I shouldn’t have thought unkind thoughts about Linode. It wasn’t their fault. However I offer as a suggestion that in future cases like these, they run ab from their side to eliminate ISP middlemen problems.

Stop trying to make me use your crappy “self serve” checkouts.

I noticed you installed them a few months back. A few weeks ago, out of curiousity, I tried it.

It was just that: a curiousity. My experience went as follows:

1. I was reminded of my first job as a checkout operator, which I utterly detested. It was with your company, actually, at the Big W in Darwin. Your managers there were incompetent and mean-spirited. I guess they got promoted to head office. I do not see doing a job I hate for free as progress.
2. I am out of practice. A normal checkout operator is much faster and has a good idea of efficiently packing the bags.
3. You still needed someone to verify my credit card signature. This took longer than it would at a normal checkout. No, I will not use a credit card PIN. I happen to like the additional legal protection the signature gives me.

So basically you want me to provide free labour, waste more of my own time and get crappy service from a grumpy curmudgeon (me). No bloody thanks.

It’s obvious you’re really keen on these machines. Today you closed the express checkouts so that I would either have to queue up with the trolleys or go through your stupid, rubbish, useless, dodgy, crappy, dumb, time-wasting, moronic, transparently grasping self-serve aisles. I chose to queue with the trolleys.

I noticed today that your competitors at Coles haven’t installed these machines. Indeed their express checkouts were fully staffed. And so, from now on, I will refuse to purchase my groceries at Woolies. I will be buying my petrol at Shell. I will be avoiding Dan Murphy’s and Dick Smith.

You, the Board and Executives of Woolworths, are a pack of wankers. I hope to see you resigning or being sacked with no bonuses. Thereafter I will look forward to the news that you are all rotting in a special hell where you are required to torture yourselves.

Yours Sincerely,

An ex-customer.