Blog — No comments
26
Jan 10

White Guilt: The New Patriotism

Here is a story idea I submitted to Hungry Beast on this Australia Day. Just to be clear, I don’t experience White Guilt. I’m way ahead of the curve and experience White Meta Guilt, the guilt that comes from being a member of a society that feels White Guilt.

***

Reconciliation in this country needs to stop being about what white fella thinks is best for indigenous Australians. As a nation, our reconciliation vocabulary only extends to telling this culture how to live their lives based on our own ideals. Has anyone ever stopped to ask the indigenous population what THEY want?

I’m not going to make a video or write a story. You are the journalists, that’s your job.

I want to see this on the 2010 series of Hungry Beast: a vox pop asking indigenous Australians the question “What do you want?” You can come up with more specific variations of this question in order to extract the kinds of answers you need e.g. “When will you know that true reconciliation has been achieved in Australia?”

And really ramp up the White Guilt in your editing. I mean seriously. Thrust that knife into our cold, shriveled, white hearts and rotate. Maybe interleave the vox pop interviews from white and indigenous Australians in a way that illustrates the contrast between our views on what is needed vs. what they actually want.

More ideas

Observation: There is an emerging trend for white Australians to vocally express their White Guilt. This may soon become a new mainstream form of Patriotism, replacing our previous forms: racism and getting drunk.

The kind of White Guilt I’m talking about doesn’t lead to action or solve practical problems. It’s more of a passive attitude that’s adopted by whites so they can wash their hands of the mistakes of governments past. Plant a flag in the moral high ground and one is free to enjoy life in the prosperous Australia we know today, despite the historical events that lead to its creation.

For successful reconciliation, the minority needs to feel like the engineer of their own emancipation. Epic bloody battles for freedom help with this. I’m definitely not suggesting we have one but Australia’s indigenous history is lacking this kind of epic empowerment that is present in other nations, e.g. USA.

Germaine Greer made an insightful observation recently: in indigenous youth culture, getting arrested is seen as a rite of passage. This illustrates my previous point. We can’t just tell indigenous Australians that reconciliation has been achieved. They have to feel it. This will sound ignorant but based on observations of analogous situations, I think it will help if the minority feel like they’ve earned it; like they had to fight for it. If equality is simply handed to them on a platter by Whitey, they don’t own it.

Maybe Investigate New Zealand. They have their own Maori TV station, the Australian equivalent of which seems a long, long way off.

Blog — No comments
10
Jan 10

Photos from Docklands

Melbourne City Lights from Docklands
Westgate Eclipse Bolte Bridge Close Up Newport Power Station

See the full set here.

Blog — 1 comment
07
Jan 10

Why I’m not excited about Nexus One

Firstly, the Nexus One has no multitouch, which is a deal breaker. Secondly, it’s not yet available in Australia (according to Google). However, I recently discovered that Apple has suckered me into being a permanent iPhone customer without me even realising it.

I’ve bought a few paid Apps for my iPhone. I can’t remember how much I’ve spent but it would be about $45. I was not conscious of it at the time but these apps I’ve paid for won’t work on any other phone. If I switch to an Android phone (or any other phone), I’ll be losing that investment. I guess I could buy an iPod Touch but what’s the point of carrying around two relatively bulky smart devices, and one where my apps only work over WiFi? I guess all I can hope for is that the iPhone hacking community figures out a way to run Android on the iPhone. Now that would be a “superphone”.

On a related note, do the Android apps have to be open source? Regardless, without an iTunes App Store equivalent, and hence the prospect of cashing in big time, devs won’t be as motivated to develop for Google’s platform if they don’t see a clear business model or way they can make money from it.

Blog — 3 comments
05
Jan 10

What I watched in 2009: TV Shows

Since it seems to be the season for best of 2009 retrospectives I thought I should get in on the action. First up, here’s my top 5 for TV Shows for the year that was.

  1. Arrested Development. I know, it’s like six years old, but I finally got around to watching all 3 seasons of this awesome series. The quality of the comedic writing is simply amazing. There are so many set-ups for the ultimate joke which you don’t see coming. And the clever yet subtle tie-ins with previous episodes make it well worth a couple of re-watches.
  2. True Blood. I didn’t think I would get into this series, especially in an industry so saturated with Twilight piggy-backs. True Blood is more than “just another vampire show”, it’s raised the bar for this genre by just being so damn compelling. The Season 2 story was a bit slow for a while and Bill Compton’s incessant chivalry makes me want to puke or just stake the guy, but apart from that it’s great.
  3. Battlestar Galactica. This series wound up this year to a semi-surprising climax with it’s 4th and final season. I’m glad it didn’t go longer as even Season 3 was starting to suffer from “filler bloat” which is where they pad out the main plot with pointless episodes to stretch it to 22 episodes or whatever. BSG remains in my opinion one of the best shows OF ALL TIME.
  4. Heroes. What can I say, I’m a sucker for punishment when it comes to this series. Season 4 has introduced some new characters, mostly original. Still has a good amount of mystery but the overall plot is pretty obvious. I used to watch Heroes for the powers but these days they’re a dime a dozen. Now I watch for Sylar, the evil antagonist who is really the only character that still has balls. He knows what he wants. He wants to kill everyone with powers, steal their powers and rule the world as the only one with powers. I respect that, you know. Too many characters these days are just lolly-gagging around while they “discover” their “destiny”. Snooooore.
  5. The Big Bang Theory. This show was hella funny even if it does reinforce geek stereotypes. Then there was S02E07 where Sheldon is a complete bastard prick. That turned me off the show because real people would not accept his behaviour, nor even care enough to react. They would simply ignore him or get a restraining order. The artificial construction of Sheldon’s character became even more apparent to the point where I stopped believing and started being angry at the writers. This has happened before and it’s an edge I am only rarely pushed over, but when I am it’s not pretty. But if I can ignore that one episode, it still makes my top 5 for the year.

So what have I missed? Did you watch anything last year that I don’t know about? Besides Dexter and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which are both on my to-watch list.

Blog — 1 comment
30
Dec 09

What Stargate Universe could have been

I’ve already watched Cube. It’s a pretty decent movie. If I want to watch it again, I’ll go get out the DVD. Disappointingly, Stargate Universe (SGU) has been created around the same basic plot: a crew of military and scientific personnell are stranded on an Ancient spaceship travelling to some unknown destination millions of light years from Earth.

It’s the classic “stalled elevator device” which is often used in film and TV dramas: trap your characters in a confined space to force character development. Simple. If you’re pressed for time, throw in a real annoying bastard (such as Robert Carlyle’s character) for some added tension to speed things up. However, after three episodes, SGU hasn’t moved past this basic device. If Wright and Cooper plan on stretching this to multiple seasons, no amount of pit stops on random, cliched planets, or dodging close calls with the Sun will make this format sustainable.

The next logical progression of the Stargate franchise became obvious to me after watching True Blood. Here’s a series in which vampires are “out of the coffin” as they put it, meaning the existence of vamp-kind is a fact, and also public knowledge. The series is thus speckled with parallels to historic struggles for minority equality. This results in a portrayal of the “vampires are real” world which is actually convincing, and believable.

The Stargate franchise needs to burn those NDA’s and just go public already! A few episodes in SG-1 touched on the idea, mostly via trips to planets whose Stargate program has already gone public. The challenge would be to develop this idea beyond “Stargates are glorified airports” while minimising the amount of political drama. District 9 showed us that seemingly far-fetched science fiction concepts can be handled with effective realism by drawing parallels with historical events (e.g. refugees).

At this early stage, I’m ready to applaud the creators for daring to diverge from the classic Stargate format: a power struggle between humans and an oppressive alien force. Defeat one, and another one comes along to replace it, and keep the series going. In SG-1, we had the Go’Ald, the Replicators, and finally the Ori. In Atlantis, it was the Wraith. If SGU reverts back to the power struggle format, I’ll stop watching.

Another potential direction, which would likely be more interesting, could be a prequel of sorts following the “Ancients”, their culture, technology (and the creation of the Stargates), and ultimately their path to ascension. If the series was different enough to its predecessors, it could work. It could explore themes such as “with powerful technology, comes great responsibility”, something we know defines the Ancients, who are always held up as the perfect race. With their superior genetics and technology, ultimate wisdom, and curious intervention restraint, they are an example of something we humans should aspire to become. So let’s see it, already! The ascension story arc could also deal with more “spiritual” themes, which would be something refreshing for the franchise.

Blog — No comments
22
Dec 09

Ukulele Boy meets Guitar Rig

This kid shot to “Internet” fame to the tune of 7.5 million views in a little over 2 weeks for his adorable rendition of “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz on the ukulele. I stumbled onto his equally impressive performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The middle of the video contains 44 seconds of seriously hardcore jamming. I felt it was just begging for the Guitar Rig treatment to truly express this kid’s inner rock legend! Enjoy!

Blog — No comments
16
Dec 09

Captain Conroy, your Censorship is taking on water

Today, Stephen Conroy announced that he would introduce blacklist Internet filtering legislation. Shortly thereafter, Google publicly voiced their concerns in a blog post, citing their  reasons against the filter. I personally take anything Google says about censorship with a great heaping bucket of salt given their previous actions in China, but Google’s complicity was commercially motivated (albeit unethical) so I can understand why it happened.

Now don’t worry friends about this ever getting through parliament. The motivation is most probably a grab for conservative votes, and if it pisses too many people off, the lost votes will offset any gains. So we’ll most likely see some form of watered down filter, which may not be entirely evil.

In its current form, the filter simply has too broad a scope, which is the main point raised by  Google, and one I half agree with. While a tightly scoped filter (as used by Germany and Italy) which excludes specific material such as child pornography may appear to have benefit, it does not address the real crime, which is the fact that this material is being created in the first place. What are the governments of the world doing about that? Blocking child porn sites is akin to the government putting fingers in its ears and going “La La La! If I don’t know about it, it isn’t happening!”

If we can agree (UN-style) on specific classes of materials that no one should access, and if filtering does not impact speed, then It might be OK. However, when dealing with the Internet, blacklist filters simply don’t work. They are impossible to maintain and proxy sites pop up faster than they can be blocked. I’ve seen 10-year-old kids circumvent the NSW Department of Education’s filtering system like they were punching through a wet paper bag. The Department switched to a whitelist filter in 2008, but that doesn’t stop VPN’s and future loop holes that haven’t even been discovered yet.

In schools, it then becomes a discipline issue. Filtering students inside the school network is a requirement, as there is a clear duty of care and it is not feasible to manually police kids on the internet, just as one can’t police everything they talk about in the playground. But restricting the surfing of every adult Australian citizen is a completely different ball game and dangerous territory. We are responsible for ourselves; it is not the government’s job to decide what information we should and should not access.

UPDATE: This is the ultimate irony:

Australia

Blog — No comments
15
Dec 09

A Video Rebuttal to Eric Schmidt on Privacy

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”

FUCK. OFF.

Blog — No comments
08
Dec 09

Google Reader Recommendations

Google have added a new “recommendations” feature to Google Reader. First I thought, “Oh great, they’ve stolen my idea.” But actually, it’s not even close to the goal of increasing the precision of my Google Reader inbox. Recommendations does not appear to be using any kind of classification (e.g. StumbleUpon), instead just clumping all users “likes” together in one big naive popularity contest.

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Google Reader Recommendations

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

  • It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
  • It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
  • It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
  • If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
  • Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
  • It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
  • However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
  • Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

Blog — No comments
05
Dec 09

ABC’s New Invasive Popups

Shame ABC! Shame!

What have you done?! I can understand the need for invasive TV popups on a *commercial* station which relies on advertising revenue. With the growing popularity of PVRs which have ad-skipping capability, the traditional ad-breaks will become less effective.

But there is NO excuse for this shit on a publicly funded TV station! Kill the popups, ABC or kill your reputation as Australia’s only respectable broadcaster.

« Older Entries