Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Back when I worked in the arms industry ... | Feb 13, 2007 10:13

Well, I wasn't so much in the weapons side of the business as the selling-the-Phantom-of-the-Opera-soundtrack-to-tourists trade - and I can muster no moral justification for that - but the fact was that the HMV Store in Piccadilly Circus was owned by Thorn EMI, which was also the maker of popular battlefield radar systems. When I had a performance assessment, my boss asked me what I thought of the company, I felt bound to point out that the weapons thing troubled me a little.

It actually turned out to be somewhat worse than most people knew at the time. The company was selling its radar systems to the Saddam regime in Iraq. And those sales were being secretly facilitated, at the expense of British taxpayers, by Margaret Thatcher's government.

The two parts of the company de-merged in 1996 - so you can listen to Kylie Minoque with a clear conscience - but I offer this story as a note of caution in response to the news, in a report from the Green Party and an extensive story by Matt Nippert in The Listener, that the New Zealand Superannuation Fund is investing in some ventures that seem morally repugnant or fly in the face of government policy.

Some of the investments offer a clear-cut case. We shouldn't be investing in tobacco companies: even $28,745,112 out of $11.2 billion is too much, and it appears the Prime Minister thinks so too.

But the $10 million we have in Halliburton is a different matter. We largely know the Halliburton name through its bountiful supply contracts in Iraq, especially via its subsidiary KBR, but the basis of its business lies in construction and providing technical services to the oil industry. Its business practices have been questionable, but that is more a matter for the US taxpayers who were overcharged on contracts than it is for us.

The picture is similar for most of the "defence" firms listed in the Listener story. Computer Sciences Corporation, for example, provides IT services to the public and private sector in 88 countries, but a minority of its business is bound up in defence contracts, including a gig for the Missile Defence Agency. Do we consider General Electric (in which we have $33 million) a healthcare company and network TV owner - or an environmental vandal and demonstrably corrupt weapons supplier?

As the story notes, New Zealand's own Rakon (nearly $10 million) "makes GPS [global positioning systems] that end up in telephones and bombs." Our nest-egg is also vested with three uranium mining companies, to a total of $20 million: we don't like nuclear weapons, but there's a case for regarding nuclear energy as a means of moderating climate change.

In the end, I suspect it will prove impossible to run a viable investment portfolio without running into some moral complication - such is the sprawl of corporate capitalism - but this is a useful controversy if it obliges us to more clearly define some ground rules.

Meanwhile, No Right Turn has some commentary (Craig Ranapia makes the good point in the comments that our government disapproves of tobacco companies, but is still happy to bank the tax revenue they provide) and notes that the Super Fund has joined the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Anyway, I'm feeling more than a bit exhausted after two weeks that encompassed Foo Camp and two Karajoz Great Blends. By the time I'd visited the dentist yesterday, I was good for no more than a few hours on the couch watching purloined documentaries.

The Auckland KGB wasn't a bad night, if not quite a raging success by our standards. As Rob McKinnon pointed out, I think we were all a bit overawed by the magnificent venue, and we felt a bit disconnected from the audience on stage.

Wellington, on the other hand, was an absolute blast. There was a real buzz, perhaps because last Thursday was the hottest day I have ever experienced in Wellington, and the city folk were going mad all day - stripping off their clothes and leaping off the wharf. The Great Blend punters had drunk all the beer by half time (resourcefully, they moved on to the wine).

The lady bloggers of Wellington were out in force. Jo from Hubris, the queen of them, swam in the harbour both before and some time after the event, and accompanied me and various other ratbags to Mighty Mighty in Cuba St (where I ran into David Cohen and Lloyd Jones). Martha enjoyed herself, distributed fliers for the Craft 2.0 show she's organising with Ellipse (a Vox user!), and scoffed all the chilli mussels when she got home. Sarah offered an interesting metaphor for my mind. Mauricio from Geekzone took pictures, as did Matthew Sew Hoy.

It was also nice to see DPF there, and to meet Danyl, and Dave Crampton from Big News, who was younger than I expected.

Memorable moments: Matt Heath from Back of the Y offering strategic advice to Simon Pleasants, and an encounter in the tablecloth-sized courtyard at Mighty Mighty: some bumptious twentysomething jerk came out to relitigate some perceived slight for the benefit of his mates. His target was a geeky-looking guy in glasses. In response to the verbal provocation, the geeky-looking guy stood up.

"You're tall …" gasped the jerk.

"Yes," said the geek.

And he was: Che Tibby-tall, and not exactly light with it. He simply stood there, looming, while, over several hilarious minutes, the jerk crunched into reverse, with his mates watching, and decided that he'd never wanted any trouble in the first place. It was one of the nicest examples of someone being put on their place that I've ever seen.

Scoop has Wellington Great Blend coverage, including audio from the "digital democracy" panel.

Foo stuff continues to emerge. Matt Gibbons mashed up a bunch of video (35MB QuickTime) that captures the Foo Camp flavour nicely, and Don Christie of Catalyst IT blogged his highlights. His presentation on open infrastructure as the path to prosperity is also online. Synthetic Thoughts also has a detailed post.

PS: The teaser trailer for Back of the Y's debut feature film, The Devil Dared Me To, is in OurTube on the Public Address System page.

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Chew before swallowing | Feb 08, 2007 08:16

A "new analysis" says a staggering 83,250 New Zealand children are "going to school hungry", according to the Herald's lead story today. Like hell it does.

The story is based on some math by health researcher Rob Quigley, who took the percentages from the 2002 National Children's Nutrition Survey and matched them against the 2006 census figures, coming up with the 80,000+ figure.

It would seem to mesh nicely with the current crop of news stories sparked by National Party leader John Key's call for businesses to donate food to schools - and Key promptly leapt on the numbers today, repeating his prescription for private charity and accusing the government of being in denial.

But the Children's Nutrition Survey is a survey of children's nutrition: what they're eating, when. In the report from the survey, there is a section on food security, but the words "hungry" and "hunger" do not appear in the report, and certainly not in the section about not eating breakfast at home, which was a completely different question.

Quigley, was far more circumspect than the Herald was when he was interviewed on National Radio this morning: he used the phrase "skipping breakfast", and noted that the survey did not cover some of the biggest breakfast-eaters, 16 to 18 year-olds.

There ought to be concern that more children from lower socio-economic groups than wealthier ones, and more Maori than Pakeha kids, don't eat at home before they go to school, but, as even the story notes toward the end, this eating trend isn't necessarily related to poverty. Younger kids are much more likely to eat before leaving the house than 12 year-olds, for example. Children from poorer families and Maori and Pacific Island kids are more likely to purchase food at the school tuck shop. Girls are more likely than boys to skip breakfast. Urban girls are more likely to leave home without eating than rural girls. But rural males are more likely to pick up something on the way to school than urban males.

I'm not seeking to dismiss poverty, or minimise the nutritional issues highlighted in the 2002 study, but this looks like the Herald, yet again, trying to own the news agenda with a beat-up story. I can hardly wait to hear what John Key says next.

(Although a policy statement on market rents for public housing would seem relevant.)

Anyway, it's Karajoz Great Blend night in Wellington tonight: we'll have the Back of the Y crew showing and telling on their chequered career, and then a panel on digital democracy with Chris DiBona, Alastair Thompson, Rob McKinnon and David Hume. It'll be fun. If you're all booked, you can arrive at 6.30pm.

And thanks to our lovely sponsors: Karajoz Coffee Company, Idealog magazine, Hatton Estate wines and Monteith's Brewing Company. There's a page here with more information on each.

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An okay sort of day | Feb 07, 2007 11:24

It can be hard to separate the actual Waitangi Day and the Waitangi Day narrative that the media choose to adopt each year - they can effectively be the same thing - but it does seem that we reached some sort of equilibrium in 2007.

It was as if everyone knew their role: the Prime Minister did her staying away thing, the protestors protested, John Key ferried that girl from McGehan Close around (which, depending on your view, was either a great human gesture or a blatant press opportunity) and a lot of other New Zealanders just sort of did their thing.

I watched Te Kaea on Maori Television last night and even with the language barrier, marvelled at the content (a lot of Maori having various sorts of good time) and the standard of production. It was a good watch.

Meanwhile, Groove in the Park thudded away on the easterly wind from Western Springs and, when I wasn't watching the Black Caps ingeniously contrive to throw away another victory, I worked.

Why was I working? In part because we've had a bit of a Wikipedia situation over the past two days. I created an article for Kiwi Foo Camp, linked from the main Foo Camp article. But minutes after I had created it and added some initial text, it was hit with a "speedy deletion" tag, which under Wikipedia policy is supposed to be reserved for spam, vandalism and "utter rubbish". I followed instructions and added a {{hangon}} tag, which is supposed to halt (or at least delay) the action and explained what I was doing on the discussion page.

But when Juha visited shortly afterwards, the article had already been deleted. He wrote some text, added another {{hangon}} tag - and the article was deleted again, while it was actually being edited. We had a hostile editor, or perhaps more than one. We tried to discuss the issue with the anonymous editor, who accused us of spamming, declared that the main Foo Camp article (the top result for "FooCamp" in Google) was also spam, belittled us and raised a string of fairly ropey justifications for the immediate deletion of our article.

Fortunately, another editor turned up and placed the article in the "Articles for Deletion" process, which meant that it could not be immediately deleted again, and automatically launched a discussion, which our hostile editor hasn't bothered to join. This gave me the chance to actually edit the article, which I think is in quite good shape now, for a two day-old article. An editor I've dealt with before has been quite helpful, but another one has also been hostile and dismissive.

I confess, I'm dumbfounded by this. I'm happy to meet a high standard for article writing, but the hostility has been hard to understand. As things stand, the article seems unlikely to be deleted, but may yet be merged into the main Foo Camp article, even though it's longer and better-sourced and the content doesn't really suit the merge.

I'm trying to manage my way through it, but I'd appreciate advice from readers with Wikipedia experience. You're also, naturally, free to join the discussion, but I'd appreciate it if you were very civil, and if you don't register as an editor purely to join the discussion, because the editors seem to be sensitive about this.

The last thing I wanted was an edit war, but creating the article did oblige me to register, rather than make the occasional edit unregistered as I've done before, and to learn a few more skills. I've updated the 95bFM entry, and I'll add a little more to the Graham Kerr article I improved a little while ago.

The irony is that in my talk at Kiwi Foo, I favourably compared Wikipedia to our official online reference works. Guess we're seeing that nothing is perfect.

Anyway, an excellent post from Nigel Parker about being the Microsoft guy at Foo Camp. It includes video, and there will be video and audio of the ministerial sessions posted to YouTube once it has been cleared with those involved.

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Foo, what a scorcher! | Feb 05, 2007 10:55

Well, that was Kiwi Foo Camp. And it was great. The first O'Reilly-inspired "unconference" to be held outside the US or Europe took place over the weekend at Mahurangi College in Warkworth. About 120 geeks, artists, scientists and business and policy people attended, and, happily, seemed to need no encouragement to go into Foo mode.

The first formal part of the event was a powhiri, which was followed by an orientation meeting where, in the Foo tradition, every delegate was required to introduce themselves and employ three words to sum up their particular thing.

After the meeting, it was time for people to hit the whiteboards (in this case, actually large white sheets of paper) and schedule their sessions; something they needed little prompting to do. The first session, after dinner, was a meeting on broadband and regulatory policy with Communications and IT minister David Cunliffe.

People tend to forget that sometimes policy-makers are on top of their portfolios, and Cunliffe considerably raised his stocks by demonstrating that he knew the issues, but more so by clearly listening to what people said. "It is clear to me from what I've heard tonight that peering is my next primary issue," he concluded at the end of the session. The room burst into applause. Afterwards, I spoke to an employee of a state entity, from whom Cunliffe had requested a copy of a technical paper on the issue. It was the first time he'd ever been able to communicate directly with a minister, and he was feeling highly encouraged.

There was another round that evening, but I was more inclined towards social networking over drinks, meeting people and making introductions. Discussions continued back over the road at the motor lodge, where it somehow got to 2.30am.

Being of robust constitution, I got back over promptly in the morning, but skipped the first session to work the presentation ('Stories are the new data') that David Slack, Mark Cubey and I gave that afternoon. People seemed to enjoy it.

I attended a session with Ben Goodger (with assistance from Asa Dotzler) on open source and consumer software, which provided an interesting insight into the philosophy behind Firefox. I was familiar with the messy early history of the Mozilla project, but the consumer stuff was new to me.

"There was always a clear focus about what the intent was," Ben explained. "We wanted to make a browser for ordinary folk. We're here to make the web usable."

The catch is that when you're orienting decisions explicitly around the consumers, you may do things that content producers don't like. Implementing a pop-up blocker in the core browser, but making the actual ad-blocker an extension that consumers can choose to install is an example of the balancing act that implies.

On Saturday afternoon, Mike Hodgson (of Pitch Black) and Bruce Ferguson held a session explaining the multimedia installation work they do for Louis Vuitton, the US NBC network and other large clients. To say it's an unsung story is puttingit mildly. They're working in a field where money is almost no object, and the rooms they create are simply stunning. Matt 'Starlords' Gibbons was also on hand to show off progress on his new mash-up, which is based around the oeuvre of Temuera Morrison.

Later in the day, I made a mental coin toss and plumped for a lecture on functional body modification by Wired News reporter Quinn Norton , which turned out to be a enjoyable and provocative way to end the day. Several years ago, Quinn had a small, spherical magnet implanted in the nerve-rich area at the end of one of her fingers.

This meant she could pick up other magnets with her fingertip, but it also gave her the functional equivalent of an extra sense. The human brain's neuroplasticity means it can respond to and model data it has never known before, which is what hers did. After two months, she could detect electromagnetic fields, and gauge their strength, from the way the tiny magnet in her finger vibrated.

Another, bolder body-modder, with more and bigger magnets, developed the ability to sense the frequency of EM fields, and could even tell when his computer was about to slow down by sensing EM radiation from the motor in his hard drive as swap-file activity picked up.

But here's the catch: the magnets almost always fail in a quite unpleasant way: they shatter from the inside out, and breach their inert coating. In Quinn's case, the first thing her body did was absorb the iron in the rare earth magnet, leaving the other minerals in splinters throughout her finger. Her doctor was unable to remove them, but - being magnetically attracted - the splinters eventually reunited. She doesn't have her superpowers any more, because the reconstituted magnet is encased in scar tissue and can't vibrate.

From there, the discussion ventured into what's possible in terms of human enhancement, and what society will tolerate. For example, a glucometer attached to an RFID chip that can deliver real-time blood sugar readings to a website; which sounds kind of fun until you consider the idea of remote "blood surveillance" being non-voluntary.

Quinn was also appearing with the benefit of ProVigil, a drug developed to treat narcolepsy. It relieves the subject of the requirement to sleep, without any apparent ill-effects or addictive risk. She has a friendly doctor. Not present in anyone's bloodstream: melanotan, a synthetic hormone that helps prevent melanoma. It will also make you more tanned and thinner and increase your sex drive. Wired had a story late last year on what it dubbed The Barbie Drug.

The outer boundaries of modification are easy enough to trace ("If I decide to modify myself by contracting airborne ebola, society's not not going to let me," Quinn observed) but there's a lot of territory between those boundaries and where we're at now.

Quinn was also here as a "spy" for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to report back on our current debate about copyright law amendment. Judith Tizard fronted a session on the Copyright Amendment Bill, which didn't get quite as lively as people expected, and talked to people about it at length afterwards. In fact, she turned up on all three days and talked with people more or less constantly (a heightened facility for conversation may indeed be Judith Tizard's superpower). At one point on Saturday night she strode past me declaring "I'm going to play Werewolf with Google." Yes, she became almost certainly the first member of a national government executive to play Werewolf.

The games of bluffing, logic and face-reading continued until 4am on Saturday night, even after game leader Chris DiBona had departed for bed with his Werewolf cards. I didn't participate, preferring to devote my bandwidth to socialising. I met a lot of people I've been copied in to emails with for years, but had never spoken to. I enjoyed hearing John Houlker and Mike Hodgson in enthusiastic conversation. ("Is there any reason in principle," one asked of the other, "that your band couldn't be as big as, say, Pink Floyd?")

On Sunday morning, I enjoyed a more low-key session with Canterbury University linguist Jen Hay, who demonstrated the nice open-source software they use to merge and manage historical voice recordings and transcripts. Then I went to a session on internet traffic measurement that didn't really hit the mark for me.

Things I missed that other people rated: Rod Drury's packed-out preview for his "Accounting 2.0" product Xero, Auckland city councillor Richard Simpson's presentation on ideas for Auckland's future, Chris DiBona from Google's show-and-tell on the "one laptop for every child" project, the Firefox 3 session, Artur Bergman from Six Apart's "Fucking Big Websites" primer and David Haywood's alternative energy session. I also missed Graeme Merrall's briefing on News Limited's online strategy in Australia, but got him to give me the short version on Saturday night: they're driving a big and growing quantity of comments traffic by having around 100 journalists blogging. (The part I found slightly worrying was that the most extreme partisan blogging was driving the most traffic. It's nice that Rupert gets his page impressions, but sad if that comes at the expense of civil discourse.)

Nat Torkington rather flattered me by describing me as an organiser of Kiwi Foo: in reality most of the heavy lifting was done by Nat and his wife Jenine Abarbanel, a woman of formidable capacity. What I did was help invite people and bring the coffee. Karajoz let me take up a Domobar and various other kit and product, which was an even bigger hit than Glen Barnes' Wii. We will so be doing that again.

We subverted hierarchies and got ourselves a really good mix of campers, but of course there wasn't room for everyone we liked, and I realised over the weekend that there were people (Rod Oram!) who simply should have been there. There's always next year.

A personal good moment on Saturday night was a conversation with a young man on the autistic spectrum, about my kids and about what he summed up as a matter of recognising your own difference and deficits, and getting on top of them intellectually. I felt affirmed.

A number of people remarked to me that the timing was good; that people feel that there's something happening. And I suspect that's right. Rod Drury (a Kiwi Foo sponsor) is providing the kind of entrepreneurial leadership too long missing from our business community, the former Trade Me shareholders' money is at work, and, of course that keynote of geek politics, copyright law, is in play.

There was a lot to take in, not a hell of a lot of sleeping, and plenty of talking. By the time I got home yesterday, I was having trouble processing language - in or out - my brain was so tired. I found it sort of amusing.

But there's a bloody busy week ahead. Both our Wellington and Auckland Great Blend events will up inside a day. I've added TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis to the online media panel for Auckland, and David Hume of the State Services Commission to the digital democracy discussion in Wellington. Also, the museum's New Zealand Decorative Art gallery will be open for viewing as people arrive at the Auckland event, and there will also be … a surprise.

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Anyway, some other reactions. Juha blogged Day One, Two and Three.

Australians Laura Thompson and Greg Luck had commentary.

Rod Drury summed up day one, and the "game-changing" Firefox 3 session.

Mauricio has lots of photos. Mark Derricutt has blog entries and yet more pictures. And there are even more pictures.

If anyone else has more links, please post them in the comments.

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