Andrew E. Scott

I recently got back from a short holiday in Canberra, our nation’s capital. Amongst other touristy things, we visited Old Parliament House, where there is an Australian Democracy Museum. One of the displays is on the past Prime Ministers, and when you see them all together, you realise that we’ve had a lot of them, in the century and a bit that we’ve run our own parliament.

In fact, from 1901 to 2010, we’ve had 31 changes of government. For those not doing the math as we go along, that’s one every three and a half years.

And for someone who is, say, 35 years old, and facing 25 years before they can get access to the money in their superannuation, there’s an expected 7 or so new governments that will have a chance to meddle with it in the mean time.

The risk of current and future governments impacting the performance of an investment through passing laws is called Legislative Risk. Unfortunately, laws that affect superannuation have been prime candidates in the past for government fiddling. In the future, given the rumours about the Henry Tax Review, it will almost certainly get further tweaking still.

If you’re an employee, participation in superannuation is compulsory, where 9% of the total salary package (or thereabouts) is locked away in the system. Unless employees are willing to go to the expense and effort of setting up a Self Managed Super Fund, their money is generally invested in Australian stocks and bonds. So, if you want to invest in say fine art, residential property, a family company or venture-capital backed start ups, you aren’t going to get any joy with super.

Despite the limited investment options and the long period that you can’t directly benefit from it, an investment in your superannuation gets beneficial tax treatment. This is its key advantage, and the very thing that is vulnerable to legislative risk – a risk that is real, based on past actions and rumoured future actions of our governments.

I think that most Australians would benefit from having some level of investment outside of superannuation (even if it’s just their home), in order to reduce their exposure to this risk.

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Tags: Australia, canberra, government, investment, legislative risk, pension, prime minister, risk, superannuation

After I’d written the previous post on Communications Industries, I worried that the two properties that I’d used as the axes to obtain the set of four industries were perhaps the wrong ones. I suspect that for any 2 x 2 matrix, there are probably an infinite set of alternative axes that produce a given set of contents. For example, instead of the public/private distinction, I might have chosen asymmetric/symmetric. But that said, the properties “feel” like good ones to me, so I’ll stick with them for now, while allowing myself to luxury to throw them away later if they turn out not to work.

Anyway, to continue my musing…

Taking the 2 x 2 matrix from last time, and populating it with examples of the products and businesses within those industries is helpful in building up a picture of the characteristics of each quadrant:

One of the first observations is that all of these examples of communications require some sort of network. The different quadrants have different types of networks, clearly. I’m interested in seeing if there are some common characteristics shared by the examples in the e.g. public or discrete categories.

Another observation is that the older examples make use of analogue or manual methods, while the newer examples are digital or electronic. Analogue technologies are probably better aligned with a continuous approach to communicating, as digital technologies are, almost by definition, discrete approaches. Bits are bundled together into packets, and sent across the network in discrete chunks. However, each chunk may carry something very small, perceptually, and so can effectively emulate a continuous channel.

It seems that in gathering up examples, I have found comparatively fewer examples of continuous communication than distinct communication. An explanation of this could be that discrete communication has historically been based around a particular physical medium (a letter, a pneumatic capsule, a book, a film reel, a CD, etc.) which was the means of expressing the communication. The large variety of physical media possible have resulted in different products and businesses based around them, and the characteristics of those products have been carried forward into the digital world. (Although without the conservative force of those physical constraints, we are seeing some of them merge.)

On the other hand, continuous communication networks developed after their discrete cousins, when technology was finally able to capture and transmit two of the senses we use to experience performances. Aside from the relationship to a particular sense, there was no physical medium to constrain the communication, and hence the communications networks were more versatile. Fewer types of continuous communications networks were needed to accommodate the range of things people wanted to communicate. Any sort of performance at a venue (theatre, concert hall, sporting ground, office, or home) could be conveyed to somewhere else.

That said, there are definitely constraints of various kinds on continuous communications networks. The other senses that might be used if you were physically present are not accommodated. In terms of vision, you are provided with only a window into the other end, rather than the whole vista. In terms of sound, you are provided with a limited frequency and dynamic range as well as a loss of some of the spacial characteristics. But, unlike some of the discrete communications options, there is also a much reduced need for literacy, as the experience aims to provide a “natural interface” through conveying key human senses.

I think I’ll leave this discussion there for now, and pick up the differences between public and private later.

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Tags: broadcasting, communications, continuous, discrete, messaging, publishing, technology, telephony

This is something that I’ve been mulling over for a little while, and I’m hoping that by posting it here, the discipline of having to write it down will clarify it for me. And, perhaps people reading this will comment on the ideas and help flesh them out a bit more.

A variety of industries have developed that deal with interpersonal communications at a distance. Each of them has crystalised around their own set of technologies. However, there seems to be a blurring of the boundaries between them these days, and in order to better understand what this means, it could be helpful to understand how the underlying technologies of these industries relate.

If you simply consider two properties of technologies used by the communications industries, it appears that you can draw some reasonable boundaries. The two properties I’m thinking of are privacy and continuousness, and by building a simple 2×2 matrix out of them, you get the following diagram:

Admittedly, the separation between Public and Private is a little fuzzy. Does sending something to 10 of your closest friends make something public? What about 100? What about 1,000? Does it depend on the friends? However, I think it is reasonably well understood that you can have private group communication, not just private one-on-one communication. I think we also usually know when we are engaging in something that is highly (publicly?) visible, and something that is private, despite the occasional exception.

And while the distinction between discrete and continuous communication ought to be unambiguous, it too has its fuzziness. A discrete communication is one where the communication itself has a clearly defined boundary, e.g. an image, a movie, a book, a song, or an article. While a continuous communication lasts as long as the communications channel is maintained, e.g. a TV channel, a radio channel, a telephone call, or a video conferencing session. Recordings tend to be discrete while performances tend to be continuous.

But, what if you watch a movie on the TV, or listen to a song on the radio? This is an example of convergence between the different industries. Once a movie or a song is published, the broadcast network can distribute it, although it loses some of its discreteness in the process.

Similarly, there is convergence between the broadcasting and telephony industries. A reporter can call into a news station, and have their story broadcast out to the viewers. Or when your call is put on hold, you may end up listening to a live radio station.

Convergence between telephony and messaging is well understood within the telco realm. You can call and leave a voicemail for someone, which becomes a message they can later retrieve. Or it might be transcribed and then delivered as a text message. Or it could be send as an audio attachment in an email. Or instead of leaving the voicemail, you could record an audio MMS and send that instead. And if a SMS is sent to a fixed phone that cannot display it, a phone call can be generated instead with text-to-speech used to render the message audible.

However, what has become most interesting of all recently is the convergence between messaging and publishing. This blog post is an act of publishing. However, I could have sent it via email to a few of my friends, and that would have been messaging. Instead of emailing it, I can make it available via Facebook. If it is made available to my network of friends, it is messaging. But, with the click of a button I can change my preferences so that Notes are public, so it is publishing.

One of the interesting aspects to social networking for me is that some networks are designed primarily around a messaging model (like Facebook or Friendster) and others around a publishing model (like Myspace or Twitter). As the social networks all compete to offer similar features, the sharp lines between the models get very blurred.

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I’ve spent a couple of weeks in Hong Kong, and am familiar with the Octopus card. I’ve lived in London, and traveling on the Tube to work every day, clocked up a lot of experience with the Oyster card. So, I was interested to see how Victoria’s own Myki would fare, and I was willing to be an early adopter.

The stories in the press haven’t been pretty. My personal experience was varied, but comes down on the side of bad.

I normally use a Zone 1 weekly ticket, so I decided to simply transition over to a Myki with a weekly ticket on it, rather than risk using the new Myki money system. However, it appears that you can’t escape the latter system, as I found out the hard way.

It started off well. I ordered my new Myki ticket for free (offer extended now to the end of January) and it arrived in the post a few days later, with my name spelled correctly, and the right letter (!) accompanying it.

I went to the train station to put a weekly ticket on it. It was a little unintuitive to load it up, but I’m sure next time it will be quicker.

Arriving at the exit barriers at Parliament station, I encountered my first problem. I wasn’t sure where the Myki had to be put in order to be scanned. As people banked up behind me, and I tried attempt after attempt, eventually I found the right spot. It’s on the side of the barrier (rather than the front or top), on right side of the passenger using it, and at about their knee level. When you scan properly, a message “CSC PASS” appears on the display at the top of the barrier and the gate opens.

Heading home, I knew where to scan, so went through okay. But getting off at my station (in Zone 1) to head home, I was engrossed in my podcasts and I really can’t tell you if I “touched off” at the station or whether the machine didn’t read the card correctly.

The next day, mysteriously, the Myki card didn’t appear to scan correctly when I got on the train, and when I again got to the barriers at Parliament station (confident in my ability to get Myki to scan correctly) they didn’t open. There was no error message, no beep. The Myki card simply wasn’t recognised.

Luckily I was carrying around my receipt for the weekly pass, which I showed the barrier attendants, as there was no other way to indicate to them that the Myki card was valid. They let me through then, and again in the afternoon when I experienced the same problem trying to get home.

Here’s what I learned later: even if you aren’t using the Myki money system, you still need to touch off, as it turns out that Myki will assume that you’ve travelled to the end of the line if you don’t, which means you get charged the difference between a Zone 1 trip and a Zone 2 trip. In my case, this difference was $2.02, so my Myki money balance went from zero to negative $2.02. If you have a negative balance, the card won’t work.

That evening, I rang Myki to complain about my card not working, and spoke to a helpful person called Vinh. After several periods of clarifying what happened, punctuated by long periods on hold, he explained that I’ll be getting a credit for $2.02 to get the card working again. He wasn’t sure if $2.02 was the right amount, because he couldn’t see the negative balance on his system.

Despite the positive news from Vinh, my card continued to be ignored by the barriers for the rest of the week, and the balance stayed at -$2.02. Hopefully next week it will be working, but by this point, I don’t expect it to.

Lessons learned:

• Always keep the receipt handy for the weekly pass, since this is the only way to prove that I’ve actually got the right to travel on the train.
• Always remember to touch on and off, even if I’m not using the Myki money system, and even if there isn’t a barrier at the station that forces me to scan the card to get out.
• Keep using the old system for as long as possible, since the weekly passes cost exactly the same and I don’t need to keep a separate receipt nor remember to touch on and off.

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Tags: Australia, melbourne, metlink, myki, problems, public transport, ticket, train, transit pass, victoria

There’s plenty that’s already been written on this movie, since it cost a bomb to make, the director waited a decade to make it until technology caught up to his vision, and it’s on a rapid trajectory to become the highest grossing film ever. But I’ve been hanging out to see it ever since I heard it would be in 3D, making it the first of the current crop of 3D films to be (at least, partially) live-action. And anyway, at least this review will be adhering to my strong policy of no spoilers.

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My grandfather always makes this recipe at Christmas, so for me it is part of that bundle of food associations that make this time of year particularly special. However, this year he’s been a little unwell, so didn’t have time to make the stuff. He normally produces enough Nuts and Bolts to feel a small nation, and gives gifts of the savoury snack to every family member. The dinner table wouldn’t have been the same this year without it, so I made a quick batch. It is deliciously more-ish!

Ingredients

250g dry-roasted peanuts, unsalted
300g Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain (these are the “bolts”)
1/2 cup (125mL) of light oil (preferably peanut oil)
45g packet of French Onion Soup mix
1 tablespoon of curry powder
1 teaspoon of mustard powder

Method

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius.

Mix together all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

Warm oil in microwave, for example, on High setting for 30 seconds, then pour over the dry ingredients and mix well.

Spread the mix across a large, flat baking dish and put into the oven for 15-20 minutes, removing to stir every 5 minutes or so. The result should look dry and smell very aromatic.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool before eating. Needs to be stored in an air-tight container.

This recipe is easily adaptable to taste, e.g. use more or less Nutri-Grain, nuts, curry or mustard as your taste dictates.

Makes enough Nuts and Bolts to fill a 2L container. Best eaten before 1st January.

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Disclaimer: If you already knew this stuff, I apologise, but I found it pretty cool.

Our eyes have three different types of cone cells that allow us to see a huge range of colours. Okay, so you knew that already, but I haven’t gotten to the good bit.

Televisions, computers, magazines and other visual media all exploit the fact we have those three types of cells to create the range of colours we see in them. They use three different pigments or three different lights, in various combinations, to do this. Hence the three “primary colours“. No, that wasn’t the good bit either.

Different animals have different numbers of cone cells in their eyes. Sea mammals (like dolphins) have just one type of cone cell, so can’t really tell colour at all. Most other mammals, except primates, have two types of cone cell. Most birds, and some fish, have four types of cone cells. Pigeons and butterflies are believed to have five types of cone cells. Stomatopods are thought to have as many as twelve different colour receptors!

Actually, some people (particularly women) are believed to have four types of cone cells. If ordinary people can see 1 million colours, they can see 100 million different colours.

But for these women, and most birds, butterflies and stomatopods, the three primary colours don’t always represent reality as they see it with their naked vision. You might show them a picture of a colourful flower on a computer monitor, but it is generated by red, green and blue dots, and so won’t look like the actual flower.

I wonder if the different species cone cells have evolved to help us find food and avoid predators, and if so whether you could match up the different spectral sensitivities of species’ cone cells with the colours of different plants and animals to determine if they evolved together.

Oh, the cool thing was the women with super vision. But, I think the rest of it is pretty cool also.

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Tags: biology, color, colour, cone cell, cones, spectral sensitivity

I use and believe in the value of anti-virus software to protect my PC against malware. However, it appears that the full level of protection will soon come to an end, if it hasn’t already.

My home computer of choice is a laptop. It’s not by any means a highly performant, always-on, always-connected server. When I need to use it, I power it up, do what I need to do, then power it down. Mostly I use the web browser – it doesn’t need a whole heap of grunt.

More people are turning to these as their preferred computers. Laptops now outsell desktops. Netbooks are expected to sell like hotcakes.

Unfortunately, the following facts don’t seem to paint a pretty picture for me:

• During the week, I use the computer for at most a couple of hours per day.
• The virus scanner takes a couple of hours to run.
• By default, the scanner does a complete computer scan every day (a practice recommended elsewhere).
• Over time, I will have more disk to scan (e.g. you can buy about twice the size hard disk for the same money each year).
• Over time, I will have more files to scan (e.g. browser caches will contain more since more objects appear on each web page every year and HTML5 techniques involve storing data locally).

It has gotten to the point where I turn off the computer prior to the virus scan finishing. The virus scan effectively never completes, so at no point can it assure me that the computer is free of malware.

I can see some solutions to this. None of them are ideal.

Firstly, I will have to give up on daily scans. If it never gets to finish anyway, then why should I pay the price for the massive slow-down that I get from constant scanning?

I could also set the browser to delete all files in the cache when I exit (or at least delete them on a regular basis). However, I suspect most browsers lack this feature today.

Finally, I could use a Mac or a Linux PC instead. Since there is less malware for those platforms, scanning should be much faster.

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Dear Tony Abbott,

Your new climate change policy for the Liberal Party is certainly interesting: a 5% reduction in national emission levels from those of the year 2000 by the year 2020, but without implementing an energy trading scheme or carbon tax. Although it doesn’t sound like you’ve quite settled how you’ll achieve this yet, you are looking at options such more regulations and new government subsidies. You are clearly open to options which the Labor Party is traditionally closed to.

However, as someone who might be willing to take on radical yet reasonable policy positions, I would like you to consider a simple measure that will cost the government nothing, yet easily achieve your target. Pass a law that makes it illegal to eat meat.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” found that 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the livestock sector, which is more than the emissions from all the cars in the world. We have been looking for emission savings in all the wrong places.

Having Australia become the first country to go vegetarian would demonstrate global leadership and really show those United Nations guys that we can do without their pesky energy trading scheme. If China can introduce a one child policy, then surely we can introduce a one food policy. Almost a third of Indian people are vegetarian, which is like if seventeen entire Australias were vegetarian. The global thinking is consistent: I have been assured by a very knowing fellow in London (author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change) that people ought to go vegetarian for the climate’s sake.

According to the Australian Government’s Department of Climate Change, “Tracking to Kyoto and 2020″ report, our emission levels in the year 2000 were 553 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent gasses. A 5% reduction is a reduction of 27.7 million tonnes. Vegetarianism will easily achieve this.

As the Garnaut Climate Change Review notes, “Australia’s per capita emissions arising from agriculture are more than six times the world average, more than four times the OECD average” and the Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing industry is the largest industrial contributor to emissions, accounting for 29.3% of industrial emissions. Garnaut attributes 123.7 million tonnes of emissions to beef cattle alone.

Meat & Livestock Australia estimates that “50.7kg of red meat was available for consumption by each person in Australia in 2006-07″ while a Japanese study estimates that each kilo of beef “generates the equivalent of 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide”. At a population of 20 million, that is an equivalent of about 37 million tonnes of greenhouse gas from meat eating.

Even more dramatically, an analysis by the Vegetarian Network Victoria forecasts Australia becoming completely carbon neutral within 3-5 decades of adopting vegetarianism if land currently used by cattle was reforested. Ask the Labor Party if their tax is able to achieve that.

There is also the opportunity to snooker your colleague Mr Turnbull, who seems to be positioning himself as a sort of Australian Al Gore. By adopting vegetarianism, you can occupy the highest of moral ground, while also being against taxation and climate change. High ground is the safest position to be in these troubled times.

Your role-model and mentor John Howard took strong measures in 1996 to ban all the dangerous guns (thank goodness we got to keep the safe guns). This type of bold leadership is what we need in the climate crisis of 2009.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew

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This is a topic that I’ve been mulling over in my head for a little while now, but hang in there with me as I stumble through it, because the conclusions aren’t fully formed.

I’ve noticed that often the concept of the value of something is linked to its price. If someone is willing to pay $50 for an object, then it is considered that they value it as worth $50. If we add up all purchases across a country, it is equal to that country’s GDP, a measure of the value created by that country in that year.

However, the aspect of valuing things doesn’t sit well with me. When I buy something, I don’t feel that the more I pay, the more value I’m getting. In fact, the reverse is generally true, and I imagine most people feel the same. Also, I think different people may place different values on an object, even if they pay exactly the same price for it. It seems that price doesn’t explain value, at least not completely.

Another explanation that has occurred to me is that value is not tied to an object but to a transaction. Clearly a transaction (between a willing buyer and seller at arms-length, etc.) will go ahead only if it generates value for both parties. Otherwise there’s clearly no point. And there are obvious cases when a transaction won’t go ahead: when the price is too much for the buyer, or if the price is not enough for the seller. So, this gives us a framework to identify how much value is being created.

Excuse my poor excuse for an illustration. Hopefully you can see that ‘A’ is the difference between the price of a transaction and the most the buyer would’ve spent, and ‘B’ is the difference between the price and the least the buyer would’ve accepted. So, in this interpretation, the value of the transaction to the buyer is A, then value of the transaction to the seller is B, and the overall value created by the transaction is A + B.

Out of A and B, it is probably B that is the best understood. In some way it corresponds to the seller’s profit, or perhaps risk-adjusted profit. But not always, since the seller may be willing to make a loss in order to recover some money for their stock. So, in this version of value, based on the fact that a transaction will occur only if both parties see some value in it, a technical loss (sale price less than nominal cost) must still be value positive.

The value A is not easily described since most people don’t explicitly calculate the most they would be willing to pay for their milk, eggs, petrol etc. and are even less likely to tell you about it. However, one exception is in auctions. (Hopefully) most potential buyers at an auction have figured out the most they would be willing to pay. Although, their upper limit may be more influenced by the amount of money at their disposal than by the benefit they will gain through possessing the item. (It may turn out to be impossible to accurately estimate A in most situations.)

As mentioned before, the overall value created from each transaction is A+B, which is also the difference between the most the buyer would pay and the least the seller would take. This number is independent of the price chosen for the transaction, and is clearly “better” the more the expectations of the buyer and seller diverge.

It would be interesting to see what figure we’d get if we added up the A+B numbers for all the transactions that occurred in a country for a year, and compared it to the GDP. I think it would provide a more accurate representation of the economic value created.

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