Author: Mary

Last night at SLUG I attended my second technical talk featuring projected slides of scantily clad women (the first was at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in 2006, see the presenter’s account of it and also my jam). I wrote something quite long about this tonight and have thought better of publishing, at least at the moment.

However, in brief, a couple of things for event organisers. First, it is apparently necessary for Free Software events who don’t wish to have sexualised material shown at the conference (and neither OSDC or SLUG do, as far as I know: neither the sponsors of OSDC nor the hosts of SLUG were impressed with what happened at their respective events) to warn their speakers of this. Here’s something you could adapt:

[Event name] is an all-ages event, attended by people of different cultural backgrounds and sensitivities. Please make sure your talk and slides are not likely to offend or upset people unnecessarily: particularly we require that no sexual material and nothing targeting people on the basis of age, religion, race, gender, sexuality or ability appears in your talk or slides.

Second, it would be good for chairs to be aware of how to react: being unable to seize the moment is common in anything to do with inappropriate behaviour, because of lack of experience. Something like the following would work from the chair:

• Stand up and move towards the speaker. If their slides are inappropriate right then, block the projection, disconnect their laptop from the projector or turn the projector off. Otherwise ask them to halt the presentation at the current point.
• Tell the speaker quietly that the material is inappropriate and that they may not continue the presentation.
• Address the audience and apologise for inappropriate content and let them know the talk is ending. If the speaker seems genuinely contrite allowing them a brief apology would work.
• Let the event organisers know what happened, if they aren’t in the room. They may wish to do something more or be prepared for questions about what happened.

The reason you need to end the presentation is that otherwise the audience is stuck in the very uncomfortable position of needing to continue responding to a talk after seeing both out-of-line material and seeing an intervention about it. The speaker is also likely to be embarrassed and off-put.

Note that the audience should not be expected to demonstrate openly that they feel uncomfortable before you intervene: they have far less power than the chair or conference organisers do. Don’t ask them for their opinion of the material that you’ve already decided is inappropriate (and don’t let the speaker ask them either). It’s pretty uncomfortable to be asked to identify yourself as someone who was just offended, it’s seen as a weakness. Also, don’t assume that children or women or homosexual people etc were necessarily the only ones who were upset: for example some heterosexual men find hetero-male oriented sexual material distasteful when used in technical talks too. Just apologise to the audience as a whole.

In the course of writing my talk for SLUG tonight, the following idea occurred to me.

Scenario: I am a desktop/laptop user without cron/commandline fu (caution to people picking this entry up without knowing me: I am not actually a desktop/laptop user without cron/commandline foo: I am fully fu-ed up and just pretending). I want to backup my stuff. I don’t want pain. So, I buy a big external hard drive. I plug it in. Up pops a helper/notification/whatever saying “would you like to use this drive as a backup drive?” I select ‘Yes’, do as little configuration as I can humanly get away with, and it is now my backup drive. Every time I plug it in in future, a (non-system destroyingly intensive) backup begins. I do not have to even contemplate anything named ‘udev’ or any commandline tool whose name begins with ‘r’.

Obviously there needs to be a nice easy way to do partial restores too in the event that I accidentally delete my desktop. In the event of media failure, I should be able to pop in a new internal hard drive, boot from a LiveCD and be invited to plug in my backup drive if I have one, and the system is then restored to the new hard drive… and already know about the backup disk for ongoing backups!

Random things that would be nice:

• integration with my ‘Trash’: things that are on the backup drive don’t need to remain in the local Trash, and perhaps I should be able to see backed up stuff in my Trash folder when the drive is plugged in… and have the option to restore more than the most recent version!
• sane command-line interfaces to all this, so the fu-ed up can join the fun
• network backup as well/instead of local drive backup

Time Machine for MacOS (which I was only aware of by name before just now, when I wrote most of this entry and then went and looked at it) seems to be more or less the equivalent of this, and has some other desirable features:

• doing backups as long as the drive stays plugged in
• automatically cleaning up old increments
• skipping caches (oh ~/.thumbnails, how giant you are)

I don’t care so much about the visualisation of my system as it changes over time, but what the hell, it sounds cool anyway.

I am giving a talk for women in a while (the venue has not yet been announced) entitled Starting Your Free Software Adventure. This is the current abstract:

Free Software development opportunities range from code and documentation through to community management. There are a huge number and variety of projects to get involved in and even more waiting to be started. But finding a place to begin can be difficult.

This talk will show where the entry to Free Software contributions lie from all kinds of directions: coding, bug triaging, documentation, packaging and more, using women already involved to illustrate pathways to involvement.

If you are a woman involved in Free Software or Free Culture volunteering or paid work, I’d like to invite you to be used as an example in this talk. There are two main things I want to know:

1. what are you doing now?
2. what were your first few steps into Free Software/Culture?

I will want to use either your name or a usual handle in the presentation, and a (CC BY-SA or compatible) photo if possible, but neither is absolutely essential.

I’d prefer to talk to women who have made the results of their work public at some stage (ie you’re active in a freely joinable community with web archives, or your code goes in a Free project, etc). That is not essential though. Please identify the country or countries you would say you come from — I am hoping to have a good mix of Australian and international women, for an Australian audience.

Feel free to send a link to this to other places before November 28 2008. Please do not forward after that. I would like expressions of interest by December 5 2008 to mary@puzzling.org and we will take it from there in email.

I have that thing all PhD students hate and fear to speak of, that is, a submission goal. I aim to submit my thesis no later than October 2009.

This means that until then I’m doing the same thing I did in my honours year in 2003: cutting back on random accumulated cruft in my life. That includes but is not limited to volunteering for committees, talks and organising events. It will definitely mean less time shooting the breeze on IRC or IM: I intend to try and be on them only when I have something to accomplish. I’ll cut blog subscriptions and twitter/identi.ca subscriptions back shortly too. I’d cut mailing lists, but my mailing list subscriptions never actually made it back from 2003/2004.

I’ll probably also be trying to cut down on social and semi-social commitments: as I’ve said elsewhere the number of them this year has been staggering. (You’re lovely people, all of you.) And exhausting: I can’t keep getting home after midnight three or four nights a week. I don’t intend to crawl into a hole, far from it, but I need to rediscover the joys of introversion, and not having my evening scheduled military style. So if you see me saying no to your things, that’s what’s going on.

If I’ve already volunteered for something with a firm scope, I am still doing it unless you hear otherwise. If it doesn’t have a firm scope, I’ll be in touch to firm it up. If I haven’t volunteered, I’m not hugely likely to. Not this year.

Incidentally, I’m not sharing this for accountability’s sake. If I need someone to sit on me and make me finish my PhD, I already have a mother. And you can be sure that she’ll be sufficiently displeased on your behalf if she does have to do that: she never spent much time making me do my homework before.

Apparently the linux.conf.au domain is dead and might be for a little while. Steve Walsh writes:

Subject: Re: [Linux-aus] linux.conf.au dead?

> whois linux.conf.au
> No Data Found

The admin team noticed this about 11am this morning and notified the
registrar of the domain, who appears to have expired the domain out of
their system. We're working on getting it back into the system ASAP.

Meanwhile, http://marchsouth.org and https://conf.linux.org.au are still
up and serving conf-y goodness.

I am getting fed up with science journalism, and so here I am, bound and determined to make you annoyed too. First, a general introduction to things that annoy me:

1. reporting the results of a self-selected survey as a population-wide finding (if you survey readers of Australian Top Gear and furthermore describe it as a manliness survey — unless that was the journalist — about how much they feel about their female partners’ driving skills, it’s going to be news if it doesn’t come up as women drivers suck, not if it does)
2. when reporting on medical results, not reporting on exactly which population was studied

There’s more subtle examples that don’t annoy me so much because you have to have a bit of knowledge of the science in question to get underneath them. For example, studies where a bunch of sick people and a bunch of healthy people are studied and asked questions like do you eat eggs? and the result is reported as either being sick is correlated with eating eggs or (more usually) study links eating eggs to cancer! are difficult to interpret because people who know they are sick tend to over-report (or alternatively healthy people under-report, or possibly both) anything that they think of as a risk factor. Because they too are looking for an explanation of why they’re sick.

Anyway, today’s example is from door number two:

In about 70 per cent of the kids, we’re seeing that if they’re not responding to their name at 12 months, they’ve gone on to receive a diagnosis of autism, [Associate Professor Robin Young of Flinders University] said.

New test to detect autism in babies

A very important question follows. Was that:

• 70% of a sample of children who have been diagnosed as autistic didn’t respond to their name at twelve months; or
• 70% of a random sample of children who didn’t respond to their name at twelve months went to on receive a diagnosis of autism?

The difference is pretty important: the second is much more concerning to parents of children who aren’t responding to their name than the first one is. (To illustrate the difference, consider the statements 99% of women aren’t blonde compared to 99% of people who aren’t blond(e) are women in terms of the kinds of predictions you’re making when you’re told someone has dark hair.)

I don’t know if Associate Professor Young gave a sloppy quote here, was misquoted or whether a sloppy quote was selected from a more informative interview/statement/press release.

Via Stewart Smith, a Computerworld article stating that:

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether.

Possible objections to this include but are not limited to:

• general advisability of universal access to information;
• optional filtering software already being commercially available to those who want it;
• likelihood of universal filtering restricting activities of researchers and professional workers who need knowledge of illegal activities;
• likelihood of universal filtering blocking access to legal information about (among other things) sexual issues and drugs;
• likelihood of blocked material being expanded to include other things commonly not approved of by governments (criticism, activism, protest) and by people who most want a filtered Internet (pre-marital and extra-marital sex, religious and anti-religious material);
• affect on Internet access speeds;
• the need to identify oneself to some authority as someone willing to view adult-only material in order to be exempted from the larger blacklist;
• low precision and recall of automatic blacklists (that is, they both block things they shouldn’t and don’t block things they should) and low recall of manual blacklists (they don’t block things they should).

Assuming you deeply dislike this proposal, you might want to discuss why you dislike it in the letters you are right now sitting down to write to Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Senator the Hon Nick Minchin, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Then you can move to New Zealand, where copyright takedowns are required regardless of proof of copyright violation.

The programme for linux.conf.au 2009 has been announced. I was chair of the committee that selected the talks, and you can see how seriously I took my duties (evidently I did nothing but look slightly grouchy and earnest all day).

Some talks I am especially looking forward to are:

• Brian Aker’s Use the Fork Luke! about the Drizzle project;
• Akkana Peck’s What Makes the Lizard Roar? A Tour through Mozilla Architecture;
• Jonathan Corbet’s Joining the mob: the kernel development process (we broke with tradition and he’s not giving the Kernel Report this year) although it clashes with Nancy Mauro-Flude’s The Genderchangers Academy, which I’ve wanted to hear more about for years;
• Sarah Stokely’s and Jeff Waugh’s Crikey! Open sourcing the future of news
• Walter Bender’s The Sugar learning platform;
• Rusty Russell’s lguest: hacking the ltitle Linux hypervisor, although I notice the preparation hour hasn’t made it on to the programme yet, but even if it never does this year I will be there even if Rusty holds the preparation hour in a haunted house at 3am (however it breaks my heart to miss Donna Benjamin’s The Joy of Inkscape);
• Hugh Blemings’ Tricks of the Trade: Learning Free Software hacking from clever people and;
• Matthew Garrett’s Power management that works (alas, against Pia Waugh’s OLPC in Australia and the Pacific

I outlined the style of good academic reviews to Jonathan in light of our impending OSDC review responsibilities, and it’s worth noting here too.

For information’s sake, my authority, such as it is, on reviewing comes from being the editorial assistant of Computational Linguistics, which is a journal with a hardworking editor and conscientious reviewers. Not all academic reviews are of the quality I discuss below. They should be.

Begin with stating the title of the paper you are reviewing. Then spend one to three paragraphs summarising its content, particularly what you perceive as its major findings and conclusions.

This has a couple of purposes. The first is that if the reviews have got mixed up in the system the author finds out as soon as possible and doesn’t have to slog through a review that (perhaps) is a partial match for their paper and (especially in academic circles) a privacy problem to boot. The second is so that they know in what light to read the rest of the review. If they see that you have understood its fundamentals they will be inclined to take the entire review seriously. If they see you have misunderstood it, they can do one of two things. One is to realise that their paper is confusing, and to make its focus clearer. The other is to discount your review. The decision here may be affected by the following section.

The main body of the review is a discussion of how to improve the paper. Both the tone and discussion will vary considerably depending on certain factors:

1. is the paper already accepted?
2. is this the only reviewing round or will you or another reviewer be checking the changes?

For OSDC, both factors hold. For almost all conferences, there is only (at most) one reviewing round for full papers. This makes reviews more limited in scope than journal reviews, where substantial changes are often recommended even (or perhaps especially) to articles the reviewer fundamentally likes. Journal reviewers can have a role which is not far from being anonymous co-authors. (If a colleague did as much re-reading and suggestions of additional work and additional reading as Computational Linguistics reviewers do, many people would consider adding them to the authors list.)

In the event that the article has been accepted, or that this is the single reviewing round, you should limit the scope of your suggestions to much more cosmetic things. Someone who has had an article accepted is just going to be annoyed that you want it to have a whole new body of work incorporated, and they will ignore you. (And if it’s rejected after a single reviewing round, they are probably ill-placed to revise much!) In the OSDC scenario, reviewers are going to be mostly limited to suggestions as to how to structure the argument and the paper better, and not really able to productively suggest changes to the argument or the work described in the paper.

As you write your review and this section in particular, keep in mind the key factor of providing useful critiques: how could this work be better on its own terms? That is, don’t provide a review that is, fundamentally, about how the paper would have been better if you’d written it… about your pet topic. This is a subtle, tempting and common mistake, and if you have never caught yourself in it, you are likely to be the worst affected. Remember: What is the paper trying to do? How can it do it better? Avoid the temptation to suggest that it would be a better paper if it was doing something different from its current aim. (There is a little more leeway for this in journal reviews, but even in that case, generally what happens if a reviewer thinks this is that they review the article on its current form and recommend a fate suited to its current aims, and additionally comment that they would be interested in seeing further work in the additional direction should the authors choose.)

As a recipient of reviews, I do have a couple of things to add. One is to respect page limits. If you are reviewing for a work with a page limit, especially a conference, and you do really want to see a longer discussion of foo, please suggest which bar could be shortened or cut. Otherwise it is close to impossible for an author to consider your suggestion. Also, if you are making suggestions for future work that you think the authors should consider but which you do not actually want to see in the article, make this clear in the text of your review. I would probably recommend a whole separate section for this if you’re going to do it.

A review may conclude with a list of typos, spelling mistakes, suggested rephrasings, etc. Mistakes that affect the reading of the paper (eg mislabeled figures and sections) go right at the start of this list. A sufficiently ill-proofread paper may go back with a suggestion that the authors find the mistakes themselves.

(It used to be that I couldn’t look back seven years. Then I could, but at least it was a different person I saw down there at the wrong end of the telescope. Now, I recall the me of 2001 and in most ways, she was me.

Google has their search index of 2001 up for playing. Crooked Timber is already collecting some fun stuff including searches for housing bubble and subprime mortgage lending. Instead, I would just like to observe that apparently 2008 wasn’t looking so exciting back then.