Category: Life

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US-based websites and COPPA

Alex Sutherland, who is not yet 13 years of age, told Google+ his date of birth and promptly lost access to his Gmail account.

I’m not posting this to join any obnoxious blamestorm aimed at Alex or his parents: it sucks he lost his email archives and I hope that his parents are able to get it back for him. It sucks he had his trust breached and there’s no getting that back for him.

But I’m mostly posting because people are seeing the provisons of the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for the first time and saying “pfft, not that hard to comply, why ban under 13s at all?” There was an illuminating comment on Making Light that is helpful there:

COPPA has a lot of “common sense” provisions which no doubt sounded great from the point of view of legislators and parents, but which are pretty appalling from the point of view of the operator of a Web 2.0 service. They’re burdensome enough, that, to my knowledge, only sites intended specifically and exclusively for children trouble to implement them. That is, no Web2.0 websites operating in the US permit users under the age of 13, except for specialty children’s sites. Not Google, not Facebook, not MySpace, not Livejournal, not Twitter, not Flickr or Picassa or Photobucket, not any web service here in the US.

Why? Well, you know how when you have a problem with your Gmail, you can pick up your phone and call Google’s tech support line? Ah ha ha ha. Right: no such thing. Well, one of the provisions of COPPA is that there has to be a phone number through which parents can call the service, as well as an email address at which they can email the service. Google doesn’t particularly want to have to pay operators to be standing by. No Web2.0 startup wants to be staffing a phone number open to the general public.

Google also doesn’t particularly want to figure out how to fulfill the provision of writing a statement as to what “information it collects” from (minor) users, since it allows users to type absolutely anything they want into those email bodies. Among sites for children, the open-ended TEXTAREA form field, like the one I’m typing this comment into, are seen as threats; highly structured or brief forms of input — pulldown menus and short text fields — are seen as safer. That prohibits most interesting Web2.0 applications.

Now Google is pretty big, it could afford to solve this if it wanted to, but has decided not to. But I think this is an issue worth knowing about in general: this means that children under 13 can’t participate in the Web as we know it today, essentially, because COPPA means that it’s prohibitively expensive to allow them to use websites that allow free-form content. Opinions might vary on whether this is a good thing (I certainly don’t think so, although I’m also not planning to turn my son loose on Google on his sixth birthday either), but it’s a thing.

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The secret to terrible tech writing

At which point, the topic became that wankiest theme of all bad tech writing (imo): “How can I use this to optimize myself?”

Catherine, on Terri’s Geek Feminism post about the Wired article The Advantage Of Dual-Identities (A Case Study of Nabokov)

This has a parallel in parenting studies too, “how can I use this to optimise my child?” This is definitely the most annoying undercurrent of the Life at 1, Life at 3, Life at 5 series for me, on which see more at Hoyden: breastfeeding, obesity, disability, general discussion.

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Goodness knows why!

Families not claiming thousands in childcare rebate:

“Child Care Minister Kate Ellis says parents often do not know they are eligible for the rebate.”

Or, perhaps they know, and thought they’d applied, and just haven’t gotten around to chasing up yet another damn thing…

Or! I have some suggestions about what might have happened!

Perhaps they went to Centrelink’s site on the childcare rebate and found instructions to apply. Oh wait, no they didn’t. They found information about eligibility and payment rates, but not instructions. It almost sounds like it might happen automatically…

But just in case they went to their online Centrelink account, and it said that their identity has not been sufficiently verified to apply for childcare rebate. And they recall what their current level of identitiy verification involved. Consider this interaction (where “Mary” is a randomly chosen name for a Centrelink childcare benefit* recipient, of course):

Customer service officer: “How many shares do you own in $company?”
Mary: “The correct answer is zero. But I am guessing you want the answer I last gave you in 2001.”
CSO: “Yes, the one in 2001.”
Mary: “Well, I don’t know, because I have not kept records of how many shares I owned in $company in 2001.”
CSO: “OK, I see the problem! That was quite a while ago. All right. If you can just tell me how much rent you pay…”
Mart: “The correct answer is zero. But I am guessing you want the answer I gave you in 2003?”
CSO: “Yes please. If you can!”

That is, I received Youth Allowance as a student from Centrelink, and their entire identification procedure assumes that either I kept details records of my exact financial state at the time, or that it hasn’t changed. (Rents haven’t gone up in eight years, surely?) So, the system is designed to not give a benefit to anyone who ever received a benefit in the past, because interacting with them is just such a pain the second time. Which is not a surprise, since they administer unemployment benefits.

Not that new customers have it easy. A story I heard was someone’s genuine physical address tripping up a rather poorly written “no post office boxes” validator, and who therefore couldn’t meet the requirement of providing a residential address.

* Childcare benefit is not the same as childcare rebate. DUH. And there’s no way that’s confusing people into believing they have received all their entitlements.

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linux.conf.au 2011: Day 1

Slow first day for me. I had a stressful Sunday getting a toddler to the airport on my own and Andrew has just flown in from the US.

We weren’t very impressed with our hotel, iStay River City. For starters, it has extremely limited keys. Many, but not all, rooms have two keys, which would be hard enough with four adults per room, but one of the keys for our room is missing, which means one key (and suggests that somewhere out there a former guest still has a working key to our room). The hotel reception wasn’t even sympathetic. People steal our keys all the time! What else are we to do?!

There’s no way to leave a key with reception and get yourself back into the room unless you have a second key to the room. There are buzzers for the rooms, but the reception smilingly conceded that it does only get guests into the lobby. You have to go down the lift yourself to get them up to the room. (Interestingly, this has meant with a lot of confusion from other LCA attendees. “How hard is it to make a new keycard?” Bad assumption. They are using keys, as in, those chunks of metal with notches in them.)

There’s also several things broken in our apartment: a couple of lights, the phone, the bathroom fan.

Anyway, after a restless night, LCA! I mostly spent time at the Haecksen miniconf, although partly working on my laptop in an introversion bubble. I wasn’t really ready, after the travel and the settling in, to sit down and listen to talks well. Some talks I did catch in whole or in part:

  • Pia Waugh Applying martial arts to the workplace: your guide to kicking arse
  • Brianna Laugher An Approach to Automatic Text Generation
  • Andrew Gerrand Practical Go Programming
  • Noirin Shirley Open Source: Saving the World
  • Donna Benjamin We are here. We have always been here
  • Valerie Aurora and Donna Benjamin Training Allies (workshop)

I didn’t really fully follow any of them, except for Training Allies, which is of professional interest to me now. (More on that later, I guess.)

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Endangered Sunday: grey nurse shark

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

I’m hoping to blog a little about SCUBA diving here occasionally. I dived on Wed December 29 for the first time in a year and a half (diving is contraindicated in pregnancy and was practically difficult with a young baby to care for and a body rearranging itself too often for a wetsuit fitting).

How did I elect to return to diving? Shark diving!

This is much less adventurous than it sounds, although definitely stressful or impossible for people with a shark phobia. (I’ve also dived with sea snakes—which are, yes, very very venomous, and quite inquisitive and tame so you get very near them, but they’re not aggressive at all—just don’t ever make me touch a slug in the garden because that is my critter limit!)

I’ve been in the water with a lot of sharks: leopard sharks, wobbegongs, Port Jackson sharks, grey and white tipped reef sharks and grey nurse sharks. This isn’t done in cages as you see with great whites, we’re in the ocean together. The trick is the size of the mouth: if a human limb doesn’t fit in there, there’s not much of a problem. Most species of shark are after much smaller prey than humans, the main exceptions are species that hunt seals. It’s also good to know that sharks generally sleep during the day (Port Jackson sharks look like very large cuddly toys, sleeping on the seafloor), and that they find the loud noise of SCUBA rather intimidating, although I have also dived at night when the reef sharks were hunting, but again, their prey is small. (Diving at night, also not as difficult as it sounds, but extremely cool.) I’ve also dived with seals, there’s a fairly simple rule for that, which is that if you notice none of the seals are in the water, you probably ought to follow their example and get out too.

What’s a scary thing I’ve encountered diving? That dreaded apex predator homo sapiens. I was not pleased to find that I’d been diving in murky water below people spearfishing one time. I hope they could see me better than I could see them.

Homo sapiens is of course the big threat to today’s Endangered Sunday species, the grey nurse shark or carcharias taurus. These are big, scary looking sharks (adults are between 2 and 3 metres in length), and if I wanted to impress you with my shark braving skills, I could show you this:

Dentition of a Grey Nurse Shark
Grey Nurse Shark, Dentition of a Grey Nurse Shark (Carcharias taurus). Magic Point, Maroubra, NSW, by Richard Ling, CC BY-NC-SA

Image description: a grey nurse shark is seen from in front and below, its head and fins lit from below, emphasising the teeth visible in its jaws.

Grey nurse sharks are quite timid, docile sharks. There’s a group living in a cave just off Magic Point at the south end of Maroubra at a depth easily accessible to recreational SCUBA divers. It is a very popular site with divers in Sydney. On the 29th there were five sharks in the cave. We didn’t join them: the cave is a protected habitat. It’s not quite up there with Michael McFadyen’s 2008 sighting of 26 sharks, but more than I’ve seen there on the six or so times I’ve dived the site.

The grey nurse shark is listed as critically endangered on the east coast of Australia, with the population estimated at somewhere around 1000 individuals. In 2009 it was reported (the original article is Ahonen et al. (2009)) that there is also low genetic variability on the east coast and that it likely does not interbreed with the west coast sharks .

Grey nurse sharks are ovoviviparous: they give birth to live young (-viviparous), which have grown inside eggs (ovo-) and hatched inside the mother. The two shark pups a female births are the result of adelphophagy: pre-birth cannibalism. Each of the surviving shark pups has consumed its siblings until it was the sole surviving pup in its uterus (of which the mother has two). This process takes up to a year and results in a reproductive rate that means the return from critically endangered levels is going be slow if it happens at all. There is some research into an artificial environment for the sharks to mature to birth size in. These environments have been successfully tested on dwarf wobbegongs.

Here are two more pictures of grey nurse sharks taken at Magic Point. Doug Anderson took these lovely shots of, I think, the sharks in the cave (the angle isn’t quite wide enough to tell on these two):

carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC
carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC

Image description: a large and a small grey nurse shark, close to the bottom of the ocean, side on to the camera. A school of fish is in the foreground.

carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney, by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC
carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney, by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC

Image description: four grey nurse sharks are clearly seen side-on between one and three metres above the ocean floor. The outlines of two more sharks are in the background, in dim light, presumably in the cave.

Both Doug Anderson and Richard Ling have shots of the sharks with hooks in their mouths: not happy and A Grey Nurse Shark (Carcharias taurus) with hook and exit wound in the jaw.

So there you have it, big, scary looking but not dangerous: a perfect diver’s day out. May their numbers continue to increase and the number of hooks and wounds seen in their jaws fall.

Ahonen et al. (2009) Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA reveals isolation of imperilled grey nurse shark populations (Carcharias taurus) in Molecular Ecology Volume 18, Issue 21, pages 4409–4421, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04377.x)

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Quickies

Andrew and I try and have some quick dinner recipes in mind at all times, for those nights when one has ten minutes of energy and time for dinner preparation. Every night since January 2010, for example.

Here are a few. There’s a lot of ready-made things in here that aren’t that hard to make oneself. But that hard is too hard, on the nights in question.

  1. Wraps: buy tortillas. Buy filling (mince for us), fry it or whatever is appropriate. Place in tortilla, add lettuce, chopped tomato, salsa and natural yoghurt, or subset thereof. Eat.
  2. Gang Show Chicken. Buy roast chicken, cream of mushroom soup and olives. Combine in saucepan until soup is heated through. Eat. (It’s called Gang Show Chicken because in my early teens I was a Girl Guide and in a few Gang Shows. Rehearsals were Tuesday nights I think and my mother also had something on those nights. So this level of preparation was what the household had time for.)
  3. Tom Yum Goong. We use this recipe. This one needs a few practice runs to bring it down to easy cooking. It is a little bit trickier in terms of sourcing the ingredients, although you can buy kaffir lime leaves in supermarkets in Sydney, but you probably want your nam prig pow in advance. (It’s often not transliterated into English, so you get a jar with Thai characters and an English description along the lines of “roasted soya beans in chilli”.) Note that adding more lime juice makes this better. There’s probably some upper bound on that, but we haven’t found it.
  4. Larb/laab. More or less like this, except we use chicken or kangaroo, skip the shallots and a purple rather than green onion. OK, so not lots like the linked recipe.
  5. Daal, to Stephanie Alexander’s basic recipe in The Cook’s Companion. This has a rather long cooking time.
  6. Lazy pizza, as in, we buy the base. We buy Bazaar Breads of the World bases, which beat McCain’s anyway. Then tomato paste, olives, pepperoni, purple onion, maybe some finely sliced garlic, and cheese.

Rice, couscous and/or oven baked potatoes usually fill out meals of this style for us.

Six is a decent number of options, although more vegetarian dishes would be good. What are your “I feel like the very soul has left me tonight” home dinner options?

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Some fun for 2011

Things I plan to do!

  • visit the Canberra area at some point, as we know several people there and want to spend more time with all of them. I’m currently thinking sometime in March.
  • have someone(s) over for dinner several times, maybe every other month or so.
  • join a gym. I realise this doesn’t fall under the category of “fun” in many of these lists, but YOGA CLASSES and maybe a chance to try pilates and maybe Zumba and free weights. I miss the pool already dammit.
  • occasional shore diving, probably with a local-ish club (Frog Dive?).
  • at long last, five years after we started on swimming fitness, I’d like to do PADI Rescue Diver, ideally combined with a Nitrox course. That, barring perhaps PADI Deep, will likely be the last SCUBA course I do in the foreseeable future. As a prerequisite, this requires renewing our First Aid certification, which is a February todo.
  • some kind of organised parent-kid thing with Vincent: book group or something like that.

Things I’d love to do, but realistically… we’ll see. I definitely won’t do all these things.

  • Travel to the US/Canada. I’d like to visit Liga, spend some time in the mountains, go to one or two great conferences… This will probably happen sometime in or before 2013, but I don’t know that it will be 2011.
  • Go to the snow again. And maybe level up in snowboarding again. Or work out if I should be on skis instead.
  • Baby swimming lessons for Vincent.
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2010

I dented:

I had a baby. There. That’s my year in review post! (I’m enjoying everyone else’s.)

A year ago I was already been monitored several times a week in case rising blood pressure resulted in a sick fetus. That started on Boxing Day. A year ago I was keeping a secret pregnancy blog, and in January I created a new tag “over-fucking-due”. (OK, yes, technically “post dates” but since induction came up for me from 38 weeks onwards over-fucking-due was the appropriate sentiment.) Here’s some thoughts from that:

January 6: Hornsby’s hospitalisation time for mothers who had a vaginal birth and don’t have post-birth complications is 48 hours. If I’m induced Monday and Janus is born that day, then this time next week I will likely be home with him. This time next week.

January 9: My mental model of being overdue (I am not, but in a few days will be) was that women mostly hate it because it’s like being nearly due but not fair. For me though, things have actually changed for the worse over the last couple of days.

January 9: I have decided that Monday or early Tuesday morning would be optimal baby-having time, because the hospital is airconditioned and I would like to lounge around in a private room for the Tuesday heatwave. Let’s make it happen, Janus. Thank goodness I don’t live in Adelaide.

January 10: Meanwhile, waiting for labour: exactly as boring for me as it has been for every other pregnant woman in the history of the universe. I’m convinced the whole having sex with your acupuncturist while mainlining habeneros and raspberry leaf tea and constantly going for long walks thing is just to stop the revolution. The revolution that would inevitably happen if post-dates women were left to their own devices.

January 11: I trundled off for an ultrasound this morning. I don’t know the exact results. She said the placenta looked ‘mature’, undoubtedly that’s not an entirely positive thing. The amniotic fluid looked fine. The computer estimated his weight at 4kg almost exactly. I have no idea how the blood flow measured up, it took her forever to do it because he was playing with the cord. The exact prognosis will have to wait on the doctors tomorrow.

Apparently he has hair.

Oh good times, especially as he wasn’t born until a week and a half after all that. The only fun bit was talking about all of the silly self-induction advice. There’s a stand-up routine in there somewhere. (Also January 11’s heatwave was nothing on that of January 24, which reached 43℃… and! yes! I was in hospital!)

However, on reflection, I think I was wrong. In fact, the thing, the single thing, about 2010 was becoming a mother. The specificity of being Vincent’s mother isn’t confined to this year. And for all that another child would be a strange mystery and unexplored territory, I would be doing it as a mother already. I’ve been in places like that now, just not necessarily in the same company.

In 2010, I became a mother.

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Reverb 10: Community, Beautifully Different, Party

Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

The Geek Feminism community has been my big community in 2010 (and late 2009). It leaks nicely into the personal, expanding my undead army of feminists, and of friends.

In 2011, I really hope to make more contact with other parents of young children. I’m picky about this, I probably basically want to hang out with feminist parents, but I live in an uncongenial location physically.

Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.

Saving this kind of question for therapy?

Actually, being snarky is all too common. I find this question really hard: I am much more able to identify things that I share with other people than ways I differ from them. Here’s some things that are different about me, I suppose beautiful is in the eye of the beholder:

  • I’m extremely tall for a woman.
  • Despite being born and raised in Australia (by parents who were likewise, but it doesn’t matter much for accent) I do not sound Australian to people who live here, and constantly have awkward conversations about where I’m from.
  • I am quite fearful of heights, but am and always have been perfectly happy in deep water. (Except, just once, watching divers descend in extremely clear water, as it looked like they were falling.) I do not find spiders, snakes or sharks especially scary either.
  • I need (or vastly prefer) a couple of hours of screen or book time a day for relaxation purposes.

I honestly cannot answer a question about what I do that lights people up.

Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

I conceived and threw what I called “Party of Three”, which was in May celebrating Andrew’s third decade, Vincent’s third month, our third year of marriage, and becoming a family of three. Excellent conceit: I can’t think that I can repeat the pattern for anyone’s fortieth. We went to Shark Island as for Andrew’s twenty-first and had a slow picnic in the heat of an autumn day. It was beautiful.

I don’t know where I will be living this time next year, possibly not in Sydney at all. So it’s good to take advantage of the harbour while we’re here.