Category: Uncategorized

My laptop is only moderately recovered from a recent ‘spillage incident’, in that the arrow keys do not work very well and I need to replace the keyboard. But this cloud does have a silver lining. While the down key was completely broken, I was unable to adjust the brightness of my screen downwards (Fn+Down). During that time, my terrible (or terribly annoying) X slow crashes in which I progressively lose the mouse, the keyboard and sanity in various orders (because the main effect is the Ctrl key behaving as if it’s being held down, this last time I managed to scatter the same document all over my Desktop, since Ctrl and drag is copy in Nautilus).

And now the Down key is mostly working, I can adjust my screen brightness downwards… at the cost of needing to restart X every couple of hours. So, there you go. I might even be able to file a bug, depending on what ended up in the logs.

Via Unlocking IP comes a suggestion that the iTunes U feature (videos of university lectures, essentially) is going to be a lock-in deal where if you put your academic content on iTunes U you forgo the right to charge anything yourself for it, and thus probably forgo the right to do truly free licencing of it. (Releasing something under a licence that restricts use to non-commercial only — common in academia and on Flickr — is not really free in the sense I’m using the word.)

This sounds like another round of a very annoying saga in academia, it has its equivalent in publishing, which goes something like this. Academic articles are:

• written by academics on their salary, stipend, wage or whatever;
• reviewed and judged by reviewers and editors almost always donating their time (or rather, working on paid time but foregoing some of their paid research hours to judge other people’s research);
• published (typeset, copyedited and printed) by, increasingly, for profit specialist academic publishers; and
• bought by universities for large subscription fees back from those publishers.

This is generally considered quite a tidy little deal for the publishers, who are getting the universities to buy back their own product in a somewhat value-added form at a rate often thought to well exceed the additional value. (Incidentally, I personally am part of the additional value in a sense. I work one day a week for Macquarie University paid by money from the Association for Computational Linguistics in order to do most of the grunt work of coordinating the review process for Computational Linguistics. My job title is editorial assistant. In this case the reviewing work isn’t all donated: although the editor himself is a volunteer, I am not.)

Some movement in academia is trying to claw this back, particularly the advent of Open Access, whereby a journal is published (usually in electronic form only) and does not require a paid subscription to read it. Computer scientists are ahead of the curve, if informally: throwing PDFs up on their webpages, having OA conference proceedings. I was shocked when I went to a ‘graduate experience’ feedback meeting and someone in an experimental science was held up in their work due to not having a journal subscription, in CS we’d head over to the author’s website and download their preprint and work from that.

But just as we start to get it back apparently video lectures are becoming the new model where universities produce content for someone else to sell. I’m fairly firmly of the school where the value of universities is in producing public knowledge (this is quite controversial now: many universities and governments see universities as a sort of a behemoth commercial intellectual property production shop), and this is not the right way to go about doing that. Dear universities: don’t sell exclusive licences.

Something I’ve enjoyed a fair bit over the last couple of years is the idea of a blog carnival. You can learn what they are mostly by looking at them, but essentially the idea is that about every month a blog is chosen to host a given carnival, in which they link to a number of thematically related posts with short summaries or reactions. The one I’ve most often dropped in on is The Carnival of Feminists (Down Under Feminists Carnival has also just started up), The Festival of Frugality I’ve also seen once or twice (budgeting and frugality blogs are mostly run by people who both live in the US and have extracted themselves out from under tens of thousands of dollars of consumer debt though, so a lot of it is ‘spend less than you earn!’ advice that I’ve never had much need for).

There’s also Club Troppo’s Missing Link Daily which does actually pass through my feed reader, and from which I occasionally launch a spate of new tabs (the secret to carnivals in general is not being completionist about them, for goodness sake, people are already getting down when their reader says they aren’t up to date).

It’s not something I’ve come across in the Free Software blogs though, or at least not enough to have ever made it to a Planet. The blogcarnival site shows a couple of software development related carnivals, mostly defunct. As far as Free Software goes, the Planets are probably part of the reason, they already bring together a bunch of thematically related posts, or rather, people likely to make thematically related posts some of the time, but I still think there’d be room for a carnival of some type, for a couple of reasons: one is getting some cross-community linking, and the other is selecting individual posts of high quality.

If you’d be interesting in doing one round of hosting for such a thing, get in touch, if I get enough interest (and if I get a few non-Australians), the experiment would be worth a go.

Andrew and I aren’t singularly iconic, like Jeff:

And furthermore, I’ve grown and cut my hair and grown it and cut it again in the last few years, and I cut all of Andrew’s off and have kept cutting it off. So these aren’t us anymore:

In fact, I never looked much like that (although I wish I had), I just lacked photographs of myself at the time and grabbed what was to hand. In any case, welcome our new hackergotchis:

In the spirit of Peter Hardy’s post, my Wii friend codes:

Update October 12 2008: our console and game codes can now be found at codes.txt.

The one single non-standard tax ‘thing’ that many people I know do is to salary sacrifice for a new laptop. Quick review of how this works: normally, you are discouraged from buying yourself stuff out of pre-tax income, because otherwise a sensible financial strategy would go something like: pay for everything, declare small remainder to government, be taxed only on small remainder. The way the government puts a stop to this is by charging Fringe Benefits Tax on things bought from pre-tax income. FBT is a huge amount of money, you’ll pay an insane amount of tax on fringe benefits: better to buy things from your wages after tax was taken out.

There are a few exceptions or partial exceptions to FBT, and one is laptops, at present, more info here (written from an employer’s point of view). Given how many people I know get their employer to let them salary sacrifice for their ‘yearly laptop’, I am surprised to see less commentary on this aspect of the Federal Budget for 2008/2009:

FBT improves tax fairness by taxing non-cash remuneration. Tax planning arrangements and changes in technology have eroded the fairness and integrity of the FBT system, which will be addressed by:

• …
• removing the FBT exemption for work-related items used mainly for private purposes such as laptops
• removing the double benefit from employee depreciation deductions on FBT exempt items used mainly for work purposes

Budget Overview 2008–2009 [706K], page 5

What does this mean for you? I am not a tax professional (or financial professional) but my interpretation is:

• if you are buying yourself a new laptop and it won’t be used mostly for work, you buy it out of post-tax income from now on (and you don’t claim depreciation on it either, you’ve never been allowed to depreciate private possessions like that anyway); or
• if you are buying yourself a new laptop and it will be used mostly for work, you can either buy it out of pre-tax income, or you can claim depreciation, but not both as you may have done previously.

I assume this applies from July 1 2008 on. My understanding of depreciation is that ‘work purposes’ in the above is something along the lines of ‘assisting in the production of assessable income’, but this is certainly getting into regions where you should consult the ATO and tax professionals.

Michael Davies pointed out in email that the changes to laptop purchases and taxation have already taken effect, there is no window of opportunity to buy a new private-use laptop and still salary sacrifice it. Depreciation on existing laptops purchased via salary sacrifice can be claimed for the 2007/2008 tax year, but that’s the last time.

The Government will tighten the current fringe benefit tax (FBT) exemption for certain work‑related items (including laptop computers, personal digital assistants and tools of trade) by ensuring the exemption only applies where these items are used primarily for work purposes… The measure will apply to items purchased after 7.30 pm (AEST) on 13 May 2008. The measure reduces the FBT concession and tax expenditure for work‑related items…

…

The Government will also deny employees depreciation deductions for FBT exempt items (that is, items purchased primarily for work purposes) purchased from 7.30 pm (AEST) on 13 May 2008. For items purchased before that time, employees will be denied depreciation deductions for the 2008‑09 and later income years. This measure will ensure that employees are no longer able to gain a double benefit by obtaining an FBT exempt item (such as a laptop computer) from their pre‑tax income, and then claim a deduction for depreciation.

Budget Paper No. 2 > Part 1: Revenue Measures > Treasury

Background: I had mild to moderate shoulder pain after SCUBA diving a month ago. I was treated for Decompression Sickness (DCS, the bends) although it’s impossible to confirm the diagnosis for moderate pain, because it feels exactly like a sprain or strain.

I just had my followup appointment about safe diving practices (there’s an Australian standard, in fact). Since these are enormously different to diving practices pretty much anywhere, I thought they’d be of interest. These are the ones they wish they could give to everyone, by the way, not the ones that are only for people who have had DCS. Take the ones that are actually taught in training — slow ascents, safety stops — plus:

• dive the DCIEM tables with a square profile assumption (no multi-level, no computer algorithms);
• never do more than 2 dives in a day;
• never dive more than 4 days in a row; and
• the fact that everyone do repeated dives on the President Coolidge and in the Truk Lagoon to 50 or 60 metres breathing air and without decompression stops doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t an idiot.

OK, that last one comes up in dive training too I admit. But only in the context of your instructor sheepishly admitting to their idiotic profiles. (The relevance of breathing air at 60 metres is that’s a lot of nitrogen, over 5 atmospheres of partial pressure, and nitrogen not only gives you DCS, it makes you rather drunk starting from about 25 metres and steadily getting worse from there.)

In my case there is one extra restriction: take a 3 metre depth penalty and a 3 minute time penalty reading the table. Which is pretty conservative. For reference, I could dive to 27 metres for a grand total of 11 minutes bottom time on that reading of the table. (30 metres for 14 minutes is the standard reading.) Unless I decompress of course, but that has its own risks (equipment failures mean I’m stuck with failed equipment AND a missed compulsory decompression stop). The reason for the penalty is that the scar tissue from the DCS injury to my shoulder (actually, we suspect two, plus the damage from subluxating it six times previously) renders me somewhat more vulnerable again.

For non-divers, to contrast this with diving as it is actually done by pretty much everyone ever, imagine that you are going to a dance party, but need to tell the organisers that for medical reasons you’d really appreciate it if they’d keep the music no louder than 40dB. Cheers, thanks.

Or, to make this about diving, imagine that you are on a dive boat travelling to some great dive site several hours from shore. Your air consumption isn’t amazing, you can’t keep up with the suntanned French couple or the hoary old guys who are coming back after 60 minutes with half a tank left and cursing their computer time limits. But the guy running the boat who has done 1500 dives and your group’s friendly English backpacker dive guide have come up with a plan for your group that gives you 35 minutes of good solid diving to see all kinds of cool things. Now imagine I’m in your dive group. I’m the one whose medical advice is to do a 18 minute dive at the absolute maximum (the clock stops at the beginning of the ascent by the way, so probably about 24 minutes in the water total). The upside of this last scenario, I suppose, is that firstly my air consumption is rather good, so I can always loan the group my tank, and also that because I’m doing 2 dives a day and most liveaboards allow 4 at the very least, it won’t happen every dive because I’ll be on the boat sulking for most of them.

Or, let’s face it, never doing liveaboard trips again.

For divers the obvious question is what about nitrox? (For non-divers still reading, nitrox or enriched air is a tank with less nitrogen and more oxygen than the standard atmospheric ratio.) Well, it doesn’t thrill the dive doctors. They agree that it is much safer on air tables. They don’t so much like the use of separate tables to extend your dive time which, let’s face it, is why I’d want to use nitrox. It also comes with separate risks: the mix can vary wildly from what they claim it is, and you have one more factor to manage, which is oxygen toxicity. (High partial pressures of oxygen are toxic to cells. The first you know of the cell damage is a sudden seizure. So the solution is not to breathe those partial pressures, from about 1.4–1.6 atmospheres up. You shouldn’t go much past 20 metres on 36% oxygen.)

There’s nothing to stop me learning technical diving (adding helium to the mix to offset the risks of high pressures of nitrogen and oxygen) or adding decompression stops to my time, except that no dive boat I’ve ever been on is set up for the latter. (And they’re both complex.) The Pacific is choppy: you can’t really stay at 5.5 metres easily for 5 minutes without a good reference line. And the boats move all the time without warning, taking their good reference line with them.

In a couple of weeks Andrew will make his first and I hope only attempt at the NSW Driver Qualification Test, the computer exam that separates provisional drivers from fully licenced drivers. (Here’s the NSW car licence pathway.) And may I say that it’s a good thing that I got a full licence back when there was only one test (I did the on-road driving test in 1998, held what is now the P1 licence for twelve months and then just got handed the full licence when it expired) because although it did take me four attempts to pass the on-road test that’s nothing on what it would take to get me through the DQT.

Why? Well, the problem would be that the DQT asks a lot of questions based on the test handbook, and I wouldn’t be able to read the test handbook without smashing a wall down. With my teeth.

Let’s have a look. First we have some dodgy handwaving in which the authors of the handbook are astonished that 90% of their data fits into only five categories:

About 90 per cent of all crashes in NSW involving full licence drivers in their first year fall within only five crash types…

What’s that only doing there, huh? How many crash types are there? Six? Three hundred and twelve? For reference the five crash common types are: rear-ending someone, colliding with a vehicle travelling perpendicular to you (at an intersection), colliding with a vehicle coming from the opposite direction, running off a straight section of road and running off a bend. That does seem to cover a lot of possibilities doesn’t it? Don’t divide your population into five obvious segments plus a catch-all and then act all surprised that most of the population ends up in the five categories.

But the much more annoying problem is this. They note that 25% of provisional driver accidents are rear-enders, 34% of first year full licence accidents are rear-enders and 40% of experienced full licence accidents (‘experienced’ is drivers in the fifth and all subsequent years) are rear-enders. From these numbers they draw this conclusion:

Researchers think that these differences are due to novice drivers getting better at staying on the road but also getting into the habit of driving too close behind other vehicles in traffic. This bad habit seems to continue for full licence holders. As you can see from [a colourful pie chart], full licence drivers with more than five years’ experience have even more rear end crashes. However, they are much less likely to run off the road and hit an object.

Uh-huh. And what an interesting conclusion that would be, if they had first established that they were all having the same number of accidents. If they’ve done this, they do not indicate it, it’s all percentages of crashes within each population. (‘The same number of accidents’ is a little hard to define, but I believe it’s usually number of accidents per driver, number of accidents per driven kilometre, or number of accidents per passenger kilometre. For various reasons, mostly because of a subsequent section about how women have less accidents partly because they drive about half the kilometres men do — half! — I think this booklet is measuring on a per driver basis.) If they’re not, the higher proportion of rear-end accidents among experienced drivers doesn’t suggest that they’re risk-taking: only a higher absolute number of accidents does that. It could be, for example, that rear-end accidents are harder for even experienced drivers to avoid, and thus rise as a proportion of their total accidents just because they don’t drop as much.

In fact, we certainly hope that the same-number-of-accidents premise is false here, because the whole point of the insanely complicated and steadily getting worse NSW licencing system (in which learner drivers now must log one hundred and twenty supervised driving hours before taking the on road test, ie, about twenty minutes every single day for a year) is to reduce the number of accidents among novice solo drivers by making them less novice (and also older and less prone to risk-taking, although NSW hasn’t made this as obvious as in, say, Queensland where novice drivers over 24 get to skip a significant part of the pathway).

So far so good. That brings us to page 12 of the 94 page Driver qualification handbook. I think it’s fairly clear that I’d struggle to get through it. Especially since I can’t argue with a computer examiner.

Since I am only of the very few Australian residents I know who haven’t had an employer stuff up their tax withholding, a useful link: the ATO tax withheld calculator for PAYG employees.

It’s in the ‘for employers’ part of the ATO site, but employees can use this to check whether each pay packet they receive has had the correct amount of tax taken out. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of tax refunds or debts because it doesn’t take into account a mountain of stuff, the major one being non-employment income but also private health insurance stuff, deductions, blah blah. But it does mean you can catch the most common payroll mistakes, the big one being an employer forgetting to take out a HELP payment. If a payroll mistake results in you having a tax debt, you’re just as liable for it as in any other circumstances (assuming that the extra money turned up in your pay, which is what a mistake usually means) so unfortunately it is a good idea to double check that your after-tax amounts match the tax table whenever you get a new job or a pay rise.