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Ways to spend my time

Ideas already for my unexpected surfeit of time in 2010!

Joining the Sydney Recorder Society. I played recorder a lot in high school, through to seventh grade AMEB. I have very rarely played since, nor in fact really missed it, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy playing again. I’ve also been interested in improving my singing and perhaps joining a choir for many years but up until now I’ve had money or time for music, never both.

My mothers’ group is joining an indoor netball tornament. People tend to salivate at the idea of me playing defence for their netball teams; I’m not actually terribly good at anything other than casting a long shadow, nor do I find netball itself the most fascinating of sports, but it doesn’t sound like it will be a terribly serious team and playing a season would probably be pleasant enough.

Finally doing some sewing on the machine we were given more than a year ago.

Working on the children-on-the-Internet project described here.

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Reading habits

I intended to write this as a comment at Matt Zimmerman’s post on ways he reads, but it got rather long.

Let’s start with books. I also don’t read as much as I used to, but I am trying to do more of it and less of other reading. I was struck by Kate Harding’s post on reading:

… that’s a wonderful thing, especially for people who for various reasons can’t be physically present everywhere they might like to be, or who find it much easier to be social this way. But for me, the blessing and the curse of it is, I spend much more of my life than I used to thinking about what I’m going to say next. I’m composing a comment in response to what I just read instead of sitting with it; I’m having “chats” with friends where there can be no pleasant silences without one of us wondering if the other is still there; if I’m observing the world around me, half the time I’m thinking, “How do I make this a funny tweet?” When I was writing for Broadsheet, I read other feminist blogs desperately looking for fodder, rather than just taking it all in because it’s smart and interesting — which is exactly what got me interested in them and made me want to start my own in the first place.

All that thinking up something to say gets fucking exhausting.

I’m not going to insert the mandatory I love the feel and smell of paper thing about books here: I for one couldn’t give a toss about it and, except for the heavy metal aspect (and what an aspect it is), bring on the e-reader revolution. I will happily remove bookshelves from my home and hang nice things on my walls. But the thing about books is that, allowing for 95% of everything being crap, they’re planned, revised, edited, checked and they have a lot of space to say what they’re saying. There are exceptions, but the general rule is that I get a lot more out of one good book read over a few days than I do out of 100 good blog posts over that time.

I’m trying to work out what to do about news. The trouble with news is that I do need an editor: I like to know what’s going on in the world but I don’t naturally find out about it in my normal activities. I find out things from social justice blogs, which are important to me, and I find out things from the Sydney Morning Herald’s website, and there’s a lot of things in between I am missing out on. I tried Google News, but I think the cramming of all that news onto one page makes me run and hide. I actually suspect the answer here is TV news bulletins and I’m thinking of adding, say, the ABC’s and SBS’s evening bulletins to my life on a regular basis. Then I know roughly what’s going on and there’s plenty of detailed print journalism to turn to when I want to follow something up.

I read a lot of email still, although for years I’ve been limiting (non-work-related) mailing lists to a 75% test: if I am not reading 75% of the posts to the list, I unsubscribe. Regular readers of technical mailing lists will immediately understand how few mailing lists I am subscribed to now.

I was until recently fairly firmly on the mailing list site of the mailing-list-versus-web-forum debate. But I’ve realised that this is really more about tools, that is, mail readers are more mature than forum interfaces *and* you can use your favourite mail reader for all lists. Each forum has its own, bad, UI, on it’s own, regularly crashing, server.

But some of the features of forums, especially but not only the ability to move or delete or edit posts or entire threads after publication, are useful for high volume discussion. I’d love to see work on development of both standards and tools for more moderated threaded discussion that does not bind as tightly with a single UI. (I’ve used Usenet/NNTP. It’s not what I’m looking for.) Really I’d love to do that work, even, but it’s not a one-person job, buy-in is needed from software developers and users.

At the moment I follow a few web forums, mostly related to parenting things. I resist becoming too actively involved (ie, I’m not a regular poster at any and certainly don’t want to moderate, I keep the relationship to a state where I can regularly take breaks of months from a given forum and no one notices).

I read a lot of blogs (really, a lot). They get subjected to the 75% test too, largely, at least if they update frequently. About a year ago I gave up trying to be basically completionist: if I went away and you blogged during that time, I didn’t read it.

For a long time now I’ve been a fan of personal life-blogs over most other genres. I want to keep up with the educated, researched, niche blogs like Language Log or LWN (OK, the latter doesn’t think of itself as a blog, but it’s in my feed reader, so to me it is) but I find it difficult to be in the mindset to read it as I go through my reader and I can’t think of a good model for setting them aside and going through a bunch of them, especially since I do web reading at my desk. I also want to keep up with hypertextual discussions on social justice issues, but that also easily becomes a second full-time job.

I used to like the big aggregators, but now someone needs to do a highlights column. I care deeply about my baby and my PhD, but I don’t really care about the life milestones of, say, a given random Ubuntu developer. If someone else could pick the top three technical blog posts of the week and I could just read them, I’d prefer that.

I read less and less of microblogs or Facebook and I think it’s going to stay that way. I feel a bit bad about it, since I like writing a microblog, I just don’t like staying on top of my stream. I’m very over the 140 character limit too, it’s too easy to get into needless arguments because my teeny sentence missed a nuance and then I have to clarify with someone, 140 characters at a time. I read direct replies to me, and every so often I surf over and read the most recent 50 or so items I’m subscribed to and that’s about it.

There’s things about Facebook I like (more generous character limit, reply threads, the ‘Top News’ sorting) but I do intend to leave. Just, people keep announcing the birth of their babies exclusive to Facebook. Knock it off!

I don’t really find shared links as useful as Matt does, possibly I need a better tool for it. But I think the theme of most of this is that really, I am turning to edited content, sometimes by pros and sometimes by very smart people who spend a lot of time on the ‘net. I am not cut out to be an editor in that sense, at least, not most of the time. Probably no one is.

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Stuff I’m against, privacy edition

The ALP’s proposed mandatory ‘clean feed’, see Save the Net, No Clean Feed, Open Internet and, especially if you are going to vote in Victoria in the 2010 Federal election, Filter Stephen Conroy.

Recording of email and correspondence history for Internet users in Australia:

Currently, companies that provide customers with a connection to the internet don’t retain or log subscriber’s private web browsing history unless they are given an interception warrant by law enforcement, usually approved by a judge. It is only then that companies can legally begin tapping a customer’s internet connection.

In March 2006, the European Union formally adopted its data retention directive (PDF), a directive which the Australian Government said it wished to use as an example if it implemented such a regime.

…

The EU regime requires that the communications providers from certain EU member states retain necessary data as specified in the Directive for a period of between six and 24 months.

One internet service provider (ISP) source told ZDNet Australia that the Australian regime, if implemented, could go as far as recording each URL a customer visited and all emails.

But, just when you decide to vote for the Liberal-National Coalition (or MAYBE NOT)… Youth privacy at risk under the Mad Monk:

At the heart of the near-universal support for adolescent health privacy is an extensive body of data. The research shows that the greatest barrier to young people seeking medical help is the fear their parents may find out.

…

In Australia, “mature minors” are authorised to make decisions about their medical treatment. A mature minor is a tween or teen with sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand the nature and consequences of the medical intervention proposed, and to give informed consent to it.

While all those under 18 must be accessed on such criteria, it is generally assumed that those over 17 are mature minors, that those 14 to 16 are reasonably likely to be, and that those under 14 may not have capacity to consent, particularly in relation to more serious treatments. The requirement for confidentiality is a corollary of the mature minor framework.

Never one to let evidence muddy the waters of ideology, the now Opposition leader Tony Abbott was part of a government that in 2003 lifted the age at which information about a child’s healthcare visits could be accessed by their parents from 12 to 14. As Health Minister he vigorously argued for this threshold to be lifted again, from 14 to 16. Had he succeeded, an entire group of Australians would have been denied independent and confidential medical care, despite most qualifying for it.

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The end of 2010

Although there’s always a possibility, it seems that regular childcare will not be available for my son Vincent until early 2011 (yes, I’ve had his name down for ages, although not since birth, since I was pretty sick afterwards).

What this means: my supervisor and I have agreed that I can’t resume my PhD studies if I am doing fulltime baby care. My experience so far meshes with this: I can poke at my code and read the literature, I can’t really pound on it in forty-five minute chunks a few times a day, and it would be a waste of both of our time if I was to be formally re-enrolled now.

So it looks like I have six months or so to kill, and I’m thinking about what to do with that time. I may or may not have some paid work lined up for some hours of the week. I’m hoping not to spend the rest aimlessly noodling around on the ‘net, well, not all of the rest. Options include more paid work (if you for some reason have paid work that can be done by a — skilled! — programmer/writer/researcher in forty-five minute chunks, get in touch), hacking, writing. Looking forward to coming up with some projects!

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Don’t mention the war

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Over at Livejournal, angelbob is gathering anecdata:

A friend recently said… that as a woman working in technology, she wouldn’t recommend that other women enter the field. She’s a system administrator… I’m not going to repeat her reasons here. Rather, I’d be very curious whether other women working in technical fields, especially system administration and/or programming, felt the same way. Anybody care to comment?

I find this is a bit of an elephant in the room in “women in technology” discussions, and so I (bravely! like John Tierney, no doubt) want to talk about it. It probably applies to “women in science” discussions and so on, I just don’t follow them as much.

There are women, quite a few in fact, in technology careers who suggest other women don’t enter them. They usually find this is a unpopular opinion in the harming the community direction. Often some of their major critics are other women, especially women who are running recruitment and outreach for the field. The argument generally goes like this: the major thing that will fix sexism in this field is more women! So if we stay silent and take the sexism bad with the geeky good for long enough, sexism will solve itself. By encouraging women to stay out, you are basically furthering sexism in this field. QED.

Let’s pick this apart. First, purely as a practical matter, even in the forthcoming geek feminist utopia, some women will be talented programmers or engineers or mathematicians but will choose to spend most or all of their life in a different field. The human endeavour is not a zero sum game, we have not “lost” someone when she becomes a nurse or a musician.

Second, we don’t want to be denying women’s experiences. If a geek career was hard, unpleasant and not ultimately worth it for her, she should say this, and if it was related to her being a woman, it makes sense to recommend against it for other women. It’s hard to hear this if you are among the women who passionately love their geek work and want to share the good news, but those of us who are more in the advocate line surely do not want to spread the message that if women so much as hear negative experiences about geekdom they’ll all flee. If women’s interest in geekdom comes at the expense of lying to them and denying other women’s negative experiences, then the cause of women in geek careers isn’t worth it. Women can listen to passionate detractors, passionate advocates and people somewhere in between, consider their own experiences, and make up their own minds.

And lastly, women do not in fact bear the responsibility of ending geekdom’s sexism, and even if we did, we couldn’t. It is, in fact, ultimately down to the most powerful people to bear the bulk of the burden for changing the social environment. Having a field become 50 or 75% women has some effect on the stereotype effect, but it is not a magic de-sexist-itising measure.

How about you? If you left a geekdom or a geek career, or are a passionate critic of it (and aren’t we all, since pretty much any criticism is subject to the tone argument) have you been told not to discourage women, or that you are undermining the work of advocate women?

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The latest essentialism go-round: do we dare to discuss?

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Showing up on our Linkspam radar this week is John Tierney’s article for The New York Times, Daring to Discuss Women in Science, which is another round of “I am going to challenge the groupthink and be the one person who dares to make gender essentialist arguments about women in technical fields [well, me and that army over there]”. It argues from a finding among very high performing high school students, the top 0.01 percent of the population as sorted by the SAT and ACT standardised tests in the US, from which the researchers concluded that there’s distinct gender differences among students with that sort of performance.

Tierney writes:

The boy-girl ratio has also remained fairly constant, at about three to one, at the right tail of the ACT tests of both math and science reasoning. Among the 19 students who got a perfect score on the ACT science test in the past two decades, 18 were boys.

Meanwhile, the seventh-grade girls outnumbered the boys at the right tail of tests measuring verbal reasoning and writing ability. The Duke researchers report in Intelligence, “Our data clearly show that there are sex differences in cognitive abilities in the extreme right tail, with some favoring males and some favoring females.”

Here’s a roundup of feminist/women-in-science-o-sphere responses, many via SKM at Shakesville:

  • Anna N., 3 Problems With The “Women In Science” Debate: If boys and girls, men and women had truly equal opportunities, we might be able to conclude something about their “innate abilities” ”” or at least stop worrying about gender inequality in various fields. But we’re still very far from that point. Tierney finds fault with programs to eliminate bias at the university level, and says, female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants. But girls may be implicitly or explicitly discouraged from pursuing science long before they actually become scientists…
  • Caroline Simard, “Daring to Discuss Women in Science:” A Response to John Tierney: The problem with the biology argument that “boys are just more likely to be born good at math and science” isn’t that it’s not “politically correct” — it’s that it assumes that we can take away the power of societal influences, which have much more solid evidence than the biology hypothesis. Tierney makes the point himself in his article…
  • Christina Agapakis, Adventures of Women in Science: The irony here being that this article is a very clear example of some of the social biases women in science face every day, just one of the countless attacks and indignities that make it that much harder for women to get up and go to lab every day, to achieve great things in math and science.
  • Janet D. Stemwedel, John Tierney thinks he’s being daring: On the general subject of claims for which there does not does not exist relevant empirical evidence, are there any published studies (or any research projects currently underway) to explore the connection Tierney, Summers, et al. seem to assume between being in the extreme right tail of laboratory measures of mathematical and scientific aptitude (like the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test) and having the chops to to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university?
  • SKM, Daring to Discuss Women and… *Yawn*, which also includes several links from the Larry Summers debate and earlier: For that matter, I think the “daring” idea that women are innately inferior to men at various Important Things–and indeed the preposterous notion that the idea is “daring” to begin with–has been answered quite competently in the past
  • Gretchen Keller, Women in Science: 2+2=?: …one of my least favorite, yet thought-provoking questions is “How does it feel to be a woman in science?”. Usually I reply that it feels the same as it does for a man: frustrating, time-consuming, invigorating and mostly like a bird flying repeatedly into a window desperately hoping that one of these times that pane of glass will turn into thin air.
  • Amy E. Slaton, Erring on the Side of…Exclusion: I know, I know: sarcasm is petty and unattractive. So before I lose any remaining credibility, let me defer to Troy Duster’s brilliant historical discussion of biological understandings of intellectual capacity. For almost 20 years, editions of his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, have laid out the very worrisome political and cultural implications of our pursuit of biological bases for intellectual and behavioral differences.
  • Clara Raubertas, “daring” to draw unscientific conclusions from statistics: Of course, his conclusions aren’t very scientific. Here are a few of the unfounded assumptions he has to make to draw the conclusions he draws… The assumption that science is so hard that it’s really only suited for people with extremely high scores (in the top fraction of a percent among a group of students who are already in the top fraction of a percent among their peers)
  • Melissa, The never-ending discussion: biology or bias?: What I find most frustrating is that there are myriads of studies, and everyone can cite their favorite study to support their viewpoint ”” be it that bias is the dominant factor keeping women out of sciences or that biology accounts for the paucity of women… I found what may currently be the best, though still imperfect, antidote to the never-ending, go-nowhere discussion of this topic, namely Stephen Ceci and Wendy William’s book, The Mathematics of Sex: How biology and society conspire to limit talented women and girls.
  • FemaleScienceProfessor, But I Don’t Want to Write about John Tierney Again: Thanks for all the e-mails and comments with links to the New York Times commentary by John Tierney, but what he wrote is just more of the same of what he’s written before: i.e., many women don’t want to be scientists or engineers, others can’t because they aren’t as good at math as the guys. Oh yeah, and Larry Summers made some reasonable statements in a speech that was misunderstood by hysterical females.
  • Hannah (in reply to FemaleScienceProfessor), Daring to Discuss: While I do understand this fear, how else are we going to convince the scientific establishment, many of whom likely share Tierney’s views, that gender bias is real and actually does keep women from succeeding in science careers? Clearly, just waiting for the old guard to pass on isn’t working, because I’ve met plenty of young male scientists who are just as biased as the old ones: they just hide it better.
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larch: migrating mail between IMAP accounts

I recently had to move several gigabytes of email (not my own, work-related) into Google Apps (Gmail). As best I can tell, the way most people do this is that they grit their teeth and they open up a graphical email client and drag folders one-by-one. It’s a one-off job for most people.

There were a couple of reasons I didn’t want to do that. One is that I was on my parents’ DSL connection at the time and pushing gigabytes of data through someone’s DSL is a violation of good guest principles, at least in Australia. The other is that we have over 500 folders in the account I’m talking about: that’s a lot of mouse pain.

Anyway, here’s your answer, if you are in the same position as me. After substantial searching, at least for this kind of tool, I came across larch, which is a Ruby command-line tool for IMAP-to-IMAP moves, most tested on Gmail and essentially designed for the “move my mail archives into Gmail” use-case. It’s much more mature than most of the one-off scripts people have thrown up on the ‘net. It certainly seemed robust over this volume of mail, although I did have to run it a couple of times to get past a few errors (it does not re-copy already copied mail, so re-runs are fast). It deserves more search juice.

If you wanted to keep two accounts permanently in sync, offlineimap would be the tool of choice, although the manual still seems to regard IMAP-to-IMAP syncing as not as robustly tested as its core mode of operation, which is IMAP-to-Maildir.

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The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Feminist criticism of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” anti-filtering campaign has shown up on several blogs:

ZDNet Australia writer Josh Taylor picked up the story and contacted myself and Geordie Guy, vice-chair of EFA’s board, for comment in his article EFA apologises for ‘sexist’ anti-filter site.

[Geordie] Guy told ZDNet Australia the responses he received to his blog forced him to delete the entry.

“A couple of the comments that came in response to that were really abusive and I didn’t want to start or continue a fight, which is why the article was removed,” he said.

“We sincerely regret that the campaign offended some people,” Guy said, explaining that his personal musings on the blog were superseded by the apology from the EFA board. He said it was inevitable that the different approach to the censorship debate — and getting a comedian involved — would offend a few people.

“Needless to say, we didn’t set out to upset anyone and we don’t think mums are stupid — we think some mums are being treated as such by the government, who is playing on their fears without giving them the full story,” he said.

The EFA though have explicitly disclaimed any apparent apology in their own blog:

So contrary to reports elsewhere, like [Taylor’s piece], we aren’t apologising for the campaign – we’re happy with the way it turned out. Of course, we’d rather nobody was offended, and sincerely regret it. But offending nobody is only possible without any risk-taking, and a risk-free campaign is unlikely to break any new ground.

I’ve also transcribed the the Akmal Saleh video that’s part of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” campaign.

Continue reading “The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship”

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So simple, even your mother will be opposed

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

My four month old has explained a lot of things to me. To date it’s been things like “it’s been four months and you still can’t tell the difference between tired and hungry? HERE LET ME SHOW YOU.”

But I confess that I was surprised last night by his cogent explanation of reasons to oppose the Federal government’s proposed Internet filtering scheme, thanks to Electronic Frontiers Australia’s It’s Time to Tell Mum campaign, which enabled him to simply explain things like even mums want an internet connection that’s faster, cheaper and more secure, if mums begin to rely on the filter to keep their children safe, rather than monitoring their children’s internet use themselves, children will actually be less safe than before the filter was in place.

And I have to thank him, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, because that was a lot clearer than the confused mother-logic authored by some mummy bloggers I know around these parts.

Seriously, is there some kind of bingo card for “getting mothers involved” yet? Here some squares to get you started, thanks to “It’s Time to Tell Mum”: mothers are late technology adopters, mothers are uninterested in technology and toys for their own sake, mothers are solely responsible for the moral welfare of children, (which is lucky because) mothers are pretty much only interested in the moral welfare of children, (which is also lucky because) fathers and co-parents might as well not exist. Any more?

See also discussion in the previous Open Thread.

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Tinkering

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Mark Pilgrim’s post Tinkerer’s Sunset laments the increasing tendency of Apple devices to be locked for development unless you have a Mac, XCode, an iPhone simulator, and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. He goes on to write about his introduction to programming as a child:

But you don’t become a hacker by programming; you become a hacker by tinkering. It’s the tinkering that provides that sense of wonder. You have to jump out of the system, tear down the safety gates, peel away the layers of abstraction that the computer provides for the vast majority of people who don’t want to know how it all works. It’s about using the Copy ][+ sector editor to learn how the disk operating system boots, then modifying it so the computer makes a sound every time it reads a sector from the disk. Or displaying a graphical splash screen on startup before it lists the disk catalog and takes you to that BASIC prompt. Or copying a myriad of wondrous commands from the Beagle Bros. Peeks & Pokes Chart and trying to figure out what the fuck I had just done. Just for the hell of it. Because it was fun. Because it scared my parents. Because I absolutely had to know how it all worked.

I was something of a tinkerer as a tween and teen too, although at a more superficial level. I liked to change the colours of the desktop, I set up a different boot sequence because our 486 didn’t have the memory to run both Windows 3.1 and Doom II, and so on. But Pilgrim’s throwaway line about “scared my parents” struck me, because this did scare my parents.

My parents weren’t scared of a loss of control over me in the way that, I think, Pilgrim is implying. They were specifically scared: scared I’d make our family’s shared computer, which they’d barely been able to afford, unusable for everyone (and I did on a few occasions). And they certainly didn’t know, and neither did I, that tinkering with it was any kind of investment in getting jobs in the future. That’s what university is for, and the computer was an investment in me having the computer literacy I’d need to pass university. (The web was in the public eye by then, this was the 1990s, but at the time “computer literacy” meant word processing skills.)

That kind of tinkering isn’t accessible unless you can do it to a device you own, whether because it has no other user, you don’t especially care about those other users, or because you’ve been specifically told that you’re more important than those other users. I didn’t have any gadgets that met those criteria. It requires money, leisure time, and people who recognise the value of you having such a relationship with your toys. I don’t have brothers, so I can’t say whether or not a brother would have been implicitly granted the ability to break our shared gadgets for his own education in the way I wasn’t: some women do report this.

One of the early things I did when I started earning money above my basic living needs (in 2000 some university students could get computing jobs that met this criteria) was buy my very own computer, and it was worth it many times over for all the Linux installs, Windows installs, SMTP config and similar I did to it.

What about you? Did you have a tinkerable toy (in the broad sense of ‘toy’) as a child that you were granted licence to tinker with? How about as an adult? How about now? Or alternatively, have you been put in second place while your useful tool was given to someone else to take apart and put together at their own leisure? And how has this influenced your geek journey?

Update: If you want to discuss the general issue that Pilgrim raised in a way that isn’t either (a) your personal tinkering experiences or (b) a feminist discussion of tinkering, can you put it on your own blogs or in Pilgrim’s comments please? It will derail this thread otherwise.