singingfish’s blog

The "you can't photograph us / our building, it's against the law" zeitgeist seems to be waking up in Australia.  Here's a story from Boxing Day about a guy being harassed by the police for taking photos. 

Soooo ...  I was at North Wollongong Station the other day and there were a bunch of tourists taking photos of themselves on the platform until the station attendant told them that photographing the station wasn't allowed.  I don't know where public officials get this idea from, but I suspect if they're not actually mistaken, then they should be.

I propose that it's time for some non-violent direct action.  Let's pick a time and a date, go to our nearest contentious public space - train station, police station, town hall, anywhere else we can think of, en-masse and start taking photographs of them. 

What do you reckon?

Late last night I came across this article from the Guardian Newspaper in the UK.  It being late at night, I didn't read it all the way through, but, I liked what I did read.  But ... there are some issues.

So, I'll look at each of the ten things in turn.

Myth 1.  Solar power is too expensive to be of much use

Absolutely true.  Solar energy is developing a critical mass in application and use.  On the other hand, people misunderstand how to use solar energy.  Elsewhere in the Guardian's environment section I came across the comment along the lines of "how am I expected to power my immersion heater from a few solar panels on the roof".  This is utterly wrong.  The reason that flat bed, and the more efficient evacuated tube solar water heaters are successful is that they use heat from the sun (in the form of infra red light rays) to heat water in an insulated tank.

On the other hand photovoltaics, use high-tech materials with  high levels of embedded energy to generate a flow of electrons in copper wire, which for water heating would in turn drive an immersion heater.  This is clearly much more complex.  It has has more stages than the simple heat harvesting panel, and therefore more room for inefficiency.  The moral of the story is, to think what you need the energy for first, and then use the technology best suited for the purpose.  Remember, fossil fuel technologies generally sacrifice efficiency for convenience, which is what has got us into this mess in the first place.

Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable

The author is on the money here too.  So long as there are many points where wind energy is being collected and fed into the grid, it's very unlikely that it's going to be calm in all of these places at once.    I think that this kind of myth has been encouraged by the design decisions favoured by the fossil fuel industry, which tend to only look at facility design issues without placing them in an environmental context.  Again a case of simplicity and convienence at the expense of efficiency.

Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end

Again, on the money.  Here's an outfit local to me doing some good work in the area.

Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity

Spot on.  Nuclear energy is only cheaper if you don't cost externalities (i.e. environmental and social costs).  Here's yet another example of the widespread use of fossil fuel encouraging lazy design and convenience over efficiency and environmental sensitivity.  When will they wake up that it's not the economy or the environment, it's the economy because of the environment?

Myth 5: electric cars are slow and ugly

This area is looking increasingly interesting.  Now we need to make sure that the energy used to power them doesn't come from coal.

Myth 6: biofuels are always destructive to the environment

Here's where I start to disagree.  If you're using crop residues to generate biofuels, this means that there are a bunch of nutrients that aren't being returned to the soil.  This will result in soil degredation, partly caused by this, and partly caused by a lack of protective vegitation on top of the soil.  On the other hand, algae derived biofuels look promising, so I won't write this area off completely, but it's no panacea.

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

Well, here we have wrong headed thinking.  Factory farming requires very high inputs from fossil fuels which makes this farming method's sustanability  pathetic.  Add to this long transportation distances between farmer and consumer, along with the pretty poor soil conservation record of industrial agriculture, and there's a real problem.  I was thinking the other day that a good way of measuring the sustainability of a population would be to look at the education level of the population and the proportion of the population involved in food production.  So my guess is that a highly educated population (60%-80% of the population finishing high school, and 30%-50% of the population with university degrees) plus around a third of the population generating at least some of their income from food production might be a good indicator of a sustainable society.

The Cuban experience is definately interesting here.  Here's a good video I found about this:

Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings

We're back to sensible commentary here.  In Australia there are huge cultural barriers to achieving increased efficiency in old and new houses.  This is an area where governments need to prioritise.  There are some noises in Australia going in the right direction with insulation rebates, solar power rebates and feed in tarifs, but this is at the early stages, and much much more effort needs to go into this.

Myth 9: the most efficient power stations are big

Again I'm back in agreement. The Melbourne Council building CH2  is a great example of this.

Myth 10: all proposed solutions to climate change need to be hi-tech

Absolutely.  The best solutions are low tech and simple.  Catch the low hanging fruit with this and then think about the technology to fix the harder stuff.  A lot of government policy like carbon capture and storage seems to be the wrong way round.

Just for future reference - I was having a conversation with someone the other day who made it clear that they didn't know the difference even though they ought to.

• Assertive is not taking any shit from other people.

• Aggressive is handing out shit to other people.

Of course you can be both at the same time, but assertive by itself is far better.  If you don't know the difference and you find people give you trouble, you probably need to tune down the agression and up the assertiveness.

It has come to my attention that if you google for the term "mad keen wowzers" you get no results, so I thought I'd provide a link to a famous image of some mad keen wowzers:

Yes, this is a real answer.  Another student scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Fortunately this is school level, not university ;-)

Right, for whatever reason, you've chosen to buy a windows PC. Bad choice if you ask me,  I'm not you, and we're both glad about that.

First up, you've hardened your computer against spyware by following this advice.  Next, you need to be able to play multimedia files with no problem.

For audio files, you want Media Monkey or iTunes for Windows.  Unless you own an ipod (not a generic MP3 player but one of those things manufactured by Apple), I'd probably go for the former.  If you own an iPod, go for the latter unless your computer literacy is good and you like to troubleshoot.

Video is a different matter.  Video files are complicated.  I once spent a whole two weeks at work getting to the bottom of video file support as part of my job.  At the end of the day the answer is, that the most widely supported video format in the world is VideoCD format.  Pretty much every computer, dvd player, set top box and other magical video-playing-thing can play this format.

But that's not what you want.  You want to be able to play everything.  On a mac, it's simple, install Perian and Flip4Mac.  On linux, it's simple, install mplayer and win32-codecs.  For some reason on windows it's complicated (see the first paragraph of this post).

The first thing you want to do is to remove Windows Media Player.  The advice here is sound, despite the appalling spelling.  The reason you want to remove Windows Media Player is complicated, but the essence is that microsoft is more interested in entering a benificial business relationship with entertainment and media companies than it is in entering a benifical business relationship with you.  Besides WMP doesn't play the most common video formats, so it's best to get rid of it straight away.

As far as the software you can install goes, I hear that the home theatre crowd like Zoomplayer.  I haven't used or even heard of it before, but it's probably worth a try. My own suggestion is to download and install VLC for most media files, and Media Player Classic.  After this, you want save any downloaded files to the desktop, right click on them, select "open with"and then pick any of these programs until you get an idea of which one you like best.

Hope this helps.

I've made a lot of bread in a home bread maker for the last 5 years.  I've burned through 2 machines (I'm on my third).  The second cheapest Breville Baker's Oven bread maker has been perfectly good for me.  My second bread maker was the cheapest model of Baker's Oven, and I was never that happy with it.  Here are the steps to success:

Here's a photograph of my standard bread making ingredients:

Here's the recipe:

Add the following into the breadmaker in order:

1 375 ml cup of water (that's the metal cup)
A slug of oil (1-2tbsp) 3 teaspoons of salt, 6-8 teaspoons of sugar
3 imperial cups of wholemeal flour (that's the clear plastic cup on top of the flour bag) I buy 5 or 10 kilo bags of flour from my organic food shop)
A slug of hulled millet ( 1-2 tbsp) some pumpkin seeds and some sunflower seeds.  Of this everything is optional except the millet which seems to be a really useful bread improver.

Here are some instructions I believe will help you make your new Windows computer more secure as a home user.  The source of most of this is from here. 

So you're going to have to  maintainin your own computer and for whatever reason you've chosen Windows.  The single biggest security hole with a Windows computer is Internet Explorer.  Stop using it.  This is the simplest solution to the problem of spyware and many viruses for home users.  It's probably the simplest solution for professional administrators as well, but they have a vested interest in keeping their jobs,  so they need to keep themselves busy ;-)

Follow the  procedure below.  You should consider it unsafe to connect your computer to the internet before you've completed this.  Doing this means that you won't need to run anti-spyware software and greatly reduces the need to run anti-virus software.  This will improve the performance of your computer and dramatically reduce the incidence of "mysterious software problems".

Step 1.

Download and install Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/). 

Download the installer and save it on a usb thumb drive or burn to a CD from another computer.

Step 2. 

Set firefox as your default browser using the following menu options:

Firefox 2: "Tools -> Options -> Main / System Defaults -> (checkmark) Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup -> Check Now"

Step 3. 

Secure Internet Explorer

Unfortunately Microsoft have made it almost impossible to completely uninstall IE.  Use the following procedure to secure it and remove as many traces as possible of it from the system:

Secure Internet Explorer

    * Open Internet Explorer
    * Go to Tools | Internet Options... | Security
    * Set the security level for all zones except trusted sites to high
    * Set the security level for trusted sites to medium
    * While the trusted sites zone is selected, click on the Sites... button
    * Uncheck Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone
    * Add:
          o http://*.update.microsoft.com
          o https://*.update.microsoft.com
          o http://download.windowsupdate.com

With only the above three sites in the trusted sites zone, the trusted sites zone set to medium security, and all other zones set to high security, Internet Explorer is as secure as it can be while still leaving Windows Update functional. To be as safe as possible, use Internet Explorer only when absolutely necessary. IE generally has known highly critical security vulnerabilities, and even well-known sites can contain exploits that a fully patched version of Internet Explorer is vulnerable to. In addition to securing Internet Explorer, you may also want to hide the icon as described in the next section.
[edit]
Hide the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop

Right-click on the Desktop -> click Properties -> Desktop -> Customize Desktop -> Desktop Icons -> Internet Explorer <uncheck this

Another way (in Windows XP, possibly different for other versions of windows) Start -> Set Program Access and Defaults -> Add/Remove Windows Components -> Uncheck Internet Explorer -> Click Next. Now Internet Explorer has been partially uninstalled.

OK, now it's much safer to connect your  computer to the internet.  Be sure to install your operating system and especially web browser updates regurlarly!

Note: You can point your friends and colleagues to this page with the web address http://xrl.us/35qk (easier to write down or spell out loud).

A very good friend of mine is having problems with their boss.  In my opinion as an ex-psychologist and management researcher, this person is a corporate psychopath.  I did some work on the personality profile of psychopaths a few years ago, and also had a fair amount of professional dealing with people suffering a variety of personality disorders.  So what I'm going to do here is to write a little about how to identify a corporate psychopath, and look at your options as to what you can do about it.  By way of warning, there are no easy solutions, and most of the things that you can normally do to fix difficult social situations will not work.

What is a corporate psychopath?

The ABC Catalyst show had a nice segment on corporate psychopaths here  (video is available from that page) They have a 6 question checklist on their website (here).  The theory is that the more yes answers you provide, the higher the chance you do have a real toxic boss.  I don't particularly like the questionnaire - it's missing some important personality attributes like:

• Does your boss use bullying and intimidation as their primary management technique?
  
• Is your boss impulsive?
• Does your boss make frequent mistakes which they cover up by denial or blaming other people?
• Does your boss apparently not suffer from anxiety?
• Does your boss make decisions without consulting the rest of his team?
• Does your boss try to set members of his team against each other through manipulative behaviour?
• Is your boss completely self-centred (narcissistic)?
• Does your boss have lax personal ethics in the way they deal with other people?
  

What does "psychopath" mean?

A psychopath is someone that lacks empathy.  This means that they are unable to see the world from another person's point of view.  This is the core of the problem.  Imagine a child who is born without the ability to see colour.  As they progress through their life, there is a lot of stuff that they can't see, and have never experienced, so it is very difficult, perhaps impossible for them to appreciate what colour is, and the value that it brings to the experience of other people.  Colours are concrete things that people use for information (e.g. traffic lights), and we tend to talk about them a lot, so people with complete colour blindness realise early on that there's a problem and work on strategies to deal with the problem.

People who don't have the ability to feel empathy similarly develop strategies to deal with their disability, but because other people's feelings are much more abstract than colours, and because people communicate about them in different ways (compared to colour) the afflicted individual is unlikely to see it as a problem, and they will develop strange ways of dealing with it that are focused on manipulating the people around them.

This means that a psychopath will have a fundamentally different set of motivations than the rest of the population.  They don't recognise the existence of other people's feelings, and so their perspective in social situations are quite alien for normal people.  In general their motivations are to get other people to do exactly what they want, with a complete disregard for the consequences.

Because of the severity of this problem, some psychopaths are unable to live by society's rules, because these rules are completely alien to them.  These people are criminal psychopaths and probably account for about 10% of the prison population.  Psychopaths who can internalise some kind of  rule system can live reasonably normal lives, but will make the lives of those around them very difficult.  One way a psychopath can internalise a set of rules that could keep them out of trouble would be from an upbringing that stresses the importance of authority, and presents simple rules to live by - e.g. in some kinds of religious situations.  However, they are likely to strive obtain a position of authority for themselves, because they get big internal rewards from being able to control other people's behaviour.

The overall incidence of psychopathy in the population is about 1%. About 2% of senior managers fit the criteria for psychopathy, and as mentioned above, about 10% of the prison population.

Why do psychopaths do better in management positions?

I must admit that I don't fully understand this.  Two things come to mind.  Firstly in a hyper-competitive world like the modern workplace, ruthless individuals have an advantage.  Coupled with this, because psychopaths live in a kind of "parallel reality" where normal values and rules are for exploitation of personal advantage rather than for promoting social harmony, this provides them with a perceptual advantage.

What are the outcomes for organisations dominated by corporate psychopaths?

Very bad.  The American company Enron, which collapsed due to poor accountability is often cited an example of this.  Robert Maxwell, a British media tycoon whose business empire colapsed shortly after he committed suicide is another example.  In the aftermath  it was discovered that he'd stolen the company pension fund.

In larger organisations, corporate psychopaths can "hide" and their activities are marked by high staff turnover, poor outcomes for staff and poor overall performance that can severly affect the health of the organisation.  Poor staff outcomes can include sleep loss, an increase in mental health problems

What can you do about a corporate psychopath if you're working with one?

Unfortunately very little.  The simplest course of action is to leave.  However, this is often not a possibility and besides, it just makes it someone else's problem.  Two things not to do:

1.   Don't approach your boss about the problem.

Really, don't no matter how tempting!  Problems in social situations have a completely different meaning to them than to you.  Alerting them to the problem  sends the psychopath a strong signal; it shows them that they have leverage over you and clarifies the buttons that they can press to manipulate you.  To the psychopath you do not have a complicated internal life, and you are there exclusively for their benefit and for them to control.

2.  Don't arrange for rehabilitation.

If you can communicate the problem to your boss' management, management may chose to try to rehabilitate them.  This will not work for much the same reason that alerting them to a personal problem will not work. Providing them with rehabilitation will give them a valuable learning experience, and enable them to expand their repertoire of techniques for manipulating and controlling people.

So what can you do?

Aside from resigning, if it's possible to  do the very difficult job of alerting their managers to the problem, along with stressing that rehabilitation will not have the intended consequences, then there may be some hope. The psychopath should have a job that minimises interaction with other people.  This will mean removing their authority for core functions of their job.  In most cases dismissal is the only long term solution. This will have major benefits to the organisation and for the staff formerly working under this person.

There are professionals who can assess the extent and severity of this disability, and if possible they should be used.  They can help you to provide an appropriate intervention, but in almost all cases, the best intervention is dismissal,and as quickly as possible. Where possible, references should be refused , so that the problem is not passed on to someone else.

Further information.

The problem of workplace psychopaths has only been recognised relatively recently.  If you want to find out more, I recommend watching the Catalyst segment I mentioned at the beginning.  If you want to look at the academic literature, visit Google Scholar, or your favourite search engine,  and search for "corporate psychopath", "industrial psychopath" or "snakes in suits" (this last one is the name of a book).  Please use the comments section here for questions or examples of your own experiences.

So my laptop had some trouble with the DC in board - the cable neds to be jiggled so that the battery knows to charge.  So I ordered a 2nd hand one for $35 from the ibook scrap yard.  Meanwhile I have a temporary fix that works but immobilises me somewhat.  Photo below.

The little "knot" above the cable tie provides just the right amount of upward pressure to keep the supply connected ... for now ...  Crack the case on the weekend :-)

[Update] even small amounts of movement can re-start the problem.  Fortunately I have this photo for a reference when I need to re-tie it.