So, for those that don't know I'm back at my parents place. The nice thing about this is that I have access to the copious junk that I had left lying around when I hastily exited the country. One such piece of junk is this literature that I produced in high school back in London. Called (somewhat unoriginally) "Me, Myself and I" it is the autobiography of a 12 year old north London boy. I never really understood the logic of having a 12 year old write an autobiography, but the fact is, it exists. As you'd expect, the vast majority of the book is very dry, factual information, since I had about two great stories to tell about my life thus far, and they involved either something falling on me, or me falling into something. However, right at the end of this 38 page odyssey, there are two pages of glorious aspirational prose. They're linked at the start of this post, but I'll transcribe them here, for the graphically challenged readers. I'll leave the interpretation of this wholly up to you, but I've handily hyperlinked a few key terms.

Me in the future

20/10/2029
Dear diary, this year as I now recall, war is raging and robots rule the land, these are the afterefects (sic) of a war, Terminators walk the skull stricken land and the last Terrans hide awaiting their warriors to return, then a Terminator bursts in and after a great struggle wipes out the last of humanity.

To be honest that stuff was in the national archives and was made by a drunk geaser (sic). Most people think I was mad leaving science as I was getting too old. I would have kept the job but I never got enough pay, thats why I changed to Sierra on-line, you get a good pay and stuff like that, but I also love computers, I even wrote that down in an autobiography. Nice talking to ya diary, see you tomorrow!

P.S. - Today I got up on the wrong side of bed, but I really brightened up when I finished "SQ100 — ATTACK!", when I got home the kids were out and I had the most delicious meal in the world. I've finally got Sound Blaster Pro III. I hope I get a good sleep!

My hopes and dreams

My hopes are to achieve something, even if it means getting more merits than anyone else. Everyone says that I should become a scientist or a computer programmer. well, have I got something for them, I'm going to try to be both. My dreams are to Invent something, and make up my own computer application and start up a buisness (sic). My hearts set on computers and science so a job just between would be perfect. We'll just see what my exams bring up.

Me as a parent

For a start I won't let my kids go wild.
I'll just keep things nice and mild.
They better be a whizz kid
or I'll flip my lid.
I'll get a nice computer for them
and play with them,
I'd take Sunday off for them.
Now I'll be firm, let them be bad
but they better not get told off
I'll make sure they hve friends
and that's all I need to say.

• Drugs czar - est. 1982
• Terrorism czar - est. 1992ish
• Cybersecurity czar - est. 2005
• War czar - est. 2007
• Copyright czar - est. 2008
• Car czar - est. 2008/9
• Czar czar - est. ?

I was watching the news today, specifically about the Government reaction to the attacks. What struck me about the whole reaction was that people were very quick to blame intelligence failures for the lack of protection. It mirrors statements given by the US government regarding the Iraq invasion (see Bush's biggest regret), 9/11 or the Bali bombings. Interestingly, there was no intelligence failure regarding the London bombings.

It's starting to come out now, that there was actually intelligence pointing towards some kind of event like the Mumbai attack happening, but there was a failure to act upon the intelligence. It seems that the generic intelligence failure is a handy crutch, blaming these nameless and faceless intelligence operatives, who by their very nature cannot be held to account for their supposed failures. Could you imagine James Bond being hauled in front of a parliamentary committee?

The truth of the matter is that these "intelligence failures" are really more like a failure to identify and remedy threats. The decision-making and analysis at the appropriate levels of government is broken, and the capability to make good decisions seems limited. Rather than fix this, it is a lot easier to manipulate the language again, and just invent the meaningless concept of intelligence failure, which has decent recognition in the public.

Ok, so here's my grand plan for fixing two problems I see with the PhD system - a) Sacrificing 3 years of rewards for a payoff which is entirely abstract (a "title") and b) The exploitation of later stage PhD students as slave labour.

Put simply, there should be significant pay/bursary increases for PhD students every year of their PhD. Each year should present an increase in pay up to the point of the end of the allotted time for the PhD student, where they will receive the salary of a postdoc. Doing this allows the student to be incrementally rewarded for performance over time, and will stop the often seen symptom burnout. Anyone who says that PhD students are doing their work for the love of science are big filthy liars.

Another big benefit of this is that eventually it gets very expensive for a lab to keep around PhD students. They have an incentive to get the PhD student out of the door so that they can save some money. Rather than keeping experienced students around because they actually know what they're doing, it becomes way too expensive to keep them. The best bit is, early PhD students can be paid less, since they don't have the experience, and you can take your chances to find good PhD students. Since it also becomes much more expensive to have a PhD student, there will be fewer students. This can be managed by possibly making the rewards scheme competitive. The bottom 10% of students don't get a pay rise, and will be gently encouraged to go away.

Comments people?

I'm hearing a lot of smack about how people dislike the new Facebook intently. What people are kind of missing is how the new Facebook really helps you protect your privacy. Let's say you have some friends who are - to put it gently - technologically a few steps up from Homo neanderthalensis and bashing weird black blocks with sticks. These people may or may not be the same kind of people who randomly add friends, or are very loose with their passwords. These people present a liability to your privacy - private information about you can leak out through these people.

On the other hand, there are some things that you really want to control the flow of information for regardless of how special/re-gifted your friends are. In these cases, you have a limited number of people that you wish to share information with. These limited groups of people have often anachronistic names such as "Family" and "Friends". While there is the possibility for confusion with using such nomenclature, it is often useful to remember that your "Family" is genetically related to you somehow, and are usually around you during Christmas and other holiday periods to inflict maximal pain and suffering. Similarly, your friends are the people who you see in the physical world more than once, and who you drink with to alleviate the aforementioned pain and suffering. Poking your friends just because you're bored may in fact lead to either them not being your friends, or a slap around the head.

We have identified three groups of people here: The Friends, The Family, and The Privacy Train Wrecks (also known as Morons). Now, let's think of some scenarios where you can decide which of these groups of people should, and should not see your private information.

Example 1: The mobile phone number. It's usually pretty handy to have contact details on hand on your Facebook page, so that if anyone needs to contact you, they've got a way to get direct access to you. Here's the thing though, you don't want these Morons getting access to your phone numbers. What you'd like to do is block them from accessing this. Conveniently, there's an option to do this. Simply go to your Profile privacy settings, go to "Contact Information" and click on "Edit custom settings" for your Mobile phone. In the "Except these people" area, start typing Moron Figure 1. It should select the group for you. Once you select it Figure 2, you have now successfully excluded all Morons from seeing your mobile phone number.

Example 2: Pictures from that time that you were shooting up crystal meth. Let's say, for example, that you're a big fan of crystal meth. I mean, who isn't these days Figure 3? The thing is, you were shooting up crystal meth at your last private party, and frankly, you don't want the whole world seeing what you look like. So, let's say you've got pictures from your crystal meth sessions that you only want to share with your family, since you know, they're paying for rehab. To let your family see your pictures, just go and edit the album that you are stashing your pictures in, and change the privacy settings Figure 4. What you want to make sure is that some of your friends can see the album, and type in the group name Figure 5. Don't forget to change the network setting so that none of your networks can see the pictures. Now, you can be sure that only your family can see these pictures.

Imagine, for a moment, that your boss asks you to write a very detailed report on what you've been doing. Then imagine that it has to cover every conceivable detail. Then imagine that everything you did was right. Then imagine that your work covers three years. Then imagine that you've got one of those anal retentive perfectionist personalities, and so even your crappy diagrams have to look perfect. Then imagine that your boss isn't even going to look at that report. That's a thesis in a nutshell.

This post was written in April 2008, but lay dormant on my hard drive until I was bored waiting for Santa on Christmas eve, so I've finished it off, and am just going to pretend I published it in April. I'm currently cleaning up the English in a chapter of the thesis, so I'm writing blog posts in order to warm up the part of the brain that houses my long-dormant writing ability. Plus, it's not exactly fun rewriting large sections of text that you've already written.

I was reading slashdot this morning - specifically a story about the blackjack teams at MIT and a couple of comments there made me start thinking. A couple of people posting there are owners of businesses, or are independent consultants who dropped out of school. They're probably the same age as me, and I probably had the same access to technology as they did. So what exactly is the difference between me and them? I stayed in school.

There's a great commencement speech by Steve Jobs in which he evinces the benefits of dropping out. Given that I was about 15 when the big tech bubble began inflating, I was in a good position to do all this kind of tech stuff. Admittedly, I was studying to finish high school at the time - but even after that, at 18 there was ample time to try and start something up before all the cash dried out. Instead, I stayed on the academic treadmill, hoping for the eventual payoff once I finished university. What I didn't realise was that as I was finally (and happily) finishing off university, I'd find myself going through the same thing five years later.

The Brits announced their new coins yesterday, and I think they look pretty good. Most of the negative reaction, as far as I can gauge is that Britannia has been removed, and there's no representation of Wales on the coins. I don't know where the strong nationalistic feelings towards Britannia come from, but I can understand that people might be a bit miffed that she's not on the coins any more. The omission of Wales is somewhat of a non-issue, since the coins never represented Wales to start with, and it's not exactly a step backwards.

On the coins themselves, I think they look great - especially the 50p piece. They were designed by a guy called Matthew Dent, who was 23 when he submitted the designs to the competition.

There was this sort of running gag on The Panel ages ago, where they'd find some young whippersnapper, and comment how the achievers of the current day are getting younger and younger. This isn't particularly surprising in a way — with the improvement in the availability of education, the general improvement (at the top end) of education, and the widespread availability of technology that would have appeared as "magic" ten years ago, it's becoming easier and easier to skip the struggle part, and just get on with doing something.

That's not to take away anything from these prodigies. It takes a certain level of skill to achieve all they have achieved, and the circumstances simply allowed them to take advantage of it, whereas in other situations, this talent may have been laid to waste.

As mentioned at the start of this post, I had actually started scribbling this post together in April of '08. Right now, it's December, and the planet is on the precipice of a worldwide recession, or perhaps worse. The original theme of this post was that I had perhaps squandered my opportunities to take the risks, and invest myself in one of the two tech bubbles that I have seen pass. Now that I am actually on the other side of the academic treadmill, I'm a little pensive about drawing the conclusion that it has all been useless. Looking around at peer success stories, the gut feeling is, of course, that I should have taken advantage of the Golden age of capitalism while I could, milked it for all that it was worth, and hoped that I could ride off any wealth I built up for the rest of my life.

Rationally speaking, I believe the PhD has been a fantastic experience for me, as it has almost totally weaned me off the collection of physical artefacts, just for the sake of it. In fact, at this point of time, I take a totally utilitarian approach to my possessions. If it's helping me, I'll keep it. I guess it helps to know that you can live on a very modest salary, few trinkets, and still have the time of your life.

A year ago, the answer to the question as to whether I would have been better off leaving the educational system earlier would have been an emphatic yes. However, in light of this perception changing event, I wonder if I perhaps am in a better position now, since my world hasn't changed significantly at all (yet). Sure, there aren't so many jobs in industry out there, and there's probably no chance I'm going to be earning ludicrous moneybags worth of cash. But then, I now don't think it was ever the right for anyone to do so.

A disclaimer here: I have no idea if this credit crunch is going to affect the science industry at all. Not even the slightest idea. So, what I've written up there is correct for the end of 2008. There's still a chance it may all go to hell in 2009. Merry Christmas :P