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.

I'm writing again.

First of all, I performed my first rick-roll today. It was glorious. There was a message board on Facebook, chock-full of pro and anti seal-hunt sentiment. Emotions were high, arguments specious. I felt that I should do my best to add to the discourse on the board, so I found my favourite link to Rick, and pasted this message in:

I think anyone that supports the seal hunt should see this first hand to see how cruel you can be to small animals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I then sit back, and wait for the replies to come - you know, someone would get it, and figuratively scream in agony as they get rolled. There will be general ROFLing. Instead I get nothing. I give up, and go to get a coffee. When I return, I'm the recipient of a message from some random person called Dylan:

I'm very curious as to whether or not that video is ANOTHER video made by PETA or the Sea Shepherd organization to spread their lies and propaganda. I'm also curious as to why you'd bother joining a group that supports the seal hunt when you so obviously do not. You should educate yourself

Yes, Rick Astley is a member of PETA.

Then, a random link appeared to me in my newsreader. It's a link to the exhibition for Stanley Donwood in Japan. Linked off there is a blog. It's about his creative process, and I save it in my newsreader to have a read of later.

And then I write this post. You see, I realised something. The internet is the great democratiser, it gives anyone with a browser a voice. It's communication on a massive scale. However, the truth of the matter is you don't want to talk to anyone. What you really want to do is listen to people who do know what they're talking about. People with some kind of authority. That's the real magic. Right now, I can read the musings of an artist, and learn about his creative process as it happens. It's there, available to me, raw and direct. It allows modes of communication between people that would never otherwise have existed. However, it also introduces noise. Noise like debates over seal hunting - essentially emotional and moral debates, which are repeated ad nauseum on an annual basis, when the latest flock of high school graduates decide they want a cause to give meaning to their life.

No, I'll care about sealing when I find someone whose business it is to know about this. Someone who is actually hunts seals for a living. A scientist who is caring for the ethical treatment of the animals. Until then, I could not care less about the ramblings of activists one way or the other. Unless someone is stupid enough to give them power, in which case, it's my business to make sure they don't screw me over.

I know, there's a great deal of irony about posting this rant up on the interwebs. But a) you don't have to read this and b) I wanted to gloat over a fantastic rick-roll.

For those of you who haven't been talking to me on Faceblerg, the blog is back, after a small technical hiccup. I still don't have time to write anything - but at least you can read the old stuff again!

For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding writing Word documents or opening up Excel spreadsheets as my installation of Office had mysteriously died. I took the time out on the weekend to prepare my laptop for a full reinstall, since I figured the machine was getting massively hosed from all the different things I've been trying out on it.

I ended up not doing the reinstall, as I kind of wanted to put an encrypted home directory (I fear the Government) on the machine, which would mean archiving off my iPhoto library, which would mean spending US$25 on a tool to do that. All of which was a bit much for a Sunday afternoon. So, I stuck with the suboptimal install on the machine.

It's lucky I actually did that, since I finally got sick of the problem, and googled myself a solution. It turns out, the problem lies with updating the prebinding. Basically, prebinding is a performance hack used to make dynamic libraries not so dynamic, and is generally a very good thing. Unfortunately, a number of Java dynamic libraries (from older versions it seems) were breaking the prebinding, so the whole prebinding operation was failing, resulting in our lovely Rosetta applications failing too.

The fact that I can actually go in to the console, play around with prebindings, and fix my computer when it stops working optimally is one of the reasons I love using Mac OS X. It's like the best Linux ever.