Qouth Rog rio Brito:

Russ, thank you for your exemplary role.

And that's all that was left to say.

Today, we held an one-hour IRC-meeting to debate the status of the current architectures in sid. During that one hour, we brought up all 13 architectures. We made a decision on 9 of the architectures. The remaining 4 will be revisited within 2 months. As for the actual results, we will announce these on debian-devel-announce with our next bits mail. I suspect the announcement to happen within a couple of days. I am quite pleased that we managed to keep the meeting to one hour. Especially considering that it was planned less than a week ago. One of the things, that I believe helped us, was that we had summarised the status for each architecture prior to the meeting. In my view, the summary allowed us to finish at least half of the architectures within their allocated 5 minutes. In fact, we had 20 minutes for the last 2 architectures partly because amd64 + i386 combined took about a minute. A second thing that helped us stay on time was cutting debates short. Obviously, with less than 5 minutes per architecture, there was little time for debate and, I admit, that was by design. This meant that we had to defer 4 decisions for later. We are currently waiting for information, which we hope to have soon. More on that in the announcement later.
I would like to thank the attendees for contributing to a productive and short meeting. It was a pleasure and I hope we can repeat the success next time.

Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that Simon Beck creates by walking in snow [1]. If you are an artist you can create art in any way, even by walking in patterns in the snow. Russ Altman gave an interesting TED talk about using DNA testing before prescribing drugs [2]. I was surprised by the amount of variation in effects of codeine based on genetics, presumably many other drugs have a similar range. Helen Epstein wrote an interesting article about Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who revolutionised child care and saved the lives of a huge number of children [3]. Her tenacity is inspiring. Also it s interesting to note that the US Republican party was awful even before the Southern Strategy . The part about some doctors opposing child care because it s the will of God for children to die and keep them in employment is chilling. Jonathan Weiler wrote an insightful article about the problems with American journalism in defending the government [4]. He criticises the media for paying more attention to policing decorum than to content. Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting post about the so-called socialised health-care in the US [5]. He suggests that Ronald Reagan socialised health-care by preventing hospitals from dumping dying people on the street. I guess if doing nothing for people until they have a medical emergency counts as socialised health-care then the US has it. Kelvin Thomson MP made some insightful comments about climate change, the recent heat-wave in Australia, and renewable energy [6]. Iwan Baan gave an interesting TED talk about ways that people have built cheap homes in unexpected places [7], lots of good pictures. Racialicious has an interesting article by Arturo R. Garc a about research into the effects of concussion and the way the NFL in the US tried to prevent Dr. Bennet Omalu publicising the results of his research [8]. Stani (Jan Schmidt) wrote an interesting post about how they won a competition to design a commemerative Dutch 5 Euro coin [9]. The coin design is really good (a candidate for the geekiest coin ever), I want one! Seriously if anyone knows how to get one at a reasonable price (IE close to face value for circulated or not unreasonably expensive for uncirculated) then please let me know. When writing about Edward Snowden, Nathan says Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor [10]. That s so right, that might make the US a country I d be prepared to live in. Andrew Solomon gave an interesting TED talk Love No Matter What about raising different children [11]. Aditi Shankardass gave an interesting TED talk about using an ECG to analyse people diagnosed wit severe Autism and other developmental disorders [12]. Apparently some severe cases of Autism have a root cause that can be treated with anti-seizure medication. George Monbiot wrote an insightful article about the way that Bono and Bob Geldoff promote G8 government intervention in Africa and steal air-time that might be given to allow Africans to represent themselves in public debates [13]. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about racism in Australian politics and how it is bad for job-seekers and the economy (in addition to being horribly wrong) [14]. Aeon Magazine has an interesting article by Anne Buchanan about the difference between scientists and farmers [15]. She has some interesting points about the way that the lack of general knowledge impacts research, but misses the point that in most fields of study there is a huge problem of people not knowing about recent developments in their own field. I don t think it s a pipe dream to be well educated in humanities and science, but I guess that depends on the definition of well educated . Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk titled Why We Need the Explorers about the benefits of scientific research [16]. Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an interesting paper about ZFS corruption in the face of disk and memory errors [17]. One thing to note is that turning off atime can reduce the probability of a memory error leading to corrupt data being written to disk, run zfs set atime=off tank to fix this. The comedian Solomon Georgio celebrated Martin Luther King day by tweeting I love you to racists [18]. It s an interesting approach and appears to have worked well.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k4eojcn
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/pp8o7l6
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/pq9xo4w
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/kgsloep
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/olsjgtf
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/md4wn2c
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/iwan_baan_ingenious_homes_in_unexpected_places.html
• [8] http://www.racialicious.com/2013/10/16/the-unsung-hero-of-league-of-denial/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/lmjf2vu
• [10] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=446
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/26zq53o
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qem2lmd
• [14] http://progressivedirection.com/australias-war-on-brains
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/mtecglz
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [17] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption-fast10.pdf
• [18] http://tinyurl.com/nrr68po

In a recent email to the Rcpp and lme4 mailing lists, Doug Bates announced that was turning away from R, Rcpp, lme4 and hence also RcppEigen for which he had been both the primary author and maintainer. This is huge loss for the R community. I have known Doug since the 1990s. He has been a fairly central figure around R during all those years in which I got more and more involved with R. I have learned a lot from him, and enjoyed the work together---initially on the Debian R package (which I took over from him), and all the way to joint work on Rcpp and RcppEigen, including our JSS paper. I am certain to miss him around R. Now, in order to keep RcppEigen viable within CRAN and the R ecosystem, I have offered to maintain it. A first new upload is now on CRAN (and I also uploaded it to Debian where I started to maintain it too as a depedency for lme4). I have also started to make a few minor changes such as tightening Suggests: a little, and editing a few descriptive files. Details are in the Github repo. Questions, comments etc about RcppEigen should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Hacker News is a fairly influential link aggregation site, with stories submitted and voted on by users. As explained in the FAQ, the ranking of stories is roughly determined by the number of votes divided by a function of the time since submission. It's not a huge traffic driver (my personal experience of stories on the front page is on the order of 30,000 hits), but it's notable because the demographic tends to include a more technically literate and influential set of readers than most other sites. The discussion that ensues from technical posts often includes meaningful feedback from domain experts. Stories that appear there are likely to be noted by technology workers, especially in the Silicon Valley startup field[1].

That rather specific demographic appears to correlate with other traits. There's a rather more techno-libertarian bias on Hacker News than on most general discussion forums, which is consistent with the startup-oriented culture that it springs from - the desire to provide disruptive solutions to real world problems tends to collide with existing regulatory frameworks, so it's unsurprising that a belief in individual rights and small government would overlap with US startup culture. There's a leaning towards the use of web technologies rather than traditional client applications, which matches what people are doing in the rest of the world. And there's more enthusiasm for liberal open-source licenses over Copyleft licenses, which makes sense in a web-focused environment (as I wrote about here).

Now, personally I'm a big-government, client-app, Copyleft kind of person, but for the most part I don't think the above is actively dangerous. It's inevitable that political views will vary, we'll probably continue to cycle between thick and thin clients for generations and nobody's ever going to demonstrably prove that one licensing model deserves to win over another. But what is important is that the ongoing debates between these opinions be driven by facts, and that it remain obvious that these disagreements exist. As far as technical (and even political) discussion goes, Hacker News doesn't seem to
have a problem with that. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is tolerated.


This seems less true when it comes to social issues. When a posting discussing the myth of the natural born programmer[2] hit the front page, the top rated comment is Paul Graham[3] off-handedly discounting the conclusions drawn. The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research. Graham simply discounts it on the basis of his preconceptions. Shortly afterwards, the story plummeted off the front page, now surrounded by stories posted around the same time but with much lower scores.

How does this happen? There's two publicised methods which can result in stories dropping down the order. Users with high karma scores (either via submitting popular stories or writing popular comments) are able to flag submissions, and if enough do so then a negative weighting is applied to the story. There's also a flamewar detector, a heuristic that attempts to detect contentious subjects and pushes them off the front page.

The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

This isn't healthy. We don't improve the state of the software industry by hiding stories that expose conflicts. Flamewars don't solve problems, but without them we'd be entirely unaware of how much of a victim blaming mentality exists amongst our peers. It's true that conflict may reinforce preconceptions, causing people to dig in as they defend their beliefs. However, the absence of conflict does nothing to counteract that. If you're never exposed to opinions you disagree with, you'll never question your existing beliefs.

Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. If we want to be able to use technology as an instrument of beneficial change to society as a whole, we benefit from building a diverse and welcoming community and questioning our preconceptions. Building a social echo chamber risks marginalising us from the rest of society, gradually becoming ignored and irrelevant as our self-reinforcing opinions drift ever further away from the mainstream. It doesn't help anybody.

[1] During the batch of interviews I did last year, two separate interviewers both mentioned a story they'd read on Hacker News that turned out to have been written by me. I'm not saying that that's what determined a hire/don't hire decision, but it seems likely that it helped.
[2] The article in question discusses the pervasive idea that some people are inherently good programmers. It turns out that perpetuating the idea that some people are just born good at a particular skill actually discourages others from even trying to learn it, even those who are just as capable.
[3] One of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and creator of Hacker News.

(Edited to fix a footnote reference)

comments

I seem to be adhering to Beckett's approach recently but for some reason, after my previous stool attempts, despite having a functioning design I felt I had to do just one more iteration.

Going back to a previous concept of having five legs instead of three while this did not improve the rotational problems with the 12mm thick material, it did make the design more stable overall and less prone to tipping.

The five legged solution realised in 18mm plywood resulted in my final design for this concept. As my friend Stephen demonstrates the design is pretty solid even for those of us with a more ample frame. There are now a couple of them in use at the space alongside the three legged earlier versions.

I was finally satisfied with the result and thought I was done with furniture making for a while. My adorable wife then came up with a challenge, she wanted a practical foldable chair her requirements were:

• Must be robust enough to cope with guests of all sizes
• Use as little storage space as possible.
• Not ugly.
• Inexpensive enough they can be given as gifts.

Things for individual humans to sit on raised off the floor, or chairs as we call them, have been around for a long time. My previous research for the stool indicated that chairs have a long history with examples still surviving from the ancient egyptians. From this I assumed there would be nothing novel in this project and to quote the song it's all been done before
Given this perspective my research started with an image search for "folding chair". The results immediately showed there were two common shapes. Either the chair base was formed with a pair of linked X shapes with the seat across the top, or an A frame style where the seat is across the centre.

My initial thoughts were to replicate the IKEA style A frame design until I noticed that some designs were made from a single sheet of timber with a small number of profile cuts. I searched for pre-existing design files but found none, perhaps I had found something novel to do after all.

Some quick measurements of chairs in shops (and more weird looks, mainly from my family) suggested 900mm is generally the highest a chair ought to stand. I selected a popliteal height of 420mm as a general use compromise which is a bit less than the 430mm of most mass produced chairs. I also decided there should be a front to rear drop across the seat which ought to improve comfort a little.

Material selection was based upon what I had to hand which consisted of a couple of sheets of structural plywood (1220x606x18mm temperate softwood - probably spruce although not specified) which had not become stools yet. Allowing for edge wastage and tool width this gave me a working area from a sheet of 1196x582mm.

I sketched the side view of the chair numbering the three parts. I decided part 1 would be 1000mm total height with top and bottom cross braces 80mm high, assuming the 900mm tall target, the A frame apex would be at 820mm height.

If we assert that the apex is immediately below the top cross brace on part 1 this gives 920mm at which point we have two sides of a right angled triangle (820 and 920) from which we can calculate the top angle is 26 . This also means part 2 will be 840mm long with the same 820 height this gives an angle of 10 .

I did the maths for the seat triangle using the 36 angle and 420mm popliteal height. Having experienced how flexible 18mm plywood was in the face dimension I decided to make the frame sides 50mm wide leaving, after 6mm tool path widths, enough space for a 358mm wide seat .

Once the dimensions were decided the design went pretty quickly producing something that looked similar to the designs I had seen earlier.

Generating toolpaths for this design proved challenging with the CAM software we had available, mainly because arranging multiple "inner" and "outer" cuts along the same path and having the tabs line up was obviously not an anticipated feature.

Things had been going far too well for me and during the routing operation our machine decided to follow an uncommanded toolpath excursion mid job (it cut a dirty great hole through the middle of my workpiece where I did not want it) ruining the sheet of material.

Fortunately, once factory reset and reconfigured, the machine ran the job correctly the second time although we still do not know why it went wrong. The parts were cut free of their tabs and hinges fitted.

The resulting design worked with a couple of problems:

• I had made an error in my maths and added when I should have subtracted, as a result the seat slopes back to front which is not very comfortable.
• The chair feels very wide and tall.
• The front face (part 1) flexes alarmingly between the seat and the ground when subjected to large loads.

The new design was cut (without incident this time) and the edges rounded off. I also added some simple catches to keep the seat and back inline while being transported.

While this version worked I had made a couple of mistakes again. The first was simply a radius versus diameter error on the handles which meant too much material was removed from a high stress area causing increased bending.

The second error was a stupid mistake that where I had worked the latch holes in the seat to the wrong side of my measure line meaning the apex angle was 35.5 not the expected 33.6 which meant the backrest felt "too far forward"

The third version rectified those two errors and improved the seat front curve a little to further reduce the unneeded material in the back rest.

The fabrication of this design was double sided allowing for the seat hinge to be fully rebated and become flush and also adding some text similar to the stools.

This version still suffers from a backrest that is a bit too far forward and my sons complain it makes them sit up too straight. The problem is that the angle of the front face (23.6 ) means that to move the rest back 20mm means the piece needs to extend another 50mm beyond the frame apex which would probably make the chair feel tall again.

I guess this is a compromise that would take another iteration or two to solve, alas my wife has declared a moratorium on more chairs unless I find somewhere to put the failed prototypes other than her conservatory.

One other addition would be a better form of catch for transport. The ones in version 2 work but are ugly, magnets inset into the frame have been suggested but not actually implemented yet.

In conclusion I think I succeeded with the original brief and am pretty pleased with the result. A neatly folding chair that can be stacked simply by having a pile of them and are easy to move and setup.

The price per chair is a little higher than I would like at 22 ( 11 for timber, 5 for hinges and screws , 5 for varnish and 1 for tool wear) plus about 2 hours labour (two sided routing plus roundover takes ages)

As previously the design files are available on github and there are plenty more images in the flikr set.

A common topic of discussion on computer users group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more mailing-list debates. A Historical Perspective the PC as an Investment In the late 80 s a reasonably high-end white-box PC cost a bit over $5,000 in Australia (or about $4,000 without a monitor). That was cheaper than name-brand PCs which cost upwards of $7,000 but was still a lot of money. $5,000 in 1988 would be comparable to $10,000 in today s money. That made a PC a rather expensive item which needed to be preserved. There weren t a lot of people who could just discard such an investment so a lot of thought was given to upgrading a PC. Now a quite powerful desktop PC can be purchased for a bit under $400 (maybe $550 if you include a good monitor) and a nice laptop is about the same price as a desktop PC and monitor. Laptops are almost impossible to upgrade apart from adding more RAM or storage but hardly anyone cares because they are so cheap. Desktop PCs can be upgraded in some ways but most people don t bother apart from RAM, storage, and sometimes a new video card. If you have the skill required to successfully replace a CPU or motherboard then your time is probably worth enough that getting more value out of a PC that was worth $400 when new and is worth maybe $100 when it s a couple of years old probably isn t a good investment. Times have changed and PCs just aren t worth enough to be bothered upgrading. A PC is a disposable item not an investment. Buying Something Expensive? There are a range of things that you can buy. You can spend $200 on a second-hand PC that s a couple of years old, $400 on a new PC that s OK but not really fast, or you can spend $1000 or more on a very high end PC. The $1000 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to a PC that sells for $400 next year. The $400 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to the second-hand systems that are available next year. If you spend more money to get a faster PC then you are only getting a faster PC for a year until newer cheaper systems enter the market. As newer and better hardware is continually being released at low enough prices that make upgrades a bad deal I recommend just not buying expensive systems. For my own use I find that e-waste is a good source of hardware. If I couldn t do that then I d buy from an auction site that specialises in corporate sales, they have some nice name-brand systems in good condition at low prices. One thing to note is that this is more difficult for Windows users due to anti-piracy features. With recent versions of Windows you can t just put an old hard drive in a new PC and have it work. So the case for buying faster hardware is stronger for Windows than for Linux. That said, $1,000 isn t a lot of money. So spending more money for a high-end system isn t necessarily a big deal. But we should keep in mind that it s just a matter of getting a certain level of performance a year before it is available in cheaper systems. Getting a $1,000 high-end system instead of a $400 cheap system means getting that level of performance maybe a year earlier and therefore at a price premium of maybe $2 per day. I m sure that most people spend more than $2 per day on more frivolous things than a faster PC. Understanding How a Computer Works As so many things are run by computers I believe that everyone should have some basic knowledge about how computers work. But a basic knowledge of computer architecture isn t required when selecting parts to assemble to make a system, one can know all about selecting a CPU and motherboard to match without understanding what a CPU does (apart from a vague idea that it s something to do with calculations). Also one can have a good knowledge of how computers work without knowing anything about the part numbers that could be assembled to make a working system. If someone wants to learn about the various parts on sale then sites such as Tom s Hardware [1] provide a lot of good information that allows people to learn without the risk of damaging expensive parts. In fact the people who work for Tom s Hardware frequently test parts to destruction for the education and entertainment of readers. But anyone who wants to understand computers would be better off spending their time using any old PC to read Wikipedia pages on the topic instead of spending their time and money assembling one PC. To learn about the basics of computer operation the Wikipedia page for CPU is a good place to start. Then the Wikipedia page for hard drive is a good start for learning about storage and the Wikipedia page for Graphics Processing Unit to learn about graphics processing. Anyone who reads those three pages as well as a selection of pages that they link to will learn a lot more than they could ever learn by assembling a PC. Of course there s lots of other things to learn about computers but Wikipedia has pages for every topic you can imagine. I think that the argument that people should assemble PCs to understand how they work was not well supported in 1990 and ceased to be accurate once Wikipedia became popular and well populated. Getting a Quality System There are a lot of arguments about quality and reliability, most without any supporting data. I believe that a system designed and manufactured by a company such as HP, Lenovo, NEC, Dell, etc is likely to be more reliable than a collection of parts uniquely assembled by a home user but I admit to a lack of data to support this belief. One thing that is clear however is the fact that ECC RAM can make a significant difference to system reliability as many types of error (including power problems) show up as corrupted memory. The cheapest Dell PowerEdge server (which has ECC RAM) is advertised at $699 so it s not a feature that s out of reach of regular users. I think that anyone who makes claims about PC reliability and fails to mention the benefits of ECC RAM (as used in Dell PowerEdge tower systems, Dell Precision workstations, and HP XW workstations among others) hasn t properly considered their advice. Also when discussing overall reliability the use of RAID storage and a good backup scheme should be considered. Good backups can do more to save your data than anything else. Conclusion I think it s best to use a system with ECC RAM as a file server. Make good backups. Use ZFS (in future BTRFS) for file storage so that data doesn t get corrupted on disk. Use reasonably cheap systems as workstations and replace them when they become too old. Update: I find it rather ironic when a discussion about advice on buying a PC gets significant input from people who are well paid for computer work. It doesn t take long for such a discussion to take enough time that the people involved could spent their time working instead, put enough money in a hat to buy a new PC for the user in question, and still had money left over.

• [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/

I ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them. Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it s impossible to determine who isn t muting their phone. Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more. I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen:

• You are added to the queue of people wishing to speak. When the other person finished speaking the next person in the queue gets a turn.
• You are added to the queue and the moderator of the call chooses who gets to speak next. This isn t what I d prefer but would probably be desired by managers for corporate calls.
• You get to interrupt the person who s speaking. This may not be ideal but is similar to what currently happens.

Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request? Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn t find anything that seems to match.

A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat. According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because unlike many people I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name. Donfried s letter is the latest step in a saga that has been ongoing since last June. It has been a frustrating learning experience for me that has made me worried about Wikipedia, its processes, and its future. In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed. The ICD is a non-profit organization based in Berlin. According to its own website, a large part of the organization s activities are based around arranging conferences. Its goals peace, cultural interchange, human rights are admirable and close to my heart. Its advisors and affiliates are impressive. I had never heard of the ICD before their founder, Mark Donfried, emailed me in April 2012 asking me to give a keynote address at their conference on The 2012 International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy & Human Rights. I replied, interested, but puzzled because my own research seems very far afield of both cultural diplomacy (which I had never heard of) and human rights. I replied saying:

What would you like me to talk about I ask because I don t consider myself an expert in (or even particularly knowledgeable about) cultural diplomacy. Did someone else refer you to me?

Donfried replied with a long message seemingly copy and pasted thanking me for considering attending and asking me for details of my talk. I replied again repeating text from my previous email and asking why he was interested in me. Donfried suggested a phone call to talk about details. But by this point, I had looked around the web for information about the ICD and had decided to decline the invitation. Among things I found was a blog post by my friend James Grimmelmann that suggests that, at least in his case, the ICD had a history of sending unsolicited email and an apparently inability to take folks off their email lists even after repeated requests. I also read the Wikipedia article about the ICD. Although the Wikipedia article was long and detailed, it sent off some internal Wikipedian-alarm-bells for me. The page read, to me, like an advertisement or something written by the organization being described; it simply did not read to me like an encyclopedia article written by a neutral third-party. I looked through the history of the article and found that the article had been created by a user called Icd_berlin who had made no other substantive edits to the encyclopedia. Upon further examination, I found that almost all other significant content contributions were from a series of anonymous editors with IP addresses associated with Berlin. I also found that a couple edits had removed criticism when it had been added to the article. The criticism was removed by an anonymous editor from Berlin. Criticisms on the article included links to a website called Inside the ICD which was a website that mostly consisted of comments by anonymous people claiming to be former interns of the ICD complaining about the working conditions at the organization. There were also many very positive descriptions of work at the ICD. A wide array of pseudonymous users on the site accused the negative commenters of being liars and detractors and the positive commenters of being ICD insiders. I also found that there had been evidence on Wikipedia also removed without discussion by an anonymous IP from Berlin of an effort launched by the youth wing of ver.di one of the largest trade unions in Germany to campaign for good internships at the ICD. Although details of the original campaign have been removed from ver.di s website, the campaigned ended after coming to an agreement with the ICD that made explicit a set of expectations and created an Intern Council. Although the article about ICD on Wikipedia had many citations, many were to the ICD s own website. Most of the rest were to articles that only tangentially mentioned the ICD. Many were about people with ICD connections but did not mention the ICD at all. As Wikipedia editor, I was worried that Wikipedia s policies on conflict of interest, advertising, neutrality, and notability were not being served by the article in its state. But as someone with no real experience or knowledge of the ICD, I wasn t sure what to do. I posted a request for help on Wikipedia asking for others to get involved and offer their opinions. It turns out, there were several editors who had tried to improve the article in the past and had been met by pro-ICD editors reverting their changes. Eventually, those editors lost patience or simply moved on to other topics. By raising the issue again, I kicked off a round of discussion about the article. At the termination of that discussion, the article was proposed for deletion under Wikipedia s Articles for Deletion policy. A new Wikipedia editor began working enthusiastically to keep the article by adding links and by arguing that the article should stay. The new user edited the Wikipedia article about me to accuse me of slander and defamation although they removed that claim after I tried to explain that I was only trying to help. I spent quite a bit of time trying to rewrite and improve the article during the deletion discussion and I went link by link through the many dozens of citations. During the deletion discussion, Mark Donfried contacted me over email and explained that his representatives had told him that I was working against the ICD in Wikipedia. He suggested that we meet. We had a tentative plan to meet in Berlin on an afternoon last July but, in the end, I was too busy trying to submit my thesis proposal and neither of us followed up to confirm a particular time within the time window we had set. I have still never met him. My feeling, toward the end of the deletion discussion on Wikipedia, was mostly exasperation. Somewhat reluctantly, I voted to delete the article saying:

Delete This AFD is a complete mess for all the reasons that the article itself is. Basically: there are a small number of people who seem to have a very strong interest in the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy having an article in Wikipedia and, from what I can tell, very little else. Hessin fahem, like all the major contributors to the page, joined Wikipedia in order to participate in this issue. This article has serious problems. I have posted a detailed list of my problems on the article talk page: primary sources, conflict of interest for nearly all substantive contributions and reading like an advert are the biggest issues. My efforts to list these problems were reverted without discussion by an anonymous editor from Berlin. I have seen no evidence that the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy satisfies WP:ORG but I agree that it is possible that it does. I strongly agree with Arxiloxos that articles should always be fixed, and not deleted, if they are fixable. But I also know that Wikipedia does not deserve this article, that I don t know to fix it, and that despite my efforts to address these issues (and I ll keep trying), the old patterns of editing have continued and the article is only getting worse. This ICD seems almost entirely based around a model that involves organizing conferences and then calling and emailing to recruit speakers and attendees. A large number of people will visit this Wikipedia article to find out more about the organization before deciding to pay for a conference or to join to do an internship. What Wikipedia shows to them reads like an advert, links almost exclusively to of pages on the organizations websites and seems very likely to have been written by the organization itself. We are doing an enormous disservice to our readers by keeping this page in its current form. If somebody wants to make a serious effort to improve the article, I will help and will happily reconsider my !vote. But after quite a bit of time trying to raise interest and to get this fixed, I m skeptical this can be addressed and my decision reflects this fact. mako 05:18, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I concluded that although the organization might be notable according to Wikipedia s policies and although the Wikipedia article about it might be fixable, the pattern of editing gave me no faith that it could be fixed until something changed. When the article was deleted, things became quiet. Several months later a new article was created again, by an anonymous user with no other edit history. Although people tend to look closely at previously deleted new pages, this page was created under a different name: The Institute of Cultural Diplomacy and was not noticed. Deleted Wikipedia articles are only supposed to be recreated after they go through a process called deletion review. Because the article was recreated out of this process, I nominated it for what is called speedy deletion under a policy specifically dealing with recreated articles. It was deleted again. Once again, things were quiet. In January, it seems, the Inside the ICD website was threatened with a lawsuit by the ICD and the maintainers of the site took it down with the following message:

Apparently, the ICD is considering filing a lawsuit against this blog and it will now be taken down. We completely forgot about this blog. Let s hope no one is being sued. Farewell.

On February 25, the Wikipedia article on ICD was recreated once again out of process and by a user with almost no previous edit history. The next day, I received an email from Mark Donfried. In the message, Donfried said:

Please note that the ICD is completely in favor of fostering open dialogue and discussions, even critical ones, however some of your activities are raising serious questions about the motives behind your actions and some even seem to be motives of sabotage, since they resulted in ICD not having any Wikipedia page at all. We are deeply concerned regarding these actions of yours, which are causing us considerable damages. As the person who initiated these actions with Wikipedia and member of the board of Wikipedia [1], we would therefore request your answer regarding our questions below within the next 10 days (by March 6th). If we do not receive your response we will unfortunately have to consider taking further legal actions with these regards against you and other anonymous editors.

I responded to Donfried to say that I did not think it was prudent to speak with him while he was threatening me. Meanwhile, other Wikipedia editors nominated the ICD article for deletion once again and unanimously decided to delete it. And although I did not participate in the discussion, Donfried emailed again with more threats of legal action hours after the ICD article was deleted:

[A]s the case of the ICD and its presentation on the Wikipedia has seriously worsened in recent days, we see no alternative but to forward this case (including all relevant visible and anonymous contributors) to our legal representatives in both USA and Europe/Germany as well as to the authorities and other corresponded organizations in order to find a remedy to this case.

Donfried has made it very clear that his organization really wants a Wikipedia article and that they believe they are being damaged without one. But the fact that he wants one doesn t mean that Wikipedia s policies mean he should have one. Anonymous editors in Berlin and in unknown locations have made it clear that they really want a Wikipedia article about the ICD that does not include criticism. Not only do Wikipedia s policies and principles not guarantee them this, Wikipedia might be hurt as a project when this happens. The ICD claims to want to foster open dialogue and criticism. I think they sound like a pretty nice group working toward issues I care about personally. I wish them success. But there seems to be a disconnect between their goals and the actions of both their leader and proponents. Because I used my real name and was skeptical about the organization on discussion pages on Wikipedia, I was tracked down and threatened. Donfried insinuated that I was motivated to sabotage his organization and threatened legal action if I do not answer his questions. The timing of his first letter the day after the ICD page was recreated means that I was unwilling to act on my commitment to Wikipedia and its policies. I have no problem with the ICD and I deeply regret being dragged into this whole mess simply because I wanted to improve Wikipedia. That said, Donfried s threat has scared me off from attempts to improve the ICD articles. I suspect I will not edit ICD pages in Wikipedia in the future. The saddest part for me is that I recognize that what is in effect bullying is working. There are currently Wikipedia articles about the ICD in many languages. For several years, ICD has had an article on English Wikipedia. For almost all of that period, that article has consisted entirely of universally positive text, without criticism, and has been written almost entirely by anonymous editors who have only contributed to articles related to the ICD. In terms of the ICD and its article on Wikipedia, I still have hope. I encourage Donfried and his representatives to create accounts on Wikipedia with their full names just like I have. I encourage them to engage in open dialogue in public on the wiki. I encourage them go through deletion review, make any conflicts of interest they have unambiguously clear, and to work with demonstrably non-conflicted editors on Wikipedia to establish notability under Wikipedia s policies. The result still can be an awesome, neutral, article about their organization. I have offered both advice on how to do this and help in that process in the past. I have faith this can happen and I will be thrilled when it does. But the general case still worries me deeply. If I can be scared off by threats like these, anybody can. After all, I have friends at the Wikimedia Foundation, a position at Harvard Law School, and am close friends with many of the world s greatest lawyer-experts on both wikis and cyberlaw. And even I am intimidated into not improving the encyclopedia. I am concerned by what I believe is the more common case where those with skin in the game will fight harder and longer than a random Wikipedian. The fact that it s usually not me on the end of the threat gives me lots of reasons to worry about Wikipedia at a time when its importance and readership continues to grow as its editor-base remains stagnant.

[1]	It s a minor mistake but worth pointing out that I am not on the board of Wikipedia ; I am on its advisory board which carries no power or responsbility within the organization. Sometimes, the foundation asks for my advice and I happily give it.

Two papers got published recently. The first one is Bates and Eddelbuettel (2013). It is titled Fast and Elegant Numerical Linear Algebra Using the RcppEigen Package, and provides a pretty thorough introduction to our RcppEigen package which uses Rcpp to provide access to the Eigen C++ template library from GNU R. The paper is out as Volume 50, Issue 5 at the (all electronic, open, and generally awesome) Journal of Statistical Software. A bibtex entry is available. The second paper is Eddelbuettel and Sanderson (2013). This one is titled RcppArmadillo: Accelerating R with high-performance C++ linear algebra and introduces the RcppArmadillo package which brings Conrad Sanderson's Armadillo C++ template library to GNU R by deploying Rcpp. The paper is currently "in press" at Computational Statistics & Data Analysis but the DOI 10.1016/j.csda.2013.02.005 will remain once a volume and issue is assigned by CSDA. Preprints of both papers are available via my papers page, and as vignettes in the corresponding packages. The upcoming Rcpp class in New York will feature Rcpp, RcppArmadillo and RcppEigen. Space is still available.

As most people reading this have probably seen, xkcd found a particularly entertaining Wikipedia argument. (It is all true. There are at least 40,000 words arguing over whether to capitalize an "i" in a page title. I went and looked last night and spent several hours following the conversation.) This is, of course, funny, and I'm sure lots of people went away smiling at an excellent example of bikeshed painting on the Internet. But I think it's rather more serious than it appears to be. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a visible manifestation of a deeply-rooted problem that is the core of why I personally refuse to contribute to Wikipedia in any way that requires me to invest non-trivial time or become a member of that community. To explain that statement requires a bit of background. One of the very first services I found when I joined the Internet in 1993 was Usenet. Originally, I talked about comics collecting and then Magic: The Gathering, but I eventually ended up involved in Usenet governance. I spent more than ten years deeply invested in Usenet hierarchy administration; roughly, the process of agreeing on names for and sometimes moderators for global Usenet discussion groups, as well as all the supporting infrastructure for Usenet news server administrators to agree upon and share articles in those groups. Usenet newsgroup creation was, throughout that period, a consensus-driven process. There was a voting system that was used to measure consensus, but the voting system was largely designed to ensure that rough consensus existed (it was heavily skewed towards not changing anything). We took great pride in that fact. I'm sure that one could find many articles from me proudly championing the concept of a consensus-based decision-making process against many alternatives. That means I was also there when the toxic flaws at the heart of a consensus-based process completely destroyed it and, as a side effect, destroyed the community of people who had formed around it. I will never again invest my time and energy in a community that operates solely via a consensus process unless that community is small enough that consensus can actually work (which means not much more than twenty people). Consensus decision-making in large groups destroys communities and hurts people. These sorts of extended arguments on Wikipedia are not rare anomolies. They happen with some frequency; just by going through the debate xkcd references and looking at pointers, you can easily find others (Sega Genesis, cat ownership vs. companionship, endless notability debates... there are many). They look funny from outside, but from inside they're hugely demoralizing. Even when they don't get heated and spill over into personal animosity (and if they don't do that, you're lucky), they consume astonishingly vast quantities of time exactly not the resource that you want to be squandering in volunteer projects. And they do so without giving back anything emotionally. I know these arguments very well. One of the most contentious and angry arguments in the history of Usenet newsgroup creation was the argument over whether, when breaking up a group into multiple more focused groups, to rename the original group to end in *.misc or leave its existing name. This argument went on for years and led to deep, lingering hatred between the participants. It's the same sort of thing. These arguments happen in the way that they happen because there is toxic waste at the center of Wikipedia's governance process. And that toxic waste hurts people, wastes their time, and destroys their willingness to volunteer. It undermines community, which is sad and ironic because the whole point of consensus decision-making is to create, support, and empower community. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work for two very simple but very closely-related reasons: it's impossible to ever end an argument, and there is no incentive for anyone to shut up. As a result, it is nearly impossible to get the decision-making to cohere into something that is timely, consistent, unambiguous, and final. These are not optional requirements of a decision-making process. Without them, people will lose faith in the decision-making process itself, and some people will learn that, as long as they never stop talking about something, they can prolong the debate indefinitely and possibly eventually get their way. Now, of course, I'm deeply involved and invested in Debian. And on the surface, it may look like Debian also uses a consensus-based decision-making process. But while Debian decision-making has some problems, it's much healthier for a few reasons that are useful to examine:

1. Individual packages in Debian are not managed by consensus, but rather fall under the authority of the package maintainer, who is either a single person or a small team. (Consensus works in small teams; it's great if the number of people involved is five or less.) This drastically limits the number of decisions that are subject to a large-scale consensus process. Nearly all decisions in Debian are made directly by the person doing the work, and only in exceptional circumstances can some larger process be invoked. This, on the surface, sounds like it could be similar to Wikipedia, but note that appeals to a larger process are much rarer in Debian than they are in Wikipedia. There is a strong bias in favor of letting the person working on the package do their job however they want to do it. This is more social than structural, but it's a core value (and we should be very careful about changing it). As a result, Debian operates less by mass consensus and more as a federation of semi-autonomous fiefdoms. This sounds worse: it sounds authoritarian and non-democratic. But it's significantly more functional, and it doesn't waste people's time.
2. On appeal, and for broader questions that necessarily cut across multiple packages, there are several people in Debian who are perceived as having clear authority to make timely and relatively final decisions, who are almost never overruled, and who can therefore effectively end arguments. These include core teams like ftp-master or the release team, formal appeal bodies like the Technical Committee, and the Debian Project Leader. Not all of this ability is written in black and white in the governance process, but that's not the important part; the important part is that it works in practice to provide timely, consistent, unambiguous, and final decisions most of the time. (Some parts work better than others, and we do struggle with timely, but I've seen much, much worse.)
3. There is a well-established ultimate appeal (a General Resolution), the ultimate appeal process is very specific and concrete, there is little or no ambiguity or human interpretation involved in analyzing the results, it is time-limited, and it's almost universally respected. Everyone abides by the result of a GR if matters get to that point, and while it's theoretically possible to propose another GR immediately to overturn the first one, this doesn't happen in practice. There's also substantial pushback against invoking the GR process for anything that isn't really important.

We still occasionally devolve into endless discussion, usually on some technical topic that cuts across the distribution and usually when the options haven't cohered enough for any authority to make a useful decision (often because it's too early for it to be possible to make a final decision). Those cases, such as the recurring systemd vs. upstart discussion, are still quite frustrating. But they're also relatively rare and largely ignorable because they have to be about just the right sort of issue. Wikipedia has these sorts of arguments all the time, and they're much less ignorable, because consensus is invoked for every minor dispute on any page in the entire project. You have to participate in endless consensus process or risk having your work undone, reverted, or removed. We would all like all decisions to be made by consensus, since we don't want anyone in a volunteer project to lose (and because we all love to convince other people we're right). And for small teams, consensus is wonderful. But that's precisely because governance in small teams is very easy; humans are naturally adapted for decision-making in small teams and have a huge variety of natural tools, tendencies, and abilities devoted to making those sorts of decisions. You rarely need any formal decision-making process; most decisions will just happen. You need a decision-making process when enough people are involved that mutual social pressure can't bring a dispute to resolution, and when you're in that situation, consensus is a horrible process. Due to my past experiences, I'm almost certainly at the extreme in dislike of consensus processes. Most people are not going to refuse to participate in communities solely on that basis. But be aware that 40,000 words of discussion about something that an outsider will not consider particularly important is not an accidental phenomenon. It's not something that just happens randomly on the Internet. It's an effect, and symptom, of a governance process, or lack thereof, and it's something that you can do something about if you want to.

Review: Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier

Publisher:	John Wiley
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	1-118-14330-2
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	285

One of the perils of buying a book written by a blogger one reads regularly is that the book may be little more than a rehashing of their blog, with insufficient original material to warrant the time investment. Sometimes it's still nice to support them financially, but it may not make sense to read the book. I've been following Schneier's blog for years (as should anyone with an interest in security), including through the entire process of writing Liars and Outliers, and was a bit worried that might be the case here. Thankfully, I can reassure any other worried potential readers that is not the case. This is substantial new material establishing a firm framework for thinking about incentives and controls in any society or organization. Liars and Outliers talks about security mechanisms, but it's not, at its core, a book about security. Rather, it's a book about incentives, order, and how order is established. It's a comprehensive reductionist analysis of how societies create predictability and compliance to allow us to trust other people who we have never met before and will never meet again. It's a unique (at least in my experience) combination of anthropology, sociology, security analysis, and political science. Schneier cuts across fields in an idiosyncratic but illuminating way that reminded me of (on an entirely separate topic) Jane Jacobs. This is not a prescriptive book, nor is a collection of answers, solutions, or even deep analysis of particular problems. Rather, it's an attempt to construct a general framework for analyzing societal dilemmas: conflicts between individual desires and social good, how those conflicts are resolved, and how societies can weigh the scales and influence the statistical outcomes. The closest Schneier comes to telling the reader how to solve problems is a checklist, at the end of the book, for designing effective societal pressures. Its primary contribution is vocabulary and structure. It also passes one of my litmus tests for any book about human behavior: Schneier complicates, broadens, deepens, and expands understanding, and points out complex interactions and complex feedback in effects we're inclined to consider simple, rather than simplifying or eliminating human complexity. One point I found refreshing about this book is that Schneier is scrupulous in refusing to define either society or individuals as good or bad, to the point of carefully defining terminology used in all of the social dilemmas. Following societal rules is called compliance; not following those rules is called defection. In some cases, defection is morally correct (Schneier's most frequent example is in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in the United States). In all cases, social pressures are tools, which can be used to encourage compliance with moral or immoral systems, and which are deployed by totalitarian dictatorships and utopian communes alike. Schneier explicitly puts out of scope for this book the questions of how societal goals should be determined, how they change, and whether any given societal rule or interest is moral or immoral. He focuses, rather, only on the mechanisms, with a primary goal of informing and deepening debates over how best to encourage behavior that societies want to encourage and discourage behavior societies want to discourage. He also emphasizes discourage, as opposed to eliminate. Early on, Schneier shows some of the results of game theory, as well as basic common sense, that indicate that no healthy society can totally eliminate defection. Not only would that stifle valuable and important reform, such as changes in civil rights, but the degree of pressure required is immense. Defectors are natural and will always exist, and are sometimes valuable and necessary. Rather, the goal of a society is to reduce defectors to a level where most people can ignore their existence most of the time, a state that leads to the level of risk and trust required to have a functioning and healthy society. The word society, similarly, is intentionally broad, and can refer to just about any collection of people, from a circle of friends to a corporation, institution, or country. However, as Schneier points out early in the book, small societies rarely need much in the way of formal pressure and appear almost magically self-governing. That's the first property that he disassembles, resulting in a general classification of societal pressures into four categories: moral, reputational, institutional, and security systems. The last is an odd category that's partly orthagonal to the other three. Moral pressure is internalized conscience: the normal tendency of nearly everyone to follow their own moral code, a code that's at least partly constructed and certainly heavily influenced by the surrounding society. Reputational pressure is, in a sense, externalized morality: it's the informal reactions of others around one to one's past actions. Included in reputational pressure is shunning of every kind, from cutting off a friendship to boycotts against corporations, but it also includes confrontation from another member of one's society, the more subtle effects of our individual desires to be liked and respected, and all the various aspects of "face", honor, and respect within a community. Small communities are frequently self-governing, in Schneier's model, because they're small enough that moral and reputational pressures are sufficient and no other pressures are required. We're so used to applying moral and reputational pressure to other humans almost unconsciously that we sometimes don't even notice its existence, leading to that "magical" self-governing property. But Schneier puts pressures in a sequence: pressures that work extremely well with small groups often don't scale. Moral pressure works best with small groups and reputational pressure with somewhat larger groups, but when societies scale beyond the limits of reputational pressure when, for example, one frequently interacts with people whose reputations are unknown to you and whose subsequent opinion of you will not be relevant institutional pressure is required to force compliance. Institutional pressure is the sort of pressure that we all tend to think of first when we look for ways to enforce rules: laws, policies, contracts, and other codes of behavior that carry with them formal punishments and some enforcement mechanism. But even in societies so large that institutional pressures are frequently required, such as whole countries, moral and reputational pressures still exist and are extremely important. One of Schneier's most interesting points is his analysis of how institutional pressures can paradoxically undermine reputational and moral pressures, resulting in more defection than if the institutional pressure hadn't existed. This is just the basic framework of Schneier's analysis, hopefully giving you a feel for the structure of the book. He goes much deeper into the complicated interactions between the various levels of pressure, and then dives into an extensive look at competing societal dilemmas: cases where there is more than one society in play simultaneously, possibly demanding contradictory actions. Liars and Outliers also includes a wonderful analysis of organizational entities within the same framework, including their much-different reactions to moral, reputational, and institutional pressures. One of the most cogent analyses of the difficulties of regulating both corporations and governmental institutions falls out of that analysis, once one looks at them in light of Schneier's basic framework. Pressures quickly become complex and multi-layered, and human reactions to pressures are frequently counter-intuitive. Schneier draws extensively on game theory to show that some counter-intuitive responses are actually emergent properties of logical analysis of the situation, but that others are more uniquely human and have little or nothing to do with a mathematical cost-benefit analysis. I haven't even mentioned his discussion of security systems, and how they can extend moral, reputational, and institutional pressures, as well as add a new type of pressure (making a defecting action impossible) that scales even better than institutional pressures. Liars and Outliers has all of the supporting infrastructure you would expect in a scholarly book: notes, extensive references, and a good index. I suspect it will end up being used as at least additional reading in college classes. The notes are, unfortunately, end notes, making the full context of the book much harder to read than was necessary, but at least Schneier does separate the notes from the references so that one doesn't chase notes for further explanation and find a simple citation. As with any book like this, one always wishes it could end in a simple prescription to fix everything, but of course it doesn't. But that's also a measure of a good scholarly work. Human and organizational motivations are complex and tricky, and any framework for analyzing them needs to be able to represent that complexity. Schneier here has constructed a very powerful one, one that I started using in discussions before I'd even finished the book. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Liars and Outliers to public discussion is clear terminology and categories, which can be of great help in finding the core components of a problem. Liars and Outliers can be slow going, particularly early on when Schneier is still defining terms and setting up the background of his analysis. One can get a bit tired of the analysis matrices of societal dilemmas. But stick with it through the groundwork, since the analyses of competing societal dilemmas and of the impact of societal pressures on organizations are exceptional. Highly recommended, particularly for anyone who is designing or implementing societal pressures: managers, political activists, or anyone in a security-related field. Rating: 8 out of 10

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about where good ideas come from [1]. He starts by attributing coffee replacing alcohol as a standard drink for some good ideas and then moves on to how ideas develop. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel gave an interesting and amusing TED talk about the ngram analysis of books that Google scanned [2]. Here is the link for the Google Books ngram search [3]. Clay Shirky gave an insightful TED talk about how the Internet is changing the world [4]. He cites Open Source programmers as the modern day equivalent to the Invisible College based on our supposed great ability to get along with other people on the Internet. If we really are so much better than the rest of the Internet then things must be bad out there. He ends with ways of using Git to draft legislation. Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about religion and the number of babies that women have [5]. His conclusion is that it s more about income and social stability and that the world s population can stabilise at 10 billion if we provide family planning to everyone. Alexis C. Madrigal wrote an interesting interview with Genevieve Bell about her work at Intel and the way people use technology [6]. Indigogo is raising funds for the Cuddle Mattress , it s a mattress with foam slats and a special fitted sheet to allow your arm to slide between the slats [7]. So you could have your arm underneath your SO for an extended period of time without risking nerve damage. They also show that when sleeping on your side your shoulder can go between the slats to avoid back problems. Nate Silver (who is famous for predicting US elections gave an interesting TED talk about racism and politics [8]. One of his main points is to show the correlation between racism and lack of contact of members of other races. Sociological Images has an interesting article by Lisa Wade about whether marriage is a universal human value [9]. In regard to historical marriage she says women were human property, equivalent to children, slaves, servants, and employees . The general trend in the comments seems to be that there are so many types of marriage that it s difficult to make any specific claims to traditional marriage unless you count a tradition of a short period in a single geographic region. Plurality is an excellent sci-fi short movie on youtube [10]. TED has an interesting interview with Hakeem Oluseyi about his research about astrophysics and how he achieved a successful career after being a gangster as a teenager [11]. He has some good ideas about helping other children from disadvantaged environments become successful. Paul Dwerryhouse wrote an interesting blog post about his work in designing and implementing a filesystem based on a Cassandra data store with FUSE [12]. Paul also wrote a post about using Apache Zookeeper to lock metadata to permit atomic operations [13]. The documentary Monumental Myths provides an interesting and insightful analysis of the processes of creating, maintaining, and explaining monuments [14]. It focusses on some significant monuments in the US and explains both sides to each story. Howard Zinn makes the insightful point that when people present a certain point of view of history it s not controversial, as soon as you present the other side they call it controversial . That happens even in debates about current issues. Howard also says to criticise whatever the government does is not anti-America, it s anti-government, it s pro-America, it s pro the people, it s pro the country . The song that plays during the closing credits is interesting too. The music video Same Love is one of the best presentations of the argument for marriage equality [15]. Chris Samuel wrote an interesting post about systems locked down for Windows 8 and options for purchasing PCs for running Linux [16]. His solution is to buy from ZaReason. I saw his laptop in action at the last LUV meeting and it looks really nice. Unfortunately a byproduct of the extremely thin form factor is the fact that it lacks a VGA port, this meant that Chris had to use my Thinkpad T61 (which is rather clunky by comparison) for his presentation.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
• [3] http://books.google.com/ngrams/
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/czsmbhh
• [7] http://www.indiegogo.com/cuddle-mattress
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/nate_silver_on_race_and_politics.html
• [9] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/10/03/is-marriage-a-universal-human-value/
• [10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzryBRPwsog
• [11] http://blog.ted.com/2012/10/05/rise-of-a-gangsta-nerd-fellows-friday-with-hakeem-oluseyi/
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/co32js5
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/c9bfh3q
• [14] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQIMrw8gSVQ
• [15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlVBg7_08n0
• [16] http://www.csamuel.org/2012/10/18/paying-for-freedom

After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn into a few debates IRL about the issues, as long as there are more than a few men who want such porny pictures used in LCA talks the issue can t be properly resolved. The most serious aspect of the discussion in question is that of rape apology, the bad ideas that were presented have a real impact on the way people behave, merely making public statements saying that something is OK is going to increase the incidence of it happening. The Geek Feminism Wiki has a good page summarising the issue [2]. The Finally Feminism 101 post about Rape Culture is also worth reading in this context [3]. Recently Valeria Aurora wrote a post for the Ada Initiaive blog about the rape apology issue and how the community needs to act to prevent such behavior [4]. This inspired Matthew Garrett to write about the issue and state the position that In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I ll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I m compelled to as a result of my job [5]. I agree with Matthew s article, everything he writes is logical and I believe that it is all for the benefit of the FOSS community as a whole. I think that most guys have quietly defriended guys who are rape-positive in the past (for example when I was 12 I refused to play D&D with boys who were raping NPCs). But blogging about it, explaining the problem, and giving the offender the possibility to reform is a good idea and it s something that should be done more often. Sam Varghese has written about the issue for ITWire [6]. He has taken the wrong approach to this, he specifically claims that Matthew Garrett has kicked off what could be a damaging episode . I think that Matthew s approach is necessary and the situation demands it. If Matthew had been on holidays and I had read the TAI post earlier then I would probably have written a blog post which Sam could have described in a similar manner. So I don t think that Matthew kicked anything off (I think that someone had to do it). I also don t think that this has to be damaging it depends on how everyone reacts. On her personal blog Valerie says When I first read Ts o s comments, I couldn t sleep for two nights. I wanted to throw up every time I thought about it. I was furious and frightened at the same time. Every time I think about this, even now, I literally have nightmares. I can t bear the thought of working with him even over email, much less attending the same conferences [7]. I don t think that any of us who are seriously involved in the FOSS community have a way of avoiding this issue, allowing Valerie and other women who have the same understanding of the situation to go through that without any support is not a neutral action. I think we need to consider whether someone who gives other delegates and speakers nightmares should be welcome to attend a conference. Valerie s post makes sense to me and I can understand why she doesn t want to associated with Ted, my understanding of the issue isn t important or even required, I merely note this because I m sure that there are lots of readers who will ignore anything that a woman might say. ITWire has a follow-up article with Ted s response, Ted fails to address all the issues and seems to think that the people who disagree with him merely don t appreciate his nuance [8]. The thing is that the issue of the incidence of rape was raised in discussion to consider the probability that rape survivors would have been in the audience for the Mark Pesce talk in question. None of Ted s claims indicate that rape could be rare enough that a crowd of 500+ random people could be expected not to have multiple rape survivors so his comments weren t even relevant to the discussion. Ted seems unwilling to try to understand the position of all the people who disagree with him.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/10/lca2011-harassment/
• [2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Rape_apology_on_LCA_mailing_list
• [3] http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
• [4] http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-to-all/
• [5] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18505.html
• [6] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57290-garrett-slams-tso-as-rape-apologist
• [7] http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/10/29/the-linux-community-cant-remain-silent-while-leaders-make-anti-woman-comments/
• [8] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57296-tso-denies-ever-saying-rape-is-not-a-problem

Scott Adams has an interesting idea for political debates he calls Fact Bubbler [1]. It sounds implausible the first time you read it, but then so did Wikipedia. Arstechnica has an interesting article on software defined radio [2]. This could change many things. The Nieder Family has another update on the way patents threaten their daughter s ability to communicate [3]. Also Apple is making things worse by taking pre-emptive strikes against iPhone apps which are involved in legal disputes never use an iPhone (or other proprietary system) for anything important if you have a choice. In more positive news crowd-funded gene sequencing has found an explanation for Maya Nieder s developmental delays [4]. This will revolutionise medicine! Steven Cherry of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting interview with Peter Cappelli about the difficulties that computer and engineering companies have in hiring talented people [5]. The Guardian has an interesting article about the non-profit investigative reporting organisation ProPublica [6]. See the ProPublica.org site for some quality news reports [7]. Michael O.Church wrote an interesting and insightful article about the fate of a Just a Programmer in a startup funded by Venture Capitalists [8]. It doesn t sound good at all. EyeNetra is developing a smart-phone based system for testing eyes [9]. It s apparently possible to manufacture glasses for $0.75 so the cost and difficulty of performing eye tests is the main factor that prevents poor people in developing countries from getting glasses. So a cheap portable eye testing system is going to help many people get the glasses they need. Bryan Gardiner wrote an interesting article for Wired about the Gorilla glass that is used in most mobile phones and tablets [10]. Maco wrote an interesting article about crochet and reverse-engineering along with a Python program to print a crochet pattern [11]. I wonder whether anyone has tried to make a crochet robot, something like a 3D printer but which crochet s things rather than printing them. Holding the wool would be a real challenge, it s not nearly as easy as printing on something that s stuck down and incapable of movement.

1. [1] http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/fact_bubbler/
2. [2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/how-software-defined-radio-could-revolutionize-wireless/
3. [3] http://niederfamily.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/silencing-of-maya.html
4. [4] http://blog.ted.com/2012/07/17/newly-discovered-gene-may-explain-4-year-olds-rare-disease-thanks-to-ted-fellow-jimmy-lin/
5. [5] http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-bad-jobsor-no-jobshappen-to-good-workers
6. [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/02/propublica-investigative-reporting
7. [7] http://www.propublica.org/
8. [8] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in-crappy-startup-jobs/
9. [9] http://eyenetra.com/
10. [10] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ff-corning-gorilla-glass/all/
11. [11] http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/algorithms-reverse-engineering-and.html

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I claim that the way we conduct discussions on debian-devel has gone quickly downhill this year. The discussions around the default init implementation are particularly sad examples of how Debian debates technical topics. I've whined about this before, and people have suggested various things. Here's a list of things that I think we can conclude do not work:

• "Do not feed the troll" does not work, because there is always someone who can't resist responding. Also, some of the bad behavior is not trolling. Further, having everyone ignore people who behave badly does not give negative feedback for bad behavior, and does not build shared social norms for what is acceptable behavior.
• Unorganized private feedback (people mailing in response to public list posts) sometimes works, but it's a bit hit-and-miss, and again does not help build shared social norms. In other words, new members of the community see that others behave badly, and then nothing happens as far as they can see, whereas in private there may be quite a lot of activity.
• Up/down-voting a la Reddit or Stack Overflow works on those sites, but it is not the only thing that keeps their sites in shape. It also works badly on mailing lists, I think, and we can't very well switch away from the lists for all sorts of reasons. Voting can also result in a stronger "echo chamber", where the popular people or opinions are upvoted, regardless of technical merit.

Things that can work:

• Real-life meetings between participants. Debconf, sprints, FOSDEM, other such conferences. Unfortunately, this is expensive, and we can't reach everyone.
• Active public, but constructive confrontation when people behave badly. This needs good social skills to be done well.

Things that might be worthwhile to try:

• Changes to how our mailing list software works. Not sure what they would be, but Clay Shirky's Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software may be a good source of inspiration.
• If not technical changes to the list software, possibly ways in which we use the tools we have. For example, a friend of mine suggested a while ago that when there is a topic on which consensus is difficult to achieve, each side of the debate (there may be any number) writes up their position and arguments for it and against the others on a wiki page. This might avoid going in circles in the discussions, repeating the same arguments over and over, during weeks and months of discussion.
• Public, but anonymous, feedback tools, a la Reddit and Stack Overflow. Perhaps as simple as adding "+1" and "-1" buttons to the web archive pages for messages, along the "Spam" button, and then publishing aggregate statistics? (A voting system, if you wish.)
• A consensus on the rough bounds of acceptable behavior and some group of people who are delegated the authority to enforce that.

The current situation, where a few hard-nosed, uncompromising people can prevent any rational discussion about init systems cannot be allowed to continue.

The Online Photographer has a meta-article on some discussion in the photography world. Summary: someone wrote an opinion piece on one site, and people on the discussion forum of another site got his name wrong, possibly repeatedly. And the quality of the discussion went down from there. The quality of the discourse of free software development is frequently of some concern. Debian has a reputation as being a host to, er, particularly vigorous discussions. That reputation is not unwarranted, but, I think, we've improved a lot since 2005. The problem is hardly restricted to Debian, however. How can we improve this? I don't know. As a community, I'm not even sure we agree what the problems are. Here's my list.

• unshakeable, dogmatic opinions; an unwillingness to consider others' points of view or their justifications; willful ignorance of anything that contradicts with the way one wants things to be; an uncompromising, winner-takes-all, last-poster-wins attitude to debates; in short, a lack of respect for anyone who isn't on one's own side
• an (unintended?) emphasis on discussion speed, leading to short missives, written quickly, without much thought, and without giving even a glimpse of how the conclusion or opinion was formed; this further leads to discussions that are hard to follow, because there are so many messages to read (the total word count would probably be about the same if everyone only wrote one or two essays)
• few good ways of dealing with bad behavior, unless it fits into some clear categories of bad behavior; no clear community consensus of what is acceptable behavior, outside of a small core that is obvious (there's probably several PhD's worth of reasons for this, and it's not just because of "geeks don't understand social interaction" or "everyone is from a different cultural background")

Insults, personal attacks, and other such outrageously bad behavior is uncommon. It crosses the line so clearly it becomes easy to deal with; I don't think handling this needs much attention. What can we do about this? I'm not sure. I have, for the time being, abandonded Debian mailing lists as a way to influence what goes on in the project, but that's just a way for me to clear some space in my head and time in my day to actually do things. My pet hypothetical solution of the day is that mailing lists might raise the quality of the debates by limiting the number of messages written by each person per day in each thread. This might, I think, induce people to write with more thought and put more effort into making each message count.

A new version of RInside, now at 0.2.6, is now available via CRAN. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. This release has an additional fix for the Windows use case, adds cmake support files for the examples, switches to using the same RNG initialization of time and process id that R uses, and other minor fixes. All changes since the last release are summarized below:

2012-01-11  Dirk Eddelbuettel  <edd>
        * DESCRIPTION: Release 0.2.6
        * DESCRIPTION: Updated Description: text 
2012-01-08  Dirk Eddelbuettel  <edd>
        * src/RInside.cpp: Correct console writer on Windows to not use
        Rprintf (with thanks to both James Bates and John Brzustowski)
        * src/RInside.cpp: Update RNG seeding to same scheme now used by
        R which blends both (millisecond) time and process id
        * src/RInside.cpp: Replace fprintf(stderr,...) with Rf_error(...)
        * src/setenv/setenv.c: Idem
        
        * inst/examples/*: Added CMake build support for all example
        directories kindly provided by Peter Aberline; this helps when coding
        inside of IDEs such as Eclipse, KDevelop or Code::Blocks
        * inst/examples/standard/Makefile.win: Allow for an R_ARCH variable
        to be set to enforce either i386 or x64 builds

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.