The Musings of Chris Samuel

Making Meaning is an exhibition of figurative, abstract and photographic works by my lovely wife Donna Williams and myself, Chris Samuel. We spent about 4 hours today at The Bakery, part of the 1812 Theatre in Upper Ferntree Gully in Melbourne setting it up whilst the crew of the 1812 finished off creating a set for their next production and distracting me with coffee and cake.

Our exhibition runs from the 5th August to the 4th September on theatre time, which is (as our flyer says):

Wed-Sat: 8.30–11pm,
Sun: 4–6.30pm then 8.30-11pm (except 22nd Aug)

As a sneak preview here is the layout of my photography:

and the layout of Donna’s paintings:

Thanks again to the 1812 crew for making us feel welcome and at home and even feeding us lunch!

As a followup to my previous blog post there is now a petition (PDF) to ask the Australian Government to keep referrals to OT’s and social workers eligible for Medicare, which Donna has blogged about. If you do grab the PDF and print it out – and I would urge you to do so if you are in Australia, they need 10,000 signatures for it to be tabled – then please also have a covering note to explain why it’s so important. Donna writes:

WHY SIGN THIS PETITION?

1 in 150 people in Australia are diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder. 90% of adults on the autism spectrum have experienced bullying. Many are forced out of school early due to depression, anxiety disorders and breakdown. As adults those in this population will be significantly more at risk of social isolation, dislocation from their community, unemployment, and homelessness than the general population.

Around 1/3rd of adults on the autism spectrum will become diagnosed with additional mental health problems stemming at least in part from social disadvantage. When those developmental disabilities, including Aspergers develop mental health issues associated with long term unemployment, social isolation and community disconnection, Accredited Mental Health Social Workers are uniquely skilled to address their psychosocial issues and improve their quality of life in ways not addressed by Psychiatrists or psychologists alone.

With a 90% unemployment rate among even those most able adults on the autism spectrum, most are on income support. As such, if they require mental health services, most will be unable to access these services if not covered by Medicare funding. From 2011 the Government is going to cut Medicare funding for Social Workers and Occupational Therapists under “Better Access to Mental Health Services” Program. 10,000 signatures is required to try and change this by December 2010. Please add yours.

Click here to get the PDF of the petition to print and sign.

It’s not making the news at the moment, but the proposed scrapping of the Medicare rebate for access to social workers and occupational therapists is going to cause a lot of pain to a lot of people. We have friends with Autism and Aspergers Syndrome who benefit from the support these people provide, support that helps these people get into jobs, to live independently or to understand how the world is working. As my own wife puts it:

As a person with autism, learning disabilities and mental health issues from a background of abuse and homelessness, a lot of my skills took years to acquire. I had had a lifetime of labels, Psych and Guidance, medicated by age 9, psychiatry since my teens. But it was a social worker who liased with my psychiatrist to get me – relatively illiterate, innumerate, itinerant and at risk – back into education. The psychiatrist took the credit but it was there I understood the very different jobs these people had in the area of mental health. The psychiatrist could medicate me, but the Social Worker had a more powerful medicine – practical plans and support to change, to save, a life.

When her first husband left after isolating her:

I had spent two years without practicing my self help skills. Agoraphobic, isolated, disoriented, I didn’t need a psychiatrist or medication. I needed practical hands on help in the home and the community to pattern me back into my life skills. That help came in the form of an Occupational Therapist. She helped me get back my strategies and the life skills these supported, helped me get my confidence back and helped me put supports in place for the things I needed help with. Within three months I was running my life as an independent adult, able to commute from home out into the community, even joining in community activities and looking after a cat.

Mental health often flies under the radar of journalists, but it is a significant health issue in Australia. Professor John Mendoza says:

Today, mental ill-health is the leading cause of death for all Australians under 45. More than car accidents. More than binge drinking. More than anything else. It is the leading cause of disability in Australia across all demographics. It affects more than 4 million Australians every year and is estimated to cost the Australian economy about $30 billion each year.

This decision isn’t yet set in stone, it is apparently due to be reviewed later this year but don’t wait for the election, please write and tell the current Health Minister why it is important to keep these services eligible for the Medicare rebate.

Federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon,
1 Thomas Holmes Street
Maribyrnong Vic 3032,
Phone: 9317 7077.
nicola@nicolaroxonmp.com

Thank you.

Paul Dwerryhouse blogs about ID checks in the US being more frequent that in Australia and the irony of people accepting a Victorian drivers license with likely no idea what one is meant to look like, or even if it really exists.

In a similar vein a friend of mine was travelling in China and wanted to use a Internet Cafe and they required that he provide identification before he could use the facilities. He dutifully handed over his Victorian drivers license and was pleased to see that they logged the fact that a Mr Vic Roads was going to be web surfing there. A nice bit of accidental anonymity.

This is a great shame, though probably not that surprising these days, but the UK Joint Academic Network (JANET) is going to pull its Usenet News service on the 31st July 2010. Basically I suspect the ever declining SNR has put people off, and these days everyone knows the web and the closest they get to knowing what Usenet is (or maybe was) Google Groups. JANET says:

There are now few active registered News Feed users and News Read users and the current infrastructure is nearing its end of life. JANET(UK) have therefore decided that it is no longer economically viable to run the service, especially in the current financial climate. We therefore will cease to offer the service when the existing contract expires on July 31st 2010.

Especially sad for me as I cut part of my first real sysadmin job at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was working on the Usenet news system that had been set up originally by Alec Muffett and I was for quite a while the maintainer of the UK.telecom newsgroup FAQ and the alt.config guidelines.

Update: I’ve been digging through some old email – here’s one from 4th August 1993 giving an idea of what we had to struggle with:

OK, I deleted all binaries under alt.binaries, all of junk and all of control. That, coupled with the AEM_TIDY got us about 27 meg back. I then ran a doexpire, whch took a long while but we’re now up to about 53 Meg free, or about 85% of the 400 Meg partition.

Yup, the entire university news spool at that time was a whopping great 400MB. We were using nntplink with CNews for the time (this was before we knew about INN).

Today is the public holiday commonly called Australia Day but really it’s only a good day for those of us who arrived since last 1787, for those who came before it’s been a bit crap. OK, a lot crap. So today instead of participating in the usual ritual of barbie and beer Donna and I went up to the Belgrave Survival Day event, celebrating the fact that we still have people from the oldest continual culture in the world around!

A nice day, we were a bit late in getting there so we missed the earlier talks and dances but we did get to hear some good indigenous bands play and had a wander around to look at the displays and talk to people. If you want to know a little more about why these things are important have a browse of the ANTAR website.

My friend Alun Jones forwarded onto me the sad news of the death of one of my former lecturers, Tudor Jenkins (here’s the archive.org link, in case the original goes away), affectionately called “Tuba Jenkins” by his students as he played the tuba for the Aberystwyth Silver Band (Seindorf Arian Aberystwyth).

Dr TUDOR E. JENKINS, MA, DPhil (Oxon), FInstP

It is with great sadness that we report the untimely death of Dr Tudor Jenkins, Reader in Physics at the Institute of Mathematics and Physics at Aberystwyth University. Dr Jenkins died on 3rd November after a short illness aged 60.

Originally from the Rhondda Fawr, Dr Jenkins read Physics at Corpus Christi College Oxford, and obtained a D.Phill at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. He subsequently studied as a post-doctoral research assistant in Cardiff University before being appointed as lecture in micro electronics at St Andrews University in 1979. He joined the Department of Physics at Aberystwyth in 1983 becoming Senior Lecturer in 1990 and Reader in 2007.

A tribute by Professor Neville Greaves, Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Physics, is published on http://www.aber.ac.uk/aberonline/en/.

I remember I did his lasers course when I did my degree in Planetary and Space Physics at Aberystwyth back in the late 1980′s and whilst I wasn’t very good at that course I do remember his enthusiasm for physics and the fact he could inspire you to want to learn more. Turns out that he was recognised for that, in 2005 he won the Universities award for Teaching Excellence. This quote from the tribute also rings true to form:

Dr Tudor Jenkins was a committed and colourful colleague, famous for his often pithy Latin quotations with which he ended his e-mails. Looking forward to rationalising teaching modules for the 2009 session, he concluded wryly with Occam’s Razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which approximately translates as “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Tudor was always a pragmatist.

I also seem to remember that he had an enthusiasm for real ale..

My friend & colleague Laszlo Kun and his wife Reka Kun have just had the good news that they have been granted Australian Citizenship and the ceremony is in just a few weeks! Also Reka has just got her new business, “Healing Touch“, a massage therapy service, up and running. Congratulations folks!

Found this great quote whilst reading up more about Alan Turing being the first person to really comprehend what a modern computer would be like, a quote by Howard Aiken (of Harvard Mark I fame) in 1956 (the year after Turing’s death):

If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered.

Luckily Turing was right and he was wrong..

55 years after Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing and one of the intellectual powerhouses behind the achievements of Bletchley Park, committed suicide following his conviction for “gross indecency” for being gay and his subsequent exile from GCHQ the UK Prime Minister has apologised for his treatment.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later. [...] we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

The BBC has a good article on Turing, his persecution and the apology.

Alan, we all owe you a massive debt of gratitude for all your work and I’m very sorry the UK treated you so very cruelly. We cannot right those wrongs, all we can hope to do is to learn from them and try to not let them be repeated.

(Heard via an InsideHPC blog)