Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Two Bittersweet Anniversaries

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There are two significant anniversaries in the equal rights battle for the indigenous peoples of Australia this weekend.

For those outside of Australia this may be a difficult fact to comprehend, but today, Sunday 27th May, is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 national referendum to remove the two sections of the Australian Consitution that discriminated against Indigenous Australians.

Saturday, 26th May, was the 10th anniversary of the release of “Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families” which dealt with the forced removal of indigenous children from their parents from the first days of colonisation through to the present day.

On the 9th July 1900 the UK Parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Wikipedia page) which removed the power of the Federal Parliament to legislate on behalf of the indigenous peoples, saying that the Parliament could pass laws for:

The people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws

It also prohibited the indigenous peoples from being counted in any census, Section 127 “Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population” saying:

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

Then, on June 12th 1902, the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (PDF of original) removed the right of all coloured people (except Maoris) to vote, in a section bluntly called “Disqualification of coloured races”, saying:

No aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so entitled under section forty-one of the Constitution.

There is a common perception that the 1967 referendum permitted Indigenous Peoples to vote, but that is not the case as the earlier Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 had already extended voluntary enrollment and voting rights to all Aboriginals (a 1949 act included indigenous people who were enrolled at the State level, basically covering SA, VIC and NSW), but it was not made compulsory (as it had been for other Australians since 1924) until 1984. The Australasian Legal Information Institute has a timeline detailing “Legal Developments Affecting Indigenous People” in beta at the moment.

Sadly, this is bittersweet anniversary as the average life expectancy for an indigenous person is still around 17 years less than a settler, according to a recent WHO report. As the primary author on the section for Australia, Dr Lisa Jackson Pulver, told the ABC:

For example, Indigenous babies born today can expect to live only as long as people in Australia 100 years ago.

Australia is now officially the worst wealthy country in the world for Indigenous health. It is a shameful record.

Microsoft / Novell Deal Terms Posted

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LWN has this to say:

The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.

Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.

Cutty Sark badly damaged by fire

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Some bad news out of London..

A fire which severely damaged the famous 19th Century ship Cutty Sark is being treated as suspicious by police. The ship, which was undergoing a £25m restoration project, is kept in a dry dock at Greenwich in south-east London. An area around the 138-year-old tea clipper had to be evacuated when the fire broke out in the early hours.

Fortunately it appears that because of the restoration work about 50% of the ship had already been removed for work, but this will make the conservation work much harder.

The images below are linked from the BBC.

Before:

The Cutty Sark before the fire

During:

Cutty Sark on fire

After:

Cutty Sark after the fire

Oh the hard cheese of old England

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This is, er, cheesy.. but in a good way.. 🙂

Since www.cheddarvision.tv debuted in December, the Web site offering a live broadcast of a round slab of English cheddar cheese slowly maturing has had more than 1.2 million hits.

There is also a YouTube time lapse film of it maturing over the last 3 months.

It even has its own MySpace page where you can pledge allegiance to the Cheese (if you use MySpace). Where’s Les Barker when you need him ? 🙂

Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor

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Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!

Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:

Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.

ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 4 released

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This beta release updates the build process to remove the -m486 flag on non-PPC systems as the distros are already doing this.

This may break backwards compatibility on AMD64/EM64T based systems, the fix is to run vacation -I to reinitialise your database of addresses you have received email from.

The option ‘-i’ has been added as an alias for ‘-I’ and documented in the manual page.

This release includes the Makefile changes from Marshal Newrock to build (hopefully) on FreeBSD with automatic detection of whether it is necessary.

There have been a few other housekeeping changes.

Please report any problems!

SourceForge has both the released sources and the ChangeLog.

Dell to ship Ubuntu Linux

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Dell have announced they will sell systems bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though the details are yet to be announced. Here’s hoping that this time they escape beyond the USA (hello Dell, there is a world outside the US!). There’s also a report on the BBC, which is where I first saw this mentioned.

On the Direct2Dell page that announces this there is a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical in a variety of formats, including the free Theora codec. Props to Dell for including that.

If this gets to Australia I suspect my next laptop will be ones of these Dell’s (as long as they have a model with an Intel graphics card).

A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3

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Eugen Leitl has just posted on the Beowulf list a message with a link to a draft of a paper by Alfredo Buttari, Piotr Luszczek, Jakub Kurzak, Jack Dongarra and George Bosilca called A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3. It’s a 74 page PDF looking at the possibilities and problems with using the PS3 for scientific computing (there is already a PS3 Linux cluster at NCSU).

The introduction to the paper lets you know that this isn’t going to be easy..

As exciting as it may sound, using the PS3 for scientific computing is a bumpy ride. Parallel programming models for multi-core processors are in their infancy, and standardized APIs are not even on the horizon. As a result, presently, only hand-written code fully exploits the hardware capabilities of the CELL processor. Ultimately, the suitability of the PS3 platform for scientific computing is most heavily impaired by the devastating disproportion between the processing power of the processor and the crippling slowness of the interconnect, explained in detail in section 9.1. Nevertheless, the CELL processor is a revolutionary chip, delivering ground-breaking performance and now available in an affordable package. We hope that this rough guide will make the ride slightly less bumpy.

Of course, it’s unlikely you’re going to see the PS3 being used in production clusters anyway, so the interconnect shouldn’t be such a problem there.. 🙂

The paper covers the hardware, Linux support and how to get it onto a PS3, programming methods and models, MPI, performance, etc. The paper isn’t complete as I write, but it is still a very interesting read. HPC folks will certainly want to read section 9.1 “Limitations of the PS 3 for Scientific Computing”, especially the part that says:

Double precision performance. Peak performance of double precision floating point arithmetic is a factor of 14 below the peak performance of single precision. Computations which demand full precision accuracy will see a peak performance of only 14 Gflop/s, unless mixed-precision approaches can be applied.

Compare and Contrast – Pre-entrance Chinese University Question and First Year UK University Question

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For anyone who doubts that graduates in China are going to be more than a match for the rest of the world, go and read this BBC news article comparing a maths question set to first year chemistry students in the UK with a maths question that is set to students wishing to enter university in China.

The Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK is running a competition offering a GBP500 prize to a winner who can correctly answer the question from China. This is because of their concerns about the poor level of mathematics that Chemistry students in the UK have:

Increasingly, universities are mounting remedial sessions for incoming science undergraduates because their maths skills are so limited, with many having stopped formal lessons in mathematics two years earlier at the GCSE level.