Most of this entry is exactly a year old today and it's just sat around in draft form all that time. Since I posted something similar on Geek Feminism about research into women in tech and similar topics, I thought I'd get it out there.

In January 2009 a researcher named Anne Chin of Monash University Law emailed the chat list for the linux.conf.au 2009 conference asking for research subjects to be interviewed about licencing and Open Source software. There were several responses criticising her use of HTML email and Microsoft Word attachments. I'll leave the specifics of this alone except that people should be (and probably are) aware that this is almost always an unknowing violation of community norms.

I did, though, think about making some notes on research ethics and Free Software research. A bit about my background: I am not a specialist in ethics. I'm somewhat familiar with ethics applications to work with human subjects, but not from the perspective of evaluating them. I've made them, and I've been a subject in a study that had made them.

For people who haven't seen this process, the ethical questions arising from using human subjects in your research in general covers the question of whether the good likely to arise from the outcomes of the study outweighs the harm done to the subjects, together with issues of consent to that harm. (There are many philosophical assumptions underlying this ethical framework, I don't intend to treat them here.) Researchers in universities, hospitals, schools and research institutes usually have to present their experimental designs to an ethics committee who will determine this question for them and approve their experiment. Researchers who work across several of these (eg, a PhD student who wants to interview schoolchildren) will need to do several ethics applications, a notable chore when the forms and guidelines aren't standardised and occasionally directly conflict. Researchers working for private commercial entities may or may not have a similar requirement. Researchers who use animals also have to have ethical reviews, these are done by animal ethics committees, which are usually separate.

At my university, essentially any part of your research that involves measuring or recording another person's response to a research question and using it to help answer that question needs a human ethics application.

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Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2010/January/6/ethics

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As of the New Year (2010), I am no longer paying for my Livejournal account. I'm also going to move my commenting to my Dreamwidth account. LJ entries will still appear, but they will not have comments turned on in future. They'll point to the DW entry where you can leave comments.

I'll be keeping my LJ open in order to keep access to and commenting rights on other people's LJs.

My journal

Everything on LJ will be a copy of DW (and almost all of that a copy of stuff that goes to my normal blog). Thus, if you read me on DW or elsewhere you do not need to read me on LJ or vice-versa. Feel free to drop me from your friends/subscription list on one of the two sites (unless you want me to keep access to your locked posts of course).

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This will let you comment, and you can also set up a reading list and get access to locked posts. You just can't make entries.

Starting a journal at Dreamwidth

In order to make entries (including posts to communities) you need a DW account. This is like LJ used to be: you either need to buy a paid account (for one month only), or get an invite from a DW user. I have some invites, you can request one if you want.

Why Dreamwidth?

You can look through this and see what you think.

Way back at linux.conf.au 2008 there was a large OLPC XO giveaway, but with the rider do something wonderful with this, or give it to someone who will. Neither Andrew nor I received one directly, but Matthew Garrett gave his to Andrew essentially on the grounds that he wasn't going to do anything wonderful with it. (If I have the chronology right, Matthew had a stack of laptops in his possession at the time and did things to them regularly, generally making them sleep on demand.)

In any event, neither Andrew nor I did anything wonderful with the XO: Andrew intended to look at some point at Python or Python application startup times (the Bazaar team have a bunch of tricks in that regard), but two years is a lot of intending.

Still, better late than never. In the spirit of the original giveaway, we've handed it over to be taken to New Zealand by someone going to linux.conf.au 2010. It will be donated to the Wellington OLPC testers group, who meet weekly to work on various projects and who are somewhat short on machines.

If you are similarly (morally) bound by the linux.conf.au 2008 giveaway conditions, aren't doing anything wonderful with your XO, and are going to linux.conf.au 2010 or can get your XO there, you could do likewise. You could drop off to Tabitha Roder at the education miniconf, the OLPC stand at Open Day or otherwise get in touch with her. (You probably want to let her know yours is coming anyway, so she has a sense of whether to expect one or two, or a truckload.)

Other possibilities include getting involved in the Sydney group or checking if they'd have a use for laptop donations. (They meet more regularly than that wiki page implies; they are now meeting at SLUG.) I don't know what the status of the OLPC library is. The webpage being down is probably not a great sign, but perhaps collaborators would help John out there. You'd at least be doing something meta-wonderful.

Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2010/January/6/donating-our-xo

Just for the record, the final results of my Hottest 100 of female artists are below. Thanks to all who voted. Hope you liked the CD :)

1. Spooky - Dusty Springfield
2. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free - Nina Simone
3. Glory Box - Portishead
4. Gorecki - Lamb
5. Spin Spin Sugar - Sneaker Pimps
6. Milk - Garbage
7. Army of Me - Björk
8. Wise Up (Live) - Aimee Mann
9. Sway (Live) - Tim Finn, Bic Runga & Dave Dobbyn
10. Paper Bag - Fiona Apple
11. The Special Two - Missy Higgins
12. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
13. Back In Your Head - Tegan & Sara
14. Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos
15. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
16. Gloria - Patti Smith
17. Good Fortune - PJ Harvey
18. Kool Thing - Sonic Youth
19. Violet - Hole
20. Dirty Jeans - Magic Dirt
21. Cannonball - The Breeders
22. Seether - Veruca Salt
23. Souleater - The Clouds
24. Lies Are Much More Fun - The Grates
25. Jungle Drum - Emiliana Torrini
26. Boys in Town - Divinyls
27. Like a Prayer - Madonna
28. Rhiannon - Fleetwood Mac
29. Call Me - Blondie

This livejournal is generally friends only, comment to be added.

I went a little bit December crazy with social engagements, although not as much as in some years. After getting back from Melbourne we had the Marriage Equality rally, a family dinner for Jock's birthday and an National Computer Science School reunion on the last weekend of November. NCSS (or its earlier variants) was probably the only nerd camp on the east coast I didn't go to as a teenager, but Andrew went to the inaugural one and it influenced a lot of things, especially his choice of university. He was disappointed I think to be the only student from his year there.

I remember being much more tired that weekend than I am now, but there's probably a couple of factors there, one being that I was schlepping into uni most days at the time and the other being filling a whole weekend with bonus schlepping.

I then developed some sense and had some quieter weekends. Andrew went diving without me for the first time ever (we've very occasionally had different buddies and I once dived while he was seasick but never has one of us been out on a boat without the other). I didn't really properly absorb the idea that you can't swim after childbirth for a while until quite late in the piece. No diving during! No swimming after! What was I thinking? The ocean has finally warmed up enough for me and my hormonally elevated body temperature and we had a good swim at Manly on a remarkably calm day the weekend before Christmas. I can spend a lot more time bobbing in the surf than most people now, even if I did have a mild contraction for every wave that got me in the belly.

Christmas Day was foretold as a day of doom, by people whose slant on the entire New South Wales climate is whether or not it is sunny in Sydney. The forecast flooding in parts of the state didn't eventuate, but many areas did get a lot of rain, so it would be churlish to point out that... it rained all day. Luckily I have an inbuilt psychological requirement for a certain amount of rain anyway; Andrew was unwilling after Christmas to go for strolls in the misty glasses-fogging rain. We catered Christmas for the first time, as my family came over for breakfast and then went north to Mamie's for a lunch of meaty death. I played in the sand on Terrigal beach rather than heft myself along for a walk in the sand.

Most days now I spend a fair bit of time sitting around and plotting and executing shopping trips. Now that New Years is past this should ease off. I still am not properly mentally set up for organising New Years when we don't have a view of the fireworks any more (we had a good one when we lived in North Sydney from 2003 until 2005) and it seemed like a bad idea to go anywhere last night when the traffic and public transport would both be so difficult. So we had Pete and Jono around and played Catan and Guitar Hero. I felt obscurely connected to the geeky North American tradition of skipping the prom for gaming. I like games like Catan in theory but it's not often something I make time for. I would be pleased with my game except that Andrew has also only played twice, and won... next time, Gadget.

Honestly, at such an important transition my inclination would have been to do something bigger in some way, possibly involving a starlit night and a beach and fire. My relationship with Andrew dates from August 1999, so overlaps the noughties quite neatly and even more neatly Janus will be born in the next few weeks, so the teens will be very much about a boy.

Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2010/January/1/20100101

... we can get there by the light of day"

I've uploaded part two of my NSW Holiday snaps to a new flickr set.

After Mudgee, we left the vineyards and headed west to Wellington to see the caves. It was a really hot day, but pleasantly cool once inside the caves. We went on two tours, into Cathedral Cave and also the smaller but more intricately beautiful Gaden Cave. The latter was a private tour because we were the only tourists there. :)


Cathedral Cave


The Altar, Cathedral Cave






cave coral:


So pretty!



And the next day we went to the zoo! Western Plains Zoo! It was a scorcher of a day - 38 degrees. We got there early, slipped-slopped-slapped and made sure we drank plenty of water. We also hired a golf buggy to get us around - much more fun than the car! The first half of the day we followed the track and went to lots of keeper talks and feedings. We had a quick lunch stop (it was too hot for anything except cold juice and icecreams) and were hot and exhausted and finished the full circuit of the zoo by about 2pm.

We saw meerkats!


And rhinos!


And giraffes, oh my!


And my favourite, elephants!!


Real ones!




And some hippos!




Zebras! Including a baby one!


And a baby buffalo too!



( bigger pics )

For my loyal and devoted readers: I need to turn off the firehose so I'm taking something of a 'net vacation for a while, including but quite possibly not limited to Identica/Twitter/Facebook, mailing lists and blog comments. Phone and direct email will reach me (before I go into labour at least, which is likely not any day now).

Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/December/28/hermit