Population will mightily increase, and the earth will be a garden.
Governments will be conducted with the quietude and regularity of
club committees. The interest which is now felt in politics will
be transferred to science; the latest news from the laboratory of
the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the
experimenting room of the biologist will be eagerly discussed.
…
Men will look upon this star as their fatherland; its progress
will be their ambition; the gratitude of others their reward.
…
Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed;
immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small,
mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas
which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will
become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all
the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the
forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of
systems, manufacturers of worlds.

–The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade, 1872

Today I got the following email from Amazon EC2 Notifications:

Hello,

We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.

   [instance-id]

The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you launch replacement instances and start migrating to them.

Feel free to terminate the instances with the ec2-terminate-instance API when you are done with them.

Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 Team
Reference: [reference#]

Now *that’s* great customer service.

Happily on January 8th they emailed me with a new ETA of January 17th.

On January 10th my kindle shipped, and I tracked it as it travelled the 16 thousand kilometre journey from Kentucky US to Durban, South Africa:

To my delight it arrived this morning, January 14th – so in total 4 days with only a few hours to clear customs in Johannesburg. Others had reported delays of several days in the past, but Amazon’s new expedited customs tactic (you pay up-front for customs duties, which are refunded if not used) seems to have made all the difference.

I bought the 3G version, for those interested the price breakdown is:

• Item Subtotal:    $189.00
• Shipping  and handling:     $20.98
• Import Fees Deposit:     $29.11
• Total:    $239.09 (ZAR 1,780.92)

Recommended resources:

• Simon Dingle’s post “how to buy a Kindle” is well worth the read for existing and prospective Kindle owners
• if you own a Kindle, you *need* Calibre.
• Instapaper is also a fantastic free tool

Thanks to Indian cellular provider Vodafone Essar (others will follow), you can now download OS 6 and upgrade your Bold. OS 6 is a huge leap forward, even for non-touchscreen devices – the WebKit default browser alone is worth the upgrade.

Package Version: 6.0.0.1478
Applications: 6.0.0.380

Software Platform: 6.6.0.86

File name: 9700jAsia_PBr6.0.0_rel1478_PL6.6.0.86_A6.0.0.380_Vodafone_Essar_Limited.exe

File size: 150.12MB

Download URL: https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=15CF76466B97264765356FCC56D801D1

The procedure remains the same as for any OS update:

1. If you’re a corporate / BES user, I recommend doing this from your work desktop if possible. Makes re-activation automatic and painless.
2. Make sure you have the latest version of BlackBerry Desktop Manager installed
3. Do a *full* backup of your device using Desktop Manager
4. I recommend you then delete all 3rd party applications to simplify the upgrade (you can re-install them afterwards), especially those which automatically start at boot. Desktop Manager makes this quick and easy, with only one device restart required.
5. Download and install the OS 6 install (on your PC/Mac) – be sure to get the correct installer for your device model (e.g. the Essar URL above is https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=15CF76466B97264765356FCC56D801D1)
6. If you are installing an update from a different cellular provider (e.g. you downloaded from Essar above, but they’re not your local provider) then delete the “vendor.xml” file (on Win7, located in “Program Files –> Common Files –> Research in Motion –> AppLoader”)
7. Run “loader.exe” in the same AppLoader directory and follow the prompts
8. Voila!

If you get stuck with BES / Enterprise activation, this may help.

General comments on OS 6 on my Bold 9700 so far:

• Snappy performance – no noticeable lag
• The new WebKit based browser rocks. Finally, a decent default fast browser with tabbing, proper rendering, decent zooming etc. I’ll still likely use Opera Mini in parallel though.
• Reboots down from 7 minutes (!) to under 2
• Taking photos is faster – and browsing images is *much* faster, especially for large collections
• I’m not sure how I survived without universal search / search from the home screen rocks
• Setup / config menus are far more intuitive and usable
• Social feeds – we’ll see.
• “Application Management” has been hugely improved – finally you can see what apps are running, which are chewing up CPU cycles (now and by day) and memory usage. Excellent.

• Power wristbands a dud, says ACCC (news.smh.com.au)
• Sports band slammed in Australia (www.news24.com)

as well as much happiness in the skeptic world (scepticsbook.com, Vic Skeptics, Skeptic Money).

In summery Power Balance Australia, when approached by the OZ Competition and Consumer Commission, couldn’t provide *any* credible evidence of their claims that the hologram-powered rubber bands helped the wearer in any way. What a shocker.

The best part is that they are now forced to refund anyone who asks, as well as modify their advertising / packaging to remove false claims – and their website now includes the following statement:

We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

If you feel you have been misled by our promotions, we wish to unreservedly apologise and offer a full refund.

That should hopefully hammer their Christmas sales.

Feeling a little silly now are we Mick Fanning, Benji Marshall, Brendan Fevola, Damien Oliver, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Leonardo diCaprio, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Pietersen, Rubens Barrichello, Kate Middleton, P Diddy etc?

For all you South Africans (thanks James) a link to a petition (update: OK Caroline, it’s not a petition, it’s a formal complaint by the FSI) preparing for a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA). Go sign up.

from Ewan’s posterous

Last night’s official South African Power Balance launch in Cape Town was the final straw, so I’m joining the growing online education effort and trying to help expose Power Balance for what it really is – a hoax and a scam, preying on innocent people and (perhaps worst of all) promoting bad science.

To be clear, wearing a bracelet _may_ help with your strength / balance / whatever, but it is *NOT* the bracelet (and in particular not the utterly fake and useless hologram) which helps. That’s all – literally – in your mind, and any perceived or measurable benefit is NOT due to a Power Balance product. What I really object to is people making money by duping people into buying their fake product, people who convince innocents that some outside woo woo technology is helping them, rather than the readily available (and free) power of their own minds.

Ash Donaldson’s interesting TEDx Canberra talk on “Cognitive Dissonance” specifically mentions how whole industries and hoaxes (like Power Balance, which he directly references as an example) grow up around innate flaws in our ability to think and reason logically. Skip to 11 minutes into the talk if you’re impatient.

“Multiple-TED attendee and human factors expert, Ash Donaldson, wants us to better understand why we believe what we do. In this talk, Ash explains how our minds build belief and then breaks it down, showing us how and why humans are fooled into believing that things like Power Bands, anti-aging treatments and supplements actually work. Along the way, he tells us how as a trainee pilot he managed to nearly get himself killed by allowing his beliefs to rule logic and provable fact.”

Some great references:

• Power Bollocks: holograms, unicorns, and Shaquille O’Neal’s magic underpants
• How do those Power Balance bracelets work? I think it’s because of the 20-Hz difference between a genius and an ascending colon.
• The entertaining and opinionated @kevipedia’s post: Powerbalance bracelets are complete and utter bullshit
• various posts and discussions on granitestateskeptics.org

If you want to see how the demonstrations given by the salespeople work (and are in fact old stage magician tricks), have a look at the following two YouTube videos:

• Power Balance Tests
• Applied Kinesiology – How it’s Done

And this Surfing Magazine article / interview “Do You Believe in Holograms” (which made me alternately want to cry and laugh) highlights the ridiculous lengths to which the Power Balance sales people are willing to go to promote their scam:

“if you put a Power Balance hologram under a glass of beer for five minutes, it will energize the beer and you can do the balance test before and after drinking the beer, and it should work because liquid, as a medium, absorbs the frequency. We were doing it the another night with martinis and everyone was flipping out.”

If that doesn’t ring alarm bells, all hope is lost.

Finally, go support SkepticBros and buy yourself a few Placebo Bands to further the movement :-)

Notes:

1. although that has largely stopped due to a tough-love grass-roots education process :-)

"Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute."

If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.

….

Technology is a magnifier in that its impact is multiplicative, not additive, with regard to social change. In the developed world, there is a tendency to see the Internet and other technologies as necessarily additive, inherent contributors of positive value. But their beneficial contributions are contingent on an absorptive capacity among users that is often missing in the developing world. Technology has positive effects only to the extent that people are willing and able to use it positively. The challenge of international development is that, whatever the potential of poor communities, well-intentioned capability is in scarce supply and technology cannot make up for its deficiency.

….

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health. It seems obvious that the promise of scale is a red herring, but ICT4D proponents rely—consciously or otherwise—on it in order to promote their solutions.

”When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.”

Disseminating a technology would work if, somehow, the technology did more for the poor, undereducated, and powerless than it did for the rich, well-educated, and mighty. But the theory of technology-as-magnifier leads to the opposite conclusion: the greater one’s capacity, the more technology delivers; the lesser one’s capacity, the less value technology has. In effect, technology helps the rich get richer while doing little for the incomes of the poor, thus widening the gaps between haves and have-nots.

….My point is not that technology is useless. To the extent that we are willing and able to put technology to positive ends, it has a positive effect. For example, Digital Green (DG), one of the most successful ICT4D projects I oversaw while at Microsoft Research, promotes the use of locally recorded how-to videos to teach smallholder farmers more productive practices. When it comes to persuading farmers to adopt good practices, DG is ten times more cost-effective than classical agriculture extension without technology.

But the value of a technology remains contingent on the motivations and abilities of organizations applying it - villagers must be organized, content must be produced, and instructors must be trained. The limiting factor in spreading DG’s impact is not how many camcorders its organizers can purchase or how many videos they can shoot, but how many groups are performing good agriculture extension in the first place. Where such organizations are few, building institutional capacity is the more difficult, but necessary, condition for DG’s technology to have value. In other words, disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux.

….

“Computers, guns, factories, and democracy are powerful tools, but the forces that determine how they’re used ultimately are human.”

We are in the midst of the largest ICT4D experiment ever. In 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile phone accounts, more than the entire population of the world older than twenty years of age. The cell phone is overtaking both television and radio as the most popular consumer electronic device in history. Some 80 percent of the global population is within range of a cell tower, and mobile phones are increasingly seen in the poorest, remotest communities.

These numbers prompt suggestions that there is no longer a “digital divide” for real-time communication. Yet any demographic account of mobile have-nots will show them to be predominantly poor, remote, female, and politically mute. Whatever the case, if the spread of mobile phones is sufficient to help end global poverty, we will know soon enough. But, if it doesn’t, should we then pin our hopes on the next new shiny gadget?

This is awesome. Thoroughly enjoying spending time in “the dark place” again, my fingers remember far more *nix than my concious mind does. Now on to Python 3 adventures.

from Ewan’s posterous

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

from Ewan’s posterous