brainsnorkel.com

Today we received another piece of political advertising in our mailbox. It’s not entirely clear if it’s from the Liberal Party of Australia or not, but this (other side) is what it looks like.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an election pamphlet that only mentions the name of the person who authorised it (Scott Morrison, Level 9, 140 William Street, East Sydney) and doesn’t mention any political parties other than the ones it attacks. It even gives the URL for the Greens’ web site so you can check out their policies for yourself. Of course Scott Morrison is just a citizen, concerned that the voters of Australia are informed. It’s just coincidence that he is NSW Liberal Party Director and forgot to mention the words “Liberal” or “National” on this piece of paper.

I must confess that I read through the policy headlines (conveniently highlighted) and thought “that doesn’t sound half bad” to most some of them.

Somehow I don’t think I’m the target audience.

Satire. Very serious stuff.

The alignment of the Australian and US elections is a fascinating way to compare election style. A while ago, I was listening to some random ABC radio and Anthony Green was comparing the way US and Australian elections are fought. One of the causes of difference that he cited was the model of suffrage.

US citizens have the right to vote if they want to. Australian citizens must vote.

In the US, the outcome of an election is usually determined by a subset of the population (around 51% or eligible US citizens voted in November 2000). In Australia the outcome of a Federal election is usually determined by votes cast by 95% or more of the population.

In Australia, you are required to be registered to vote. You are fined for not voting. In the US, I understand you only have to register to vote if you want to and you only need to vote if you want to. Personal empowerment? Liberty? I don’t know the history of this. I know that the compulsary/optional debate has occupied plenty of column inches over the centuries and I’m not about to go there.

The upshot is that parties in US federal elections campaign to motivate people to vote for them, and also motivate people to vote at all. In Australia, you simply need to overcome the “vote for me” hurdle.

This is part of the reason for “I shoot automatic assault weapons and I vote” bumper stickers in the US. The threat to vote at all adds weight to the message. In Australia a “I fish and I vote” sticker is a nice cliche - but the threat to vote isn’t really helping with the message. Besides, I always thought those stickers read “1 fish and 1 vote” which I thought was a quaint way of advocating voting rights for fish.

My guess is that optional voting explains a tactic that seems to be more prevalent in the US than in Australia: demotivation campaigns. It appears that it is easier to quell someone’s desire to vote than to change who they will vote for. Enter the slime, innuendo, and attack ads. Doubt may not change a voter’s preferences, but it may help them to abstain from voting.

I might be wrong. Australia has attack advertising too. But imagine the election Australia would have if voting wasn’t compulsary and the producers of Australian Idol decided to run an all-day Idol-athon.

I have a standing search in BlogLines on “mission statement” because I get a kind of perverse thrill out of reading them. The tortured sentences produced when someone tries to rationalise whatever it was that your organization has been doing, and project that into the future, are a genuine source of outsider poetry.

Between the UK Cricket Team’s mission statement, Guy Kawasaki’s new book, and various theological colleges’ evangelical metrics programmes was a real gem of a post on a Blog called: Swimming with the Razorfishes:

How to Write Software Requirements that Suck

• Put too much in one document; ignore the audience; assume that one document will serve all purposes and completely specify the system.
• Don’t establish a shared vocabulary used by clients and development team.
• Don’t separate functional and non-functional requirements.
• Don’t involve a designer or tech lead in the writing of the requirements.
• Don’t use precise, consistent language.
• Don’t separate workflow, rules, and business context.
• Focus entirely on how to get data into the system; don’t consider where it goes, or how to get it back out.
• Focus on how to solve a problem, rather than what needs to be solved.
• Don’t understand how to convert / migrate data from the old system.
• Don’t create a concise summary, mission statement, or statement of work.
• Have the wrong people review the document; assume that one person from the client department has perfect understanding of all aspects of the new system.
• Declare victory once the first draft is done; don’t plan for iterations or changes.
• Don’t pay any attention to secondary clients or systems.
• Organize the information poorly; let rule definitions and data mingle and repeat themselves.
• Don’t institute any change management procedures; allow anyone to change the requirements at any time and don’t notify anyone when they do change.
• Assume that once the clients approve the requirements they won’t change their mind.
• Don’t break the requirements down into versions or releases.
• Don’t prioritize the requirements; if you do prioritize, use some wacky scheme like priorities from 1 to 100.
• Don’t provide the client any tools to visualize the end result; rely entirely on words to describe the requirements.
• Assume that everyone is comfortable reading enormous, really dense documents.
• Don’t number the paragraphs.
• Focus entirely on the system’s data, how it is structured; ignore workflow.
• Assume that you can write the document entirely based on interviews; don’t bother to shadow the clients while they actually do the work.

Kudos to Eric.

I once took #1 son to see the “Chinese Dinosaurs” at the Australian Museum a year or two back. Nothing gets a 3 year old going like volcanoes and dinosaurs. He was quite excited about the bones and pictures, and the exhibition had a soundtrack of “what dinosaurs might have sounded like” to go with the artists’ impressions of what dinosaurs might have looked like, but more on that later.

The soundtrack was a lot like a “swamp” sound effects CD. Lots of dino-crickets and dino-frogs and every now and then a crescendo of “Grrrrrroooooooaaaaaahhhh” would be heard and Mr 3 would panic and demand! hugs! NOW!

To me it sounded like a bunch of paleontologists had got together to have a few beers, noticed the deadly combination of PA system and closed circuit TV, and set to work trying out their scariest dinosaur sounds on the corwd. For science.

Poor Mr 3 was duly terrified.

Some of the artists’ impressions of dinosaurs seemed to go a little over the top. Dinosaurs discovered in the US seem to be rendered in military greys, browns and greens. Chinese dinosaurs seem to have the same colour scheme as the lions and dragons I see around Chinese new year. Each colour scheme is probably an equally valid speculation.

So, how is it that scientists can discover something objective and then start working the press with these kinds of embellished scenarios:

[...]long necks can combine with the natural murkiness of sea water to hide the protorosaur’s body. The reptile’s head was small, he told New Scientist, so “if you’re a fish, you see something nearly your size. But by the time you figure out it’s bigger, it’s eaten you.”

Sure it’s a fun fact… speculation. But if I wrote the following, would New Scientist publish me?

[...]long necks can combine with the natural murkiness of sea water to enhance the protorosaur’s comedy routines. The reptile’s head was small, he told New Scientist, so “if you’re a fish, you see something nearly your size. But by the time you figure out it’s bigger, it’s a hilarious sight gag.
Scientists recovered what appear to be a pair of fake glasses with attached nose and moustache, as well as a sign reading `Goodyear’”

I don’t know much about Peter Costello, but the advice about time management in this news story must seem a priceless and timely reference.

It’s possible for Peter Costello to stay on as Treasurer and spend more time with his family, Prime Minister John Howard says.

Mr Costello has hinted at continuing leadership tensions, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family than the job of treasurer allowed.

But Mr Howard, who was treasurer in the Fraser government of the late 1970s and early 1980s, said with good time management, it was possible to do both and he was confident that Mr Costello would remain in the role.

“I’ve no doubt that Peter will serve as treasurer if the government is re-elected,” Mr Howard told the Nine Network’s Today show.

Everyone wanted to spend more time with their families, he said.

“I know exactly how he feels. I had a young family when I was treasurer. It is a very natural reaction,” Mr Howard said.

“Can I speak from experience that if you organise your time well you can do justice to a very responsible public office and also have a close relationship with your family.

“You can do it, you’ve got to organise your time properly, you’ve got to always remember them and make sure that they always feel that they come first in your life.

“But the two are not incompatible and I know that Peter’s values in relation to that are exactly the same as mine.”

You’d think he might have offered to get him a new Palm Pilot or some time out on the back bench.

Richard Glover’s column in the Herald today was priceless.

By mid-week the search was on. Senior ministers were poring over maps of the South Pacific. They needed to find an example - just one - of a country it would be OK to invade.

After all, the Prime Minister had made a big deal of his willingness, in certain circumstances, to order a pre-emptive strike against another country. But then journalists, in their pesky way, started asking, “Which country would you invade?”, and Mr Howard seemed to go to water. While remaining very tough and very strong and very much of opinion that terrorists were bad people, he seemed to agree that an immediate attack on Indonesia, or the Philippines, or Thailand might not be the best idea.

But, if he didn’t mean those countries, which countries did he mean? It was a mystery, and a very deep one.

Mr Downer, who loves helping the Prime Minister out on these occasions, thought he knew. And so he went on the ABC’s AM program to say that we could - just as a for-instance - invade the Solomon Islands. Not now, of course, but in the past. When it was a failed state.

And then… the answer…

Following Downer’s appearance, the outcry from our South-East Asian neighbours increased. If Howard doesn’t mean us, they asked, and he doesn’t mean the Solomons, then who does he intend to invade?

No doubt a group of advisers was assembled to think up a plausible example. “We need a failed state, somewhere in the South Pacific,” one departmental officer would whisper to another. “It has to have a large Muslim population, and be antagonistic to Canberra.”

“Hang on,” Tompkins of Trade would say, leaping to his feet, “South Pacific, lots of Muslims, hates Canberra and a failed state. Let’s invade NSW.”

The Chaser Decides showed an interesting experiment tonight. This interesting experiment was to call up John Laws and Alan Jones and attempt to read as much of the script of a Liberal party TV election ad as they could. Kind of like Media Watch, should they ever decide that entrapment is fair play.

The results are telling, and entertaining, if a little unfair.

When you see ads like this:

At the SMH’s web site it all suddenly seems like a serious competition aound our little palace in Bennelong.

The PM has had 3 glossy multi-page brochure extravaganzas poked through our letterbox since about day 2 of the election. Labor hasn’t bothered our letterbox to my knowledge. There was a little plaintive note stapled to a recycled newspaper-format brochure from the Greens asking us to put a poster in our front yard with Mr Wilkie’s mug on it (we’re on a reasonably busy street) and then the same brochure delivered into our letterbox without the request a couple of days later…

Margo Kingston has more on one of the 3 glossy Liberal brochures poked into our letterbox recently.

Alert readers will notice that Jessica has added her voice to webdiary quite a bit recently :)

This is the (*updated*) first post.

Why the brainsnorkel.com domain name?
1. URLs should be memorable
2. URLs should not require unique or difficult spelling
3. URLs should be a reasonably accurate representation of their content

2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

Why does it exist at all?
1. I want to retire an old blog
2. I need some reasonably permanent web space to cut down on my plethora of barely alive, dead, or dying ex-ISPs and online content servers.
3. Everyone needs a hobby

So now I need to spend some time to arrive at a non-default site design and get down to the serious business of making something useful or entertaining… possibly both.

Cheers Chris