Sunday was the PhD colloquium. It was smaller than the full conference has been, but there were still about 50-100 people in attendance. In the morning, there were several presentations, 3 of which I unfortunately missed due to my late arrival the night before, followed by a luncheon. Then, in the afternoon, there was a poster session, some meetings, and a really interesting panel.

After picking up my copy of the conference schedule from registration, one thing became really obvious – there’s a lot of stuff crammed into this conference. Six parallel paper tracks, as well as workshops, chapter meetings, special interest groups, workshops, and all the normal social events.  This is both good and bad – good because it’s rare that there’s nothing interesting going on, bad because conflicts between things you’re interested in are common.

Here’s the stuff that grabbed my interest on Sunday:

• Tommy Ka Kit Ngai from the U of Cambridge talked about the distribution and uptake of clean water filters in a South Indian case study. Interestingly, he sought to integrate the widely diverse ways that uptake has been explained in the past into a single model. There were two interesting points comments that came up in the discussion:
1. One guy was very keen to put a dollar figure on the cost of providing the filters to people versus the cost of not having clean water. Given the severely negative impact of tainted water on one’s health, this seemed kinda abhorrent, but his argument was that this would actually make it easier to convince governments and other NGOs to fund water filter distribution. Though it seems plainly obvious that clean water is a Good Thing, I guess he had a point in that the economic argument, ignoring all the humanistic and qualitative factors as it does, is more concrete and thus more compelling to bureaucrats.
2. Someone else speculated that randomness played a role in concealing the individual benefits of using a water filters. Imagine people get sick 4 +/- 2 times a year if they’re drinking dirty water, and only 2 +/- 1 if they’re drinking clean water. The difference is visible statistically, but in many cases, an individual’s sample size of one could make this difference quite difficult to discern. In cases like this, people are then reliant on the authority of outside agencies to tell them that water filters are good for them. Much better is to have a way of making this difference visible to them. One suggestion might be to have a glass jar sitting somewhere public in the community. Every day someone’s sick, add a pebble to the jar. Do this for three months, then give people water filters and do it again for another three months. Compare the jars. There’s obvious ethical and sampling problems with this, but you can see how useful the general idea of making the causal link popularly visible is.
• Met a guy at the luncheon with a truly magnificent mullet. He also gained bonus points as his reason for being at the conference was “I come here on vacation”. I heartily approve of that attitude.
• The ethics panel was really good. Model building is at the centre of many contentious issues in policy and business; salient examples include financial models and the current economic crisis, and climate models predicting climate change and destabilization. Furthermore, models often insulate decision makers from the systems they govern, and consequently model builders have a great deal of power and thus a great deal of responsibility. This means that ethics are critical in this discipline. The panel had three members: Alan Graham, Dennis Meadows, and Kim Warren. Here’s what I got from it:
  • Dennis gave a neat demonstration of the principle of “it’s not what you say, it’s what you do”. He told us he would count down from three, then say “Clap!”, at which point we were to clap in unison. He counted down, clapped himself, then, after a pause said “Clap!”. We, of course, all clapped when he did, not when he told us to.
  • Dennis also argued that professional ethics flow from personal ethics and that the best way to develop strong professional ethics is to focus on strong personal ones. He gave a lot of generally good advice about honesty, scrupulously honouring one’s commitments, knowing one’s limits, relating well with and supporting others, and general humility. Three cool bits: firstly, a quote by Janice Joplin “Don’t compromise yourself, it’s the only thing you’ve got”, which I quite liked; secondly, the idea that one is committing an injustice when one gets into relationships that benefit only one party because exploitation is wrong and charity only works when it’s genuine and not onerous; and thirdly, the suggestion that one should decide where one’s ethical boundary lines lie in advance of them being challenged, because otherwise it’s far too easy to make compromises that one is unhappy with.
  • Alan talked a lot about being honest concerning the limits of one’s tools. Like any tool, System Dynamics is sometimes helpful, but comes with built-in limitations. His recommendations: do not oversell the tool, and be careful not to let your clients overrate its effectiveness; be very careful not to mislead people or allow the perception that this may have occured; and, avoid even the smallest falsehoods, as these will be mercilessly exploited the moment your work becomes contentious. A couple of interesting points came out in his discussion. What do you do when the client takes your model and misleads others with it? To what extent should you get into technical details which might confuse or mislead clients? He suggested that one should clarify carefully the nature of one’s obligation to  client and, where possible, the uses to which one’s model will be put.
  • Kim built on this by talking more about ethical dilemmas. He outlined situations where ethical obligations to the client conflict with ethical obligations to society, then talked a bit about ways of rationalizing and making decisions in such situations. Like Dennis, he emphasized the importance of defining one’s ethical boundary in advance. His discussion also emphasized the need to think about the long term or indirect consequences of a model. While he didn’t seek to convince us that his that his approach was definitely right, he did seem to employ a fairly utilitarian mindset. So, for example, if one’s model suggests implies that a division of company is dragging that company down, it may be ethical to recommend the elimination of that division, despite the effects on the individuals working withing, if not doing so would risk bringing down the whole company, thus jeopardizing the jobs of everyone in the company. Another example involved offering strategy to a company such that they might act anti-competitively or even destroy a competitor. In that case, he said that after consideration, he resolved his ethical issues by making a value judgement and determining that the competitor being destroyed were harmful in some way, and that their elimination would be good for society as a whole. This is interesting, because it really reveals the subjective nature of ethics of this sort.

So, I’m at the 27th International System Dynamics Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the moment and, like any wannabe writer with a blog, I’m going to make an attempt at live blogging it.

My flights were nice and comfortable, though the second one, from Phoenix to Albuquerque was seriously delayed. At first, this was due to the plane lacking some internal power unit necessary to start the engine, thus requiring the use of some special plane starting device on a truck. Then, once that was sorted, we still had to wait for the plane to cool down – apparently sitting in the sun for a day in Arizona means an internal temperature of something like 55 degrees Celsius (130 F). As a result, I didn’t get to Albuquerque till about 1:30am, well after the office closed at my hostel. By the time I’d woken one of the staff, found my key, and all that, I didn’t get to sleep till about 2:30am.

Figuring that I wouldn’t get much out of the day if I didn’t have at least 7 hours sleep, I skipped the first couple of presentations, and arrived there a little after 10:30, just in time for the end of a presentation on some kind of network modelling.

Before I start talking about specific presentations, though, I should first provide a brief overview of System Dynamics for the uninitiated. Basically, it’s a method of modelling the dynamics within complex systems by specifying mathematical relationships between specific quantities both abstract and concrete. It’s different from a lot of mathematical models because it focuses on the relationships within whole systems and the simultaneous dynamics of multiple variables, rather than focusing on specific individual variables in isolation. There’s a number of relatively famous books either about or employing System Dynamics that you may have heard of:

• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
• Urban Dynamics and Industrial Dynamics by Jay Forrester
• Limits to Growth by Donella and Dennis Meadows

System Dynamics is related to the work of Norbert Wiener, the General Systems Theory of Bertalanffy, and the cybernetics employed by James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis. It’s variously called systems thinking, industrial dynamics, business dynamics, and many other things. There are, apparently subtle differences between all of these, but I’m too new an initiate to know them. Working with it leaves you talking a lot about positive and negative feedback loops, stable and unstable systems, death spirals, exponential and goal-seeking growth, and exogenous and endogenous variables. If any of those phrases sound familiar, you can probably work out approximately what this is all about.

I’m hoping this description isn’t just making you more confused, but I know it’s only just scratching the surface; for a better introduction, check out the article on wikipedia.

Like any modelling methodology, the predictions of made by models in this field are by no means perfect, but it has the advantage that much of its discourse involves explicit acknowledgement and discussion of the sources of model error. Errors often come from boundary conditions (which factors do you model, and which do you leave out?), nonlinearity and discontinuity (how reliable is our knowledge of the relationship between correlated variables?), and input data (how reliable are the statistics you’re putting into your model?). Even ignoring the precision or accuracy of its predictions, System Dynamics offers a way of examine the relationships between the parts of one’s conceptions of a real world system, bringing up inconsistencies and fallacies that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

That’s enough for this post. Hopefully, tonight I’ll post highlights of the first day of the conference, otherwise I’ll wrap it in with tomorrow’s events.

Yesterday was very strange.

Do you ever have those days where you just can’t get anything done? Where all of the things you know are important just seem silly and pointless? Where a Herculean effort is required even to force yourself to put your laundry away?

Of course you do. Everyone has bad days. If you don’t, please comment and tell me your secret.

The thing is, there wasn’t anything actually wrong yesterday. I was in palpably good humour, the weather was pleasant, and nothing went particularly wrong, with the exception of me leaving my gym gear at home, thus being unable to go to Kung Fu practice, my last chance of salvaging the day.

OK. So I get that bad days sometimes happen. But here’s the weird thing. When I finally went to bed late that night, I picked up my notebook and started thinking about the things I needed to do the next day. As I looked over the notes for my various projects, the scrawled to-do lists, and the barely legible Awesome Plans, I felt enthusiastic, organized, and in control. “Huh, that’s funny. I guess the bad day is over”, I thought to myself. “Maybe tomorrow will be better”. A few minutes later though, I got to thinking back on the day, idly wondering which of my many tasks I could have got done had I been less out of it. Those same tasks, which had seemed interesting and important a few minutes ago, suddenly become lackluster, and even painful to contemplate, merely by me having placed them in the context of the bad day.

While I’m sure this has happened to me before, this time I noticed it clearly, and had the presence of mind to play with it a little. By switching back and forth, I could discern that framing tasks in the context of the bad day made them awful, while framing them in the context of the next day made them seem exciting. It was like there was some unholy taint associated with the bad day that spread to anything I contemplated, and even though this was all in the past and there was no way I could make myself perform those tasks in that context, they still felt horrid!

This makes no sense!!

The perception that a day is bad doesn’t seem like it should affect my perception so much. But moreso, I never thought I could manipulate my own enthusiasm and motivation in such a way. Of course, this was a special case – while I could try to avoid thinking of things within a negatively loaded context like this, I don’t really grasp yet how I could use this to positively motivate myself. The experience has opened my eyes to this as a possibility, however.

For the moment, then, the lesson I’m taking is that context plays a much larger role than I ever realized in determining the desirability of things.

Just another way in which we humans aren’t entirely rational, I guess.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and if that’s not worth celebrating, I really don’t know what is.

Lots of people are celebrating, of course. Here’s a few sites worth checking out:

• “Remembering Apollo 11“, a photo set from the Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature.
• NASA’s official 40th anniversary page, with photos, videos, and more. One cool feature is “Apollo in your own words“, where members of the public describe what Apollo 11 meant to them.
• “Apollo 11 40th Anniversary Celebrations Around the World“, a flickr set
• Another photo set from Yahoo
• Lastly, the 40th anniversary site at the Kennedy Space Centre, which has a nifty ‘next rocket launch’ countdown in the upper left hand corner.

Incidentally, NASA itself is just over 50 years old, having celebrated its 50th birthday on July 29 last year. The 50th anniversary website is still up, with videos, lectures, articles, and a photo set called “50 Images, 50 Years“, containing many cool photos.

While writing this, I got to thinking: “40 years is quite a long time, I wonder how old those astronauts are now”. Turns out the youngest man alive who has walked on the moon is Charles Duke, who is 74 years old, while the oldest is good old Buzz Aldrin (whose foot you see at top right), at 79. That’s just a bit scary. We’re probably only 5-10 years from losing first hand experience of walking on another world. While I totally grok that unmanned spaceflight is a far better bet for science and exploration, it’s still a little saddening.

There’s one other celebration I didn’t mention yet. After at least two years of work, we’ve finally launched the new Orion’s Arm website. You might think two years is a long time to make a website, but bear in mind that this was done entirely in volunteered spare time, and involved a complete overhaul of the site’s entire content, which at a recent count was 1.4 million words in total. While I did all of the technical work, the real credit goes to Todd Drashner, Stephen Innis, Steve Bowers, and several others assisting them, who painstakingly read, edited, marked up, and in some cases, completely rewrote the whole thing.

Edit: I just had to include this link to “The Eagle Has Landed“, an award winning documentary from 1969 full of Apollo footage, stills, and audio recordings. Hat tip to Abstruse Goose

This is the third in a series of posts about music appreciation. In previous posts, I argued that:

1. Explaining our preferences with ‘taste’ doesn’t help a lot. All it really does is hide their complexities and protect us from the challenge of having to explain ourselves.
2. Preferences are better explained using ‘facets’ of appreciation that each captures a different way that music might stimulate us. This by no means eliminates subjectivity, but providese a vocabulary, we can use to more easily understand and talk about preferences.  In particular, we become able to describe different people’s taste as differences in the priority or content of the facets they use.

So, what are some example facets? Here’s a list of the ones I’ve been able to identify so far:

• Structure – The simplest facet is that of musical structure. It’s obvious to every listener that different styles of music have different structures to them, and it seems that, likewise, different listeners have different affinity for different structural elements. Some listeners like complex layered melody, while others prefer simple, accessible tunes. I’m no expert in music theory; my point is that musical structure plays a role in defining our preferences, and that there is no universal agreement on what makes for ‘good’ musical structure (excluding, perhaps, chaos and discordance). Here are some structural elements I commonly consider when trying to explain my own preferences:
  • Harmony
  • Melody
  • Beat & Percussion
  • Complexity
  • Tone
• Nostalgia – There is some music that I like simply because it reminds me of a particular time, place, or event in my past. This facet is extremely subjective, and often difficult to explain in other ways. For me, examples of this are the Phantom of the Opera (which I listened to a lot when I was about 10), remixes of the music from old Commodore 64 games, and music like Shriekback, Sisters of Mercy, and Headless Chickens, all of which remind me of parties. Depending on the emotional character of my response, nostalgia might cause me to really like a piece of music, or really hate it.
• Milieu – Similarly to nostalgia, some music evokes a particular setting, or place, or environment, and gains emotional significance from this that affects appreciation for it. The difference is that the association is not based strongly on a particular past experience. For example, one might appreciate music that evokes a particular historical period, or music that is ‘science-fictiony’. This is less subjective than nostalgia, but still quite so.
• Emotional – Music very often evokes particular emotional responses that are not associated with any particular memory or milieu, but are the result of the music’s style, key, tempo, use of motifs and so forth. This form of emotional response to music seems the least subjective; for example, people can often agree easily on whether music is sombre, cheerful, or inspirational.
• Utility – A lot of people seem to appreciate music that is good for some particular purpose. This might be music that’s good to code to (for me, that’d be Jeroen Tel, Machinae Supremacy, and similar stuff), music that’s relaxing, music that’s good to dance to, or even music that’s good to garden to (Vangelis’ Soil Festivities).
• Skill Display – Some music is attractive because of the performer’s skill. This occurs often when there is strong emphasis on a solo performer, such as in violin concertos, jazz, and some prog rock. I also get this feeling when I watch group performances where, in addition to their skill in playing their instruments, the performers exhibit great skill in coordinating their performance. For some people, there’s a point at which displays of skill shift from awesome to pretentious, but to some extent, I think virtuosity is a fairly universal facet of apprecation. Incidentally, in his cluster definition of art, Dutton identifies skill display as one of its key features (see my previous post).
• Fellow Musicians – I’m not particularly skilled in any instrument, but I know that players of an instrument can appreciate music using that instrument on a level that non-players cannot, because they can consider in more detail the skills and techniques that the performer is using. Fellow musicians might also appreciate music because of the joy it gives them when they perform it themselves. For example, I particularly enjoy music that I can sing to.
• Social – Music often plays important social roles. It might signal membership of some group, it might be linked with particular social or cultural phenomena (birthday songs, carols, Auld Lang Syne), it might have some ritual meaning (hymns), or it might be a way of establishing group solidarity (anthems). This can apply to groups of any size, from nations to couples (“it’s our song!!”, she exclaimed).
• Novelty – Novelty definitely affects appreciation. Songs can get old over time, and there’s a definte good feeling associated with discovering a new band. That said, there’s a point where nostalgia takes over, and old songs are revived (80s music!). While I enjoy finding new music, I think this facet isn’t as important to me as it is to others; I’d usually rather let other people go searching, then ask for their recommendations.
• Narrative – Music, like much other art, can tell a story, and appreciation of that story affects appreciation of the music overall. Narrative might be overt, dominating and structuring the music (musicals), it might be more abstract, where the relationship between the narrative and music is less clear (movie adaptations and medleys), or it might be subtle, where the narrative is embodied in the structure of the music and not made explicit (The Firebird, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade).
• Lyrics – Music often has lyrics, and these can significantly affect appreciation, not at the level of narrative, but at that of words and phrases. Depending on the topic, lyrics are often unimportant to me, particularly given the normal topics of love, sex, and betrayal. Lyrics that are political or philosophical, though, seem better able to grab my attention. One good example is ‘Amused to Death‘ by Roger Waters.

Obviously, this list isn’t exclusive, nor does it correspond to anything empirical – it’s almost entirely a product of introspection, with much inspiration from talking to others about their preferences over the years. I’m simply trying to build a vocabulary of ways in which we can think about our preferences for music so that I can avoid having to talk in simple terms of taste.

I’d be particularly interested to hear suggestions for other facets if you’ve got them..

As mentioned in my first post, I doubt any of this is original, but this doesn’t concern me. In fact, I’d be really interested to see research looking at this sort of thing – I’d be particularly interested in seeing, for example, some sort of data analysis performed on responses given by listeners trying to explain their reaction to particular pieces of music.

In my next, and probably last, post on this topic, I want to talk about the why of all of this – why I find preferences interesting to discuss, and why I get driven insane by people taking my desire for analysis of taste as being somehow critical of them.

Don’t screw up the little things in life – they’re easy to achieve, and failure to do so can be expensive in time, effort, or stress.

In life, there’s lots of little things you can easily do that avoid expensive annoyance later on. Take keys, for example: failing to check that you have them when you walk out the door can lead to hours spent waiting for flatmates to come home or, alternatively, money spent hiring a locksmith. Failing to put keys in a logical place when you get home can lead to frantic searching when you’re about to go out, and might be followed by 20 minutes of time wasted waiting for the next bus, a day spent running late for meetings, and an hour or so of feeling stupid. They’re not all practical things, though; socially, the small efforts of thanking people, being civil to those whose company you don’t relish, or biting back that witty retort that you don’t really need to make can help avoid all sorts of arguments and hurt feelings later on.

I’m talking about things where the act itself is simple and easy, even trivial, and the benefit is huge. Things where the question of whether or not you should do them is obvious, and things that I, at least, frequently fail to do. Not because I don’t mean to do them, but because I just don’t have the memory or discipline. Or, alternatively, because I haven’t clearly realized that they’re a good idea. The things about which we always say ‘I should do that’, but never do.

These are the sorts of things for which it would be really nice to have some little voice in my ear reminding me to do them. Or, when it’s discipline, not memory, that’s lacking, something that helps me pay closer attention and maintain the presence of mind not to say the wrong thing.

Anyway. Today’s life lesson: A little thought about the little things can save a lot of effort, and that little thought is a little thing well worth doing.

In case you’re wondering, I haven’t actually been locked out of my house in the last month, but I have spent too much time of late trying to work out where I put my keys.

While brain stoming with Julian about the implications of ‘always-on augmented reality’* on human communication, I decided I needed a way of collaboratively drawing mind maps so that we’d have some sort of concrete record of the ideas coming out of our conversation. Normally, I make notes of my own, but they’re hard to share meaningfully – what I really want is a shared whiteboard of some sort.

I’d not looked at networked collaboration tools in a while, and googling, I was pleased to find MindMeister, a collaborative mind-mapping that suited my needs well. It has the following nice features:

• Copes with multiple people editing a map simultaneously
• Supports really big maps fairly well
• Has lots of nice notification tools for maps that are likely to be tweaked and developed over time
• Is free, at least for the functionality I required.

Anyway, if you’re collaborating with people over distance and you’re doing creative work, this might be worth a look to you.

Got any other cool collaboration tools you’re using? Let me know!

* I’ll write more about this later – I’m trying to differentiate my thinking from the burgeoning mass of AR demos involving a webcam, ARToolkit, and a bunch of markers. AR has so much more potential than these suggest, and I find them constraining.

Playing with a new comments plugin called IntenseDebate. Apologies if anything weird starts happening..

I’ve been thinking a lot about music appreciation. It’s much more complicated than I think the words and concepts we use to talk about it really let on, and I think part of the confusion is that it’s not so much that each of us likes different things so much as that each of us interprets music in different ways and evaluates it using different criteria, and, furthermore, that our preferences are much more malleable than we realize.

I’m not terribly sure where I want to go with this, but it’s something that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for quite some time, so I’m going to try to get some ideas down. I’ve not studied the history or theory of art in any real extent, so I may well be saying things that have been said before, and there’s almost certainly problems that I’m not seeing. I’d welcome both discussion as well as suggestions for further reading on this topic.

I’m going to write this as a series of short posts, as I think there’s more chance of people reading it that way, plus, it makes it easier for me to write. First up, I want to briefly talk about the concept of taste:

Explaining the differences between two people’s preferences by saying that they have different tastes seems to me to be a bit of a cop-out. All this does is attribute the externally visible difference in preference to an internal disposition called taste. This is no better than trying to explain consciousness using the soul – all we’ve done is take a complex phenomena and explain it with another complex phenomena about which we’re not meant to ask questions. This explains nothing, nor does it lead to further discussion.

Taste is generally considered a personal matter, and thus is something that’s not meant to be susceptible to rational argument. By ascribing preferences to taste, there’s an vague implication that further discussion might be considered offensive, so let’s just agree to disagree. This suggests the assumption that wanting to understand why someone likes a particular song is somehow doubting their right to do so. I find this intensely frustrating for reasons I’ll talk about in another post.

In this sense, taste is merely a concept into which we can bundle our reasons for holding a preference. It serves two purposes – it simplifies the messiness of preference by shoving our reasons under the carpet, and it gives us a convenient way of protecting ourselves from others who might, through their questioning, undermine our faith in ourselves or judge us somehow. So, using taste to describe our preferences doesn’t help explain them very well, but it is a completely understandable strategy.

Another interesting aspect is that not all reasons for a preference are explained with taste, only those that are difficult to explain otherwise. You don’t shove under the carpet things that can be neatly placed on the shelf, and likewise, you don’t appeal to taste to describe preferences than can be easily articulated otherwise – nostalgia, for example, can often explain why we like music we couldn’t otherwise explain.

One final idea is that taste might act as a seemingly solid platform on which to base our own internal justifications for our preferences. If we can appeal to taste as an inexplicable yet concrete element of our personality, we can avoid seeing the arbitrariness of our preferences.

Summarizing, then, I think taste is best understood as a cognitive strategy for simplifying our understanding of why we hold certain preferences, as a way of protecting ourselves from the scrutiny of others, as a platform on which to base reasoning about our preferences, and as a way shield ourselves from arbitrariness.

Over the last few months, I wrote two letters to NZ members of parliament, one about the proposed review of the science of climate change, the second concerning the s92a amendment to the NZ Copyright Act. On Wednesday, I got responses to both. Here’s my comments:

Climate Change

The letter concerning climate change was sent to John Key and responded to by Nick Smith, Minister for Climate Change Issues. I’ve posted it here if you want to take a look. There are a few things I want to highlight:

• Concerning the science and uncertainty associated with various estimates, he says “I do not believe this uncertainty justifies taking no action“. I’m cynical enough not to assume that they’ll treat it as a priority or that they’ll take measures as strong or sincere as I’d like, but it’s nice when the discussion moves on from whether we should do something to what we should do.
• He weasels around the intent of the review of the Emissions Trading Scheme. He says they’ve rejected ACT’s calls for a full review of the science, but says they want to “identify the central/benchmark projections that are being used as the motivation for international agreements to combat climate change“. That sounds to me like they still want to review the science, but they don’t want to admit that. Since the point of reviewing the science (again) is really just to delay and obfuscate, it’s hard to see how this is really any different.
• I’m pleased to see it acknowledged that green technologies represent an opportunity for NZ rather than a threat. I perceive National as being primarily about benefiting themselves and their corporate sponsors and so, getting them to recognize that there’s some way in which they could benefit seems to me to be a key step in getting them to do something. That said, I’ve got no idea what policies they might enact to realize this benefit without dropping their normal slash and burn approach to governance; setting up seed investment and technology grants in areas of importance like this is so passe and left wing – hardly something that fits the National Party profile.

s92a – Copyright

The letter concerning s92a went to my local MP, Lianne Dalziel. It got forwarded to Clare Curran, Labour’s Spokesperson for Communication and IT, who sent me this response. I wasn’t terribly satisfied. It completely failed to address the threat posed by guilt by accusation to a democracy, let alone the impact on individuals, or the potential for abuse of such policies and the potential chilling effects on fair use. Instead, it talked about “unreasonable burden[s] on internet service providers“. I’m certain that they can take care of themselves.

Isn’t the idea of democratic government that it’s for the people? Isn’t Labour NZ’s main center left party? How does turning this from a significant issue of freedom of expression, cultural development and longevity, and corporatism serve the people? The problem with Section 92a is not that it places a burden on telecommunications providers, but that it provides a mechanism by which powerful entities (such as content publishers and any other corporation) can oppress individuals who publish content that they disagree with. You might think we’re just talking about music piracy, and that this will never be seriously abused, and you’d be wrong – look at the host of abuses of the DMCA in the US. Sure, there’s definitely a place for copyright protection measures, but some balance is definitely in order, and the issue of piracy is a lot more complex than that of simple theft.